We'll Always Have Paris (11 page)

“Yup, read about them in an article about opera singers,” she replied.

“All righty then,” I said, continuing. I swaggered around the deck and spoke in a low man’s voice. “I’m a man; I’m a manly, manly tough man.” Then I held up a finger to pause, made a snipping motion at the crotch, and finished in a high-pitched voice, “And now I have no testicles.”

“No
pene
?!” the captain gasped.

“No, he keeps that, but no…hmmm—”

“Meatballs?!” the captain gasped. “So I say,
our
bitch
is
a
eunuch
and it mean…” The captain drifted off as he absorbed the bizarre image. “
Mama
Mia!
”

***

My father would have loved the beach of Positano with its large stones and washing machine current. He regularly hung out at Bay One, the pothead beach where he met Stella. I went to the beach with him, but I was more like my aunts Rita and Bernice, who found comfort in the sterile containment of a pool with its aqua interior, numbers painted at every foot of depth. There were no murky surprises in a pool.

On my twelfth birthday, our trip to Jones Beach was derailed when my father and Stella had yet another blowout. The plan was to spend the day at the beach, then head to nearby Merrick for Chinese dinner with my aunts and their families. The shouting in the car got to be too much for my father, so he pulled over at a park in Long Island so they could continue the fight.

My father and Stella had been together nearly three years and now had a nine-month-old son together. But by the looks of it, they could no longer stand one another. Stella began shaving her head, wearing Christ-like robes, and roller-skating the streets of Brooklyn. My father was irate one day when he came home to find Stella holding the baby while skating figure eights in traffic. She insisted she was very careful and had been surrounded by a protective white light. While at their new apartment weeks earlier, I noticed dried dead tropical fish pinned to the wall like something you might see in a middle school classroom. Noting my horror, Stella assured me the fish died of natural causes. “I’m no fish murderer,” she said. “These are for scientific research.”

“What ever happened to your paintings?” I asked when I saw the walls were mostly blank.

“What ever happened to Baby Jane?” she replied.

Noticing my look of confusion, my father explained that this was the name of an old Bette Davis movie. “Today must be classic film day,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Some days she only speaks in Beatles song lyrics, some days it’s rhyming, sometimes it’s poetry. She thinks it helps her sound artistic and offbeat, but it just makes her a pain in the ass to communicate with.”

We never made it to the beach on my birthday. Instead I spent the day holding baby Leo, trying to distract him from the fighting. I placed him on a grassy hill in the park and photographed him with my new Instamatic. “I will be out of the apartment by July Fourth, Shelly!” Stella shouted. “It will be my Independence Day from
you
!”

“Good!” he bellowed back. “I’ll help you pack.”

“I don’t need your help!”

“You need mental help!” he shouted before he began a coughing fit. He had been coughing a lot lately and seemed to constantly need to clear his throat. I suggested he quit smoking. Now that I was older, schoolteachers were taking more hardcore tactics in their antismoking campaign and showing us photos of black, cancerous lungs. My father insisted the cigarettes weren’t the problem; his health would greatly improve once he quit Stella.

I wondered about Stella’s departure and what it meant for me. And for Baby Leo. Would I ever see him again? Would my father see him on Saturdays and me on Sundays? Or would we double up on visiting Sundays?

Stella’s shouting that meeting my father was the worst thing that had ever happened to her interrupted my train of thought.

“You ruined my life, you crazy bitch!” my father shouted back.

People were beginning to stare, so I took Leo to the other side of the grassy hill and picked dandelions. “Look at the pretty flowers,” I said to the baby as I snapped his photo. He began looking around for his parents. “Look here, Leo,” I urged.

From the other side of the hill, we heard shouting though I could not make out the words. Leo began crying and reached his arms in their direction. “No, let’s go
this
way,” I offered, walking further away. “I see ducks in the pond.”

Leo wailed harder, wriggling out of my arms so he could make a crawl for it. “Okay,” I conceded, carrying him back over the hill.

“If anyone told me I would meet the biggest mistake of my life, I would’ve never gone to Bay One that day,” my father told Stella.

“I hate you!” she shrieked.

And on it went like this until the sun began to set and all thoughts of splashing around Jones Beach for my birthday had been forgotten. That evening, as my father pulled his car into Stuyvesant Oval to drop me off, he startled, remembering that he had forgotten dinner. “It’s okay,” I told him. “I’m not really hungry.”

When I arrived home, my mother was sitting at the table eating a veggie burger and a plate filled with raw greens. “How’s the birthday girl?” she asked.

“Great, really great.”

She told me she went to a healing workshop and learned a new technique to release trauma. In the past few years, she had made these sorts of activities her part-time job, attending nearly every New Age lecture available in Manhattan. “Against my better judgment, I bought you a slice of
chocolate
birthday cake,” she offered.

I perked up.

“Tell me about your day. What did you and Shelly do?”

“We went to the beach,” I said, the lies flowing easily. “The waves were big, but not too bad. Then we went to Merrick and had Chinese food with Aunt Rita and Bernice and everyone,” I reported.

“How are those two?” she asked with obvious affection. My mother smiled and returned to her veggie burger. After a moment, she looked up, “Do me a favor and take a shower before you sit at the table. I don’t want sand to get in the carpet.

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t have sand.”

“If you were at the beach, you’ve got sand. We can spend five minutes arguing about it, or you can spend five minutes in the shower,” my mother reasoned.

My eyes filled with tears.

“Jennifer, I have to tell you, sometimes it’s hard being the parent who tells you to do your homework, do the dishes, and wash the sand out of your hair. Your father is the fun parent, I get it, but I have
chocolate
cake
for you, and all you have to do is take a shower so you don’t get sand all over our home, is that so hard?”

She noticed me eyeing her veggie burger and asked if I wanted her to make one for me. I jolted, reminding myself that if my mother knew the truth about the day, she would be furious with my father. If she knew about the pot smoking, she would have taken him to court to revoke his visitation rights. My mother once got a call from another parent complaining that my father had smoked pot in front of her daughter. Irate, my mother warned that if my father could not go one day without being high, he was not fit to visit me. Later he called my friend a snitch and said I needed to be more careful of friends who would rat him out. His tuning in for a day was never an option. On some level, we both understood that neither my father nor I had any idea what his baseline personality was anymore. His being high
was
normal. Clean and sober Shelly would have been a stranger to me.

“I have some extra kale too,” my mother said, returning my focus to our dining room.

“I told you I had a huge dinner,” I snapped. “I’m stuffed. I don’t know if I even have room for your stupid cake,” I said before making a swift escape to the shower.

***

Thirty years later, Claudia and her Italian family would unknowingly compensate for my failed twelfth birthday by laying out a lunch spread like nothing I’d ever seen before. I had no idea why her parents would host a party for someone they had never met, but was grateful for the generosity. On the table was fresh mozzarella, sliced tomatoes,
prosciutto
, breads, three different pasta dishes, and an array of grilled vegetables and roasted meats. They sang “Happy Birthday” in Italian as they presented a tricolored ice cream cake, mercifully with only one candle.

Claudia made reservations for us to tour the ruins of Pompeii at ten at night when the temperature was expected to dip below one hundred degrees. Before we left for her parents’ apartment, I peeked my head out the window. “It looks like it’s going to rain,” I said, practically poking a low-hanging cloud. “Should we go to Pompeii after lunch before it starts?”

“It’s a no going to rain,” she replied.

“It looks pretty grim out there.”

“You worry too much,” Claudia said.

“I think you worry too little.” She laughed.

Later that evening, Claudia’s cell phone rang. She began speaking in rapid-fire Italian, sounding disappointed. I turned to Katie. “Ten euro says it’s Pompeii cancelling our tour.”

“Not taking that bet,” she said.

Claudia shook her head and hung up the phone. “Jennifer, you’re a never going to believe what happen.”

“Pompeii is closed,” Katie and I said in unison.

My daughter beamed. “Jinx, jinx, personal jinx. You owe me a soda!”

On cue, a burst of thunder erupted and the torrential downpour began as she explained that the site was, in fact, closing for rain.

“Here’s what a you going to do,” Claudia said, undeterred. “Tomorrow when you get on the train for
Firenze
, you transfer in a
Napoli
, yes?” I nodded. “Pompeii is a stop on the way to
Napoli
.”

“If you say so.”

“You hop off train in Pompeii and you will see someone in an Italian government uniform who can check your bags at the train station,” Claudia said. “Then you walk across the street and the ruins are right there. Then you hop back on train and go to
Napoli
.”

I looked at Katie and remembered how desperately she wanted to see the ruins of Pompeii. During the school year, when her teacher allowed students to select a topic for a report, Katie chose Pompeii. When the Pompeii exhibition was at the San Diego Natural History Museum, Katie insisted we visit in preparation for our trip.

“Um, okay,” I told Claudia.

Katie clapped and jumped. “Can I do that? Am I allowed to just
hop
on
and
off
the train?”

Claudia had already expressed outrage at how much I paid for train tickets by buying them in San Diego. She told me I paid thirty euro for a three-euro fare that I should have purchased at the train station vending machine. “
Mama
mia!
” she shouted, then slapped one hand on the table and curled the other into a fist. “You tell them, I pay ten times what—”

“No, no,” I interrupted. “I am not going to argue with an Italian train conductor. Just tell me, is this allowed or not allowed?”

She sighed. “No, but you go on train with a ticket. Say you make a mistake if they give you a problem. Thirty euro is a crazy.”

“Oh no!” I yelped as I looked at Claudia’s balcony. The rain was soaking all of our laundry on the clothesline. “This will never dry by morning.”

“Of course it a will,” Claudia assured me. “It will a dry overnight. You leave out a there. You worry a too much, Jennifer.”

“You’ve mentioned that, Claudia.”

She was half right. After we wrung out the laundry, we re-hung it on the clothesline after the rain stopped. By five the following morning, our clothes were
almost
dry. I went out onto her tiny balcony in my nightgown and started running laps, spinning clothing in each hand like propellers, hoping to air dry them. I hardly noticed the sun rise. Or the neighbors watching, wondering what in God’s name was happening on Gigi and Claudia’s balcony.

Later that morning, Katie and I sat on a train headed to Pompeii. I was a bit nervous, but more proud that I was taking this leap. I was finally taking my French cousin’s advice to relax and enjoy life. Besides, what could go wrong? I had all of Claudia’s instructions written, including the Italian phrase for baggage check. The ruins of Pompeii were right across the street from the station. Our plan was foolproof.

Then the train stopped.

“I don’t see the station,” Katie said.

“There’s no station, sweetheart,” I said. “The train broke down.”

A half hour later, the train began moving again but at the pace of an elderly mule. Katie began making a rowing motion out the window and coaxing the train along. “Almost there, Little Italian Train That Could,” she coaxed. We arrived at Pompeii station an hour and fifteen minutes late.

Calculating when the train left for Naples, I told Katie we had two hours to explore the ruins of Pompeii. “Perfect!” she said.

I wondered if she really felt it was perfect. Was I simply lucky enough to have a child with a naturally easygoing nature, or was she shielding me from her disappointment? Before I could begin my internal therapy session, Katie shrieked, “Mount Vesuvius!” as she pointed to the ominous centerpiece of the region.

Three old men sat at a small table outside the station playing dominoes. Their backdrop was a clear blue sky and mountain. “
Scusi
,” I interrupted. Remembering the handy word
dov’è
for where, I asked, “
Per
favore, dov’è
…?” I looked at Claudia’s cheat sheet and asked where the baggage check was. They shook their heads and responded in Italian that there was no baggage check area.

“Um…
dov’è Pompeii, per favore?
”

They looked at each other amused. One man pointed at the small white sign posted over their table. It read “Pompeii.” He rattled off Italian words I couldn’t understand, but that clearly meant
Foolish
woman,
this
is
Pompeii
.