I Didn't Know What I Was in For

An essay on bad blood, big feelings, insects and Italy.

Across the table from me sits a princess. She has a fork in one hand and a pink water gun in the other. Her mother explains that the toy is for the kittens, meant to scare them away from the plates of food they continuously reach for. From what I’ve witnessed, the little girl uses it mostly to squirt water at her parents or into her own mouth. She’s five, maybe six. Every time she speaks or smiles or bites into a piece of fruit or fish, one of her front teeth wobbles. I’ve been staying with the family for five days, and the plastic purple crown has yet to leave the child's head, although I think it has lost a few of its rhinestones since I arrived. 

I sleep in a studio apartment on the third floor. The shower is on the deck. The makeshift walls are so short that my entire forehead peaks out over the top, and every time I go to step out I bang my brow bone against the metal curtain bar. The stove is also out there. In the morning, while waiting for my coffee to brew and worrying if I turned the gas on correctly, I watch the ants frantically pace the wall and zigzag between my feet, often up my calves. In her experimental, genre-bending masterpiece “The Unwritten Book,” Samantha Hunt writes: 

Ants have undertakers, those members of the community charged with collecting the dead into middens to keep disease away from the colony; also, because ants use chemical pheromones to communicate, a dead and decomposing ant might release chemical pheromones without sentient intention. Imagine the confusion. Imagine what mixed message a decaying, dead ant might broadcast.

I remembered this passage yesterday, and squatted down to get a closer look at the little beings, curious to see if any of them were hauling their fallen soldiers to one of these mass graves. No corpses, just the usual unidentified crumbs. Maybe Italian ants save the hard jobs for later in the evening, after the sun has fallen some and the apertiefs have been consumed. 

Italy is another planet. At least, that’s what the blonde travel vlogger who I scrolled past while sitting on the toilet this morning said. Attached to her eloquent caption was a photo of her standing in front of the ocean. Large straw beach bag. Larger straw hat. White teeth and wedge sandals and not a drop of sweat on her upper lip. I zoomed in, nothing. 

I haven’t slept since I got here. I’d blame the jetlag, but unrelenting insomnia is a well documented affliction among the women in my family. Not the men. Clearing their minds and powering off comes easy to them. I lie on my back, sweat pooling in every cranny and fold, despite the fan that blasts from the corner and the wide open window that brings in more moths than breeze. I finish a book I don’t like and text the boy I do like. The protagonist felt half-baked, the plot too rushed. The boy has lost his shoes at the beach. He sends me a picture of his feet in the bright purple sneakers he has to wear as a replacement, saying something about how the patrons at the posh restaurant he works at will surely be thrilled. 

Across the table from me sits a princess, and to her left, her father. His name is Mario. We communicate mostly through a collection of hand gestures, grunts and exaggerated facial expressions. Mario wears a linen button down every day. Maroon, yellow, cornflower blue. He rolls his own cigarettes and never has shoes on and in the mornings I can hear him singing with his daughter while they water the garden or take out the trash. 

It’s been a little over two months since my father died. It was sudden, my mom calling me late at night with a wobbly voice and “something to tell me.” It felt like a T.V show. Still does sometimes, although I was clearly not included in the casting process. The aftermath of his death hasn’t brought out the best in many of my family members, myself included.

When I’m not stewing and blaming, I’m all tears and nostalgia. Both rigid and floppy, how miraculous. 

Two seats down from the princess sits the princesses grandmother. Her name is Ana. She is from Angola. Ana brushes her thick gray hair in the afternoons, following what I presume is her second or third cold shower of the day. The heatwave is all anyone can talk about. Today, the rocks lining the beach were so hot that not even my calloused Oregon feet could stand them. Ana cooks most of the meals here. This evening's line up is a mixed green salad with melon and balsamic, fried fish, browned to perfection with a crunch you could hear down the driveway, and baked eggplant. A few minutes into the meal, I scanned the table for the salt, gave it a few grinds over my plate before slipping it back between the wine bottle and the bread basket. I could feel her eyes on me the entire time, burrowing in. Have I made a grave error? Was there disrespect in the reach of my arm? Or was it that I went for the salt in the first place, an implicit accusation of blandness? Tomorrow I will remember to wave at her with extra enthusiasm when we meet eyes across the courtyard.  

“I’m afraid that I’m the kind of person who needs other people around,” I wrote in an email to my grandmother a few days ago. She’s back in Oregon, probably listening to Democracy Now, making hummus or sugar water for the hummingbirds. She has cancer, her blood having turned against her sometime in the last year. We hardly talk about it, but sometimes we’ll be laughing on the couch or sipping Sangria on the deck (she sips, I chug), sharing stories or recapping last night's Bones episode, and one of us will suddenly go quiet.

I can’t tell if it's just a natural lull in the conversation, a breath before we launch into the next pressing issue, or if it’s the sharp and sudden remembering of our numbered days together, that makes us close our mouths. It’s the end of July. I’m in Italy doing nothing and she’s back home doing something, maybe for the last time, and I feel sick if I think about it for more than three seconds. 

So I send her emails in the middle of the night, telling her what I ate and wore and looked at that day, and how being alone is starting to feel more like a punishment than an act of empowerment.

I want to be the kind of woman who can be by herself, who can feel joy and be curious about the things in front of her, even when she has no one next to her.

My grandmother is that kind of woman. Every time I get on a plane alone, I convince myself that I am one step closer to the gray-haired, fiercely independent wild woman I am meant to become. And then I spend the following days or weeks pacing my empty hotel room, walking over my clothes and not brushing my teeth and piling dishes next to the bed and wishing I had a companion. 

Next to Ana sit two boys. One coming up on his twelfth birthday, the other firmly seventeen. They are playfully arguing about which one will be tasked with doing tonight's dishes. Granted they are speaking Italian, and I know maybe thirty words total, half of which being numbers, but I’ve gathered from their pointing and eyebrow furrowing that they are deep in negotiations. The older one has agreed to wash the plates, if the younger one does the silverware. 

It’s a little after 5A.M and I'm lying on the floor, talking on the phone. New feelings and butterflies overshadow the inconvenient time difference. The WiFi in the apartment is questionable at best, and the surrounding mountains block all cell reception, so in order to have a few hours of uninterrupted flirtation, I have to station myself on the floor directly over the router. I make a nest of pillows and point the fan in my direction and he asks me if I harbor any grievances about being an only child. He’s the middle son of many, each sibling with a stranger name than the last, and while his boyhood was anything but easy, he’s grateful for the knowing glances and shared experiences. Exchanging eye-rolls over Dad’s latest antics is a fleeting but welcomed comfort. 

I would have liked to have someone to play with when I was young. My parents spent most of my childhood traveling and meditating and having “grown up discussions” in the other room, and I envied my friends who had built-in playmates. As a teenager, though, I appreciated the solitude. I still do, kind of.

But it would be nice to share blood and memories with someone.

To have a conversation without first providing backstory and context. To have someone else that my mom can call when she’s forgotten her Apple password. 

I hobbled down the stairs an hour ago, hungover and menstruating, seeking ice cubes, toilet paper and a washing machine. The princess, crown still perched, smile huge, tooth hanging by a thread, found me in the laundry room. She put a plum in my hand, bright yellow and a little bruised, then ran back outside to chase the kittens. 

Tonight, Ana is making a seafood pasta. I’m doing the dishes.

I can’t wait. 

Dronme

I didn't know what I was in for,
When I laid out in the sun.
We get burned for being honest,
I've really never done anything, for anyone.

- Better Oblivion Community Center