just a matter of time and patience. In the meantime she made delicious vegetable casseroles for dinner, which they ate while sprawled on the carpet in front of the fire. She admired the ease Americans had with their bodies, how they used objects and moved around the furniture with a freedom Europeans never had. How they took their work to bed, ate take-out food in the car, how they put their bare feet on the table, walked inside a bank in their shorts, used their cars as a cluttered closet where they could toss in just about anything. In Europe people had meals only if sitting at a table, only worked at their desks, hardly ever sat on the floor, never walked around the house in their bathrobes and socks. She wrote enthusiastic letters to her family and friends, describing her new life. She felt she had finally become the person she had always wanted to be. Someone who thought, dreamed and made love ina different language, who had acquired different habits and conformed to different rules of behavior.
By then her English was fluent and flawless, and she hardly had a trace of an accent. She made sure to pick up every mannerism and colloquial expression that might polish her new identity. Whenever someone asked her where and when she’d learned to speak such good English, she said something about a summer in Greece and an English boy named Jack she’d had a crush on. This tale, from which David had been conveniently omitted, had become the standard answer to the question and everyone always agreed with her answer: falling in love was surely the only way to learn a language properly. The fiction of Jack as her first love grew more and more solid. But it was impossible to completely erase David from her biography. He had the unshakable position of the boy to whom she’d lost her virginity.
Her happiness with the biologist didn’t last. Within a year Emma fell out of love (she later admitted that she had been more in love with the idea of becoming an American than in love with him) and she moved to New York. Initially she had little hope of sustaining herself, but soon enough everything fell into place. Friends of friends offered her a place to stay; she got a part-time job with an architectural firm, moved into her own place and obtained a work visa. Three years later, on the day she received her green card, she got drunk on Champagne at eleven in the morning and declared to her friends, “It was my destiny. I always knew I belonged somewhere else.”
A few months later, Emma flew to Rome to visit her family, where she lectured Luca and Monica on the benefits one had living in America. It was the usual litany about efficiency, good service, being able to return a clothing item even if already worn, getting your phone service up and running in a matter of minutes, being able to FedEx anything for a pittance, etc., etc. They resentedbeing spoken to as if they were still living in the Middle Ages (they’d been subjected to her pro-America rhetoric before and were in tacit agreement that Emma’s obsession to become an American was, to put it bluntly, pathetic).
Shortly after her arrival in Rome, Emma sat on a bench in the Piazza Navona eating a gelato while waiting to meet an old friend for a movie. It was a beautiful evening, warm and clear, and the large oblong square was busy with tourists taking pictures of the Fountain of the Four Rivers, while swifts flitted overhead. She was early and had a little time to contemplate the scene. She observed a crowd of Korean women in floppy hats, dark shades and with short legs entering the church of Saint Agnes in an orderly line; a mime with a face plastered in white set up his portable speaker, getting ready for his act; and children riding their bicycles in circles, oblivious to their mothers’ calls. Emma felt buoyant, something of a tourist herself, able to look at every detail with a fresh eye.
The mime’s sound track boomed from the speakers. It was, predictably, a
By then her English was fluent and flawless, and she hardly had a trace of an accent. She made sure to pick up every mannerism and colloquial expression that might polish her new identity. Whenever someone asked her where and when she’d learned to speak such good English, she said something about a summer in Greece and an English boy named Jack she’d had a crush on. This tale, from which David had been conveniently omitted, had become the standard answer to the question and everyone always agreed with her answer: falling in love was surely the only way to learn a language properly. The fiction of Jack as her first love grew more and more solid. But it was impossible to completely erase David from her biography. He had the unshakable position of the boy to whom she’d lost her virginity.
Her happiness with the biologist didn’t last. Within a year Emma fell out of love (she later admitted that she had been more in love with the idea of becoming an American than in love with him) and she moved to New York. Initially she had little hope of sustaining herself, but soon enough everything fell into place. Friends of friends offered her a place to stay; she got a part-time job with an architectural firm, moved into her own place and obtained a work visa. Three years later, on the day she received her green card, she got drunk on Champagne at eleven in the morning and declared to her friends, “It was my destiny. I always knew I belonged somewhere else.”
A few months later, Emma flew to Rome to visit her family, where she lectured Luca and Monica on the benefits one had living in America. It was the usual litany about efficiency, good service, being able to return a clothing item even if already worn, getting your phone service up and running in a matter of minutes, being able to FedEx anything for a pittance, etc., etc. They resentedbeing spoken to as if they were still living in the Middle Ages (they’d been subjected to her pro-America rhetoric before and were in tacit agreement that Emma’s obsession to become an American was, to put it bluntly, pathetic).
Shortly after her arrival in Rome, Emma sat on a bench in the Piazza Navona eating a gelato while waiting to meet an old friend for a movie. It was a beautiful evening, warm and clear, and the large oblong square was busy with tourists taking pictures of the Fountain of the Four Rivers, while swifts flitted overhead. She was early and had a little time to contemplate the scene. She observed a crowd of Korean women in floppy hats, dark shades and with short legs entering the church of Saint Agnes in an orderly line; a mime with a face plastered in white set up his portable speaker, getting ready for his act; and children riding their bicycles in circles, oblivious to their mothers’ calls. Emma felt buoyant, something of a tourist herself, able to look at every detail with a fresh eye.
The mime’s sound track boomed from the speakers. It was, predictably, a
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