Mother Goes to Italy

Originally published in Litro Magazine.

Lottie wore a blue one-piece to the beach that morning. What would’ve passed as age appropriate back home, made her look like a downright nun in Europe. It was one of the first things she noticed at the start of her trip.

“There are so many naked bodies on the beach just out on display,” she’d told her son with childlike fascination over the phone on her first night in Italy. “And they’re all shapes and sizes too. There’s cellulite and wrinkles; no sucking in.”

“Well that’s nice Mom.” He wasn’t listening to her. “I just want to make sure you're taking care of yourself.” Her son was back in Connecticut with his fiancee and they’d been worried about Lottie ever since her divorce last year. Of course they are, one of her fellow divorcée’s had comforted her, anyone starting out a marriage has to look at someone who’s ending one like they’re crazy.

“I am,” was all she said to her son, flipping through the room service menu with her shoulder hiked up to her ear to hold the phone.

“Is that Lottie?” Her future-daughter-in-law called, at first from a distance, and then more clearly as she approached the speaker. “Buongiorno Lottie! I hope you're living it up over there.” She disappeared before Lottie could reply.

“You could remind her that I’m sixty, not eighty,” Lottie mumbled to her son, “she doesn’t have to talk to me like I’m deaf.”

“Come on now Mom, you love Joan.”

Ever since Lottie signed along the dotted line, he’d started behaving like he was her father as opposed to her son. But that was an oedipal can of worms she didn’t feel like opening on vacation.

…

By noon, most of the hotel guests had spilled onto the beach like liquid tipped from a glass. Towels and umbrellas bearing the hotel’s navy blue logo nearly covered the caramel sand. The Mediterranean opened up in front of them like a refreshing burst of mountain air, its waters as thin as glass and dyed an iridescent green. Curt waves rumbled up to the sand like a needle threading through silk.

Lottie worried her post-divorce gallivant through Europe may have been a little too “Eat, Pray, Love-y,” but she figured there were worse people to embody than Julia Roberts. Besides, she had no intention of converting or falling in love. She had every intention of gaining a little weight, catching up on her reading and sitting on the beach all day. And every time one of the beautiful staff members in their crisp, linen uniforms would ask her if she wanted another Fanta, she would reply with an indulgent, si.

Sara-Marie arrived at the beach just past noon with her friends. Lottie got her first glimpse of the black-haired girl as she had her cabana set up nearby. The linen-clad staff members were responsible for towing umbrellas, chaises and drinks out to the tanning guests as needed. It was that sort of hotel. Lottie wondered how these three girls, who couldn’t have been past twenty, could afford to stay there.

Given the popularity of the beach, there was very little real estate left so the girls were set up directly beside Lottie and whether she liked it or not, she was in an opportune spot for eavesdropping. The striped umbrella shading the trio only partially obstructed their bodies from her view. Three pairs of legs mysteriously stuck out from the bottom, reminding Lottie of that magic trick of sawing a woman in half.

Lottie quickly learned by their accents (or lack thereof to her ears) that the girls were American. They were going over their plans to visit a local vineyard, Giardini di Cataldo later that day. Given they discussed a wine tasting with all the giddiness of cheating on a diet, Lottie determined they were over sixteen and under twenty-one. She’d go with nineteen.

“A beautiful Italian man telling me what wine to drink,” one of the girls was saying, “that’s all I ask for.”

“Oh that’s all?”

Lottie had already been to Giardini di Cataldo. This was her tenth day on the Amalfi coast. Next to the girls, she felt like somewhat of an expert. It had been a tricky start, of course — her first few days away from home were surprisingly lonely. It was something like homesickness, but weightier than what had afflicted her at the start of college years ago — a sickness of something ending rather than beginning. But after a week of suntanning and wine tasting, she floated through the hotel with all the ease of a moneyed regular.

“All I ask for is a good buzz,” Sara-Marie’s other friend went on, her voice slightly muted by the angled umbrella.

“Alcoholic.”

“It’s not alcoholism until we leave Europe.”

“Not alcoholism until we graduate.”

Lottie wanted to put her orange soda down and walk up to those girls (the daughters she never had, the girlfriends her son had brought home over the years), to remind them that alcoholism was alcoholism. Instead she smiled. Was nineteen really so easy?

“I had a boyfriend, but I don’t know who it was.” Sara-Marie had changed the subject. Lottie, having missed a few key words, didn’t know what they were talking about now.

“What did he look like?” one of her friends asked.

“Faceless, everyone in my dreams are always faceless.”

A dream. It must be very lonely to only ever dream of faceless people, Lottie thought. She was amused by the unusual level of attention the friends paid to Sara-Marie’s story — most people, including herself, dreaded hearing a play-by-play of someone else’s dream; right up there with looking through a friend’s vacation photos. Lottie took another sip of her orange soda. Sara-Marie continued.

“We were at a restaurant and I proposed. You know that thing where the guy puts the engagement ring in a glass of champagne?”

“I think that’s so tacky.”

“Well, in the dream, I hid the engagement ring in a little cowboy hat and gave it to him.”

“You gave him a ring?”

“I’m sorry, are we not focusing on the cowboy hat?”

“What’s going on inside your brain?”

“So much. Haven’t even gotten to the weird part yet. So, he says no. And then he gets up to leave and turns into a mouse and I chase him around the restaurant.”

They laughed and Lottie hid an accompanying smile behind her book. She wouldn’t be surprised if she’d dreamt of something similar in the middle of her divorce that had merely slipped her mind upon waking. Was nineteen really so easy? Self-doubt and constant panic inside a perfect body, as her mother had once described it.

“Further proof that men are rats,” one friend went on.

“Correction — they’re mice.”

“Another Fanta ma’am?”

It took Lottie a moment to realize this last voice was directed at her as opposed to her neighbors. She was so tied up in their chatter, she’d forgotten that she was at the beach as well. She turned to address the man crouching at her shoulder, his linen uniform betraying him in the heat and exposing a bit of sweat on his neckline. Lottie confirmed that she did in fact want another Fanta. Si.

By the time she’d recovered her pose behind her book, ears trained back to the girls, she discovered they were heading into the water. She caught her first glimpse beyond their legs — sunburned shoulder blades, chipped nail polish, plump, gravity-defying skin. Everything about them was nineteen.

One of Sara-Marie’s friends broke the fourth wall and asked if Lottie could watch their things while they were in the water. Once again, it took her a moment to realize they were speaking to her.

“You don’t mind, do you?” the other pressed.

Strangers trusted Lottie almost immediately now that she was over fifty. She hadn’t realized how quickly she’d become the wise old woman once she wrapped up her childbearing years.

She nodded in confirmation. The two friends were all giggles and thanks as they rushed into the water, covered in more skin than swimsuit. Sara-Marie lagged behind, pretending to fuss with the ties on her swim top.

“Sorry about that,” she said, “thanks again.” She over-pronounced each word, and Lottie realized these girls didn’t even know if she spoke English.

“It’s alright, I’m not going anywhere.” Lottie waved her book at Sara-Marie to prove her point.

“Play It As It Lays,” Sara-Marie said with the familiarity of recognizing a song on the radio.

“Have you read it?” Lottie had only just started it herself.

“Many times. I wrote a paper on it last semester. I want to be a feminist.”

They both laughed at how this sounded, like Sara-Marie was saying she wanted to be a dentist or a landscaper. She clarified. “Full-time, I mean. That’s what I’m studying in school.”

To be nineteen, drowning in feminist literature and dreaming about the future. Lottie nearly said this aloud, but realized how old and grumpy she would sound if she did. Nineteen was easy, but it was also incredibly difficult. Lottie was grateful to Sara-Marie for reminding her of this.

“Well I think Joan Didion would’ve gotten a kick out of your dream.” Once again, they both laughed at how this sounded. Lottie shook her head. “The dream you had last night, I mean.”

Part of her figured these women had known she was eavesdropping the whole time and there was no use in pretending. Sara-Marie pointed to the now empty cabana in recognition of the conversation that had just happened there — as if place and memory were two inseparable things. “I’d like to think so.”

Sara-Marie backed away. Lottie understood. She didn’t want to spend anymore of her formative years talking to a sixty-year-old divorcée. She had friends to join in the water, skin to burn in the sun, a fresh liver to ruin at a vineyard later that afternoon.

…

Sara-Marie had woken up a little homesick that morning. She’d decided to stay in Italy an extra month after her abroad program ended and was supposed to be having the best weeks of her life. But she was flying back to Boston the following Tuesday, and with the pre-memory of home so upcoming, she started thinking of her parents. Here she was, waking up from a ridiculous dream in a beautiful, salt-stained hotel that they were paying for, during a perfect Amalfi June, and all she wanted was to watch a mindless action movie with her father in their moldy basement. But as her mother liked to comfort her, homesickness was like HPV — keep an eye on it, and it usually goes away on its own after a while.

As the ageless waters approached her ankles like magnificent spindles of liquid neon light, Sara-Marie looked back at the woman guarding her belongings on the beach; this woman named Loretta (Lottie for short) whom she would never know. She looked so glamorous in her blue one-piece that Sara-Marie initially thought she was from Paris. She imagined Lottie came to this hotel every summer — knew all the staff by name and spoke fluent Italian. She looked so perfectly content on the beach — maybe it was the swimsuit, or the age, or the way she merely raised an eyebrow to get a refill on her Fanta, but she seemed to have a grasp on all of the things that Sara-Marie was desperate to understand.

Of course, she wasn’t Parisian after all. It was the book that gave her away, wedged between her fingers, casting strict, afternoon shadows across her face. Sara-Marie had only noticed this upon inspecting the stranger her friends had so flippantly left all their earthly possessions with. For whatever reason, their shared interest in Joan Didion made her more comfortable leaving behind her wallet — as if the writer herself had introduced the two women.

As the waters rose to her knees, Sara-Marie watched Lottie reach for her refreshed Fanta back on the sand and take a long, decadent sip. Sara-Marie decided she’d order one when they sat back down. Her friends called to her and she finally turned from Lottie to join them where they treaded further out— feet just lifted from the rocky sea floor, heads bobbing up and down with the buoys, water sifting around their necks like elegant cloaks fanning out in endless wisps of an unearthly emerald color that would long outlive them all.