L'America

by Martha McPhee

  Most of all Beth learned about the beauty of and the seeming simplicity of an ordinary family: Bea's family, like Sylvia's, was conventional and small and predictable but even closer than Sylvia's because of the proximity of both sets of Bea's grandparents. Sylvia's grandparents lived far away and rarely came to visit. And though Sylvia's family loved Beth, she had never lived with them and had not witnessed intimately their life as a family. (Beth also knew that Sylvia's father was suspicious of her own, so of course she disliked him.) Bea's family was different. It was the family she had always dreamed of having. Bea's mother adopted Beth immediately, her American daughter, and Beth wanted to be polite and good and make Signora Nuova proud with her new Italian words. Through Signora Nuova she learned what it might mean to have a mother though Beth knew Claire would never have been like Bea's mother with her long protective arms wrapping you up in the scent of a fine and subtle perfume, teaching you about all the pretty things of the world. Bea's mother loved to iron, loved the order of making wrinkly things smooth and neat again, and she would iron for hours in the basement, which always smelled of detergent and freshly washed laundry. She busied herself with errands: shopping for food, doing laundry or running to the dry cleaner with clothes for the girls, preparing the meals. Beth took a great interest in the latter. Though neither spoke the other's language very well, Signora Nuova enjoyed teaching Beth how to make risotto alia Milanese, say, or un piatto difunghi di bosco al salvia; she taught her how to make fresh pasta and desserts: salame di cioccolata and dolce di Città and zuppa Inglese and crostata della nonna ai fichi. Beth's first summer in Italy she gained ten pounds.

  Bea became the older sister Beth had always wanted and she loved everything about her and wanted to be like her, down to the way she packed her suitcase: all her shoes in their own small felt bags; her underwear (matching bras and panties of a crisp white cotton with the smallest red strawberries) wrapped in tissue paper as if each set were a gift; her dresses, somehow still neatly ironed after all the travel; her towels soft and even warm-seeming and smelling of lavender. Watching Bea unpack was like watching a princess. Bea had an inherent elegance and self-respect, and each item of clothing was more adorable than the last. Bea's suitcase had nothing to do with Beth's, which was an indelicate mishmash of torn Levi's and Indian print skirts and T-shirts, items she cared about deeply until she met Bea. With Bea, Beth could surrender her will and stop being in charge.

  Beth had heard about the Rotary Group's Summer Exchange Program during the daily assembly at school. A man came to tell the girls about an exciting opportunity in Venice, Italy. When he asked for volunteers, Beth's hand shot up, and then so did another girl's hand. She was a year older than Beth. Her name was Larissa Lord Jones. They filled out applications, wrote letters of purpose, submitted recommendations, and waited and waited and waited. All the while Beth's grandmother drew pictures for Beth with words—pictures of palaces and canals and gondolas and Italian princes waltzing her across vast marble floors. This was what she wanted for her granddaughter. This was what she had wanted for her daughter, not for Claire to have married a hippie dreamer with ambitions she could not, for the life of her, comprehend. For Beth's grandmother, known to all, even to Beth's father, as Grammy, Europe was older thus better. Europeans had figured out how to live. Grammy would support Beth in style with trunks and new dresses and letters of introduction from people at the Met to people at the Vatican and the Uffizi. The larger Grammy's pictures grew, the more Beth wanted to go and the more she came to hate Larissa Lord Jones. The hating was mutual. Larissa hated Beth. Then Beth hated Larissa finally and completely because Larissa won. She was older, Beth was told; Beth would have another chance next year.

  And here again comes that hand, sweeping down quietly but with finality: A few weeks before Larissa Lord Jones was to begin her exchange with Beatrice Nuova (Beth hadn't stopped thinking about Larissa floating through the Venice canals with Italian princes), her older brother was killed by a semitrailer on one of those fast western roads. He had been riding a motorcycle when he was hit; he died instantly.

  The Rotary man was wrong about the city. It was Città la Venice (pronounced Ch ee ta la Ven-ee-chay, but known plainly as Città) and definitively not Venice or Venezia. Città, a small rich town, nestled into the foothills of the Alps, garnered fame not for its history or its art or its beauty but for its industry of socks and shoes: Bianchi, Macchi, Ghiringhelli. Città: capital of Italian wealth and feet.

  So Beth and Sylvia were blown to Città. Bea met them at the station, took them back to her house, fed them abundant amounts of pasta, listened to their tales of Chas ("We'll find him in Corfu!" she declared. And indeed she would make sure they were there on August first, renting mopeds and circling the island, asking other Americans if they had seen Chas, but to no avail), and of Carlos (Bea would inform them of his fame but was skeptical about whether the man they met was the real Carlos Alberto. "But the Ferrari, the Ferrari," the girls would persist). In her basement, Bea stored their backpacks and their clothing. She loaned them green leather suitcases, which she filled with clothes from last season, along with a blow-dryer and a curling iron. She taught them to wear mascara properly and trimmed their hair, giving them both bangs. In her own country she was not threatened by Sylvia, just bossed her and led her as she did Beth. And somehow this worked beautifully.

  The next day they drove to the Tuscan coastal resort town of Forte dei Marmi in a Maserati with two of Bea's friends, Miki and Dario. The Maserati was red, of course, and it belonged to Miki, a very rich, very tall (awkwardly so) heir to a newspaper delivery empire. He was the kind of man that gold-diggers prize: incredibly kind and sweet, though none too attractive, with bad teeth and a weak jaw, stumbling over himself to be polite. He drove his car fast to impress the girls. Their suitcases bobbed in the back and Sylvia held on tightly to Beth, pretending to be afraid, but they were too young to have that sort of real fear. In nearby Pisa, Miki arranged for a private tour of the Leaning Tower by moonlight. When they were hungry, he made sure everyone was well fed with whatever she desired—tortellini alla panna and bistecca alla Fiorentina and brioche at 4 A.M. fresh from the bakery, paying the fornaio extra because she opened her door for them so early in the morning (white smock, flour on her face). He took them to Parma so that they could try real prosciutto and real parmigiano. "You must. You're in Italy" (Ee-ta-lee). They would not sleep. They barely slept that summer. Over two hundred kilometers per hour, all of them squashed into the Maserati, Sylvia singing—you can guess what—about a Maserati doing 185...

  Dario was a printmaker, none too wealthy, and Miki's sidekick, small and dark and wiry, Miki's exact physical opposite. Soon he was smitten with Sylvia (who found him a fun diversion), kissing her in the dark as they walked along a rocky jetty, fringed with crashing waves, that jutted far into the Mediterranean. He spoke only a few words of English and Sylvia only a few of Italian. "They communicate through the language of love," Miki said. It was funny to watch them. Beth didn't mind losing Sylvia to Dario because she had all of Miki's attention. It simply seemed to Beth that in Europe romance was everywhere and women had their pick of men.

  After two days of sunbathing at the edge of Forte dei Marmi's thin beach, with the Mediterranean lapping at the shore and ombrelloni for shade and lettini for comfort and fresh brioche and tortellini and the fast Maserati and stories of what it means to be in charge of getting everyone in northern Italy their newspapers on time in the morning, Miki declared his love for Beth (and Dario his for Sylvia), and the boys asked them to come to Greece where they were going in ten days with some other friends to windsurf on the island of Páros. This was the way in which Italians vacationed: in packs, traveling somewhere warm and watery that involved fun and exercise and staying at least a month. They didn't travel like Americans in Europe: long distances, many destinations, cultural devouring, backpacks, long letters home. (In fact, postcards home from Italians included at best the signatures of the vacationers.)
But every night Bea and her friends would call their parents. Even if their parents knew exactly where they were and that they were not leaving the chosen spot, said island, they needed to hear from their children, otherwise they enlisted the parents of others traveling in the party, the law, the national guard, in order to locate them, nervous until they heard the voice of the twenty-year-old daughter, the twenty-six-year-old son. Watching the evening ritual of the phone call was always amusing and touching for Beth: her father or grandmother would have thought something tragic had happened if a call came in from overseas. Rather, once in a blue moon, she wrote a long descriptive letter detailing all of her adventures, every single one of them.

  "I'm in love with you," Miki had said. Waves splashed them on the jetty, soaking them entirely. His kisses were salty and he was so tall and so thin and so rich. His feet were enormous. The kisses, salty as they were, became intoxicating, the kind that send chills rivering through your body. Beth thought she loved him, too, except that he was so tall and those feet. His feet! "You're so tall," she said. "But he's so tall," she'd say to her friends. He stuck his hand down her shirt and gently held her breast. The brilliant moon blocked out the stars and lit up the water, a shimmering silver surface. "You're beautiful," Miki said, "and I'm in love." He unzipped his pants and placed Beth's hand on his penis and she had no idea what to do with it so she just held it and said, "I can't do this. I can't betray Sylvia," acting dramatic, half pretending that this was too big and complicated and confusing for her until he simply held her and told her it was okay, that they had time—indeed all the time in world. Beth looked around for Sylvia in the dark, couldn't spot her anywhere. Wet with the sea, Beth skipped back across the rocks toward shore, and Miki following awkwardly with all his size and feet. "Come to Greece," he yelled after her. "Come to Páros."

  Bea watched her friends, feeling a little like a matchmaker, or a puppeteer, proud and happy with her success. She was delighted by the invitation to Greece and happy to have established these little romances. She wasn't afraid of being a fifth wheel; Bea was too confident for that. And besides, for a while now, in Città, she had had a small flirtation going with a boy named Cesare, a handsome boy who made her laugh when they met in the center in the evenings for a Prosecco before dinner with all their friends from town. He made her laugh because he liked to observe the odd details of the other people collected there and did so in a way that was also self-deprecating. At the same time he exuded a confidence that somehow lifted him high above everyone else. He was sort of an Italian Peter Pan, loving to have fun, treating the world as his playground. He was tall and slender with black hair that receded gently at the temples and he came from a prominent Città family who had been bankers in the town for five hundred years. He loved everything American—Levi's and Bruce Springsteen—and though he had never been there, when he and Bea spoke, it was about America. Bea regaled him with her adventures on a commune there. The more stories she told him, the more she loved America herself, remembering how she had been both exotic there and utterly invisible, allowed to observe. But for the sake of entertaining Cesare, she made herself an active participant in American life: she had played American football, had milked goats with her bare hands, had picked apples and raspberries, and even sold them to fancy New York restaurants. She had been a part of the Claire community, had helped build a yurt and cut a road (not true), had taught Italian at the commune school, had been introduced to American literature. "Books?" Cesare asked. He was a reader, too, liked books in English. The flirtation was just the smallest inkling of a flame, but it flickered with promise in Bea's chest, occupying a large percentage of her thoughts—only a fraction of which she would share with her friends because she did not like opening herself for all to see; such unselfconcious candor was a characteristic she noted as particularly, endearingly, American. Cesare, one of Miki's friends, was headed for Páros as well; Bea imagined Beth and Sylvia and herself all paired off and felt exhilarated by the prospect of the summer and this vacation.

  After the declaration of love, the Maserati drove back to Città with two happy boys eager for the ten days to swiftly pass. The girls were happy, too, to be on their own again, in charge of their own adventure, though Bea took command and led them, lugging their green leather suitcases first to Florence, sweltering in the July heat, to see Michelangelo's David and the Slaves and Botticelli's The Birth of Venus rising from the foam. The girls felt nourished by culture and less guilty for at least having seen something. It didn't matter that Beth and Bea had seen all this "stuff" before. That knowledge simply allowed them to hold forth, which they did, as if they knew so much more than Sylvia about Michelangelo and Botticelli.

  After Florence they traveled to Rome where the biggest attraction, aside from the Vatican and the Forum, was the Porta Portese market. They each bought a string bikini and here Sylvia saw plenty of her gypsies and even had the chance to thwart a robbery. "I caught him! I caught him!" she screeched, holding on to the arm of a dirty little boy who had tried to snatch her wallet. He struggled with a fiery energy to free himself from her grasp. No one, not a single person, seemed to care.

  It was in Florence though, in front of the David, in the heat with hundreds of other bodies sweating and pushing against the girls, that Bea first mentioned Cesare. "Cesare has a body like that," she said. "Who?" Sylvia asked. "Who?" Beth echoed. Beth knew intimately the details of Bea's love life, knew that for two years she had been having an affair with a married man. Bea would write Beth long letters about him that Beth would read and reply to during English class or say, history, while pretending to be taking notes, riveted by her friend's escapades because they were so much more daring and grown-up than anything she or her American friends even dreamed of. Bea liked being with a married man because she always knew what to expect, knew that someday he would leave her and knew in advance that the reason would be the wife and not some flaw of her own. (Italians rarely leave for the other woman.) She never wanted anyone, especially a man, to identify her flaws. She was overly proud that way, wanted to keep her flaws to herself. Above all, Bea loved spilling her insides out to Beth in a letter, something she could never have done in person or with any other friend.

  "Cesare," Bea said. Chey-zar-ay. Just from the way Bea said his name with an uncharacteristic warmth and a tenderness, Beth knew. "He has a body like that?" Sylvia said. "He's so big," Beth said, feeling a little jealousy creeping up her throat that she tried to quell like one does an overexcited dog. Most of all she wanted to know the details.

  And as they floated toward Greece on their bubbly cloud of youth, the details of Cesare would emerge, a bit like treats to reward the girls. Cesare was generous, warm, handsome, playful, studying economics at the Bocconi in Milan, and he came from an old family with a name in her town. "Old family" was an idea that meant nothing to Beth and Sylvia, but to Bea it meant a lot; it was better to be aligned with a good old family with a name just as it is better to go to Harvard, say, than to a state university. Her family, though good, was not old and did not have a name. The Nuovas had been transplanted to Città from Verona and Genova—towns not a great distance from Città, but far enough all the same to make the Nuovas a new family (even though they had been in Città for over a hundred years). And their wealth was new, too. Bea's grandfather, a manufacturer of dyes for stocking threads and sock fibers, had been a factory worker who happened to be educated and lucky. He rose within the company until one day he owned it (an extraordinary feat), and was thus able to give to his son, Bea's father, a fortune and a job. In Città the new families were distinguished from the old families and the new families carried a certain unspoken stigma. For example, Cesare would be a good match for Bea. He would lift her from her unspoken lower status (within the upper echelons, of course) to one equivalent to his own. Bea's parents were delighted by this flirtation not only because they did not approve, needless to say, of the married man (whom they knew about even if Bea told them nothing), but because Cesare had a
good name and was known as a nice boy—if not an all-too-serious boy. For Cesare's family the match with Bea would be a bad one. The family's status was solid and a match with Bea would not lower it, but these things mattered, and all things being equal a marriage between Bea and Cesare would not be desirable. She would be a freckle on the complexion of the family name. (Heaven forbid an American!) Of course, Bea as a match had not crossed Cesare's family's mind, nor even Cesare's, to be truthful.

  His family did not even know who she was. But Bea knew all the subtleties of class, of new and of old and of how they existed, thrived even, in late-twentieth-century Italy like some sort of burden from the past. Thus Bea's last name always felt to her like a mark, a scarlet letter. And though she had mostly observed in America, she loved the freedom of being there, of being anonymous, of being free of the burdens and expectations conferred by her family name. But most of all, Bea loved Beth madly simply because this vast web of name and stigma and class that ran beneath the surface of Città like a complicated power grid supporting the infrastructure meant absolutely nothing to her and wouldn't even if Bea bothered to explain it.

  "But how long has this been going on?" Beth demanded. "I never received word."