A Semester Abroad (2 page)

I lugged my suitcase up the stairs because those two jammed all their suitcases into the tiny square elevator. My body ached from sitting for so long, and going up the stairs made me sweat once again.

“Wait till you see it,” said the blonder one—Janine, maybe. I wanted to make sure that my reactions to everything she said were correct. Her gaze was intimidating. I barely registered her looking me up and down before she was staring into my eyes. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was dealing with, but I knew that I was being sized up.

I climbed up to the third floor. The hallway was big, full of alcoves and wood. The apartment was way in the back. When I opened the door, I gasped. It was simple but prettier than I ever could have imagined. There was a tiny kitchen, the wooden desk in the hallway, the cherrywood cabinet full of plates. The dining room window looked out over all these rose-colored brick rooftops and beyond that what looked like the countryside I had seen in so many pictures. There was no microwave and no television. There wasn’t even a telephone. I was finally somewhere else, somewhere far from what I knew.

“Imagine no telephone. Hello, it’s 1995 and here it seems like 1885,” one of the blondes said. But I didn’t mind. I wasn’t expecting any calls.

“More like 1295,” Lisa said, correcting. “Because that’s when Siena was a real force to be reckoned with.”

The smiles on the blonde girls’ lips told me everything I needed to know about what they thought of Lisa. I knew I hadn’t said enough yet to give them impression of me. I didn’t want to say any more. I inspected the rest of the apartment.

There were two bathrooms, both with bidets, a strange toilet-like contraption that I didn’t understand. The bathroom in the room Michelle and Janine took was the one with the shower. Lisa started making a stink about this when Janine came in with three of her bags.

“We took the double room. We figured it would be cool if we bunked together.” Janine said as if she was doing us a favor. She looked at me for help. She determined that I already understood that Lisa wasn’t cool. If I wanted to enjoy my stay here, I would know whose side to take. “We knew you guys didn’t know each other and we thought since we did…”

I felt so lonely then. And that was nothing new except that for the first time in months, in almost six months, I was not lonely for him but for my roommate, Kaitlin, for a friend. I had already almost accepted that I would never be with him again, but I hadn’t prepared myself to feel so friendless.

All three women stared at me, waiting. I knew that I didn’t want to sleep in a room with Lisa or either of the other two. I wanted a friend but did not see that in their eyes. I would rather have my own room, no matter what the size or proximity to the bathroom.

“Look, I don’t care about the bathroom. I’m sure we’re all going to have to work it out with the shower. I’ll take the back bedroom. I don’t mind.” I said. It was smaller, but it had the window. That meant the room Lisa had, although bigger and closer to the showerless bathroom, was the one that was basically a hallway. Anyone using the other bathroom would be walking through Lisa’s room. I would always walk through her room on the way to mine

I went back to my new room without waiting for protest or permission from the strangers that were my new roommates.

It didn’t take me long to unpack the little I brought. I folded half of the things I hadn’t bothered to at home and hung up some of my wrinkled shirts on wooden hangers. I surveyed my room, a box with faded flowery wallpaper and a thin pink blanket on a tiny bed. I hadn’t had any pink in my room since I was eleven. There were two scratchy brown blankets in the dark wood armoire where I put my clothes. I took them out and threw them on the bed. The pillow was pitiful, but I folded it in half and lay back on the bed. There were chips in the ceiling paint. I am going to be staring at these chips for the next five months, I thought.

If only I had a picture of him in that secret compartment that hid my passport. Or a picture of us. It would be proof that the person I cared for existed. I didn’t need reminders of him, but I yearned for something tangible.

I thought about the first time he kissed me.

We were lying on my bed. That was not new for us to lie together, holding each other and not doing anything else. It was one of those funny dorm things people did in college. We slept bundled tight together for many weeks until it was almost comical that he hadn’t kissed me. But one night, that night, he did. He kissed my forehead first, my ears and then my chin. I held my breath expecting to be disappointed. Waiting so long for something almost guarantees that it won’t be as good as you expected.

But it was better.

When he kissed me, I felt that this boy had been born to kiss me. That he knew how to kiss me in a way I hadn’t even known I wanted to be kissed. I didn’t say that, though. I just kept kissing, wanting to go as long as I could.

“Wow!” He whispered at last. Him, not me. “I could kiss you for a long time and never get tired.”

I was so happy about that and didn’t think until much later that our definitions of a long time might be two different things.

But he was kissing someone else as I lay in that tiny bed in Siena. Someone he kissed before me. She had endured through it all. It didn’t hurt so much to think of him kissing someone else as to think that those lips 
could
 kiss someone else’s. How would those lips fit to anyone else’s? They should slide off another’s—never quite matching, never quite locking in.

But they did.

My first night in Siena, Arturo came to pick everybody up at our doors for dinner. We walked up and down the hills through the narrow, windy, carless streets of this tiny medieval town. We were a group of foreigners, a caravan of 
stranieri
.

We ate pizza with a crust like a crispy cracker with 
rucola
 and 
pecorino
. I had heard of the salad green arugula but never tasted it and it was delicious and spicy. The cheese also had a kick, it was made from the milk of a sheep.

There were about thirty of us in the exchange group. The number was less than I originally thought when I got on the bus. Though more than half of the group were people from my school, I didn’t recognize anyone because my university was so big. I liked that about it, that you could get lost, that you could avoid certain people or always meet someone new.

Some of the kids, mostly ones from the private schools, spoke Italian. I followed the gist of their conversations but didn’t attempt to speak this language. It all seemed a bit pretentious, like they were exaggerating the accents. Lisa was one of them; she kept speaking to Arturo, showing off for him.

“I don’t even speak Italian. I took French,” said the taller of my two blonde roommates to no one in particular. The other one stayed in, claiming not to feel well. I suspected she was planning ways of making an entrance. “I just came for the trip. I just came because Janine said it would be cool.”

Right, this was Michelle.

“They’re going to give us a test on Monday at the university. They’ll put you in a class that suits you,” Lisa, who acted like she knew everything, said. She turned to Adam. “I knew before I came that I was going to wind up translating a lot for my roommates.”

Adam was the guy with the biggest accent. Lisa wanted to impress him. He had mentioned several times in English and Italian that he had spent a summer in Rome. She continued talking to him in Italian. While her accent was bad and American, his was an exaggeration of vowels. They were posturing for each other and for us.

My head was spinning. Part of me wanted to go back to that little room that would be mine and crawl under the thin pink blanket and not worry about speaking to or knowing anyone. But instead, like everyone else, I drank glass after glass of Chianti and hoped that things would improve.

I slept through Saturday morning into the early afternoon, waking in the tiny bed with my mouth feeling dry. I grabbed my watch and tried to calculate the time difference. It was after one or maybe after two; I was having trouble remembering how many hours ahead we were.

I got up and I stuck my tongue out at myself in the foggy mirror in my room. My mouth was stained purple, like I had been on a Popsicle bender. But the slight throbbing in my head wasn’t a brain freeze. I tried to remember if I did anything stupid, but I didn’t even talk to anyone.

I dreamt of Jonas again. He was standing in nothing but his boxers, his body long and lean. His stomach and the muscles in his upper arms were perfectly clear. He was still tan from the spring we spent together. I could see the freckles on his shoulders, but this was just a dream. He was above me on a terrace in one of the arched windows with deep red shutters open around him. Every building I passed yesterday had shuttered arched windows, and in my dream he stood in one. He was yelling at me, yelling at me for leaving, for being who I am. I could not make out all of what he was saying, except that he was telling me that I was wrong about everything.

It would have been nice to believe that. To believe that there was some excuse for all of this. But in reality, there was no reconciling the Jonas I believed in with the truth of the one that existed.

It could drive a girl crazy, and it almost had. It still could. But so far in this country, I was okay. There were things I hoped would distract me. The newness of everything battled old memories. Maybe Crazy got stranded in Brussels.

I left the apartment quickly. Lisa was still asleep. The blonde best friends were nowhere to be found. I didn’t shower. I was not ready to be naked yet.

On the street, I studied the buildings around me, worrying that I would not be able to find my way back to Via Stalloreggi. I considered for a split second going back in. But that was foolish. I couldn’t hide forever. I needed to explore the city, see what it had to offer, discover if the brochures told the truth.

I walked through the town, circling the piazza, the center square. I hadn’t expected it to be so cold, although it was January. For some reason, I believed the brochures of Siena with pictures that had probably been taken at the height of summer. I hadn’t packed my heavy jacket, hadn’t wanted to waste the space. I regretted it. I would have to buy a new one, though I couldn’t. I was on a budget, and food was more important.

The scent of crackling fire surrounded me. It was a cross between a campfire and the Italian restaurant I went to back home. Behind the tall stone buildings people were cooking and laughing. They were cozy. They were not lonely.

I thought of how I would describe it in letters back home. I had to mention the hills, the way I braced the front of my feet as I went up and down the random slopes of cobblestone streets. I would describe the dark shutters of windows that Jonas would never be behind. I would compare the color of the buildings to one of my pale peach shirts. The streets were narrow and windy with the piazza the center of a spider web.

Around me, people walked. They knew where they were going; they had a purpose. The women were well put together. Their hair and makeup were perfect, and in their stylish wool coats, they weren’t cold. I couldn’t focus long enough on the bits of conversation that drifted by me to make sense of it. They shouted 
ciao
 at each other. Even those 
ciaos
 sounded different to me, like it was two syllables, the end ringing out harder, almost a howl. I formed my mouth into an 
o
 and said ciao, letting the end ring out, quietly to no one but myself.

I called my parents collect, to say that I made it safely. I vowed to be grateful for everything. I did a good job of convincing them that I appreciated the sacrifices they made, saving the money to get me here. I thanked them for all of this and told them how lovely the city was. I tried to convey how certain I was that I would be fluent in a matter of weeks.

I didn’t tell them how cold I was. I didn’t say that I felt trapped in the lack of language or that I didn’t feel particularly close to my roommates. They had always maintained I should stay with a family. And I certainly couldn’t have mentioned that as I walked the Italian streets I should be enjoying, the name of an American boy was just below the surface, repeating over and over like my mantra.

At last indoors in a coffee shop, I stood and tried to remember the system. The men behind the counter were handsome. They held themselves taller. They had the confidence lacking in American boys. They didn’t hunch their shoulders or jut out their chins. What would it take to forget him? Try and replace this set of memories with another. It’s what you were supposed to do. Forget. Move on.

I ordered my cappuccino, unsure of the words and my pronunciation, but the man understood me and placed a cup before me on the bar. For something to do, I added sugar and swirled it into the foam carefully, watching it dissolve.

Older men surrounded me, watching. No one was really openly looking at me. No one was a real threat. The cappuccino warmed me, but it took only so long to drink. Then I had to pay. How to say this?

“
Pago?
” I asked the man, hesitant again. He leaned closer, smiling. I repeated myself, feeling my eyebrows knit closer together. He said something in his language gesturing toward the door. He nodded at me to see that I understood. I didn’t but pretended that I did, to get out of it. I managed a smile. I nodded. Fortunately, he began helping someone else. He did not return to help me. I was helpless.

I couldn’t figure out how to settle it, what to do. And so I left.

On the street, I was frustrated. I looked ahead five months and wondered if I would ever be able to speak to anyone. What if I could talk only to the women I lived with? What if I starved? Worse, what if I had to rely on Lisa? What if I somehow got grouped with her?