Siracusa (4 page)

I
READ AN ARTICLE
about how damaging it is to find out that nothing was as you thought. I forget where I read it. The
Press Herald
or the
Maine Sunday Telegram
. It could not have been
Vogue
, the only magazine I subscribe to besides
Parents
. Usually I don’t recognize the starlet on the cover of any magazine. With her baby bump. (I do think that is a cute expression.) I’m not someone who combs the Internet to waste my day or fill my brain with inconsequential data. I don’t surf gossip websites. My friend Betsy sends me links to unusual animal stories, which I enjoy and show to Snow, like a dog that is friends with a gorilla or a duck that can sing.

I’m very busy. Mayor Beemer e-mails me as often as three times a day. I don’t think anyone realizes how important tourism is to the Portland economy. Most people, if asked, would say lobstering is the primary source of income for the city, but would you be surprised to learn that there are twenty or so Jet-Ski rentals on Casco Bay? Twenty Jet-Ski rentals on a coastline less than twenty miles long.

Am I meandering? My mother used to draw her finger across her throat whenever I did that. “You are a long trail through the woods,” she said. “And in the woods people prefer a shortcut.”

Our first day in Rome. Let’s start there. Thank goodness our room was ready. We all fell asleep within seconds of arriving and woke up around four. Finn went off for a stroll and was mercifully out of our hair. He is always climbing the walls in hotel rooms. The second we walk in, he turns on the television. That’s a given. The only channel in English was the BBC. I don’t like to hear news when I travel. I like to imagine that I am in a world where nothing happens except what happens to Snow and me. A mother-daughter adventure not cluttered up with Angola, a country no one hears about in the United States but comes up a lot on foreign television. The BBC backdrops are dreary and English news commentators don’t dress with much style. I don’t like their accent either. It seems put on. Have you ever wondered why Americans don’t speak the way the English do? They settled America. They invented English, not us. It tells you something about Americans that we gave up that fake pompous accent.

This is an example of why travel is important. It changes perspective. It alters your eyes and ears, puts unexpected notions into your head, provides aha moments. That’s what I always tell Snow.

Whenever we go on a trip, Finn, Snow, and I stay in the same room. Snow and I sleep in the double bed. Finn takes the cot because he stays out late. That way no one gets disturbed. Because of running a restaurant, Finn is an owl. Sex in this culture, its
importance, is overrated, and that is the last I’m going to say on the subject.

I loved the hotel, which was not the case in Siracusa, and I do wonder how much of a role that played, as a bad hotel room is very discombobulating. At the Cesare Due our room was spacious, the furniture old and elegant, a bureau with a bow front, deep drawers, curved legs, and gilt trim in charming need of touching up. The maroon rug with a border of tiny white diamonds had been recently installed; I could tell because the color was almost too bright and the texture prickly in a new-carpet way. I didn’t feel squeamish walking in bare feet as I did in Siracusa, where the floor was tile and worrisome as far as sanitation is concerned. I fell in love with the silver-and-white-striped wallpaper (I am always looking for ideas I can apply at home). The silver was shiny, the white matte. I took photos of that and of the sage drapes with swags.

From very tall windows was a lovely view onto a small piazza with a kiosk. I drew Snow’s attention to that and to the pots of daisies surrounding it that were especially picturesque.

Because I always wrap each of our toiletries separately in plastic wrap, Snow and I had a lot of unpeeling to do. This was how I happened to notice the only thing I didn’t like about our room, the disposable plastic bag form-fitted to the leather wastebasket and folded over the top.

At the time of the trip Snow hadn’t yet had her growth spurt—as had many of her classmates—and her breasts were just beginning to bud. She was a tender sprout of a girl still, but clearly a beauty like her mom. That’s a joke but, in all
seriousness, we do look alike and turn heads, and occasionally people kid Finn, “Are you sure you had anything to do with her?” It makes me laugh. She is pure Seddley. I have shown her a photograph of her great-grandmother Charlotte Seddley as a child to prove it—wide-set gray eyes with a penetrating, I might even say hypnotic, gaze, a heart-shaped face with a delicate pointed chin. I had worried that her nose would be a lump like Aunt Janny’s, but it has narrowed to aristocratic elegance. Her lips are thin (Finn’s contribution, his Irish heritage), thank goodness not horrible and measly like a keyhole, which some of his relatives have, only a mite less plump than might be optimum. She is reserved in manner, part of her shyness, and rarely surrenders to extremes like a fit of giggles. Her smiles are modest, lips together. Most often I see her even, perfect teeth when she brushes them, a slight exaggeration. Of course I should not forget to mention the Seddley crowning glory: thick, straight twenty-four-karat-gold hair.

We are a pair.

When she was a baby, she had the softest, loopiest curls. While she slept I would lean over her crib and twirl one around my finger. I keep this in my memory bank filed under moments of pure happiness. Snow in her crib, safe and sound, her heart beating. I always checked to make certain of that.

Sometimes I think about the mother of that Lindbergh child, kidnapped, snatched at night, or the mother of Elizabeth Smart, the Mormon girl. The stark raving horror of an empty bed. The helplessness. The shriek. I imagine it went on forever. Even when that mother had stopped screaming, she was still screaming. We
are different, mothers, because we understand the terror of that possibility.

The day after I gave birth to Snow—at 5:58 p.m., November 22—and Finn was bounding up and down the corridor inviting the nurses to the restaurant for a free meal, I spiked a fever of 104. They stabbed me with an IV and pumped me with antibiotics. They never did understand the cause, but I knew it was dread. The dread of realizing how vulnerable I now was, the fearsome responsibility of having a baby and keeping her safe.

In Rome that first evening, while I brushed her hair, which I love to do, I kept up a patter about what we might eat for dinner, the sights we would see tomorrow. I always do that. Preparation lessens anxiety, that’s my belief. Snow bit her nails. I shouldn’t mention that. It makes her sound like a little animal and not the graceful preteen she is. But, and I do hope she grows out of it, she does bite her nails to the nub. This is all part of what her pediatrician diagnosed, when she was five, as extreme shyness syndrome. Finn said,
Bullshit
. He said it right to the doctor. Brenda, who is outspoken—that’s the most polite way to describe my mother-in-law—backed Finn up. She said she’d never heard anything so quacked.

“You want to wear my earrings,” I said to Snow. It wasn’t a question. I can often read her thoughts. I had bought the tiny platinum crosses studded with diamonds at Tiffany. I always tell people that they were an engagement present from Finn, and they were, but from myself to me. Snow was too young for them, but given the special occasion, our first night in Rome, “Stay still,” I told her. An unnecessary admonishment as I’ve
never known Snow to fidget in the least. I took out her amethyst studs and replaced them with my diamonds.

Surprisingly—I say surprisingly because I expected her to appreciate herself in the mirror—she hoisted herself onto the bureau.

She sat there surveying the realm. Of course she wasn’t. I don’t know why I described her that way. She perched on top of the bureau until I was dressed and ready to go.

Leaving the hotel, Snow looked both ways not once but several times. She always does that. I noticed Lizzie noticing that too before she saw me and looked away. It’s not as if she hadn’t seen it before, in London. Snow is always hesitant moving from inside to out. On the quietest, narrowest street my child acts as if she is crossing a busy four-lane highway.

My hand in hers gives her security.

Lizzie led the way, waving a map for all to see, calling attention to us as tourists. Has she never heard of blending in? She never “modulates,” April’s word when I described Lizzie shouting out turns as if we were a tour group from Pittsburgh. (She never did that in London, but we had all been there before and knew it quite well.) Finn flaked along by himself as usual. He is not what I would describe as the escorting type. In our restaurant he’s very good about making sure diners are happy. He buzzes from table to table, he has a knack for it, but when the three of us are out, I hold Snow’s hand and he trots alongside like a horse without a rider.

Almost immediately we turned onto the Via del Corso.

How misleading were those art books. Glorious photographs,
a feast for the eye, not only of beauty but also of ancient civilizations, and then we visited and what did we find? That world was now barbaric in a modern way, crowded and cacophonous with Vespas and cars zipping every which way.

Italians do not light their streets well. Their monuments, yes, but not their streets. While it wasn’t pitch dark, people were indistinct, shadowy, and mysterious until right in front of us. It reminded me of the Portland piers on a Saturday night, tons of frat boys, most drunk.

I suppose you are speculating that I have passed my anxieties on to Snow, but I believe anyone would experience the Via del Corso that night as jarring and threatening. We were traveling against the crowd.

Someone knocked into me. I lost Snow’s hand and spun in a panic. But Michael, gentleman to the rescue, tucked her arm in his as if she were quite grown up. He steered her out of the maelstrom over to a shop window. The dresses displayed, gowns I should say, were over-the-top and fairly ridiculous. One tangerine floor-length I remember in particular: its fabric too shiny to be chic, plunging neckline, and short sleeves puffed at the shoulder. The skirt fell in folds like heavy drapery and pooled at the bottom. Who would wear this, and where would they wear it? What Italian life did it reflect? Yet still, it was so over-the-top it was something out of a fairy tale. I pushed through to keep close to Snow. I didn’t want to miss a word.

I stopped behind and a little to the side so they wouldn’t see my reflection. I didn’t want to intrude.

“Someday I’d love to see you in a dress like that,” he said.
“I’d take you to a ball and we would dance all night.” Then he leaned down and whispered in her ear.

Later when she was in her pajamas sitting cross-legged on the bed, I asked what he’d said. She gave me her blank stare.

“At the shop window, Snow. When you were looking at the fancy dresses. What did Michael whisper?”

“He hates Lizzie.”

“What? That’s what he said?”

She began drawing in the journal I gave her to make memories.

“Snow?” I said, but I knew it was fruitless.

I’ve given considerable thought to Snow’s shutdowns. She drifts someplace else and it’s sudden and quite a powerful statement, a turtle pulling into its shell. Perhaps for her, the conversation is over or simply boring. She’s so bright, that’s possible. Once she withdraws, there is no reaching her. According to her teacher, she rarely engages with other kids. “It seems to be her preference,” said Miss Halsey, which I told the pediatrician because it fascinated me. I even admired it. I had pined for my classmates to like me. When called upon—and Snow never raises her hand—she responds in a whisper. Miss Halsey knows to go to her desk, lean close to hear her answer, and then repeat it loudly for the rest of the class. “She throws off my pacing,” Miss Halsey said, laughing.

Could Michael have possibly said that about Lizzie?

Michael is a bull—compact, muscular, even burly. I would guess he is about five-foot-eight. Lizzie is a bit shorter. His skin is as white as mozzarella, a comparison that only occurred to me in
Italy, and makes me giggle. He might lose his appeal on a beach because the sun would scorch him. His neck is short and his head is large, like a boulder really, and shaved bald. When I was a teenager, I loved
Kojak
. It was in reruns every afternoon. I swooned over Telly Savalas. This must be why I found Michael especially attractive, although he is so charming and masculine that truly any woman would. He has style too. Every day he wore faded jeans and a blue or white shirt, solid or striped, with the sleeves rolled up to the middle of his forearms. Evenings he wore a charcoal gray, lightweight sports jacket. I checked the label: Zegna.

April and I analyzed every inch of this trip when I returned. I fell on the phone and we talked for more than two hours. We concluded, among other more significant things, that Michael is very aware of his forearms, that he knows they are sexy. He is vain. I needed to talk especially about Michael because he was charismatic and, I suspected, tortured, and was such a powerful influence on Snow.