Abroad (3 page)

“Fucking!” someone shouted, at which the entire auditorium rippled with an appreciative laugh.

“Some say so,” the
directora
answered, and then paused for another moment. Some Italians, I was beginning to note, were extremely adept at the dramatic pause. “Yes. There are temptations in Grifonia. Likely, you will be offered certain opportunities. Some nice, some not so nice.”

Another buzz rose in the crowd.

“Please, always keep in mind who you are. Enteria is a competitive program. You are guests of this university, and guests of Grifonia. And while we are here to help you, we are not here to save you. Be careful. You are responsible for yourselves.”

As she went on, I studiously took notes:
Reputation. Emergency number, 327 368 4122. Travel in pairs. No phone out on street.

Suddenly I felt a pressure on my shoulder. Jenny was leaning over and peering at my notebook. She laughed out loud.

“My God! Taz Deacon, I had no idea that you were such a fucking
nerd
!”

“What? I—”

“Travel in pairs? This is your year in
Italy.
Good Lord. I’m just glad we ran into each other. You need me.”

The talking around us was rising now, but the
directora
wiped her forehead and pressed helplessly on. Jenny reached out and grabbed my pen.

Italian lesson #1:
she scrawled.

“Stop!”

FUCK THE RULES

“Right?” she said.

“Exactly,” I replied.

Jenny smiled and gave back my notebook. Then, done with me for the moment, she turned away to chat with the other, momentarily more interesting girls.

3

At twenty-one, I had been in love with only one person. I’d attended a Catholic girls’ school on the outskirts of Dublin, which was exactly the sort of place those words can’t fail to conjure: uniforms, giggling, pranks involving bras and sanitary napkins, and an early fear of talking to specimens of the opposite sex. I was extremely shy, as was my best friend, Babs. We were an awkward pair, really, and clung to each other all during primary. Even in secondary, when the grip loosened enough to allow us to make other friends, neither of us was swept up into any particular group. Early on, I believed this was because of Babs’s brightly colored clothing and penchant for marine biology. Later I blamed it on the fact that my complexion was slightly darker than the other students’. Likely, it was both, yet neither. Our situation never bothered Babs, who seemed completely satisfied with the feeding habits of bivalve mollusks, but the isolation ate away at me. I dreamed of joining the cool girls at the lunch table, at the shops, at the weekend parties we knew must be taking place but we were never invited to. I would stare at myself in the mirror at home for hours, wondering what it was that made me different.

The fast girls, the ones with all the dates, steered well clear of us. Babs and I heard of the others’ boyfriends and what the girls were doing with them—blow jobs in the bathroom and all that—but we assumed that we would be ignored by the male species until college, if not beyond. Then, while I was serving cinnamon cake at the Christmas fair, a boy named Sean with large brown eyes and freckles came over and asked my name.

His ears, I noticed, were inordinately delicate—fine and white as bleached seashells.

“Tabitha Deacon,” I said.

“You make this cake?”

“What?”

“The cake?”

“Oh. No. Got it from the store.”

“Isn’t that cheating?” he asked, seemingly serious. “Aren’t you afraid of hell?”

“I’m a Jew. We don’t have hell.”

“Lucky for you.”

I looked at the cake, wanting to die. “It’s just for charity. The money. And it’s—it’s good cake.”

“You’ve had it?”

“Sure.”

He grabbed a piece and crammed it in his mouth, then screwed up his face and pretended to choke.

“It’s awful. Fucking God. I’ll take four pieces.”

“Four?”

“Sure. There’s loads of girls I hate here. I’ll give it to them.”

The next few afternoons, Sean was waiting for me at the school at the end of the day. Babs politely hung back while the other girls fanned out beyond us, smirking and jealous. What exactly Sean and I talked about is now a mystery. Movies? Algebra? I can’t imagine. After a while I would tell him it was time for Babs and me to go home.

The fourth day, Friday, Babs looked at me brightly.

“Taz, I can’t walk you home today.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve got a project at the lab.”

“On a Friday?”

She didn’t bother to answer, just turned on her heel and retreated into the school building, ignoring my braying protests.

Sean, who was waiting by the gate, didn’t ask where Babs was. We headed out, shoulder to shoulder, toward Soldier’s Field, a place we’d eventually take to visiting nearly every afternoon. There was a green hollow at the edge of the woods where we would sit, even in the winter, when the ground was hard and frozen. He was a great planner, Sean. If it was raining he brought plastic disposable ponchos; if it was cold, he gave me hand warmers, the kind that heat up after you shake them back and forth. What could they be made of, those chemical concoctions? The next day I’d find them in my pockets, formed into the shape of my inner fists, hard as ancient bits of chiseled stone.

My first thought, as I followed Sean to that field behind the post office, was that he wanted a touch of this or that. And he did, really. But he also fancied himself a poetry lover. He would arrange us comfortably, then pull out a book and start to read. I would sit there on the plastic tarp, smoothing the plaid skirt of my uniform over my wool stockings, rather at a loss. How is a girl supposed to react to Keats? Does she gaze at the reader adoringly? Lie back seductively on one arm?

We will drink our fill

Of golden sunshine,

Till our brains intertwine

With the glory and grace of Apollo!

“It’s good, yeah?” he’d ask later.

“Yeah! Oh,
yes.
” I’d try not to look bored, waiting for him to either kiss me or give me a Guinness out of his bag.

When I heard the other girls at school describe their first grapplings with sex—on the floors of garages, or pushed down on the hood of a car at thirteen—I knew that I was lucky. Sean was my first, and it was a truly lovely event, the details of which I would never share with anyone, even Babs. If I went over it, you’d probably think us just ordinary kids groping in a guest room. Yet in truth, there is never anything ordinary about the discovery of another sixteen-year-old’s skin.

I was desperate for us to marry. I knew it was silly; we were much too young and no one stayed together from secondary to uni. Yet I rashly clung to the hope that we would. Surely Sean wouldn’t leave me to navigate the world alone as my older sister did, with her one-night stands from pubs and bawdy talk of
cocks
and
balls
and dizzying lists of demands and frustrations.
Blew him for two hours, and not even a bloody text.
I was terrified of entering her arena and prayed Sean would protect me from it.

Yet my boyfriend—oh how I loved that word!—with his thoughtfully packed rucksacks and those wonderful ears, was a year ahead of me at school. This was a gap we eventually couldn’t weather. He went away to Oxford, a place I could barely imagine visiting, much less attending. His going there only made me love him more, and when my mother dropped me off to visit, my mind fairly burst at the sight of those spires, those ancient corridors. It was a place, I knew, I was just being allowed a peek at. My grades weren’t nearly good enough for me to even apply. I was no more than a frog trying to climb the lip of a bucket. And after just a few hours in that hallowed place, I began to feel physically ill.

“Hello, Beanie!” girl after girl cried all over campus as I walked beside him. These were college women, wild and free. They cruised the quads on bicycles with handlebar baskets loaded with impressive-looking books. One knobby-kneed brunette even stopped to talk. Gazing into his eyes, she chattered on, ignoring me completely.

“Have you read the Sophocles yet, Beanie? The last bit at the tomb—ugh! I was up all night in my jammies, weeping…”

Sean was sheepishly quiet after this one rode off. Sometimes first-years were given nicknames, he explained.
Beanie!
It was disgusting.

A few hours later, a serious talk on his bed after that last sad shag, followed by a heartache so acute I couldn’t eat anything but broth and cocoa until the summer.
Beanie.
For years, the very word brought bile to my throat.

Sean rearranged me. Sometimes, in the months after it was all played out, I would look around and find myself able to pick out the other girls it had happened to, being left. You could
see
it—the slight dimming of the eyes, no matter how loud the laugh. Yet maybe the worst thing about it all was my mother’s reaction. Leah Deacon had once had true passion: my father, an Irish doctor, who lured her from Tel Aviv after a series of research trips. But after children, his interest had waned, as had her faith and mental health. As a result, her absolute favorite pastime was hearing about the boyfriends she never had.

Sean she loved the most. When he stopped calling from Oxford, she grew so agitated I became afraid.
What
had I done? she demanded one afternoon, her Hebrew accent cutting into the words. She was a small woman, her once beautiful face shrunken into sharp angles.
Why
hadn’t I managed to be more pleasing? Oh, it wasn’t that she was a complete throwback—equal pay for women and all that, yes, of course. But in terms of male-female relationships, she hung on to traces of the customs and beliefs of her former household, so if something had gone wrong, clearly it was my fault.

No matter what they might say, the actual truth has no place in mothers’ ears. They beg to hear, but they don’t really want to know, do they? Not about how a boy might mash you up against a soda machine, scratching at your zipper. Not about an upperclassman who turns on a movie of bobble-breasted women spanking each other because he’s so drunk that’s what he needs. Yes, once university started, the stories for my mother had to turn to lies. But the first betrayal was this: her little jewel was no longer desired by this boy from Oxford. My mother was bereft, and I couldn’t stand it. In desperation, I finally said it had turned out that Sean was homosexual.

Leah Deacon sat back, and then reached over and patted my hand. “It’s a complication,” she said. “But nothing we can’t master.”

“Mom! No, it’s over. Really.”

“Well. We will be more careful next time,” she said, sighing.

Careful! I wanted to say. How? There was no manual for a girl like me. We were fondled, sucked, dropped, and we learned to do the same to the boys until we were all pliable and porous as old sponges. But for my mother, the story would be different. After all, I
wanted
something different. In her mind, I was taken to country inns, to long dinners in London, college dances, picnics in St. James’s Park.

And now I was going to Italy. What fantasies I would create for her there! Or maybe the storytelling would end, and I really would meet someone we both thought was wonderful. Someone who wouldn’t fall out of love with me the minute I was out of sight.

Once I arrived in Grifonia, I called my mother daily. She hung on to every word—about my classes, my friends, my new home.

“A
cottage
!” she cried. “How darling. And have you met any boys yet?”

Oh yes, I said. Many, many charming boys.

“Ahhhh. Can you send pictures?”

“I will, when I think of it.”

“Ah! Sweetheart. You are dreaming. You are dreaming.” She loved to say that. I think it was a bit of Hebrew that didn’t quite translate properly. I never contradicted her. She hated it when we corrected her English, and anyway, she was somewhat right.

*   *   *

Those next few days, I saw Jenny only once. Well, that’s not true. What I mean is, I
spoke
to her once. I saw her quite a few times, gliding across the main piazza, flanked by two other girls, a thin redhead and a tall black girl, all three dressed in long jewel-toned sundresses that flapped behind them in the late summer wind. They were an arresting threesome, promenading along the
via
there, and I watched as men and women alike turned to watch them as they passed. The scene reminded me of a bad painting my father had of the Greek Muses, holding their various instruments of art. It hung in his office at home, and as a little girl I used to stare at it, wondering who these women in the clouds could be, what their lives were like. And now, here they were, marching to Hotel Nysa for a Negroni.

The first time I spotted her I waved from the palace steps, but Jenny seemed not to see me, so from then on I kept to myself and simply followed the three girls’ movements, which seemed focused and secretive. Sometimes they turned down a side alley, as if looking for something. Twice they stopped to speak with a small pod of Italians, but after a few words the three of them moved on just as quickly, their steps perfectly in sync. I couldn’t help admiring how at ease they looked, as if they’d grown up striding through Italian squares, leaving cawing men in their wake, and I was filled with a flare of desperate envy.

My own social start in Grifonia was rather less easy. Other than directions and instructions on where to buy things, Gia and Alessandra, as warned, offered little help. There was a Welsh girl named Marcy who took an overly eager liking to me after singling me out at an Enteria orientation picnic, and, as I had little else to do, I obliged her by meeting her for drinks that night. But as soon as I approached the table my heart sank, as she had apparently put the call out to all the mousy girls in the program. I didn’t like to think of myself as a wallflower, but I was, I suppose, the type who could go either way, and dear Marcy had picked that up about me. I had never seen so many eyeglasses or baggy cargo pants at one table. Amassed in the middle was a tower of guidebooks, in every language the Lonely Planet series had to offer.