“Okay,” he said.
Francesca began to tell him things, how her father was a dentist and her mother had infantile paralysis and was confined to her bed now. She told him that she had been to San Francisco and would like to go back. The whole while she talked, that humming grew in her gut. Mac told her things too. He lived in East Greenwich and went to the Catholic boys’ school there. His mother wanted him to become a priest but he knew he would end up breaking her heart and doing something else.
“I like pretty girls too much,” he said. “Like you. I guess I’ll just have to be a lawyer like my father.”
She was glad it was too dark for him to see her blush. None of the boys from the neighborhood, not even the ones who had kissed her, or Bruno who had sucked on her breasts, had ever told her she was pretty.
Mac stopped the car and the night was completely still. There did not seem to be any air.
“Where are we?” Francesca whispered.
“Lake Mackinac.”
“Oh,” she said. She had never heard of it. But now that she knew they were near water she could hear it lapping against the shore. “Funny,” she said, “just today I was thinking of how much I’d like to go to the ocean.”
“This is better,” Mac said. “Not so wild. Safer.”
“Hm,” Francesca managed. How could she tell him that she wanted that other, wilder thing? That her body ached for something unnamable, unreachable?
“If I kissed you, would you slap my face?” Mac asked her.
She thought of how Michele had started kissing her one Christmas Eve after they’d gone into her yard to beat the fig trees that hadn’t bloomed that year. She still had a bit of cookie in her mouth and he had not even bothered to let her swallow first.
“You may kiss me,” Francesca said.
Mac laughed softly. “You’re so regal,” he whispered. “You’re like a princess.”
Then he had his soft lips on hers and he was prodding at her mouth with his tongue and Francesca was not leaving her body. She was in it. That surge of electricity kept humming inside her. Anything could happen with this boy, she realized. She thought of the name of the town where he lived and decided it was far enough away for her to go.
“I think I could kiss you forever,” Mac whispered into her ear.
It took everything she had in her to say, “We’ll have to see about that.” And for her to make him stop and take her home.
This time on the ride she sat so close to him that she could feel the muscles in his legs when he moved the pedals.
“Stop here,” she told him when they reached the fork in the road where he had first picked her up.
“I can’t leave you here,” he said. “It’s late.”
“My father would kill me if he thought I was with a boy. He thinks I’m at my friend’s house studying, which was where I was coming from.”
“I’ll only let you out if I can see you again.”
She pretended to consider this. “Monday night?” she said.
“Three whole days away? No. It has to be sooner.”
Francesca shook her head. “I’ll be right here on Monday night at nine o’clock.”
She didn’t let him kiss her again. She slid across the seat and out of his car, dizzy.
BY THE TIME she walked in the direction of the new houses and then backtracked to the church, the festa was almost over. The men were drunk and sloppy on their homemade wine. Arms linked, they swayed and sang together in Italian, some of them growing weepy as they sang. The women were sitting together, holding sleeping babies or sipping grappa. Some of the children still played, kicking the ball around the grass. Everyone Francesca’s age had gone, found private spots in the alley and fields that made up this part of town. She imagined those boys, Bruno and Michele, with their rough hands and clumsy kisses; the girls wanting something from them that they could not name.
On the table near the statue of the Virgin sat baskets heaped with the town’s gold. Posters of Mussolini were lined up everywhere like soldiers. Francesca stepped back, into the shadows, watching these people she would leave behind. These Catholics, these immigrants, these Fascists—displaced, lonely, scared. And her heart, for the first time she could remember, filled with a love so strong for them that her arms reached out for an embrace she was already too far away to give.
Waiting for Churchill
FROM THE WINDOW OF HIS STUDY UPSTAIRS, NIGEL Smith watches his daughter-in-law leave every morning. The girl, Martha, dressed like a man: pants, button-down shirt, thick shoes. Only her hair, blond and wavy, falling loose to her collarbone, gave away her gender. She walks with a light but determined step. In another time and place, not London 1943, she would be a girl going somewhere. Even with the windows closed, Nigel can smell war in the air around London. It smells of fire, of dust, of blood.
“Ask her where she goes,” his wife says.
He promises he will. But he never does.