A week before we left for Italy, I waited next to the phone for the junior company of the Boston Ballet to call. Finally the phone rang and I saw the caller ID: Boston Ballet Company. I got in! They would only call if we were accepted, they had said.
“This is Madeline Vandermeer,” I said when I answered, “and I am honored to accept this. Honored. Honored.”
The woman on the other end was laughing by the second honored. But then I started to cry and she said, “Congratulations, Madeline.”
Even though my parents were still divorced and my mother was still ordinary and all of the other terrible things in my life, I felt happy. Ecstatic, even. I thought about the patron saint of air travel, and how he used to levitate and float. That is how I felt that day.
And then, before I knew it, my mother and Cody and I were on an Alitalia 747 heading to Italy and I really was levitated, high above the Earth and everything I knew. Despite myself, I was excited, and I squeezed my mother’s hand and even let her lift my hand to her lips and kiss me. Things were starting to change. I could feel it. By the time we settled into our hotel room, I was certain. Change was in the air.
For one, Italy changed Cody. It was as if he belonged there more than anyone else, as if Providence had been a temporary place for him to stay while he waited to come here. I noticed it and I was jealous, even though envy didn’t become saints. I struggled with jet lag, waking at one or two every morning, unable to fall back asleep while Cody slept soundly through the night. When he woke up, he had energy, ready for everything and anything. He happily picked up the phone and ordered room service: caffè latte for our mother, blood-orange juice for all three of us, a tray of these crusty cream-filled pastries called sfogliatelle.
When the waiter arrived with the cart that bumped noisily across the floor, Cody was already showered and wrapped in one of the hotel bathrobes. But I could hardly pull myself out of bed after so many hours awake in the middle of the night, staring out the window, past the balcony, to the street beyond, where lovers rode their Vespas up and down, the girls holding on tight as the boys drove fast along the bay. Naples was noisy all the time, even at night. I was miserable, bleary-eyed, cotton-headed, homesick, even.
“How do you know that blood-orange juice isn’t made from real blood?” I asked Cody. “Like monster blood?” I added.
This was the type of question that would have sent him into a fit of tears at home.
But here, in Italy, in Naples, it delighted him.
“Blah,” he said, sticking out his tongue in the glass and lapping up some juice, “I’ve come to suck your blood.”
He loved the food that Mom made us try. She always scribbled in her little notebook, sniffing things, asking our opinion, drawing little pictures. The stuffed and fried rice balls called arancini, and calamari, which was squid, and rolled meat stuffed with breadcrumbs and nuts and cheese called brasciola, he liked it all, while I stuck to pizza. Here, it was so wet I couldn’t even lift it, even though that’s what they expected you to do.
In between eating we took tours. We went up the funicular to Vamero and my mother let me choose a cameo, a small pin with a saintly face carved in ivory. “She looks like you,” Mom said, and even though it wasn’t true, I felt special and maybe even pretty. We spent a hot afternoon in the Archeological Museum, room after room of ancient treasures. Many of them had been plucked from Pompeii, put there for safekeeping from vandals and tourists eager for a souvenir ruin. Even though I grew fascinated by all the broken things there, the pottery shards and cracked columns and bits of people’s lives, I got tired. Exhausted. Keeping my eyes open was almost impossible. Cody, on the other hand, chatted with the guards and made Mom read him descriptions of pottery and busts and sculptures of gods.
Italy also changed my mother. She transformed into someone new before my eyes, a worldly woman who could speak a few phrases in Italian, order in restaurants, negotiate prices with shopkeepers and cab drivers. She walked with great confidence. She even looked beautiful to me again. She and Cody walked ahead of me, pointing and laughing and taking pictures, while I dragged behind them.
“I am so unhappy,” I would call to them. “I am so tired.”
“Come on, slowpoke,” they would call back.
How could a future saint be so tired in Italy?
Our next stop was Pompeii.
It was clogged with tourists, mostly German. Tour guides carried different colored umbrellas so their groups wouldn’t follow the wrong leader. There weren’t any English guides, so our mother bought a small book at the kiosks in front and we walked through the ruins together, Mom looking things up in the book as we went.
“The bakery,” she said, reading from the guidebook, and there we saw the ovens, the two-thousand-year-old loaves of bread encased in volcanic ash, the bricks they used to heat them.
We found the Temple of Jupiter, the mayor’s house, the amphitheater. The streets had deep ruts from the wheels of the chariots.