Chapter 13
PIENZA, ITALY
JULY 25, 2009
AGE: 23
ICRANED MY NECK, EXAMINING MY SURROUNDINGS. THIS WAS UNBELIEVABLE. I was back in my studio apartment in Pienza. My living quarters looked the same as they had during my truncated stay in the summer of 2009, down to the loft bed and the Italian graffiti on the ceiling beams. Sun streamed in from the window and illuminated a patch on the rug. I saw three postcards with Geeta’s loopy hearts affixed to the kitchen backsplash.
Sending each other postcards was a tradition that had begun when I was here and continued even when we were living in the same city. Geeta said there was something about letter writing that kept her grounded. I was always plenty close to the ground, but I loved having our own special language, an analog communication style that survived despite the Internet revolution.
I was seated on top of the studio bed. My diary was splayed open across my thighs, probably bare due to the lack of air conditioning. My diary confirmed it was July 25, 2009, the day I made a huge mistake—the first of many—that would flip my life belly up. I studied the entry in my journal. It was about Massimo. Of course it was. He was the only thing on my mind that summer.
I would have blushed at the words if my head weren’t going so foggy. I’d experienced déjà vu before, but this was different. This was... time travel. Literal time travel. Desiree wasn’t kidding around. I was really here. I could feel the breeze on my skin and my heart thumping against my ribs. I put down my diary and padded over to the postcard gallery. As I read Geeta’s messages, even more came rushing back.
In the summer of 2009 Geeta was toiling away at a management consulting firm, working for a man who kept confusing her for the other brown-skinned woman on her team. I told her that she needed to get out of there immediately. But Geeta stayed put, determined to push through for reasons I could never fully comprehend. She acted out in other ways, though. She sold her collection of vintage jewelry as a single lot on eBay as if she hadn’t spent her entire life amassing it. There’d been the Saturday she flew to Dallas to buy a red cowboy hat that was only available for purchase at the original Neiman Marcus, she’d told me. These were actions that I chalked up to misplaced stress, but now wondered if they’d been Memo mandates.
I scanned the notes taped to the wall. “I can’t quit, Jen, you don’t understand,” she’d written in a card dated June 23. “I’m not like you. I wish I was. But it’s too late to do anything about it.”
Now I got it. She wasn’t like me because she was following the Memo. She didn’t have free will, not in the way I did. My initial pity was followed by a stab of resentment. If it was fine for her, why had Geeta gone out of her way to prevent me from getting my Memo? Was she afraid I would outshine her? But this was Geeta, who had an unfailing belief in me. Perhaps she thought that I didn’t need any extra help.
I could see why she would believe that. I mean, look where I’d ended up without a set of instructions! I had this amazing fellowship. And look where her Memo got her! Trapped in a skyscraper for twenty hours a day, working with people she often felt like murdering.
It suddenly occurred to me to look in the mirror. I ran to the bathroom. Lo and behold, there was my wasted youth staring right back at me! I leaned in to examine my reflection. My prominent nose was set off by the girlish glow of my cheeks. Gone were the circles under my eyes and the ever-deepening creases on my forehead.
Something even stranger happened when I returned to the postcard wall. I saw that Geeta’s same card was there, except the last part had somehow transformed. Now there was no mention of her not being like me. Those words had vanished, like a magic ink trick. The postcard now read: “I can’t quit, Jen. You understand.”
Yup, I sure did. In this configuration of history, we both had Memos.
The church bell chimed, signaling it was seven a.m. Time to head out to work. I showered, threw on jeans and a T-shirt, and put on the delicate cameo earrings just as the Memo had instructed. Properly accessorized, perfectly Memo-assisted. It was time to undo the worst day of my life.
As I walked through town to the bakery, Pienza street life playing out around me, my whole body thrummed with excitement. My potential was unlimited. I was on a mission. I took a deep breath, inhaling faint notes of citrus and fresh dirt.
Old women sat on the benches that dotted the cobblestone street, and a band of young mothers chased after their kids. A pair of teenage girls walked arm in arm, giggling and talking rapidly. One of them looked like an Italian Sophie, and I reflexively smiled at her. She scowled at me in response, but I didn’t care. I was really here, fully present in this moment, and everything was glorious.
Remembering the village map perfectly, I turned down an alleyway and entered the arched doorway of Forno Amadeo as if it were a totally normal day. I grabbed my work coat off the hook and joined Rosa and Giovanna, my mentors, at the kneading station. They were humming as they worked. A Vespa-driving single mother of two, Rosa had a beautiful zest for life. Giovanna was in her fifties, with a pixie haircut and five young grandchildren who lived in the neighborhood.
My co-bakers murmured hellos to me in Italian. It took every ounce of self-discipline not to clobber them with hugs and then spend the rest of the morning ogling them with disbelief. As far as they knew, they’d seen me the day before, and I was just some young American girl who had no idea how good she had it, not the moron who had messed up their lives by burning down their workplace. I had to keep it together.
As the recipient of the Gabrielli Foundation Fellowship—the Foodie Fulbright, as it was known—I was only expected to be in the kitchen for six hours a day, from 7:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. I was supposed to spend the rest of my time soaking up the culture and researching and writing the paper that I would deliver as a speech at the end of my fellowship to hundreds of program alumni. My research was going to center on gifts of bread in medieval folklore and how baked goods defied traditional notions of commodification. After delivering a summary of my findings, the foundation’s luminary alumni would guide me to my next position in the food world—or they would have, had I not gotten thrown out of the program in ash-covered disgrace.
Now hovering over the eerily familiar centuries-old farmers’ table, I was trying to summon all the recipes I used to know by heart. As I poured some flour into a giant metal bowl for my olive ciabatta, I wondered where we kept the biga, the wet pre-fermented mixture. Looking around, I saw a bowl sitting atop a wooden shelf covered in a cotton dish towel. My heart hitched. Was that the towel that I had set on fire? I must have gasped because Rosa looked at me skeptically and asked something in Italian.
It had been a long time. My grasp of the language was rusty.
She laughed and pointed at my earrings. “Che bella!”
“Grazie, grazie,” I said, smiling.
We worked in silence until Rosa and Giovanna started tidying up. It was time for them to head home for lunch. I, the promising young baker from America, was trusted to remain in the kitchen a bit longer to mind the shop and bake the day’s final loaves.
I’d just removed a batch of bread and loaded up the oven when a disarmingly handsome man with wavy brown hair appeared at the back door. The sight of him made me go weak in the knees. Massimo! It was startling to see him again, with his brooding brown eyes and six-foot-four stature. He was just as gorgeous as I’d remembered. Maybe even more gorgeous.
“Non vedo l’ora”—“I can’t wait”—he told me and made a puppy-dog face. I went over and playfully pushed him out the door. He finally disappeared, but not without planting a soft kiss on my neck. I could still feel the warmth of his touch after he’d slunk off.
At first there was only a tiny crackling noise. The sound was almost cozy, and so was the aroma, a woodsy tinge that reminded me of winter. My heart sped up when I saw the flames playing on the edges of the towel near the oven. The smoke had not yet gone beyond the confines of the room, and I was able to staunch the fire with the help of the oversize water bottle that Giovanna kept at her station.
And now, the massive conflagration that had once been my fault, the fire that had brought ruin to the centuries-old kitchen, as well as my lifelong dreams, was extinguished. I was shaking, finally crying the tears of joy I had suppressed in front of Rosa and Giovanna earlier. It was so simple and yet so tremendous. I had the Memo, and the Memo had my back.
This time, I supposed I would remain in Italy until my intended date of departure. If Geeta ended up coming, it would be for a fun visit, not to talk me through my pain and regret. And tonight, I would get to have my date, which, by whatever perverse logic, made me feel like I was somehow getting even with Hal.
After tidying up, I took off my apron, excitedly applied some fresh lip gloss, and headed to Massimo’s house, which, his being a true Italian, was also his parents’ house. I spent the rest of the afternoon reading in the garden hammock, curled up next to him, our fingers grazing. Finally, Massimo and I had a delicious dinner with his family. We drank a gorgeous chianti, then slipped upstairs when the elders were busy watching a dubbed western on television. It was almost too perfect.
Massimo’s room was crammed with simple furniture that looked hundreds of years old, and a poster on the wall for the Antonioni movie L’Avventura,which Hal and I had recently watched at a drive-in. I laid beside him on the bed, and we laughed awkwardly before we started kissing. Massimo took care to remove my shirt, taking his time rolling it over my head while he kissed my rib cage. He took care with everything that followed too.
As I lay in bed afterward, Massimo by my side, I felt delirious, and spent. I caught sight of my face in a small mirror hanging on Massimo’s wall. I raised my chin to confirm that once upon a time, I had a jawline. I stretched my arms and legs out, grateful for my tight young body and all the things it could do and feel. I closed my eyes, full of carbs and contentment, on the verge of sleeping soundly. Then I fell off the bed and tumbled headfirst onto the hardwood floor.