The Truth About Death (28 page)

An infinite regress? Yes and no. Maybe this mutual knowledge united us more firmly and closely than our embraces. I couldn’t be sure.

In the mornings we went to the museums; in the afternoons we walked around the city or took the bus up to Fiesole or Settignano. We walked down the narrow
mulatteria
where the carriage scenes in
A Room with a View
had been shot. We paused at the field full of flowers where the young lovers meet, though the field was bare and I would never have recognized it if I hadn’t in fact watched the scene being filmed. Maggie and I had been walking from Fiesole to Settignano … But I no longer tried to explain.

The city itself seemed brighter and sharper, like a fresco that’s been recently restored. The steady hum of traffic provided a basso continuo to the ringing of bells, and the smells of roasting chestnuts and boiled tripe drew us from one street corner to another. We ate our way through the menu at Trattoria Maremmana and walked home, holding hands, to Albergo Medici, where Volmaro turned a blind eye to our comings and goings. In the darkness we came together in silence.

On Christmas morning we had the city to ourselves. Empty panettone boxes and champagne bottles were tucked into doorways. She had a ticket for the night train to Paris.

In the afternoon I stood at the window while she packed her suitcase. The clothes that she hadn’t worn made me think that she’d had something else in mind. Something fancier, more high-toned.

At the station she waited at the taxi stand while I looked for a luggage cart for the suitcase. I helped her onto a second-class carriage, and then a young man helped me lift the suitcase up onto the luggage rack. I got off the train and she stayed on. I waited outside her window till the train pulled out of the station, and then I went home and cleaned up my room. We hadn’t exchanged addresses.

The next day I bought the soft leather jacket I’d seen in the window at Raspini. I couldn’t afford it, but I couldn’t help myself. It was too beautiful. It was the sort of jacket that the archangel Gabriel would wear in a modern-dress version of the Annunciation. Walking out onto Via Cavour, I felt as conspicuous as Gabriel himself must have felt, wings spread, halo glowing. How all eyes must have turned to him.

I walked around the city center till it began to grow dark, and then I took a number thirteen bus up to Piazzale Michelangelo and walked back down. And yet no crowds gathered. No one followed me. No one even looked at me. The jacket, far from making me conspicuous, had made me invisible.

That night—and every night for a long time—I could feel her presence in the bed, beside me, on top of me, under me. For many years, whenever I looked back on that difficult time, I could summon up her presence, and she would be there.

I’d never discovered why she’d come to Italy, never understood how she’d happened to turn up in Piazza San Pier Maggiore with her huge suitcase. But my curiosity about these things no longer ran very deep. What ran deep was the
memory of what she had given me. The gift of her body. No small thing, even in this age of casual affairs. But there was another gift too, more durable than the memory of her caresses—the gift of silence. Leaving behind my stories and anecdotes, I had followed her across the border into another country. Without words, at first I was afraid I wouldn’t know who I was, but in the silence, I no longer needed to know.

HOW TO WRITE A MEMOIR

The goal in your memoir is to discover, for yourself and for your reader, the meaning of something important in your past. Don’t worry about making a point. Just start with something—some event or issue—that you want to explore:

I went to Italy with my aunt Lydia last summer. She said that Italy would get the taste of shame and humiliation out of my mouth, like a piece of rhubarb pie.

Make a map of the scene: Imagine the place where the event or episode took place. Use your map to create a sense of place.

I’ve got two maps taped up over my desk in Mary Markley Residence Hall, where I live with twelve hundred other first-year students. One I ripped out of the back of the Carthage, Michigan, phone book. The other is a map of Florence, Italy, that I ripped out of my Florence guidebook. On the first I’ve circled our house on North Street, my aunt’s apartment on
Seminary, the high school, the Franklin Funeral Home (on the corner of Oak and M60), and the gasket company (Midwest Gaskets) out on Southport Road, where my aunt works. On the map of Florence I’ve marked the location of the station, the Hotel Mona Lisa on Borgo Pinti; the Osteria dei Pazzi, where my aunt and I ate with Severino on our first and last nights in Florence; the Bargello (where I got all worked up about Donatello’s
David
); Piazzale Michelangelo; and the bus stop by the post office in Piazza Salvemini.

Describe the people. Who are your main characters? How old are they? What do they look like? What do they say? What do they want? How do they respond to the events of the story?

My Aunt:

Technically my aunt Lydia, who’s about forty, is an old maid. My mother always sighs when my aunt’s marital status comes up in conversation. But Aunt Lydia is not like the other old maids in the Methodist church, who are sometimes called “maiden ladies.” When she was my age she went to the General Motors Institute in Flint and now she’s an executive vice president at the gasket company on the edge of town, before you get to the railroad hump yard. They used to manufacture all the gaskets for Maytag refrigerators, and when Maytag pulled out and moved to Mexico, everyone thought Carthage Gaskets was finished. But it wasn’t. The parent gasket company in Italy was expanding, not retrenching, and would be sending a team of engineers to oversee a retooling process. Which is why my aunt had to go to Italy. The engineers would be coming in September.

My aunt is someone I can talk to about certain things that I can’t talk to my mother about. For example, my aunt is the one I called when Howard Franklin, who’s a Christian Scientist, broke our date for the senior prom so he could go with another Christian Scientist, one he met at a retreat at the Christian Science Temple in Michigan City. It was lunch hour and we were standing outside my locker. He was sorry, he said, but I didn’t want to listen to his apologies. “Will she let you dry hump her,” I asked him, “or do you only dry hump Methodists?” I went straight to the office and called my aunt and she told me to take a taxi out to the plant, which is what I did. She asked if I wanted to go to Italy with her, and I said I did. And later on she gave me a book about Christian Science by Mark Twain, who called Mary Baker Eddy the “queen of frauds and hypocrites.”

She said she really wanted me to go with her because I’d taken four years of Spanish in high school and that would make it easy for me to understand Italian, so I could help her get around.

Stella (me):

Me, I’m a strong student. Not the valedictorian, but strong—more artsy than academic. I did all the artwork for the yearbook. I’m the youngest of four children and have two brothers and a sister. I’m the last to leave home. My parents wanted me to go to St. Joe Community College, like my brothers, because it’s cheaper, but Aunt Lydia offered to pay for my tuition at U of M.

I was reasonably popular in high school. I always had a boyfriend. I’m pretty good-looking. Not much in the way of boobs, but I’ve been told that my legs and my butt are “shapely”
and I’ve got a “winning” smile. I started getting serious about sex during my junior year in high school, when I was dating Howard Franklin. I wanted to go all the way, but Howard was reluctant to cross that bridge. I guess he was satisfied with dry humping. Those are the ugliest words I’ve ever heard. “Dry humping.” I can barely write them down.

I had lots of friends, including hundreds of Facebook friends. After Howard broke our date for the prom, I unfriended him right away, and then I stopped logging on. I stopped tweeting too. I didn’t want to be smothered with sympathetic tweets, which started coming in right away, along with pictures of the prom. I went cold turkey. My eyes had been opened. I could see what a terrible school Carthage High was, and what a terrible place Carthage was. No one was interested in culture or art, the important things. I couldn’t wait to get out.

Severino:

Severino works for the parent company in Italy. Centro Guarnizione Italia S.p.A. “Guarnizione” means “gasket” in Italian, and it also means “garnish.” Like those little sprigs of parsley you sometimes find on your plate. “S.p.A” means “Sociatà per Azioni,” which means “Society for Actions,” whatever that means. It’s sort of like “Inc.” The company headquarters are in Sesto Fiorentino, which is close to Florence, but Severino lives in Florence. With his mother. It was his job to show my aunt around, and me too of course. To get her to meetings in Sesto, and to take us out to dinner in the evening.

There aren’t any men like Severino in Carthage. His looks. His clothes—and not those silly-looking Armani suits either. He was
sooo
at home everywhere. People stopped to talk
to him on the street. He was friends with the waiters in all the restaurants. Wherever we ate, the chef came out to say hello and to bring us something special. He was full of masculine energy, but not cocky. Maybe even a little uncertain, like he was on a journey of self-discovery. Like me. And there was always the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. There was something spiritual about him too. He was named after a saint, San Severino, who was executed by having a wet leather band tied around his head. When it dried, it crushed his skull.

And he could talk about anything. He even made gaskets interesting. Gaskets for caskets, for example. Who cared? A lot of people. I thought that in Italy they dug up the bones after a few years and threw them in a big pile at the back of the cemetery, but Severino’s grandfather was buried in a special deluxe casket with a one-piece solid rubber gasket, and then a metal seal. The whole thing was soldered up tight and then put in a vault. And he could talk about all the works of art in Florence, like he studied art history all his life. Maybe he just grew up with it.

Describe the complication. The “complication” is whatever disturbs the status quo. It’s the problem or challenge that you need to resolve. Your description of the complication should help you figure out what is at stake. Try breaking it up into stages.

Stage 1: The Complication (First Night)

The complication is not hard to understand. I fell in love with Severino. I couldn’t get enough of him. I couldn’t think
about anything else. I fell in love with him the very first night when he came to the hotel to take us out to dinner. At dinner I fingered the business card he’d given me and listened while he and Aunt Lydia talked about gaskets. They talked about gasket tools, gasket materials, full-face flange gaskets, ring-type flange gaskets, rubber gaskets, gasket-making tools, standard vs. custom gaskets, gasket cutting machinery, boiler gaskets, tapes and sealants, compression packing for gaskets, markets for gaskets, demand going up worldwide by 5.5 percent, demand increasing exponentially in India and China. It was interesting at first, but after a while I wanted Severino to talk to me. I didn’t know how to break into the conversation, except by asking questions about the menu, and that’s how I wound up ordering risotto with squid cooked in its own ink for my first course.

“Are you sure that’s what you want?” Severino asked. “Squid in its own ink?”

“Of course,” I said as if I ate squid cooked in its own ink two or three times a week at home.

“That should take the taste of shame and humiliation out of your mouth,” Aunt Lydia said. I tried to stop her, but she went on to tell Severino about Howard Franklin and how he broke our date for the senior prom. She had to explain what a prom was.

We were drinking wine and eating bread that didn’t have any salt in it. It was the first time I’d ever drunk wine with dinner, and it was the first time I’d ever seen Aunt Lydia drink wine.

“Shame and humiliation,” Severino said, refilling my glass. “And what did you learn from this experience?”

“I learned that people will believe anything,” I said. “It doesn’t matter how ridiculous it is, somebody will believe it.” I was talking to make myself sound interesting. “Howard was a
Christian Scientist,” I explained. “They believe that death and illness are illusions. And his father’s a funeral director! Mark Twain called Mary Baker Eddy the ‘queen of frauds and hypocrites.’ ”

Severino laughed. “Stella,” he said—and the sound of my name on his lips made my heart flutter—“there’s a Christian Science reading room in Via de’ Servi. Right downtown.”

“The funny thing,” I said, “is that I believed it myself for a while. I went to church with Howard a couple of times, and when I smashed my thumb in the door of his car, he took me to a Christian Science reader instead of a doctor.”

“And did it work?”

“My thumb got better, if that’s what you mean.”

“Like Christ healing the blind man at Siloam?”

“Exactly,” I said. The wine was making me bold. “It was exactly like that.” And I held out my thumb and stuck it in his face. He took it in his hand and examined it carefully. I thought I was going to have a heart attack.

“Perfect,” he said. “No sign of previous trauma.”

Stage 2: Mornings

Mornings, Aunt Lydia went to Sesto on the train with Severino. She didn’t get back till after six o’clock. I was on my own. Lost at first without my cell phone. Without my old Facebook friends. No one to talk to. But I bought a couple of sexy dresses at the San Lorenzo market. I didn’t bring any dresses because I didn’t think I’d need them. Just jeans and tops. It was the first time I’d actually spoken Italian.
“Vorrei
…” I said (“I would like …”), and pointed at a lime green dress hanging from an overhead rack. Piece of cake. You used the conditional just like in Spanish, more or less. I
vorrei
ed a
black dress too, at the stall next to the one where I bought the green dress. I took the dresses back to the hotel, which was really lovely, by the way—air-conditioned—and modeled them in front of the big mirror in the bathroom.