The clerk stares at me, perplexed.
“I have to draw a comic,” I say.
The Cookie
In the car on the way to nursery school:
We’re backing out of the garage.
“Daddy, Daddy, are those stilts?”
“Huh? What?”
“Those things up against the wall.”
“No, Ginevra. Those are storage racks.”
“Racks?”
“They’re rails, basically, holders. We use them when we go to the beach. They go on the roof of the car and we attach a big pod to them and put our beach stuff inside: umbrellas, water wings, beach chairs, toys, whatever.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“This year at the beach I want to build a giant castle!”
“Okay.”
“You have to remember to bring my shovels.”
“Sure, Ginevra, don’t worry.”
“And then you need to get me some little flags.”
“Flags?”
“Little flags to put on the roofs of the castle!”
“Ah. And what little flags do you want?”
“Castle flags.”
“Yes, but what country do you want them from?”
“Huh?”
“What country?”
“Huh?”
“Do you want Italy, France, Spain, what?”
“Russia!”
“Russia? Why Russia? Do you like it?”
“I like the decorations on the houses in Russia.”
“Ah . . . and where have you seen Russian houses?”
“I dreamt about them. And did you know they have tigers in Russia too, Daddy?”
“Oh, well, in some parts, yes.”
“Daddy?”
“What is it?”
“This year at the beach, can we get the same cabin as last year?”
“Hmm, Ginevra. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get the exact same one. Every year it’s been different—they have a bunch of bungalows all packed together and they give us whatever one they give us. In any case, it’ll be basically the same, I promise.”
“But I want that one!”
“Why? What was so special about it?”
“I hid a cookie in a drawer in my room.”
“A cookie? Oh no, Ginevra, you left a cookie there a year ago?”
“Yes.”
“After a year it definitely won’t be good anymore, will it? It’ll be really old by now.”
A long pause.
“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe it’s dead.”
To do for this year’s beach trip:
Giant sandcastle
Find little Russian flags
Cookie funeral
The Snake
I went to take out the trash and saw a snake.
A whip snake, I’m sure. Not too long, a baby I think. It was in the street.
Knowing our neighbors, I realized it was doomed. So I did something that before Paola, I never would have done even if I’d lived a thousand lives: I went inside, put two rubber gloves on one hand, grabbed the fireplace tongs with the other, and went out.
The snake was still there, almost in the same spot. I approached slowly, breathing hard, and in a flash caught it by the tail. It jerked in fright and started to wriggle and coil as if it were having an epileptic fit. I nearly lost it because for an instant the idea crossed my mind that it might be another kind, since I know about as much about snakes as I do about soccer. Running like an old man with a fishing rod being chased by a murderer, I got to the woods in two seconds flat and tossed it in a bush.
Then I went back into the house, googled “heart attack symptoms,” and after a few minutes, “how to catch a whip snake.”
Never catch it by the tail, it says. Because “if you do and you don’t keep their head still with your other hand, they can give painful bites.”
There you go, by dumb luck I’d come upon the only lazy whip snake in the Veneto.
Anyway, it’s like they say: it takes one to know one.
The Hairband
Yesterday, Virginia asked me, “Daddy, if you and Mommy break up, who will take two daughters and who will take one?”
I was slicing onions in the kitchen. The question took me by surprise.
“What do you mean, Virginia?”
“We’re three sisters,” she said. “You obviously can’t cut the third sister in half!”
I felt like laughing. I was about to say, “Don’t worry honey, Mama and I will never break up,” but I didn’t want to lie. I know relationships are reinvented day by day, and the worst mistake you can make for yourself, or for others, is thinking you’re invincible.
“Virginia,” I said, “if for some reason Mama and I separate one day we’ll both see all three of you, sometimes me and sometimes Mama, don’t worry.”
“But in Mrs. Doubtfire the dad only saw the kids on Saturdays,” she said.
“Virginia, sometimes when parents break up things can happen,” I said. “Maybe they didn’t separate on good terms and fought. But Mama and I agree that, even if we leave each other, you three will always come first. Understand? Always.”
She stared at me silently.
“Daddy,” she said after a while, “does love end?”
I thought for a second before responding.
“Love never ends,” I said. “It’s people that change.”
“People?”
“Virginia, adults grow too, you know? You’re a big girl now, but seven years ago you were a baby. It’s kind of like that for mommies and daddies too. When I met Mama I was a different person, so was she. The important thing when two people love each other is to be able to change together, or respect the other person’s changes. That’s what parents do with their children, but between themselves sometimes they can’t. That’s why love for your children is the only kind that never ever ends.”
“But,” she said, “when you met Mommy how did you know she was Mommy?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“How did you know you loved her?”
“Oh, that,” I said. “I knew that after about ten minutes.”
“How?”
“The first time we met, she pulled her hair back behind her neck, lifted it up over her head, and put it into a bun without a hairband, just twisting it in a knot.”
“So what?”
“So I knew she desperately needed a hairband. And I needed her hair.”
“And did you have a hairband?”
“No, but by the time Mama found that out she already loved me.”
“Daddy,” she said, “that means you tricked her!”
“Maybe just a little,” I said, “but the point is Mama was the first woman who ever made me want to find a hairband, you know what I mean?”
She looked at me for a few seconds.
“Here, Daddy,” she said, pulling out her hairband. “Now you and Mama won’t break up.”
She laughed, and fortunately I was slicing onions.
SUMMER
The Right Way
Last night I heard a noise.
It was four a.m. and we were sleeping with the window open. I got up in the dark, put my T-shirt on inside out, and went into the hall. I turned on the bathroom light so I could see and went into the girls’ room. Ginevra was sitting on the edge of her bed, her knees tucked under her chin.
“Daddy,” she asked, “would you bring me some cold water?”
She handed me a bottle, I ran the tap in the bathroom, emptied the bottle and refilled it. I sat next to her, she drank it, asked me to fix her covers, and then went back to sleep. By then I was awake, so I went into the kitchen. I got a focaccia and a coffee and went down to the studio and into the
yard. As I drank my coffee in the dark, sitting on the wall, I collected my thoughts—the usual things for a forty-year-old father: money problems, drumming up work every day, how I’d like a new computer. You feel more forty at four in the morning. At that hour, you can turn around and catch sight of a few small regrets that seem bigger in the dark, or a handful of good memories that break your heart. Then I noticed that the apricot tree we’d just planted was a little dry, so I filled a bucket with water and gave it a drink. It was in looking at the tree that I remembered something. I remembered that five years from now we’d be eating apricots from our garden. I remembered that because for a second I had the perspective of a fifty-year-old man looking back; he remembers the apricot tree, he remembers with a twinge of melancholy what the first fruit was like and how the girls smiled. Or maybe not—maybe the apricot tree will die and become a sad memory. But now, sitting on the wall in the dark, I thought, I’m a forty-year-old looking ahead. The tree is here and still needs to grow. I look at it and I don’t see regrets, or memories, just a goal. It makes me think of this image of a crowded one-way street with a man waiting to cross at the crosswalk. The image leads to a thought. The thought is that, what matters, when you venture into the street, whether you’re behind the wheel or crossing on foot, is just remembering to look the right way.
Nothing Happens
Paola is at her parents’ with the girls, I’m supposed to go to the store.
I go down to the yard and open the gate, say “hi” to my neighbor pulling weeds in his garden. I get in my car. I turn the key in the ignition and nothing happens. I try again. Nothing happens. I try again. The starter makes a rattling sound like gangsters do in films when they get shot and have some crucial truth to reveal in a friend’s arms before dying. My truth is that my battery is dead. I consider my options: I could call the mechanic and have him come all the way here to jump the car, but the service charge alone would be twenty euros. Or I could wait—since Paola has the cables in her car and they’re coming back the day after tomorrow, it would only be forty-eight hours. In a surge of bucolic enthusiasm, I tell myself, “Why not, the supermarket’s only three kilometers away, and I just need a few things, it’s no big deal.” I grab the yellow shopping bag, get out, wave again to the neighbor in the garden, who’d been looking at me the whole time like “you know it’ll go faster if you turn it on,” and set off.
On the way, the road is downhill. For the first kilometer, I feel like I’m in a Gene Kelly movie—there’s even Gershwin in the background. Halfway through the second kilometer, I start getting hot. Halfway through the third, I feel like Vince Vaughn in True Detective in that scene where he crosses the desert on foot after getting stabbed. When I walk into the supermarket, my light green shirt is now dark green. I lock eyes with a new, cute young cashier with a braid, and I can’t help but think how from now on, she’ll always remember me as That Sweaty Old Guy, but I trust the words KING OF COOL on my T-shirt will make her see me as the master of self-irony. I throw some lemons in my basket and continue to the meat section. There are six-pack chicken legs—why not. I get a bag of parmesan, a box of spaghetti, some ice cream. A tin of anchovies. Then it happens: I see “discount” in proximity to “beer.” The discount ends today. I consider how the walk home will be three kilometers uphill; how I already risked emphysema on the way, downhill and without any extra weight; but in my head a voice like the drill sergeant in An Officer and a Gentleman yells at me, “Private Bussola, stand straight in that mud!” I put five tallboys in the basket, well . . . let’s make it six. An extra can of “Beer”-brand beer—hey, you never know. I head to the checkout. I fill my yellow grocery bag and pay.
When I get outside, the eleven a.m. sun kisses my forehead as if making a promise. The promise says, “I’ll go get some popcorn.” I walk like the zombie in Cemetery Man dragging a corpse. After the first bend in the road I can’t feel my right arm. After the second, I can’t feel the left. After the third, I can’t feel anything. The beers clink together in the bag, cruelly mocking me. In a stroke of genius, I try to put the bag around my shoulders like a backpack; I desist only after risking strangulation for the fifth time. When I pass a blue Ape truck for a second I think of throwing myself like dead weight onto the cargo bed, but in my head Sergeant Foley’s voice shouts, “There’s only two things in the Veneto, cattle and conservatives!” And in a surge of bovine pride, I pull myself together. When I’m about halfway up the hill, I decide to stop and catch my breath for a moment at Marisa’s bar, might as well. Marisa isn’t here today; her daughter is at the bar. I ask if she can keep my ice cream in her fridge while I sit down. I order a small beer, but instead, she comes back to me with a medium lager, saying “this one is new—you have to try it, you drink it with pepper!” With pepper. How about with a loaded nine millimeter, I think to myself, but can’t bring myself to say it out loud. I set off again and finish the rest of the trip in a Salvador Dalí painting. In front of me, through the beads of sweat clouding my eyes like cataracts, I see only melting clocks, trees reaching out to grab me, flying tigers coming out of the mouths of clownfish with vampire teeth. With less than half a kilometer to go, I see Francesco Moser skateboarding past me. I make the last three hundred meters on nothing but sheer Veneto will. Once my house is in view I’m all one color—even my green shirt has turned maroon. My neighbor with the garden looks at me from his balcony, I nod at him like, “Relax, even doctors recommend getting a little exercise. . . .” I open the gate, take fifteen minutes to get up the stairs, and roll onto the couch, groceries and all. My eyes close as the voice of announcer Nando Martellini echoes in my head shouting, “World Champions! World Champ—” Then they open suddenly. I realize I left the ice cream at Marisa’s and forgot to buy butter.
I consider my options.
I guess I’ll prepare a sorbet out of green apple hand soap and attempt to make margarine out of curdled basil.
Four
All four of them are back home whereas I’m down in the studio working, keeping an ear out. They had gone straight to bed.
One I put to bed without pants. One without her teddy bear. One without a sock.
One without me.
The Cat
Melania doesn’t just say “A!” anymore.
Now she also says “es” to mean yes, and the one time out of ten when she gets the “y,” she says “yesh” and bursts out in applause. She also calls cartoons “boo-boos.” And says “mo!” for more. More what is a mystery—it could be more water, more fries, or “Pick me up, old man, can’t you tell I want to lie on your chest some more? Learn to talk, why don’t you.”
The only comprehensible word she pronounces (almost) correctly, the only unmistakable word that has climbed to the top of her highly personal top five loves, even ahead of Mama, is “Cake-uh.”
“Cake-uh” means any sweet, from candies to muffins to chocolate eggs to pudding. But the ultimate “cake” remains the undefeated discount store Danishes. The discount Danish, or “Danish”-brand Danish, is straw yellow, and when you take it out of the package, you get a whiff of hay and honey and cream cheese. It comes in a light blue package that makes it look like the little cracker packets they give you in the hospital. I have to open it for her, but without throwing away the wrapper, which has to remain in sight. Then I have to peel it off the little paper boat that serves as internal packaging without taking it all the way out. She grabs it, bites into it on one side with her big hook tooth, and then meticulously crumbles it up into about a hundred pieces. When she’s done with that operation, she puts all the crumbs together and throws them into her mouth like confetti on Mardi Gras.
After finishing her “cake,” Melania looks at you and bites off your nose. The nasectomy has evolved from what it used to be. Now it alternates between: “Give me some water,” “I want a pound of chips on the little elephant plate,” “I want a chunk of parmesan, no, some prosciutto, actually two hot dogs,” “Take me out of the
high chair, I said take me out of the high chair, I-said-take-me-ooooout!” “All the markers here, now!” “Where are my darn toy pots?” and “I’ll have a cutlet and French fries on the side, thanks.”
When she bites my nose and laughs, it means she’s really happy. When she bites my nose and laughs, I’m really happy too.
When she falls asleep on my belly at night, just after dinner, I eat the crumbs from the cutlet or Danish off her like a cat licking her kitten clean. Then I lift her a little and whisper in her ear, “Should we go to bed, Melania?” And she lifts her head a little without opening her eyes and says to me, “Yesh.”
I get up, holding her tight, and we head quietly down the hallway. I lay her gently in her crib, straighten her legs, and rub her head. Getting to her bedroom door ends the best half hour of my day, every day. With a pang of nostalgia that gets stronger every night; with drool on my sweatshirt, always in the same spot, which by now seems intentional; and a bad craving for Danish-flavored cutlet that I hope never goes away.
Cyrano
The first time I broke my nose, it was my twelfth birthday.
It was a middle school party, my party. The attic, with the strobe lights and the blue and red spotlights and the egg cartons on the ceiling for soundproofing, was all decked out. We’d worked on it long and hard, we’d hung posters of Gazebo and Spandau Ballet and the Police on the wall—it seemed like a real home discotheque.
I was dancing with Lara, who I knew liked me. I also knew that my friend Riccardo—whose house it was—had a huge crush on Mariarosa. What Riccardo didn’t know was that Mariarosa was dying for him to ask her to dance. It wasn’t obvious; Lara had just revealed it to me. Looking past her hair, I observed the two: Riccardo with his unbearable hesitation and Mariarosa with her hopeful suffering.
Sleepless Nights and Kisses for Breakfast Page 8