We'll Always Have Paris (13 page)

“Maybe it’s good,” my mother says, now a woman who carries a senior Metrocard, wears sensible shoes, and questions the wisdom of multiple tattoos. “The kids have done wonders with Brooklyn, but I sometimes miss the old city.” She says that just ten years ago, by the time the L train arrived at First Avenue—its last stop before leaving Manhattan—she was the only person left on the subway. “Now it’s filled with young people with guitars and knapsacks and bicycles,” she says. “The train is still packed when I get off, and they all stay on and head to Brooklyn.”

***

Katie and I arrived at the Accademia a full hour before our scheduled time. We walked the exact route that had taken us ten minutes the day before, but I wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. Seeing the
David
was important. As much as I enjoyed our afternoon of unscheduled opera, I wasn’t ready to let go of my checklist mentality. And I wasn’t sure abandoning it completely would be a good idea either. It would be crazy to visit Florence and miss one of its most important historical sites.

Walking through the doors to the Accademia was like stepping though the wardrobe to Narnia. I gasped seeing him, even from afar. I fully expected to be underwhelmed by the
David
, but the marble statue had the opposite effect. From the moment I saw the statue in the distance, it was as though the wind had been knocked out of me. “My God, it’s…” I began, unable to complete the thought.

“Huge,” Katie finished.

We quickened our pace to get closer. I had never had a reaction like this to a work of art. It was like falling in love, an inexplicable sense of euphoria just being in his presence. I had seen this image countless times in art books and on postcards, but being in the same room with the statue was something entirely different. If I wasn’t certain I would’ve been arrested, I would have climbed up onto the pedestal and run my bare hands across every inch of his smooth, marble body. I settled for staring at
David
’s toes for twenty minutes and making my way up fourteen feet. Every muscle, every vein, and every hair was perfectly sculpted. I’d always thought of him as expressionless, but I’d never had the chance to look directly at his eyes and notice the way his forehead furrowed with a mix of fear and determination.

Was it possible to have a crush on a statue?

Katie stared at
David
with his slingshot and wondered aloud how big the statue of Goliath would be.

“Through the roof,” I replied. “Thank goodness Michelangelo was commissioned to sculpt the underdog.”

***

My mother came to see me at Camp St. Regis on the first visiting Sunday in July. My father visited in August, which was also the day of the horse show. When I was ten years old, I won first place in my division, so my father urged me to ride in the championship. “You have to be at least thirteen,” I explained, taking off my boots and hat.

“How come?”

“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “Just the rules.”

We sat on a slope of dry grass that overlooked the corral as the next group rode in on their horses. “I’m not really one for just following rules that don’t make sense,” he told me. “Do they do anything in the championship that’s dangerous for a ten-year-old?” I shook my head. “Do they do anything you haven’t done before?” I shook my head again, eyes focused on the corral. “You should ride in the championship.”

“I’ll never win,” I explained. “The girls who are riding are much, much better.”

“It’s not about winning, Jennifer,” he said. I knew I wasn’t going to get a Ward Cleaver-style speech about it only mattering how I played the game.

“It’s not?” I looked at him.

“No. Everyone is going to love you when they see you on that horse.”

“They are?”

“Are you kidding me?! You’re a foot shorter than anyone else in that ring,” he said. “You’re a featherweight swinging with the heavies. I’m telling you right now, if you ride in the championship, you will come in dead last, but no one will get more applause than you.”

My heart raced at the thought. “But…the rules,” I said.

“I’ll talk to the judge,” he said. “Is that her?”

That’s right, the judge is a girl
, I remembered silently.
I’m going to wind up riding in this thing, aren’t I?

During the break, I watched my father from a distance. Against a backdrop of the white stable, my father smiled and introduced himself to the horse show judge. My father’s hands gestured to me as he spoke for a few minutes. The judge smiled and nodded.

My father trotted back to the hillside and gave me the thumbs up. “You’re in. Very cool girl. She saw no reason for the age discrimination.”

“Are you sure I should?”

“Wait till you feel the rush of everyone rooting for you,” he said.

As I entered the corral, I heard a collective
Awww
. Then a single voice began chanting my name. A few people joined in, and within thirty seconds, my father was leading the entire audience, shouting “Jen-nie, Jen-nie!!!”

My father’s prediction was spot on. I placed last, which I found only slightly humiliating. “You’re ten years old, you had to come in last,” my father explained, placing his arm around me. “You were the underdog and the people loved you. That’s better than any trophy.”

***

Before the symphony in the piazza, Katie and I stopped at a local deli to pick up our dinner. Dozens of sausages hung in the window. Breads were piled high. Inside, tubs of mozzarella balls, pasta, and seafood salads sat behind glass counters. Katie opted for a piece of pizza and a bottle of Orangina. I made a meal of the octopus, squid, and mussel salad.

Katie and I sat on a blanket in the piazza for hours as the seventy-piece symphony filled the city of Florence with classical music. Wine bottles were drained as the evening went on; couples got cozy. Apartment windows opened and balconies filled with onlookers. It was like a serenade of Florence en masse and we were all smitten.

The next day was our scheduled tour of Pisa, which a travel agent back in San Diego had arranged for us. I figured if we wanted to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa, we had to go through an organized tour group. The touring company asked guests to meet at a bus station at 2:00 p.m. We spent the morning taking a long walk down the Arno River, people-watching and admiring the bridges. The hosts at the bed and breakfast told us the Ponte Vecchio was spared bombing because the Nazis could not bear to destroy such a beautiful historic site.
Oh
those
sweet, sentimental Nazis
, I thought silently.

Katie and I decided that we’d spend a few minutes checking email at a local cybercafé. “Oh my God!” Katie shrieked after looking at her screen for a few minutes. “Someone forgot to close their email.”

“You’re reading someone’s personal email? You know better than that, Katie.”

“Wanna know what it said?”

“No, you should close that email.”

“This tour guide of a teen group got fired and the company had to write to all of the parents and tell them that Mr. Finkle had been let go for
drinking
with the students,” Katie read.

“Really?”

“And that if any of the teens were caught drinking, they would be sent home immediately. No refund!”

I loved Katie’s eleven-year-old innocence. Sixteen-year-olds drinking was unheard of in her world of elementary schoolyard tetherball and gold star stickers on spelling tests. “But Mr. Finkle is still traveling with the group. He’s following them even though he was fired.”

“Seriously?! That’s odd. Does it say why he won’t leave?”

“Nope.”

Now intrigued with the drama, I speculated. “I bet he’s in love with one of the girls he was drinking with.” Our fifteen-minute tokens for email use expired, so we grabbed a cup of gelato nearby and lay on the grass for the next half hour, trying to fill in the blanks about the case of the wayward tour leader. With a mouthful of chocolate gelato, Katie continued. “Know what? I think the guy who told on Mr. Finkle is also in love with the girl. I think he squealed to get rid of him.”

“This is quite an opera.”

With a chocolate mustache of gelato, she sang, “Mr. Finkle must-a leave-a teen tour.”

I joined with a flitty soprano number from the girl torn between the two men. It sounded a bit like the frenetic part of
Figaro
. “Finkle-a-drinker, Finkle make trouble, Finkle no leave, Finkle in love,” I sang.

We improvised a duet by the girl’s parents back home who worried about their drunken daughter. We called it “Oy Vey Maria.” A few people glanced our way and smiled, but for the most part no one seemed fazed by the sight of a mother and daughter laughing themselves silly, trying to compose the worst opera ever.

With our hands outstretched for the grand finale, I caught a glimpse of my watch and noticed the time. “Oh no! We need to get to the bus for Pisa!”

***

When our bus pulled into Pisa Square at 3:00 p.m., our tour guide told us we absolutely must meet back at the bus by 6:00 p.m. so she could return us to Florence by 7:00 p.m.
But
we
don’t need to be back so early
, I thought. “Three hours is plenty of time to do what we came for,” I assured Katie.

Still on the bus, the tour guide repeated her instructions in Spanish and French through a microphone.

All Katie wanted to do was climb that tower. For days, she had been talking about how many steps it had, how high it was, and how long it might take if she jogged. “Okay, we take you to church now,” our tour guide said as the bus doors exhaled open.

Church?!
At this point, we had seen several dozen churches. Two days earlier, we had visited a church with a mosaic of Jesus shooting light beams from his fingers. “Is Jesus…playing laser tag?” Katie asked.

“Don’t be silly, they didn’t have laser tag back then,” I said.

“The churches are pretty, but we’ve seen so many. I feel like we’ve seen Jesus doing just about everything.” She was right. We’d seen him as a newborn, sleeping in the manger, in his mother’s arms, giving sermons, being tried for crimes, having his last supper, being crucified, and rising from the dead. And shooting light from his fingertips.

“We haven’t seen his prom shots,” I offered. “Those are in Venice and I hear they’re
cuh-razy
. He took Mary Magdalene, and plenty of people thought her dress was way too short.”

As we departed the bus, I told the tour guide we were going to skip the church visit. We could see the Leaning Tower beckoning Katie like an outstretched finger saying,
Come
here, kid
. The tour guide snapped, “No, you stay with group! We go to church. It is few minute, then you go to your own.”

There was no escape. If we tried to tiptoe away, we would have surely been caught. “It’s okay,” Katie whispered. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

After a forty-five-minute tour of the church, the guide took us on a half-hour walk through the piazza and told us more than we ever wanted to know about a fountain.

Finally, our tour guide forced a tight smile and told us we were free to tour the rest of the square on our own. Before we could bolt, she barked, “Be back at the bus at six o’clock or there is a trouble.”

Katie and I ran to the Leaning Tower, passing dozens of people posing for pictures pushing down—or holding up—the tower. Breathless, we arrived at the booth to buy a ticket to climb the tower. “
Signora
, the next ticket for climb is at six o’clock,” a man told us.

“Six o’clock?!” Katie gasped, her eyes welling with tears.

This was turning into the ruins of Pompeii part two.

On the bus ride back to Florence, the tour guide finished her cell phone conversation with her boyfriend, then plastered on a big smile. Through the microphone, she asked everyone, “You like a visit Pisa?”

Fuck
you.

I watched Katie stare out the window for the next half hour. “It was cool to see the Tower at least,” she said, trying to convince herself that the day trip wasn’t a complete loss. But I wasn’t in Italy to create experiences that ended with Katie’s resignation. Our troubles in Pompeii were out of my control. Because of the timing here, however, I could remedy the situation. On the one hand, it was important for Katie to learn to be flexible and roll with the punches of life. But on the other, I knew I could go back and straighten things out for us in Pisa. So fix them I would.

“I have an idea,” I said, tapping her leg. “Tomorrow we have our tour of Siena and San Gimignano, but on Saturday, let’s take a train and come back to Pisa on our own.”

“Can we do that?”

After our visit to Pompeii, I was actually terrified at the prospect of independent day trips. But as afraid as I was to venture out on our own, I had greater fear of disappointing Katie, of her remembering me as a mother unable to deliver what was most important to her. This was critical, especially if my fate was the same as my father’s. I wanted Katie to think of me as a mother who made the most of our time together, even if it was cut short.

“Yeah, how hard could it be? We’ll just check out the train schedule and grab a map,” I said, feigning confidence.

The next day, after a guided tour through Siena and San Gimignano, I decided we were absolutely done with high-priced organized day trips. Our guide was a direct descendant of Mussolini, controlling every move we made, including when we went to the bathroom. Katie and I got such a bad case of motion sickness on the bus ride to San Gimignano that, upon arrival, we immediately got off the bus, threw up, and found cool nooks in the stone walls in which we could curl up and cry until the world stopped spinning.

As luck would have it, we started feeling better at the exact time the fascist with the clipboard told us it was time to get back on the bus to Florence. Our bus mates told us the town was charming and shared their photos of the walled village and surrounding Tuscan olive groves. They showed us the olive wood salad bowls and flavored oils they bought. It was almost as if we had been there.