“Well,” I said, “ my mother comes tomorrow to get us and take us home.” I added, “I can’t wait to see her.”
Suddenly, I felt an ache for my mother that was so enormous I almost fell over. I pictured her in our backyard, working in the sunless garden there. I saw her at the stove, sprinkling herbs, tasting, and correcting. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel the shape of her that night in Naples, her strong shoulders, her hair that smelled of generic-brand strawberry shampoo.
Ava went to a fancy drugstore in Greenwich Village and bought tubes and bottles of expensive toiletries. I liked to go into Ava’s bathroom and take all of the lids off everything and inhale their exotic smells. But now I longed for my mother’s simple smell of Ivory soap or no-name toothpaste. I remembered complaining not too long ago about the cheap stuff, holding up a bottle of fancy shampoo, and the way my mother had taken the other kind and read off the ingredients, making me compare. “How embarrassing!” I had shouted. “How cheap!” And then I’d buried my face in the racks of magazines, leaving her to do all of the shopping herself.
“I miss my mother,” I said, and that ache grew so great that the only way to relieve it was to cry.
“Oh,” Carmela said, patting her ample lap, “come here, cara mia. Come here.”
I climbed onto the old woman’s lap and let her wrap her arms around me. They did not feel like my mother’s arms, knowing and familiar, but they held the comfort of someone who understood a broken heart.
That night, my father told me to dress up fancy—the two of us were going on a date.
“I don’t want to,” I said miserably. All I wanted was to go to bed and sleep until my mother came for us. Then I would hug her and not let go. I would tell her how sorry I was for every bad thought I’d had, every cross word, all of it. I would tell her she was a good mother, the best mother ever.
“But you have to,” my father was saying. “You and I need a proper celebration for your acceptance to the Boston Ballet School. We’re going to dinner at a restaurant near Piazza Navona, and then we’ll get ice cream later.”
I loved ice cream in Rome, with all the flavors I had never tasted before, chestnut and hazelnut and zabaglione. I loved the Piazza Navona, too, with its fountain lined with statues hiding their eyes. My mother had said that the sculptor for the fountain, angry that he had not been commissioned to build the church as well, made the statues cover their eyes from the church’s ugliness. My father said that story was not true; the dates when each had been built proved the falseness of that tale. But I didn’t care. I chose to believe my mother’s version.
Dressing, I struggled to remember things my parents had agreed on. But I could find none. Those happy times of just a few years ago were already fading away. They couldn’t even agree to stay married, and now I knew why.
Cody tiptoed in, his eyes wide. “Don’t leave me with her,” he said.
We were united now in our hatred of Ava Pomme, home-wrecker, wicked stepmother, strega—witch.
I shrugged. “I think Daddy’s trying to cheer me up.”
“But she’ll ignore me all night. I’ll have to color or something.”
Cody hated to color, but Ava had bought him dozens of coloring books and crayons because she never bothered to notice how much they bored him.
“Can’t you stay in the lines?” he mimicked. “Why is the girl’s face purple?”
I laughed. “Strega,” I whispered.
“Strega,” Cody whispered back.
The cafes in the piazza were full in the warm summer night. People sipped coffee and emptied liters of wine, their heads bent together in conversation, cigarette smoke furling around them.
“Cody loves Italy,” my father said.
He had his arm hooked in mine, so gentlemanly that I could almost, but not quite, forget that he was not a gentleman. Gentlemen followed certain rules of behavior, and even though I wasn’t certain exactly what those rules were, I knew they didn’t include cheating on your wife or jettisoning your family. He guided me to an outdoor table, pulled out a chair for me to sit, then pushed it back in, effortlessly.
“How about you?” he asked when he settled himself into the seat across from me. “How do you like Italy?”
I wanted to explain the things I loved here, the churches and the oldness and the way the Italians understood something important about me. But wrapped up in that was what I had figured out here, about him and Ava Pomme. I felt homesick. I missed my mother. I didn’t know how to say all of that, how to tell my father that I thought Italy was wonderful but he was not. A part of me still loved him so much that I wished what I knew could go away.
“It’s all right, I guess,” I managed to say. It was the best I could do.
He looked surprised. “I figured you loved it, Mad,” he said. “What with your interest in religion and your love of churches and saints.”