L'America (22 page)

On the road, the long straight 1-80, driving west, filling up with gas (very cheap, he noted) at those massive truck stops that seemed to sell everything, driving over the small ribbon roads that laced together quaint farms, with their cows and chickens, and communities of houses that all looked the same, lit up brightly (already) with elaborate odes to Christmas—Santas and reindeer and blinking lights climbing up the houses, trees, garages, entire neon crèches in front yards—Cesare felt especially like an American boy going home. When he arrived at Claire that afternoon, a cold November day, leaves off all the trees and grass stiff with a freeze, he threw off his jacket with the confidence of one who belonged. He joined the small American football game on the front lawn as if he had played many times before and as if he had known these strangers all along. Beth watched. This was why she loved him.

"Welcome," Jackson said, smiling, his hand extended. He was a tall, slender, handsome man with penetrating blue eyes, bushy eyebrows, and a sharp jaw. (Cesare had envisioned a heavier-set man.) His hair was thick, his sideburns cut across his cheeks. He wore faded blue jeans and a flannel shirt with a leather vest, reminding Cesare of Peter Fonda in
Easy Rider,
which he had seen many times on television as a boy, gathered with a group of friends all privately dreaming they were riding free on motorcycles on those long American roads. Jackson seemed youthful, unlike a father, despite his forty-seven years. Cesare gave Jackson two kisses on either cheek and then kissed Preveena and Sissy Three. Rada jumped into his arms. An admittedly strange-looking girl, Cesare thought; her dark skin and blond hair were such a striking combination. Cesare would soon see that Rada, ten years old, was in love with Beth, like a puppy, following her around and wanting to be just like her big sister. As a result, Rada would flirt wildly with Cesare, telling him everything about herself that was just like Beth: "I don't drink carbonated things, like Beth. I only like coffee ice cream, like Beth..." She would sit on his lap at the dining table or in front of the fire. She would ask him repeatedly to be on her team when playing football. She would take him for walks to show him her secret hideouts. Beth indulged her little sister, teasing her about her crush, scooping Rada into her arms and tickling her in a way that delighted Rada far more than the gesture deserved. Cesare noted all this, deciding there was something sad in her desperation, as if she were trying to find a closer link to this world in order to compensate for the fact that one side of her, her Indian world, was so obviously unknown to her.

"That's ridiculous," Beth would say later when Cesare tried to explain. "That has more to do with you than Rada."

On the lawn, a football game had begun before their arrival. As they approached, Cesare was surprised to see Preveena in her sari and a sweater, football in her arms. "Isn't it hard to run in that?" Cesare asked. And she smiled at him, loving his directness. She was beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her hair was very short and her eyes bright and dark but still somehow like lights, accented by the arcs of her dark eyebrows. Her face was broad. There was a lot of it, but all her features worked together to make a composition, a study in perfection. Beth had not mentioned Preveena's beauty. A small diamond stud sparkled in her nose. Her complexion was as even as milk glass except for one large freckle on her left cheek.

"So this is our Beth's great love. We've heard all about you," Preveena said. "And now we're going to want to hear everything from your perspective, all about this love affair in Páros."

"A third degree," Jackson said. "You'll have to watch out for us. We like questions." The lawn sloped toward dense woods, an intricate network of bare trees.

"Answers even more," Preveena said.

"And I have heard all about you but still have many questions," Cesare said, and the list dashed across his mind. Most of all he wanted to know how it was possible for Jackson to never leave Claire. He did not seem the type of man who could stay put. "He brings the world to him," Grammy would say.

"Beth can worry a little too much about us," Jackson said. "I hope she and her grandmother haven't told you too many stories." He smiled a big mischievous smile, his face alive with depth and mystery and gentle fun. For as long as Cesare could recall, Beth had never slighted Claire, only spoken of it with fondness, and at times, perhaps, Cesare imagined, for he did not yet know himself, a bit too idealistically. He wondered if she were different around her father. Jackson looked around for his daughter.

"Here I am," Beth said, running down from the deck to greet her father with a big hug and kiss. Cesare noted (he was noting just about everything) their obvious love, nothing formal about it. Jackson swept Beth into the air as if she were still a child and then set her down so she could kiss the others. The cold air steamed from all their mouths.

"Finally," Sissy Three said. "All these years Beth has been hoarding you."

"Now Sissy," Preveena said. Cesare was struck immediately by Sissy's beauty, too. The opposite of Preveena's beauty, Sissy's was a pre-Raphaelite vision, with her blue eyes and her long reddish tresses, her sharp and pointy nose. Her face seemed to be made of porcelain and just as fragile. She wore jeans and sneakers and a sweatshirt. He was impressed by these two women, whom Beth had spoken of so often. Here they were, come to life like characters resurrected from the pages of a book, vibrant, pulsing with blood. Somehow he never expected them to be only a few years older than himself. How strange to find these two living side by side even if there was nothing strange about it for them.

For a few moments they fawned over Cesare, offering him a drink, a smoke, a tour of the grounds. They asked Beth quick questions about school and New York, the pizzeria where she worked, teasing her, Cesare could tell, by the way she laughed and bowed her head. They seemed like three sisters. Rada jumped around them, trying to include herself.

Mash and Hunter were playing, too. They kissed Beth and shook Cesare's hand. They seemed nice. He looked at Hunter, recalling Beth's declaration of his wealth. He was dressed like the exact image of the American boy that Italian boys aspired to—khakis and untucked oxford shirt all in need of ironing, boat shoes. An Amish farmer and a pair of Amish boys played, too, as well as some others, the names of whom Cesare did not catch—friends from a neighboring farm that had nothing to do with Claire although they probably bartered some wares, friends from New York City, a rumpled professor with a name like Alibaba. They huddled around kissing and welcoming Cesare and Beth. Beth listed all the treats she had brought from New York City—biscotti from the Bronx and olive oil and mozzarella and wines. She promised to make pizza and asked Mash if he would quickly build her a brick oven. "Anything for you, dear," he said, and winked. (And he did make the oven. Beth had that effect; people wanted to do things for her.) When Cesare's sister came home from Milan, she brought nothing. When she left, she had bags filled with steaks and pastas and cheeses and fruits, supplies enough to last her until the next visit. Cesare noted the contrast.

"It's getting dark," Preveena said. "I want to make my touchdown before it does." She tossed the football to Cesare and told him he was on her team. The football spun off her fingers and glided smoothly to him. He caught it against his chest and then he passed it back to her, rolling it off his fingers. "You're a quick study," she said. "I'm sure Beth didn't teach you how to play."

"He's befriended a group of football players from Texas at school," Beth said. "All they do on Saturday is teach Cesare how to play and then how to drink as many beers as possible."

"Texans?" Sissy Three said, as if Texan football players and New York City didn't make any sense. Just then Cesare looked at Beth, bundled up in a sweatshirt and sweatpants, down vest, and running shoes, and understood that she made sense here. Creases made by his mother's maids still lined his jeans. The creases made no sense.

"Watch out for those Texans," Jackson said, lifting his left eyebrow flirtatiously. "They don't usually play fair." Cesare thought of the day Beth first met his father, how he had been cool and stern, how her friendly welcoming manner hadn't been able to imagine the impolite man as Cesare's father, rather she had mistaken him for someone irrelevant who had had a bad day, who didn't need to be friendly: the gardener.

And the game carried on with Preveena in her sari making her touchdown and Cesare being kneaded seamlessly into the fold. This was the scene Cesare wanted to re-create, later, when after returning to Italy, he would gather his friends to play football in the big field at Fiori. He would want to collect a group of people coming from everywhere: his father, his mother's Sri Lankan maid, her husband, his windsurfing friends. He imagined throwing a football to his little old father, imagined his father catching it and then sailing it off his curling fingers, a smile on his lips. He imagined hugging his father, big and broad, the way Jackson hugged Beth.

The sun, falling into the hills, splayed its colors against the sky.

 

Thanksgiving, too, was an odd and beautiful ritual for Cesare to observe, all the warm faces gathered around a long table singing songs ("We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing" and the like), eating the largest bird he had ever seen (which had been raised and killed by them), heaping plates with potatoes and yams and greens and stuffing and sweet cranberry sauce and pearled onions—dishes he had never seen before, tastes he had never tasted before. Like everyone else's, his plate overflowed with a massive heap of food—nothing delicate or discreet. He thought of his very thin mother, of how she was almost afraid of food and only ate the smallest amount. He imagined her shock before a plate such as this, and he looked forward to describing the details to her, knowing how she would laugh.
Grammy's serving,
he would write,
was the largest and she ate every last bite, even helped herself to more. She ate like one of those Amish mules. All the foods ran into each other—cranberry against potato against kale against onions until it became pink and indistinguishable. The more it blended together the more she seemed to enjoy it, mashing it all together with her fork.

Gravy dripped over everything. All of these jolly people gathered to say thanks. Thanks for what? Thanks for coming to this country, thanks for being together, for getting along? Italians had always been in Italy—they were long past the stage of being grateful for who they were. There was something innocent and naive and young in this ritual, which he would observe again at Christmas with all the caroling and the Santas everywhere and the adoration of the tree. At the table everyone talked at once, arguing and discussing passionately a list of subjects that included music and food and interior design and even the color of the dinner plates—cranberry with gold trim. "Plates should be white," Short declared in a discussion of aesthetics, "to show off the food."

"What if the food is ugly?" Hunter said. There was a confidence to this handsome young man, who was probably younger than Cesare, the confidence of privilege and a fine education. He came from Beacon Hill in Boston, wealth, blue blood. He had gone to Harvard, then Columbia for business school. Hunter's Boston Brahmin credentials (which Cesare learned from Beth, who listed them as though they were reasons why he should warm to Hunter, as if their wealth and familial prominence were enough to make them best friends) meant nothing to Cesare. Hunter would try to engage Cesare in arguments about corruption in the Italian banking industry and in Italian politics. What Cesare noted most about Hunter was his aggressiveness, his desire to let you know how much he knew about everything from Italian culture and history to music and food to literature. (What could an Italian possibly know about American nonfiction and the literary journalists? Hunter implied. Rather than engage—Cesare did not argue; that was not his nature—he changed the subject.) Cesare wondered again if Hunter had ever had designs on Beth, as he seemed to be performing for her, and somewhere Cesare understood that Hunter's elite upbringing—his money, his schooling, his knowledge of the world—seduced her. Hunter hovered over Beth, smiling, and flirting, telling her of grand travel plans and ideas for making money off of nothing for Claire. Beth seemed to blush, becoming bashful with his attention, the way that can happen when someone you like flirts with you—the way she had been with Cesare in Páros. ("You've got him all wrong," Beth said to Cesare alone, after dinner. "He's a gentle soul and your jealousy is making you see innocent questions as challenges." Pause. Then, "Do you want me to fall in love with him?")

"Food is never ugly in a house like this," Short said.

Reagan was spoken of and the stock market and the latest hot topics in the
New York Times,
which, every morning, sprawled across the dining-room table until thoroughly read by all who cared. Cesare imagined that no one was ever lonely at Claire, and then he wondered if that was why they were all here. Beth had told Cesare that Hunter's family came once a month to Claire to try to convince him to come away, telling him that fear was trapping him here.

"Thanksgiving is a designed holiday," Preveena said to Cesare. She sat to his right. "By a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale, in the early nineteenth century. She wanted a holiday that centered around women and their food and she promoted the idea in a novel that she wrote and in an enormously popular magazine she published that was filled with advice for making your home more perfect. She wanted to give a holiday to women."

"And the Pilgrims?" Cesare asked.

"They had nothing to do with it really. Myth, that's all."

"Preveena knows her Americana," Sissy Three said. Her face glowed in the candlelight.

"Sarah Hale again," Beth said. She was sitting across from Cesare, dressed in a long black velvet gown. Everyone had dressed formally. Jackson wore a bow tie and a tuxedo vest. His sideburns caused his smile to seem even bigger. Cesare wondered if he would be capable of growing sideburns. Rada sat on Jackson's lap, eating off his plate, which Cesare found mildly distasteful, as if she were some kind of unruly pet. "Lincoln made it a national holiday finally in 1863."