by Rita Ciresi
“For who?” I asked, no longer caring about decorum.
“For myself,” she said, and then asked the waiter, “Could you wrap this? I want to feed it to my dog.”
I got up without excusing myself and disappeared for three or four minutes into the ladies’ room. It was a single-stall bathroom, cold and not very clean, and after I had gotten over some of my shame at being related to someone like Lina, I went back into the dining room. Lina was bent over her compact mirror, reapplying her lipstick. She had coated only her bottom lip when Mr. T. Tran came back carrying the check and two fortune cookies wrapped in cellophane on a black lacquer tray.
“You choose,” Lina told me, her top lip pale and cracked compared to her coated bottom lip. “You first. You have a future. I only have fate.”
I selected the cookie on the left. Lina put down her lipstick and seized her own cookie, as if certain it would contain some secret as to how she should live her life.
We hesitated, then ripped the cellophane and gingerly broke our cookies in half. I thought about how different we were in our approach from Phil and Dirk, both of whom extracted their fortunes by breaking the cookie in half with their teeth.
I looked at Lina expectantly.
“Do not purchase any items from the Home Shopping Channel,” she pretended to read from her fortune. “All that glitters is not gold.”
I leaned over, took the scrap of white paper out of her hand, and read the real message: “Good friends stick by your side.”
Lina took mine and read aloud, “Be confident.” Then she tossed it down to the table. “Have you noticed how shitty these fortunes have been lately? They used to sound like Confucius. Now they sound like your local Girl Scout leader.” She looked back toward the kitchen door. “I feel cheated. I demand a refund.”
“Lina,” I said warningly.
She clenched her fists on the table. “I swear to God, if you marry him—”
“I'm just going out with him,” I said.
“You said it was serious, and serious means marriage. Which really means jail.”
“You're a sour person, Lina,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I'm just like the eggplant Mama used to pickle in vinegar.” Lina looked around the restaurant. “Bob used to take me here,” she said, as if she hadn't told me that already. Then she told me something I hadn't heard before. “I stole money from Phil to get an abortion.”
I sucked in some breath. “How could you?”
“How could I not?” Lina pursed her crooked lips together. She looked all lopsided as she said, “Now when I fall asleep—God, I have so much trouble going to sleep—I dream about tidal waves. I read about them in the Reader's Digest in the clinic. They're called nightmare waves. They rush out of nowhere onto the shores of South Sea islands. They're supposed to be sent by a hostile god. Whole families, entire villages, get swept away.”
I felt the sharp corners of my fortune cookie melting in my mouth.
“Do you ever have weird dreams?” Lina asked.
“Sometimes I dream in Italian,” I told her. “I'm talking, but I don't have the least idea what I mean to say.”
I sighed. I reached over for the check, but Lina grabbed it first. “I'll pay,” she said. “You know I like to pay.”
AT THE AIRPORT-LIMOUSINE terminal, my sister demanded that Dirk and I bring back the tackiest souvenirs from Italy that we possibly could find. “I want a Pope-on-a-rope key chain from Vatican City,” Lina told us. “Plastic statues of Michelangelo's David. Laminated place mats that say Torna a Sorrento.”
“They don't want to spend their whole vacation shopping for you,” Lina's husband said.
“Who said they did?” Lina countered.
Lina and Phil glared at each other. I looked down at the floor of the terminal, and Dirk looked away.
“Well,” Lina finally said. “Buon viaggio. Have a ball.”
We hugged. I held on to Lina tight. “You'll get to go someday,” I whispered.
“Is that an offer to baby-sit?” she asked.
We left them on the sidewalk of the terminal, Phil holding my niece's hand, Lina holding Richie's. With her free hand, Lina blew me kisses that seemed to sting my face. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I turned my face out the window of the limousine so Dirk wouldn't see.
The limousine was empty except for us and the driver. Just outside of Bridgeport, Dirk pushed up his wire-rim glasses—always a signal that he was about to say something important—and told me, “They don't seem to match, your sister and her husband.”
“They had to get married,” I reluctantly said.
“Oh,” Dirk said. I sensed disapproval in his voice. “You should have told me that before.”
“And Lina needs a vacation,” I said.
“Well, she doesn't need to make you feel bad because you're taking one.”
I shrugged.
“Your sister seems to constantly compare herself to other people,” Dirk said. “It's mean-spirited. Not to mention unhealthy.”
Dirk rarely said anything negative against another person. What lay behind his attack of Lina was his (accurate) judgment that Lina didn't like him. Over the past weekend, which we had spent at Lina and Phil's house, Lina had stared too intently at Dirk, as if challenging him to stare back; she watched him go into the bathroom and wash his hands before dinner and observed how he brushed the crumbs off the table before he stood up to bring in his plate. He was too tidy for her, too precise. Out of his earshot, Lina referred to him as Hans Brinker, the boy with the silver skates.
“Lina's definitely going through one of her bad phases,” I told Dirk.
“Good thing it's a phase,” he said. “It would be very uncomfortable for you if she always acted like that.”
“Look,” I said, annoyed, “my sister and I are really close. She's always done a lot for me. I mean, she didn't have to invite us for the weekend. She didn't have to take us to the terminal or volunteer to pay my bills while I'm gone.”
Dirk blinked, as if surprised I would stand up for anyone in my family. “I realize that,” Dirk said.
“And she's covering my tracks with my father.”
“That whole situation is ridiculous,” Dirk said. He lowered his voice so the driver couldn't hear. “You're an adult. You should be able to tell your father you're going away with me.”
I sighed. How could I explain to Dirk that in our family, a three-week spin of Italy was what two people—if they were lucky enough to afford it—did only on their honeymoon? They certainly didn't do it before they had even announced their engagement. Although my father must have known inside that Dirk and I “were a pair,” as he put it, he preferred to ignore the situation. If I had told him we were off to Italy, he would have been forced to acknowledge that Dirk and I were sleeping together. He would have held it against me for a long time, even if Dirk and I eventually got married.
The hint—the threat—that Dirk was going to ask me to marry him hummed between us, in an undercurrent seemingly louder than the jet's engine, all the way across the Atlantic. Dirk held my hand a lot and kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye, as if he were making one last appraisal of an expensive item he was about to purchase. I grew tremendously thirsty and kept on walking back to the stewards’ station for more orangeade, which also kept me going back and forth to the bathroom.
At da Vinci Airport, Dirk—who had peed only once on the entire plane ride—left me standing by the baggage claim while he went off to use the bathroom. The hubbub of families and friends reuniting—the loud shouts and greetings, the kisses and hugs— reminded me of a big party from my past. I kept on seeing people—types—that I recognized from my childhood: relatives, people from our neighborhood, church parishioners. When a woman whose hair was darker than mine casually asked me something in Italian, I was pleased that I was able to give a faltering answer back.
But the feeling of belonging disappeared when Dirk came back from the bathroom and joined m
e. With his hair so pale it sometimes looked white and his scholarly wire-rim glasses, Dirk was clearly a foreigner. As we waited for our luggage, no one said anything to me, and I noticed that a little more space cleared around us, as if people realized that we were different.
That was the way it went for the rest of the trip. Wandering through the ruins of Villa Adriana or down a narrow, winding street in the pale pink light of Siena, people spoke English to us if we were together, and Italian to me and German to Dirk if we were apart. It got to be a joke. At night—lying on the too-soft, grungy mattresses in the only hotels we could afford, our feet swollen from walking and our stomachs gurgling to protest all the wine and the garlic—we would report on how people came up to us and asked for directions to churches, piazze, railroad stations. Dirk was tremendously amused at being taken for un tedesco. I was slightly annoyed that he could respond more fluently in German (which he had carefully studied from seventh grade through graduate school) than I could in Italian, a language I had grown up hearing—although, admittedly, consciously ignoring—from the time I was born.
My Italian was coarse and unmistakably the language of contadini. The further north we traveled, the more my sh for s and the way I slurred the last syllable became apparent. While in Rome I felt like I was in the midst of a family gathering, in Florence I felt more and more alien among the skinny, chic-looking women climbing out of Fiats onto the crowded streets. The girls jetting around the Duomo on motor scooters—their long, light brown hair flying behind and their faces impassive behind their dark glasses—seemed to have grown up worlds away from me. And yet, with all their bravura, they reminded me of Lina.
By the time we got to Venice, people's faces had sharpened so considerably that they had high cheekbones and hawk noses.
Here Dirk, more often than I, was the one people began speaking to. His precise looks were the rule instead of the exception.
At a souvenir stall in Saint Mark's Square, I paid ten thousand lire for a black plastic replica of a gondola. When I peered through a little hole in the back of the gondola and clicked the red button on top, I saw colorful, cheesy scenes of the Venice I had longed for years to see: a flock of pigeons scattering in the air in front of Florian's, the Rialto Bridge hung with blazing red flags, the dome of Santa Maria della Salute bathed in a cloud of mist, the lacy facade of the Doge's Palace, the shadowy Bridge of Sighs. When I took the gondola away from my eye, I saw the real St. Mark's Square—the white tables and chairs lined up in front of the cafés, tourists posing for pictures in front of the Campanile, a group of nuns patiently waiting in line in front of the Correr. From the bandstand in front of Quadri's, musicians in white coats played too-slow swing music. Then bells began to ring, and at the top of the tower, the figures of two Moors stiffly swung their hammers, striking the hour.
Dirk came up behind me. The sunlight glinted off his pale blond hair and the rims of his gold wire glasses as he stared at my plastic gondola.
“My Great-Aunt Grazia used to have one of these,” I said, slipping it into my canvas backpack.
“So you have to have one too?” he asked.
“It's for Lina.”
“Your sister doesn't really want that stuff.”
“She told me to bring back the tackiest souvenirs I could find.”
“You've done a splendid job of locating them,” Dirk said.
Only the thought that the whole afternoon and evening—never mind three more complete days of vacation—loomed in front of us kept me from stalking down the square in silence. I tried to make light of the situation. “You're just jealous of that snow globe of the Vatican that I bought,” I told Dirk.
“Don't be ridiculous,” he said, slightly smiling to show that he, too, didn't want a fight. “I'd much rather have that hollow replica of the Pietà.”
He unsnapped his camera from the case. I waited impatiently while he shot everything in the piazza—the four bronze horses and the mosaics at the top of the basilica, the pigeons on the large white squares on the pavement, the dizzying height of the Campanile. Then we walked down to the Grand Canal. I trailed a little bit behind, watching the leather identification tag swing back and forth from the strap of Dirk's Minolta. Before we left, Dirk had taken his black fountain pen and labeled practically everything he had packed with his name and address. When he quit packing for a few minutes to make a phone call, I borrowed his pen, and like a mother sending her son off to summer camp, I blocked out his name in capital letters on the inside of his underwear. “Very amusing,” he said, when he opened the suitcase in Rome and discovered it.
As I walked behind him, I wondered if his name was rubbing off his Fruit of the Looms onto his backside. Then I wondered, with guilt, if Dirk also was thinking something mean-spirited about me. But Dirk didn't hold grudges. He probably had his mind on something dull from another century, some fact from the guidebook he had consulted—and read aloud from—the night before. In 1756, Casanova escaped from a wooden cell in the Doge's Palace and scaled the walls to his freedom…. Black candles were lit on either side of the Byzantine Madonna to comfort criminals about to be executed on the piazza.
“Where are we going now?” I asked.
“The Frari.”
“Does it have any Botticellis?”
“It's a church.”
Dirk offered me his Blue Guide while we were waiting for the vaporetto. I declined. I held on to one of the posts on the dock and stared down the canal. A crowd had gathered underneath a sign that said SEE MURANO, ISLAND OF GLASS! I wondered if the island was a Venetian version of Cape Cod—the glassblowers fashioning vases and decanters in the shop windows of Murano just as the craftsmen made baskets and candles in the shop windows at Hyannisport. But what did it matter? I'd never see it. In his day planner, Dirk already had worked out an itinerary for the rest of the trip. It was full of churches and museums. Glassmakers, lacemakers, and gondola rides were forbidden.
The night before, our elbows leaning on the windowsill of our hotel room, we had watched the black gondolas glide along the water, their red lights illuminating their hefty cargo: German tourists and vacationers from New York and New Jersey. The gondoliers, in their red-and-white striped shirts and straw hats, sang songs I remembered from my childhood. Sometimes they were accompanied by accordions, whose hum sounded mournful as it faded on the water.
Dirk was scornful of the whole business.
“Lighten up,” I said. “It looks like fun.”
“It looks like an amusement park.”
“I like amusement parks,” I said.
“I thought you said you used to throw up on the rides.”
“That's because I ate too much cotton candy.”
Dirk sighed. “We should have gone to the hill towns,” he said. “Assisi. Padua. Ravenna.”
“But everyone goes to Venice,” I said.
“Yes, every Italian-American.”
“I'm Italian-American,” I reminded him.
“But you're not on a Perillo bus tour.”
“Maybe I wish I was,” I said, and walked away from the window.
“Are you premenstrual?” Dirk asked.
“No,” I said, carefully watching him. “My period's late.”
His face turned ashen, and I laughed. “Don't worry,” I said. “I feel it coming.”
He blinked, and the anxiety that had just tightened his face disappeared. “Don't do that to me, Angel,” he said. “It's not fair.”
I shrugged and sat down on the bed. He kept his eyes on me, and I started to feel so uncomfortable that I decided to make him uncomfortable back. “What if I was pregnant?” I asked him.
“Were pregnant,” he corrected me.
“Whatever!”
“But you aren't,” he said. “You just said you probably aren't, so it doesn't bear further discussion.”
From below on the canal, I heard shouts of laughter and an accordion begin to play. In the midst of Venice's playfulness, Dirk's pure Midwestern outlook on li
fe annoyed me.
Lina had an affair, I felt like telling him. With a married man. She got pregnant by him too, and then she had an abortion.
But I didn't say anything. Dirk kept staring at me, as if trying to see a side of me he never had discerned before. “You know,” he said, “sometimes I think you're so jealous of your sister that you even want to make the same mistakes that she did.”
“Let's drop the subject,” I said.
“My pleasure,” Dirk murmured, and sat down beside me on the bed. I felt the tension emanating from his body, and felt my own tension aching to be transformed into something else.
“Do you still have your diaphragm in from this morning?” he asked as he carefully took off his glasses.
The vaporetto sputtered as it pulled up to the dock. Dirk and I climbed aboard. We stood at the back, watching the yellow sign that marked Saint Mark's stop fade away in the distance. We didn't talk anymore until we landed at the Rialto stop.
Once we wandered off the main canal, the paths became
much narrower, and the pastel buildings with their high, tall windows seemed to close us in. Cats climbed on grates and slid in and out of the broken lower windows. Dirk and I went one way, bickered about the best route to take, then turned in the other direction. Dirk stopped at a bridge that arched over a small canal and pulled out a map. “Do you want me to ask someone for directions?” I said.
“There's no one around,” Dirk said.
I turned. One door down, there was a linen shop. In the window were cascades of lace, tablecloths, and runners draped over pedestals and hanging from overhead bars. Big wicker baskets were stuffed with napkins and handkerchiefs.
I peered in. Dirk came up behind me.
“It's closed,” I said.
When I didn't move away, he asked, “See something you like?”
I pointed. “My mother used to keep a runner like that on the dining-room table.” When we dusted the furniture, Lina used to take the runner off the table and drape it over her head like a wedding veil. She picked up some wax flowers, held them like a bouquet, and pretended to solemnly glide up a church aisle.