Late afternoons brought with them glasses of wine, standing in for the vodka tonic she drank each day at home. By dinner she would be properly hungry and would finally order something of substance—pasta shells filled with cheese, spaghetti with aromatic meat sauce and a thick snowfall of Parmesan, a slab of stratified lasagna heavy with sausage. And always more wine—dark red, poured into thin-stemmed glasses, and refilled by the server from a waiting bottle before she reached the bottom.
One night, toward the end of our time in Rome, we were eating dinner at the restaurant in the lobby of our hotel. When the waiter poured her glass of wine, she motioned for him to pour one for me, as well. He obliged, tipping the bottle so a thin stream spilled into the empty cup beside my plate. When he stopped with the glass only a quarter filled, my mother motioned for him to pour more.
“You’re going to get drunk eventually,” Mom said. “The first time might as well be with me.”
I had never given a thought to the idea of drinking alcohol, but here was a drink served to me, and here was my mother waiting for me to drink it, and I had no moral objection to the thought of getting drunk. If anything, it just seemed kind of silly that drunkenness could really happen to anyone. I had a vague belief that it was just an act people put on, silly people who wanted attention. After all, my mother drank every night, and I’d never noticed her to act any different before, during, or after.
The wine tasted terrible at first, and slightly less terrible the more I drank of it. By the time our dinner arrived—pasta, again, this time with garlicky shrimp and thick chunks of cooked tomatoes in a creamy broth—I had decided that I liked red wine quite a bit, and that drinking it made me feel older. I wondered if I looked older, holding the glass by its delicate stem, taking dainty sips between bites.
A couple at the next table, the man much older than the woman, their fingers entwined on the table between them, glanced over and smiled at me, and I smiled back, feeling a connection to them, to my mom, to the waiter who had poured my wine, to everyone.
“You look happy,” my mother said. She held her own glass in her hand, and the red of the wine reflected up on her face. She looked, I thought, very European.
“I am happy,” I answered, and I drank the last of my wine. Now the world was vibrating, and suddenly I heard music that I hadn’t noticed before, and I couldn’t tell if they’d just turned it on or if it had been playing all along.
“Are you drunk yet?”
I shook my head no. I wasn’t drunk; drunk wasn’t really a thing. I was just, I don’t know, loose, sort of. Relaxed. Everything felt . . . better. The fork in my hand felt more solid. My mother, across from me, the red in her cheeks, looked hopeful, somehow. Everything would be okay, I felt. The warmth in my chest was proof of that. Life, it was beautiful.
Mom took another sip of her wine and then handed the glass across to me. The couple that was watching us stopped smiling.
I drank that wine, too, quickly, before the waiter came back and saw. I burped, and some of the wine and food came back up into my mouth. I swallowed it, suddenly sick, suddenly very sure that drunk was a real thing after all, and this is what it felt like.
“You don’t look so happy now,” Mom said.
She paid our bill and we stood up from the table. My armpits felt hot and sweaty, and I had to hold onto the edge of the table to keep from losing my balance. I closed my eyes, hoping that would make the room stop spinning, but it made it much worse, so much worse, and I opened them quickly to find my mother staring at me appraisingly.
I wanted to take her arm as we left the table, but she moved too quickly for me to grasp it, and my hand clawed at the air in the space where she had just been. When I took a step one foot crossed over the other, and I had to put all my attention into just making my way across the floor.
His voice heavy with some sort of accent and full of derision, the man at the next table said to my mother, “What kind of a parent lets her child get that drunk?”
My mother looked at the man, and then at the girl beside him. “You take care of your daughter, and I’ll take care of mine,” she said.
I followed her out of the restaurant and across the palatial lobby, making it all the way to the elevator before I puked into an elegant footed ashtray.
Back in our room, my mother handed me a glass of water and tucked me into bed. All night I dreamed of hurling through space, head over heels, lost and spinning, and surrounded by martyrs.
In the morning, I asked my mom through the pounding pressure of my headache, “Why did you make me get so drunk?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she answered. “Now, get dressed. We’re taking a train to Florence.”
???
They piled up as we visited church after church, crypt after crypt, a tour of religion and violence and death. We saw other things, beautiful things, life-affirming things, but the beautiful things were slippery, sliding through me and away. The ugly stuff had hooks and claws and teeth, and it became part of me. The bodies of the virgin martyr saints arranged themselves in a line behind me, silently following me as we wound through Italy, as I read about their short lives and ugly deaths, Agnes behind Agatha, Valerie behind Catherine, on and on, eyes downcast, gentle smiles on their lips, hands clasped like schoolgirls, all just about my age. They didn’t speak to me, they did not reach out to touch me, and when I slept in the hotel they formed a horseshoe around my bed and waited for me to wake, dancing through my restless dreams, bleeding from wounds to their hearts, their necks, carrying their beheaded heads, their sliced-off breasts, their gouged-out eyes.
They followed me through Italy. They watched me bathe and sleep.
And when we went to the airport, when we boarded the plane toward home, they made a line along the runway and watched me fly away from them.
At home, after we took a cab home from the airport, the empty place in the garage told me that Dad wasn’t there to welcome us back. But it wasn’t him I missed—it was them, the virgin martyr saints. Dad’s parking space would remain empty for two more weeks. And then, when his car reappeared, and him with it, there would be no mention of the absence, no celebration of the return.
The day after we returned home from Italy, still groggy from the time change, I helped my mother fold the sheets fresh from the dryer.
“There is no such thing as unconditional love,” my mother told me. “I could stop loving you at any time.”
I thought about the virgin martyr saints. I thought about the men who had loved them, who killed them.
I thought about my mother and my father, and about my father and his first wife Judy. Her words were a warning, a gift, a benediction.
And I nodded. I believed her.
???
At school on Monday, I wait on the steps out front for Seth’s Acura to pull into the parking lot. I wait and I wait, until the final bell has rung and I am late to class. Finally I go inside, go to class, accept the raised eyebrow I get from the chemistry teacher.
I sit in the chair I always sit in, but know that I am not the same girl who sat here on Friday.