A Semester Abroad (4 page)

“
Grazie
.”

“
Prego
,” three of the boys said and the other, the one who held the pack out to me, said something that made the rest of the table laugh.

“I think he called me a 
fumacina
,” I told Olivia when I retreated to her corner, offering the cigarette. “Do you know what that means?”

She shrugged. I wasn’t sure if I was being made fun of. But it didn’t matter.

I hoped I had found a friend of my own.

Michelle found me upstairs with Olivia and her friends. Michelle hugged me with the affection only a too drunk girl can find. She lost Janine in this bar after a marathon of other bars, she explained slurring. The details were hard to understand. It seemed to me that Janine might have purposely lost Michelle. I doubted she would have wanted to hang, as we did, upstairs drinking big cheap beers. Janine wanted something more exciting. She wanted action.

When Olivia was ready to leave, I hung behind with Michelle to look for Janine. I didn’t really want to, but it seemed the right thing to do. Downstairs, the bartender said. “
Quella bionda è andata via
.” He flicked his hand several times. I squinted my eyes as if I could understand better by seeing better. He laughed at me, which was no longer a surprise, and dumbed it down in my language. “You friend go.”

I understood some Italian words that night. I thought I heard one of the tray women sitting at the bar saying 
quella bionda
, the blonde, as the bartender referred to Janine. As we turned to leave I heard her laugh and say 
putana
 and 
americana
. American whore.

I walked unsteadily arm in arm with Michelle back to the apartment through the empty streets. There were lanterns with dim white light flush against the side of the buildings, but the streets were still dark enough to see the stars.

It was like Michelle was sleepwalking. Her eyes didn’t focus on anything, but everything was hazy for me, too. I hoped I was going the right way.

When we finally reached the apartment, it was freezing. Michelle went straight for the refrigerator. She pulled out a tub of Nutella. She found a spoon and started shoveling spoonfuls of the hazelnut-chocolate sauce into her mouth. She did not even taste it. She was a savage, eating it ferociously. A little bit fell on the floor, and Michelle crouched on the ground and wiped it up with her hand. Then she ate it. She was a junkie. She didn’t care where the fix came from. She just wanted the Nutella high. I watched her, stunned, shivering.

“You’re hungry, huh, Michelle?” It was all I could think to ask the girl who was turning into an animal before my eyes.

“Yes, and it won’t stay closed,” Michelle said, twisting the top of the tub off again. She had abandoned the spoon now. She was reaching in with her fingers shoving them into her mouth again and again. The chocolate sauce fell out of her mouth onto her pretty pink shirt. She didn’t care. She rubbed the stains with the back of her hand, licking it. Any minute, she might peel off the shirt and suck on the material to maximize the taste.

I didn’t want anyone else to see her like this. I didn’t want to see it. I was embarrassed for her. I didn’t know her. I didn’t think I should see this part of her.

“Well, I’m going to bed, Michelle, good night.”

“G’nigh.” Michelle said, barely looked up from the tub. Her teeth and lips were covered in brown chocolate sauce. She was moaning with the delight of having the freedom to eat like this.

I walked through the hallway that Lisa slept in. Her face was turned into the pillow. She was awake, I thought, and crying. Lisa hadn’t gone out. No one had asked her. I had thought about it and decided I didn’t want to be saddled with entertaining her. I didn’t want Olivia to associate me with her, because I didn’t really like her. So there she was crying in her bed and I felt guilty. But I was too tired and drunk to see if she was okay.

I climbed into my little bed. I didn’t bother to brush my teeth. I was careful not to let my hands touch my body. The last thing I wanted was to remind myself of his touch. Many nights I went to Jonas’s room after a night like this, with my lipstick smeared.

“Did they love you for your mind?” he asked me about all the nameless boys I met. He wanted to remind me that they didn’t. He wanted to show me again how different he was from the rest. I was waiting for him, waiting for him to kiss me.

But he didn’t kiss me, not that night. I was used to nights of just waiting and not being kissed. He reached across to wipe off some of the lipstick on my mouth.

“You know your lips are a beautiful color without all this crap.”

I couldn’t look at him, then but I could feel him looking at me, feel his words spread through my body out into my legs.

It was too much.

“And hers?” I asked, meeting those eyes again in time to see the hurt. He got up and left his own dorm room.

He was not going to her. She was sick. She was far away and I was there. But now she was well. She was back and I was gone.

Just fall asleep, I told myself, don’t think. For once. 
This scene is too weird and you have drunk too much to deal.

I drifted off, but then I felt the chill in the air, the blanket being pulled back. I started to smile a bit, in anticipation, but it wasn’t him. It was Michelle, smelling of booze and burps and chocolate that was certain to stain my shitty pillow.

“They’re doing it,” she said. “Janine and some guy. Going at it in my room.”

“Shit.” I moved over as much as I could in the bed to let Michelle in. I could hear the distant sounds of sex, the screeching of the bed, thumps. A woman was moaning, a man speaking a language I didn’t really know yet. Michelle promptly fell asleep, taking up more of the bed than seemed possible and staying that way, a stiff rock, for the rest of the night. Not even my bed was my own anymore.

This is only the first whole day, I thought, and tried to imagine what the next 150 would be like.

The Università per Stranieri di Siena was across the Piazza del Campo from the apartment at Via Stalloreggi 6. It was there that I spent some of the most frustrating moments of life. But unlike my apartment, the
universita
always had heat.

There were two buildings to the school, with a small piazza between them. The school was for
stranieri,
meaning foreigners, not just Americans. It was full of people from all over the world. The only language we would ever share was Italian.

Each time I walked to school from the apartment, sometimes with my roommates, sometimes without, I worried that I would slip down the steep hill into the
campo
. When I came back up and out the other side of it, I worried that one of the little cars or motorized bikes would hit me on the narrow streets. Small commercial cars were the only cars allowed beyond the walls and then only in the morning. In the small window of time they had, the drivers sped around like demons. There were times when I don’t know how they missed me at the very last minute. But they were the experts; I was the
americana
.

My first day at the university I bombed the placement test. I was never a good test taker and I was nervous about speaking Italian. In my individual interview, I couldn’t seem to raise my voice when the proctor asked me about American film. He wanted to put me in the first level, the level for beginners, but I pleaded with him for placement in the second. Even though I barely understood anything, I had taken Italian for three semesters. I couldn’t be a beginner. It was a matter of pride.

“
Posso fare secondo. Voglio secondo
,” I said, not even sure if I was speaking the right words as I begged to get into the second level, whether I was making my case better or worse.

He looked over my written portion again. Thankfully, there were a lot of multiple-choice questions. I smiled the biggest smile I had at the proctor and said, pronouncing every syllable, “
per favore
.”

When he sighed and started talking in fast-flowing syllables I still wasn’t sure of my fate, but I kept my face calm and nodded. Then he handed me a piece of paper with my class on it. He had given in, and I was in the second level.

And so I found myself in Signora Laza’s class. Many days I watched the sun stream through onto the white walls and had no idea what the hell was going on. I kept telling myself that it was all part of the experience, but 
non ho capito
 became my party line to the 
professoressa.
 I sat next to Lucy, which was helpful.

I didn’t understand a single complete sentence throughout the entire first class. Maybe I should have accepted defeat and gone to the beginner’s class. None of what I learned in class seemed familiar from my last semester of Italian at school. That last semester I had skipped many classes, and Italian was the last thing on my mind.

Each day I understood a little bit more, but there was never a moment that I felt relaxed or comfortable. Every day there was a
pausa
, the break that would be customary in the three-hour-a-day lesson. I drank my cappuccino and wondered if it was ever going to get any easier. Luckily, I mastered the art of ordering cappuccino by the first week. That was my small victory.

Lisa was bitter that she also got placed in the second level. Apparently, she expected to get into the third level but didn’t speak Italian as well as she thought she did. I wondered if my being in her level made it sting even more. I should have been above enjoying that, but I wasn’t.

Janine got the first level and Michelle, who had never spoken a word of Italian, was able to avoid the placement test all together and just go into the beginner’s class of the first level. For our first week Michelle’s default was “
Mi chiamo Michelle. Sono
americana.”

It was almost impossible to be comfortable in the apartment those first few weeks. I was always shivering. A warm bar was always preferable to a freezing apartment. The heat in my cold stone building came on in the evening and shut off somewhere in the middle of the night, leaving me to swim around my tiny empty bed for warmth. I started leaving my clothes out on the bed, so I could change under the covers.

Some nights, I lay on my bed, pulling the scratchy brown blankets around me, trying to take the lesson in. I studied my Italian grammar book and tried to concentrate on the 
ezercizi
 in 
suffissi speciali
. Mostly it felt futile. 
Futile.

I would have done anything to be able to veg out in front of TV with a bowl of microwave popcorn and a down comforter. I didn’t know how I was going to handle not having a television or a telephone. I wanted to get away, and now I was away and isolated. There didn’t seem to be much else to do. No distraction from learning the language. Right.

I fell into a pattern with my roommates. They remained strangers to me for the most part. We occasionally met at the kitchen table in various stages of eating the meals we prepared for ourselves. I began cooking for myself once I was brave enough to order bread at the 
forno
 and learned that I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone at the Coop supermarket, though it was closed in the middle of the day and on Wednesday afternoons.

They were not roommates the way I had been with Kaitlin. She was a friend who made me think that a roommate was someone who shook you awake when you hit 
SNOOZE
 too many times before a midterm, who shared clothes and confidences. I was spoiled by Kaitlin. She always had a smile when I needed it.

There were little things I liked about them, though. Janine was a performer; she thrived on attention. She had a way of holding court, exaggerating the frustrations we felt with no idea of what was going one. She made fun of herself trying to act out a blow dryer in the tiny department store Upim because she couldn’t think of the word.

Lisa kept herself separate from us. Maybe she was homesick for the boyfriend she claimed to have. Janine speculated that this boyfriend was gay when it was just the three of us, following it up with, “Oh, no, I didn’t!”

I thought I could hear Lisa crying at night sometimes, but I didn’t know her or what to do to make her happy. I tried what I could. The one time I asked her to come out with me she said, “I don’t know how it is in 
your
 second-level class, but I have a lot of homework in my class.” I shook my head and walked away.

Lisa was the queen of passive aggression. I knew she was the loser of the bunch. That gave me a bizarre protection but also a sort of sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I went out with Michelle and Janine a few times. It was never like the casual nights I had back at school with Kaitlin. Those girls took going out for a drink to a new level. I was always underdressed in my tight knit shirt and jeans. They got really dolled up and it worked; they got attention. I often felt like a third wheel except for the times that Janine got hit on. The slightest interest from a man would make Janine turn away from us, leaving Michelle and me with nothing much to say to each other.

Janine brought a lot of guys home those first weeks. All of the freedom intoxicated her. She skipped a couple of classes to the horror of Lisa. Janine hobbled around in the mornings with her body looking sore and her hair a tangled mess.

“Just needed to get the cat patted,” she said, smiling and heading back to bed.

Too many random men came into our apartment. This wouldn’t have happened if I stayed with a family. But at least Michelle started taking the small couch in the dining room and not my bed.