Sisterchicks in Gondolas!

by Robin Jones Gunn

  Steph glanced around as if trying to see what Sue saw. “The floor is uneven under the table so be careful when you walk around the backside. It shouldn’t be a problem, but just know that it’s permanently sloped due to the building’s settling. Are you ready to see the kitchen and bedrooms?”

  “Do you want to wait here?” I asked Sue.

  “No, I’m ready. I’ve just never seen anything like this in my life. I can’t believe we get to stay here.”

  As if a breather for our senses, the kitchen was mild. No painting by undiscovered masters appeared on the ceiling or walls. Everything was simple. Sue couldn’t stop running her hand over the marble top of the kitchen table. The table was rectangular and large enough to fit six chairs around it comfortably.

  “Do y’all know how much this grade of marble goes for in the U.S.?” Sue asked. “I mean, even a cutting-board size of this sort of marble. This is incredible.”

  Steph told Sue to brace herself before she showed her the large sink, also in marble.

  To this day I don’t think Sue has recovered from the marble overdose. Especially because the marble flooring continued through the rest of the apartment. With Steph at the helm, we floated down the hall.

  “This is the linen closet,” she said. “You’ll have to make up all the beds because our maid service just cleans the towels and sheets, but she doesn’t make the beds. Don’t ask me why; it’s odd, I know. I’ve asked her before, but she refuses. So now we just tell all the guests they have to make up the beds.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  As we continued the tour, I counted five moderate-sized and moderately decorated bedrooms before we viewed two tiny “water closets.” Just when I thought we had made a complete circle back to the entry room, Steph opened a side door and invited us into the ultimate princess bedroom.

  “This is my favorite room,” she said. “I love the pale green color of all the furniture. I call it the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ room. You know, the video in which all the castle staff have been turned into furniture, and they start to sing and dance when Belle shows up.”

  I vaguely remembered watching the animated video many years ago. When I looked again at the matronly bureau drawers, I saw what Steph meant. The furniture in this princess bedroom did appear to have some dormant performing skills hidden beneath the pale green paint.

  The floor space had to be comparable to the gigantic sitting room we had viewed earlier. At the far end of the magnificent room, double-slatted doors opened to the balcony I’d viewed from the street. Bright afternoon sunlight streamed in when Steph threw open the shuttered doors. Sue gave a happy little sound when she saw the piano.

  “Do you play?” Steph gave the keys a playful plunk.

  “A little,” Sue said modestly.

  “She used to teach piano lessons,” I said. “All three of her grown children are very accomplished. Her oldest son went to college on a music scholarship.”

  Sue headed for the piano without adding any details. That’s when I remembered they had sold the piano when they moved into the new house. This would be a treat for her to play again.

  I checked out the twin beds and matching vanity table, complete with rounded mirror and padded, pullout seat. On the opposite wall was a tall dresser that reminded me of a dress form for a broad, buxom woman.

  Sue played a light, airy tune on the piano, and the room filled with an enchanting happiness.

  “Lovely,” Steph said.

  “Keep playing,” I urged, lowering myself to the edge of one of the beds. “It’s the perfect music for this room. Look at the detail on these headboards and footboards. Hand-painted, no less.”

  “I know,” Steph agreed.

  As Sue closed her eyes and let her fingers express her feelings in music, I walked across the room to check out the balcony. My estimations were correct; we could fit a couple of chairs on the balcony, sit in the sun, and soak up the gorgeous view of the canal that ran the length of our street. I would be happy to sit there for hours and watch all the quiet activity of this peaceful neighborhood.

  Sue finished the music with a run of high notes fading slowly as she barely touched the keys.

  “That was beautiful,” I said.

  “Good to see someone using that old piano,” Steph said. “I hate to break this up, but the last rooms I need to show you are the main bathroom and the storage closet. Are you ready to see them?”

  Sue and I completed the tour with an introduction to an elongated bathroom that had a shower attachment inside the tiled tub. It was the most updated part of the apartment since indoor plumbing obviously hadn’t been part of the original palace floor plan.

  At the end off the hall was the final door Steph opened. “The space under the stairs is where you’ll find extra cleaning supplies.”

  “Where do the stairs lead?” I asked.

  “To a small space on the roof. You can take laundry up there if you want to dry it quickly. You saw the washing machine in the kitchen, right? Although in summer your clothes will dry just as quickly indoors once you open the shutters at both ends and let the breeze through. That’s the advantage of being on the third floor.”

  I poked my head into the storage area and tried to see where the stairs led, but all was dark after the first four steps.

  “Can you think of any questions? You have my contact information, right? And you understood my instructions earlier about getting the trash down to the street level before eight on Tuesday morning. What have I forgotten? Oh, the name of the restaurant where you can take your group tonight. I’ll write that down. And anything you find in the kitchen to eat is yours.”

  We said ciao to Steph and meandered back into the kitchen to figure out what resources we had available. The refrigerator was small and narrow like most European refrigerators. I checked inside and found a few condiments, some Roma tomatoes still connected to the vine, and two waxed cardboard boxes full of fresh green beans.

  Sue opened a cupboard door on the decorated wooden sideboard. “We have pasta. Lotsa pasta. And some olive oil and garlic cloves.”

  “Good. That means we have enough to eat dinner here. We can do our grocery shopping in the morning nice and early. What should we do next? Take our luggage into the princess suite?”

  “Slight problem, Jenna. Did you count beds while we were on our tour?”

  “No.”

  “There are five bedrooms. Each of the five bedrooms has only one bed, except the first one and the princess room.”

  “Is this a trick question?”

  “No, there’s nothing tricky about it. We have a total of seven beds.”

  “Seven beds for seven ‘brothers,’ ” I quipped.

  “Right. And no beds for the cooks.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. ‘Oh.’ Where are you and I supposed to sleep?”

  “Well …”

  “You know what, Jenna? I wonder if that’s why Steph pointed out the comfortable couch in the sitting room. She knew two people would need to use those couches as beds.”

  “Okay, so you and I will sleep on the couches. It’s only for the first few nights while the men are here. When they leave, we get the princess suite all to ourselves. What do you think?”

  Sue didn’t look thrilled.

  Just then a breeze skimmed across the marble floors.

  “Ahh.” I closed my eyes and felt the swirling air across my face. “God is breathing His blessing on us.”

  Sue pulled up her unruly hair into a bunch with her left hand, letting the coolness of the room minister to her perspiring neck. “You’re right,” she said slowly. “Just being here is an extravagant blessing. I don’t know why the thought of sleeping on the couch got to me the way it did.”

  “I do.”

  Sue looked amused. “You do? You know what’s going on in my psyche? Tell me.”

  “You’ve been sleeping on far too many couches and chairs in waiting rooms and doctors’ offices over the past few year
s. Sleeping on anything but a bed means ‘unsettled’ to you. It means you can’t really relax. It means you’re on duty and that you’re out in the open and at any moment someone may wake you, and you’ll have to get up and manage more trauma.”

  Sue twisted her closed lips into the kind of pressed-together scowl she made when she was trying not to cry. “You’re right.” She let down her hair and sunk into one of the nearby chairs.

  “This is a new season for you, Sue. For both of us. Couches can now mean sleepover fun or adventure and happy times. Not all couches are cursed.”

  Sue nodded slowly. “You’re right. New beginnings. A season of refreshing. Isn’t that what we decided this trip was going to be for both of us? Jumping into the deep end.”

  “Yes. New beginnings. Refreshing. And sleeping on couches for a few nights.”

  “I can do that.” She sounded as if she needed a little more convincing. But, as I’d seen her do many times during the past few years, Sue stood and put on her determined face. She could tough her way through any difficult situation. Didn’t mean she liked it. But she pushed hard and always got through.

  “We should make the beds first,” she said with an air of authority. “Then they’ll be ready whenever the guys arrive. After that, why don’t you and I go to the restaurant Steph suggested for lunch?”

  “Sounds good to me.” It struck me that whenever any of us come into unfamiliar situations that feel out of control, our instinct is to try to take control. Sue was doing a pretty good job of finding her place, and if taking control of the schedule helped her to settle in, that was fine with me. Strangely, I didn’t feel as if our circumstances were out of control. I felt very much at home. I loved this place. What if I decided I wanted to live here for the rest of my life?

  And why couldn’t I? What’s stopping me?

  I think that was the first moment in all my years of singleness that I realized how utterly free I was. I could go anywhere. Do anything. There might even be places in the world where I could live and serve with no one really caring that I was divorced.

  A new sense of hope stirred inside me as Sue and I made the beds. If I truly was entering a season of new beginnings, it seemed the first step would be a reshaping of how I viewed the opportunities before me and myself. Was I really bankrupt because of my “limitations”? Or was I rich in options? These were all new thoughts, but each thought planted a seed of hope in my heart.

  “I’m not done yet,” I said aloud.

  Sue gave me a strange look at my offhanded comment. “I know. We have three more beds to make.”

  I didn’t try to explain. Instead, I went about making the rest of the beds as if it were the most important work I’d ever done. I was in training for something, but I didn’t know what it was.

  Four

  It took Sue and me nearly an hour to make up all the beds and sort out the towels. We placed a folded set of towels on the foot of each bed and organized the kitchen a bit.

  A drooping cobweb hung from the high ceiling above the sink, so I went to the storage closet in search of a long-handled broom to knock it down. Once again, the view into the darkness above the stairs inside the closet intrigued me. I felt around on the wall for a light switch but didn’t find one. Carefully taking the first three steps up, I came to a small landing where the stairs turned and made an angular ascent into the darkened shadows. If this was where the laundry was carried up to the roof, I imagined the maid of a Venetian nobleman had taken this journey with a basket of washed clothes on one hip and a candle in the other hand.

  It was a safe guess that my organized sister-in-law had packed a flashlight, and I had a penlight in my purse. I considered going back down to fetch a light, but the Nancy Drewness of the moment urged me onward. I was on a quest in the darkness.

  Four more steps up my eyes began to adjust. Two more steps, and my head bumped against what I thought was the ceiling but turned out to be a door. I found a thick metal latch. The cool metal didn’t feel like any sort of closure found in this century. Or maybe even in the last two or three centuries. I tried pulling on it. When that didn’t work, I gave it a yank to the right and then to the left.

  “Jenna?” Sue’s voice sounded far away. I guessed she was still in the kitchen.

  “I’m up here, in the broom closet.”

  I could hear her shoes tapping across the marble floor, coming in my direction. She entered the storage room and in a confused voice asked, “Jenna, are you in here?”

  “Up here. Up the stairs.”

  “In the dark?”

  “I’m trying to open the door to the roof Steph told us about.”

  Sue climbed up the stairs behind me. “I can’t see a thing. Where are you?”

  “Only another five or six steps.”

  “I feel like Nancy Drew.”

  “I do, too!” I said. “Which book was the one about the creepy old mansion? Was that The Hidden Staircase?”

  “I don’t remember.” Sue was on my heels now. “So, where’s the door?”

  “Here.” I tried to lean back to give her space to wedge in beside me. “Can you feel this ancient latch? I can’t figure out how to make it open.”

  Sue reached up, and we worked together in the dark, our hands tangling together, as we tried to figure out the medieval lock. We somehow managed to turn it just the right way and were rewarded with a promising click.

  “Should we open it?” Sue said.

  “Of course. Come on. On the count of three, push.”

  Blinding midday sunlight gushed into our narrow cavern and caused us both to look away. Instant heat flooded the cooled space and invited us to take the final steps to the roof. I climbed out onto the sunroof and shielded my eyes from the intense brightness.

  “Sweet peaches! Look at this.” Sue emerged right behind me. “It’s like our own secret hideaway.”

  The flat area was only about ten feet long and maybe six feet wide. It was level and had drainage holes in the side of the raised wall that was about four feet high and protected the open space on three sides. The fourth side was the elevated extension of the roof that went up another six feet or so and had various odd looking spouts and vents cut into the red tiles.

  “I feel like we’re on top of the world.” Sue’s hand shielded her eyes from the direct sun as she surveyed our surroundings. “This is incredible!”

  “It is.” We could see over the side of our building into the small square that formed the only open space between our apartment building’s backside and the other three buildings. In the center of the cobblestone square stood an old well that had been capped. It was easy to picture life in this small, secluded piazza hundreds of years ago. The women would come to the well while the children tagged along and played games. Their cries and laughter would have echoed off the buildings. I imagined this as a happy corner of Venice.

  “Look over there.” Sue pointed to the neighboring buildings that also formed a square. “They have trees.”

  Sue was right. Sprouting up to rooftop level was an immense tree or perhaps several trees that spread their green goodness in a comforting canopy. We’d already seen at Campo Apostoli how rare trees in Venice were and how shade was at a premium.

  Straight ahead of where we stood, beyond the rows of red-tiled rooftops and tall, saffron-colored buildings, we could see blue water. In the midday brilliance the blue wasn’t the playful aqua I’d seen that morning on the Grand Canal. This blue was deep and brooding. It was the blue of the Venice lagoon where waters from the Adriatic Sea flowed in to greet this fleet of anchored islands. Sue took in the sweeping vista of our quiet neighborhood. “This is amazing.”

  “It is!”

  “I’m having a hard time comprehending how all these buildings, all these huge, intricate structures, have been here for hundreds of years and are built on man-made, or at least man-assisted, islands. The buildings look like a row of dominos, don’t they? Take one frontline building, tip it far enough, and the whole row of
structures could crumble into the sea.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “It’s all so precarious, yet so settled and established. What a strange and wonderful place.”

  “Well, Nancy Drew, it seems you have another mystery to solve. How does Venice keep from falling into the sea?”

  I leaned against the edge of the roof ridge and thought for a moment. “I have no idea. But you know what amazes me, Sue? I was thinking of this earlier today. Or yesterday, I guess, when I was looking out the plane’s window. I’m amazed that God holds all of this together. Not only Venice, but also earth. And us. Everything could crumble in a flash if God took His hand off us, if He removed His presence. But He doesn’t. He holds everything together.”

  Sue surveyed the ancient world below us. In a quiet voice she said, “I don’t know. Sometimes it feels as though God removes His hand.”

  I knew she was referring to her husband’s car accident.

  “You know,” Sue continued, “everyone said God had protected Jack and kept him alive and brought him out of the coma after all those months. But my husband is going to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.”

  “I know,” I said softly. I had been there every step that took Jack on the journey of recovery over the past two years. My brother’s accident was what prompted me to move to Dallas. The hours Sue and I spent together had cemented our friendship. I knew how awful it had all been and in many ways still was.