and said, “Come join us.”
“We decided to get married only last week,” the bride told me, still thrilled. “We thought it would be so romantic, and Rome was a good meeting point for all our friends. So we just called them. I bought a frock, he bought the plane tickets, we booked the hotels—and here we all are.”
We laughed with them and toasted to their health and happiness, then returned to our own pizza margherita and caprese salad with tomatoes that tasted as if they had been really grown in hot summer fields, and the bottle of light red wine that had a tiny touch of bubbles in it, the kind the Italians call frizzante .
How lucky they were to find such happiness, I thought enviously.
Ben
Ben Raphael, the “Michelangelo from Long Island,” watched Gemma from a corner of the terrace. His daughter was eating fragolini , the tiny, lusciously sweet wild strawberries that are a specialty for a short season in Italy, and which she nibbled as though they were precious as pearls. Ben felt glad that in spite of her mother’s thin-is-better attitude to life, Muffie had inherited his own love of good food.
He glanced again at the American woman, hidden behind those swept-up glasses that matched her swept-up cheekbones, eating pizza with the teenage daughter with the cropped yellow hair and quirky clothes, and the grandmother in her best black.
Odd was the right word to describe her, he thought, shaking his head and smiling as he recalled their encounters that day. But he also remembered when he had first seen her, just last night. For a second there, she had stopped him in his tracks, made him think for a moment how real she looked: un-made-up, uncaring, her exhaustion showing.
He’d been struck by how different she was from the glossy women he knew. Looking at her now, in her simple white shirt and skirt, with sandals on her bare feet and her golden hair haloed by the lamp behind her, he wondered who she was and why she looked as though she wasn’t enjoying herself, and whether it was just her accident-prone clumsiness that made her seem so vulnerable. Somehow he didn’t think so. And somehow, too, she had just stuck in his mind.
Chapter Twelve
Gemma
The next morning we were speeding north in a car like a silver bullet, a flashy and, since I was with an “heiress,” horribly expensive Lancia. The powerful engine hummed soft as a lullaby, the leather had that wonderful new-car smell, and the dash with its high-tech display dazzled. I was in automobile heaven. The signs said FIRENZE , but I almost didn’t want to get there. Driving this car was the closest thing to bliss—and bankruptcy—I could imagine. But Nonna had informed us she intended to return to her old village “in style,” and how could I say no to that?
The traffic was a nightmare. Cars charged up behind me, lights flashing, forcing me over, then passed at speeds I knew must be illegal, while the truck driver in his lumbering camion coming at me on the other side of the road flashed his lights, warning me to get over, until I wondered if maybe I should just leave the road to them.
But soon we were out of the city sprawl, passing signs that said URBINO and PIENZA , driving down roads lined with umbrella pines and hillsides dotted with cypresses, past tumbledown farmsteads and through tiny hamlets, mere straggles of houses and barns, with old men sitting in the shade, leaning on their sticks, watching the world flash by.
“Almost there, Nonna,” I said, wondering what she was thinking, now she was almost “home.”
Nonna was staring worriedly out of the car window at the passing countryside. I guessed she thought she remembered it, but it had been so long, and she had been only a child.
This was meant to be the big event of her life, of all our lives, going back to our roots, visiting long-lost relatives, seeing the old village and the humble little stone house where Nonna was born. Now, though, I thought she looked uneasy. What if
“We decided to get married only last week,” the bride told me, still thrilled. “We thought it would be so romantic, and Rome was a good meeting point for all our friends. So we just called them. I bought a frock, he bought the plane tickets, we booked the hotels—and here we all are.”
We laughed with them and toasted to their health and happiness, then returned to our own pizza margherita and caprese salad with tomatoes that tasted as if they had been really grown in hot summer fields, and the bottle of light red wine that had a tiny touch of bubbles in it, the kind the Italians call frizzante .
How lucky they were to find such happiness, I thought enviously.
Ben
Ben Raphael, the “Michelangelo from Long Island,” watched Gemma from a corner of the terrace. His daughter was eating fragolini , the tiny, lusciously sweet wild strawberries that are a specialty for a short season in Italy, and which she nibbled as though they were precious as pearls. Ben felt glad that in spite of her mother’s thin-is-better attitude to life, Muffie had inherited his own love of good food.
He glanced again at the American woman, hidden behind those swept-up glasses that matched her swept-up cheekbones, eating pizza with the teenage daughter with the cropped yellow hair and quirky clothes, and the grandmother in her best black.
Odd was the right word to describe her, he thought, shaking his head and smiling as he recalled their encounters that day. But he also remembered when he had first seen her, just last night. For a second there, she had stopped him in his tracks, made him think for a moment how real she looked: un-made-up, uncaring, her exhaustion showing.
He’d been struck by how different she was from the glossy women he knew. Looking at her now, in her simple white shirt and skirt, with sandals on her bare feet and her golden hair haloed by the lamp behind her, he wondered who she was and why she looked as though she wasn’t enjoying herself, and whether it was just her accident-prone clumsiness that made her seem so vulnerable. Somehow he didn’t think so. And somehow, too, she had just stuck in his mind.
Chapter Twelve
Gemma
The next morning we were speeding north in a car like a silver bullet, a flashy and, since I was with an “heiress,” horribly expensive Lancia. The powerful engine hummed soft as a lullaby, the leather had that wonderful new-car smell, and the dash with its high-tech display dazzled. I was in automobile heaven. The signs said FIRENZE , but I almost didn’t want to get there. Driving this car was the closest thing to bliss—and bankruptcy—I could imagine. But Nonna had informed us she intended to return to her old village “in style,” and how could I say no to that?
The traffic was a nightmare. Cars charged up behind me, lights flashing, forcing me over, then passed at speeds I knew must be illegal, while the truck driver in his lumbering camion coming at me on the other side of the road flashed his lights, warning me to get over, until I wondered if maybe I should just leave the road to them.
But soon we were out of the city sprawl, passing signs that said URBINO and PIENZA , driving down roads lined with umbrella pines and hillsides dotted with cypresses, past tumbledown farmsteads and through tiny hamlets, mere straggles of houses and barns, with old men sitting in the shade, leaning on their sticks, watching the world flash by.
“Almost there, Nonna,” I said, wondering what she was thinking, now she was almost “home.”
Nonna was staring worriedly out of the car window at the passing countryside. I guessed she thought she remembered it, but it had been so long, and she had been only a child.
This was meant to be the big event of her life, of all our lives, going back to our roots, visiting long-lost relatives, seeing the old village and the humble little stone house where Nonna was born. Now, though, I thought she looked uneasy. What if
Similar Books
