Now I See You (17 page)

It felt fantastic to loosen up our terribly American rigidity—and between the laissez-faire parenting, the siestas, and the red wine at every meal, David and I were having one hell of a vacation. It was like a second honeymoon, only with a lot more scrubbing urine out of bedclothes.

We needed it, too. The first few months of Lorenzo’s life had been hard on our marriage. It wasn’t just that Lorenzo woke us every two hours all night long like he was a Navy Seals drill sergeant until we cowered under the covers in fear, unable to sleep even when he was quiet. It wasn’t just that David had watched my body, previously an object of desire, transform into something that belonged in a medical encyclopedia. More troubling than all of this was the fact that David had been instantly demoted from the love of my life to the man who changed the diapers of the love of my life. David couldn’t help but feel like a third wheel as I nuzzled the baby and laughed at the baby and hung on the baby’s every gurgle as if he were Confucius. But by the time Lorenzo was about six months old, my body had recovered, his sleep had stabilized, and my hormonal monomania for the baby let up a bit, which allowed David and I to find our way back together again. And by the time Lorenzo started walking and talking, David had fallen in love with him, too.

David could do stuff with Lorenzo now. He could read him his childhood copy of
Where the Wild Things Are
. Lorenzo danced along when David played Dylan and the Drive-By Truckers. The two of them could even have a conversation, albeit pretty one-sided, about the superiority of Marvel over DC comics. Whereas Lorenzo and I enjoyed a Vulcanesque mind-meld from the very start, it took David some time before he’d bonded; but now they were tight.

It helped that Lorenzo looked just like David, with thin tufts of pale yellow hair and eyes the color of a swimming pool, a deep cyan. His eyes were so startlingly lovely—big and wide and blue like the sky, “celestial” my grandmother called them—that Italians would stop us to take pictures on their cell phones.

It was a regular lovefest in our family, one that was only heightened by our transatlantic trip. Although now that we’d run out of milk in Pompeii, things were taking a definite turn for the worse.

“BAAAAAAAA,” bellowed Lorenzo so ferociously he was forced to pause and take another breath to finish the word, “BUUUUUULLLLL.” His face said, “Did I stutter?
What
is the holdup here?”

I tried to hand him his lovey—a stuffed monkey named Earl—but ended up tripping over the cobblestones and tossing Earl into an ashy dirt heap, which might have been human remains. Those damn cobblestones were beautiful and all but not a friend of the tunnel-sighted. Which was unfortunate for me, since they were everywhere.

“Let’s just head to the nearest bar,” I yelled over Lorenzo’s shrieks, dusting Earl off, “by the train station. We’ll buy him a glass of milk.”

“Lead the way,” David agreed.

“Me?” I protested. “
You
lead the way.”

A half hour later, we were standing on a hillside covered in white flowers, watching a sheep amble by. We were approximately a hundred miles away from a bar, or any other evidence of civilization.

“David,” I ventured cautiously, “can we agree now that we are—”

“We are not lost,” he barked, turning the stroller in the direction of a dirt road. “I am sure we can get out this way.”

“Baabull?” Lorenzo whispered weakly, looking up at me with hopeful eyes. “Baabull Mama?”

“You should have let me ask someone where the exit was when there was still someone to ask!” I snapped.

“You should have read the signs!” he snapped back.

“
You
should have read them!” I shrieked. “I can’t see the print.”

“Well I can’t read ITALIAN!”

“Who the hell’s going to help us now?” I whined. “The sheep?”

“Baabullbaabullbaabullbaabullbaabull,” moaned Lorenzo, in a real delirium now. He looked like a man in the throes of the Spanish flu, shaking and rolling his head from side to side. “Baabullbaabullbaabullbaabull.”

“I am beginning to wish I was one of those guys encased in lava,” David said.

At that moment, an explosive sound echoed out of the stroller. It was the unmistakable sound of a child shitting himself in his very last diaper.

I gasped. “No. Fucking. Way.”

After a pause, the thunderous sound commenced again. And again. And again. Lorenzo was taking a dump as epic as ancient Rome itself. We were up shit’s creek without a diaper.

“Well, here we are. It’s us. We are the ruins of Pompeii,” David observed.

“AIUTO!”
I bellowed in no particular direction, “Help!”

It only took five more minutes of screaming before a groundskeeper who looked to be about 110 hobbled over. He was very kind and insisted on escorting us to the road that led to the train station, although to describe the speed with which we walked to be a snail’s pace would be insulting to snails. An hour later, we reached the train station where we purchased a glass of milk for Lorenzo and a stiff drink for David and me. The bar didn’t carry diapers so we were forced to bring shit-encrusted Lorenzo on the train, and though we were humiliated by the grimaces of the other passengers, it ended up working in our favor. Turns out a kid who’s crapped himself is better than an unwashed homeless person to clear out a train car. There’s always a silver lining.

The next day we boarded the train again, only this one was headed to the beach. We were traveling to Terracina, a coastal town about an hour south of Rome, where my mother and aunt Rita used to spend summers as kids. We’d be staying at my aunt Rita’s apartment, just in time for Ferragosto.

Ferragosto is a fascinating Italian holiday for which there is no American equivalent. The date, August 15, commemorates the Assumption, which is when the Virgin Mary ascended into heaven. That, in and of itself, is cool. Mary deserves her own holiday, if only for not freaking out about the whole immaculate conception situation. Over time, though, the celebration, which you’d think wouldn’t get wilder than a bunch of lit candles and an all-Latin mass, has become a balls-to-the-wall blowout beach rager complete with skinny dips and widespread public intoxication. The Virgin Mary must have more fans than one would think. That, or August in Italy is party month and an Assumption is as good a reason as any, and better than most, to party hard.

Starting the first week in August, Italian businesses in the big cities hang signs in their windows that read
CLOSED FOR FERIE
as inhabitants head to nearby beaches or mountain towns for the rest of the month. No one anywhere feels like working in August and in Italy, the cityfolk basically just agreed that they wouldn’t. Some Flavia or Fabio one day just said, “Oh, to hell with this daily grind. I’m fucking doing it; I’m taking the whole month off,” and then everyone started doing it and now if you find yourself in Rome anytime in August, your choices for dining out are McDonald’s or Burger King.

By Ferragosto Eve, August 14, sleepy beach towns like Terracina are bulging with tourists who have perfected the art of partying over the past two weeks and are looking for a climactic night to take their revelry to the next level. The midnight ocean swim and subsequent all-night beach party is on par with New Year’s at Times Square, only with a lot less clothes and a lot more cigarette smoke.

What made the celebration especially exciting for us is that Ferragosto Eve happened to be David’s birthday. We told Lorenzo that Italy was going to throw Daddy a huge birthday party with fireworks and music, where everyone in the whole town would go swimming in the ocean at nighttime. It would be, I promised, the crown jewel of our Roman holiday.

Of course when the big night came, we were too tired to go.

David and I were, that is. Lorenzo was all revved up, running around the apartment buck naked at eleven p.m.

“Well, should we rally?” I asked David, turning my head on the pillow to face him. After a day of chasing Lorenzo on the train and in the beach and out of the street, David and I looked like we’d taken one too many horse tranquilizers.

“Do you want to?” he muttered, hardly moving his lips. He was lying beside me on top of the sheets, eyes shut.

“Do
you
want to?” I mumbled back.

“Uhhuhhhhh,” was the sound from David’s mouth. It was more of a snore than a reply.

“Yeah,” I agreed, rolling onto my stomach. The road to the beach was so dark and uneven, I hated having to brave it after sundown. The night before, we’d gone into town to get a gelato and I’d stepped directly into the slimy guts of a run-over pigeon, which were so slippery, I’d thought for a minute I’d stepped on a banana peel. I’d been wearing flip-flops and had to scrub my foot for a half hour before I felt clean, like a less poetic, more gross version of Lady Macbeth. Who wanted to repeat that? Better to skip the party this time.

“YAAAAAAAA!” came a screech from the living room. It grew louder and louder until Lorenzo was shouting directly in my ear. He pounded my back and chanted cheerfully: “WAWA! WAWA! WAWA!”

“
He
wants to go,” I told David.

Lorenzo shimmied off the bed and began yanking on our feet, attempting to drag us out. By way of explanation he offered: “Wawawawawawawawawa!”

“You sure??” David asked Lorenzo, his arms still folded in corpse pose.

“Ya! Ya! Ya!” chanted the baby. I lifted my head to look at him and the thrill of getting eye contact set him a-chortling, his mouth gaping open so much it made the skin on the top of his nose crinkle and his tiny teeth show.

“Okay,” David said, sitting up slowly, “Let’s do it.”

A half hour later, we were standing in the sand staring at the dark waters of the Aegean Sea. Us and every other person with a pulse in Terracina, including a few very wrinkled old ladies whose pulses were pretty borderline. Techno music blared from the beachfront dance clubs and DJs were shouting into their mikes, pumping the crowd up for the countdown to midnight. Lanterns had been strung up along the boardwalk but it was still too dark for me to make out much of anything. I did discern a little boy in a Speedo drop trou and piss into the sand directly in front of us. Somewhere to my left, I heard clinking bottles and a bunch of teenagers cursing each other’s mothers.

Lorenzo danced around the beach in his diaper, stomping on the sand and chanting, “Wawa! Wawa!”

“Not yet, honey,” I told him, reasserting my grip on his arm to ensure he didn’t dart out of my sightline. “We have to wait til they yell,
‘UNO!
’”

“C’mere.” David lifted Lorenzo into his arms. “Daddy will carry you in.”

The shape of the two of them was just barely discernable by the lantern light, more unseen than seen. But for me, the fact that I could make out the shine of Lorenzo’s eyes at all was a victory.

I’m making it work,
I thought to myself. Then Lorenzo squealed and pointed to the ocean where someone had released a fleet of paper boats carrying candles and I amended the thought.

Fuck that,
I thought,
I’m kicking ass and taking names.

When he was a baby, I’d been concerned that Lorenzo would miss out on things, that my handicap would limit his life experience. But in the past two weeks Lorenzo had lit candles at St. Peter’s, tossed a coin in the Trevi Fountain, seen (and become) the ruins of Pompeii. And now my son was about to swim in the Aegean Sea at midnight. The kid wasn’t missing out on much.

Lorenzo wasn’t the only lucky one. I’d been fortunate enough to see all of it, every milestone, from his first bites of food (carrots), to his first steps (Halloween night) to his first scrape (elbow). I wasn’t missing out on anything either. My eyesight was mercifully holding steady, making me not only enjoy motherhood tremendously, but feel good at it, too.

Boosting my confidence was the fact that I’d weathered the transition of Lorenzo becoming mobile. I’d been terrified of the kid learning to walk, and run, and climb, and now he was doing all of those things but somehow both of us were not just surviving, but thriving. Enough that I’d decided to stay in Italy with Lorenzo for another two weeks after David went back to work in New York.

Sure, the kid narrowly avoided getting plowed down by Vespas on a daily basis, but that could happen to anyone, and besides, he hadn’t actually been hit. I’d managed to rescue him just in the nick of time, even with no peripheral vision.

It wasn’t so hard really; all it required was that I never take my eyes off him unless he was physically attached to me, and that I run on hyper-drive, at Maximum Level Alert every waking second. Yes, it was exhausting, but that’s why God invented espresso.

I’d been managing so well, in fact, that I hadn’t even needed to start telling people about my vision loss. When Lorenzo was a newborn, I’d readied myself to bite the bullet, but then I’d discovered I didn’t need to really, that I could handle this parenting thing on my own. David lent me his eyeballs for the detail work, and that filled in the gaps, for now. Eventually, of course, my vision would get so blurry and constricted that I’d have to reveal my limitations to the world, but I’d cross that bridge (or jump off) when I came to it.

“DADA!” Lorenzo screamed, slapping his little hands on David’s left pec. A new tattoo stained the skin there, a few inches from the place where my name was marked on his arm. Etched in red and blue ink was a human heart, with four chambers and ventricles, and underneath in capital letters was Lorenzo’s name. David had come home with it a few days after the baby’s first birthday and Lorenzo was fascinated by the image, even if he didn’t understand what it meant.

“Oh, here they go,” David told Lorenzo. “Get ready.”

“Nove, otto, sette,”
chanted the crowd, along with the DJ’s booming voice.

“David,” I said, feeling down his arm until I found his hand and slipping mine inside. “Don’t let go.”

I needed to hold his hand but I wanted to, too. We were taking the plunge together.

“Sei! Cinque! Quattro!”