Chapter 23
TOM HAD INSTRUCTED US to meet him at the guardhouse, and when we got there, he was in a hurry to get Paul out to the tender.
“You going to be okay on your own?” Paul asked me in a low voice. Because I didn’t want to come off as even a tiny bit needy, I said I would be.
“I’ll have him back at the hotel by half past six, if not before,” Tom promised.
“Want us to walk you as far as the piazza?” Paul asked, but I waved him off like I was an expert at this whole thing.
“I might check out that lending closet,” I said, which was the exact right thing to say because it showed Paul that I was paying attention, committed to making use of my available resources, and interested in making us a home—no matter how temporary.
He gave me a big kiss on the cheek, then followed Tom out of the compound and down the hill toward the pier.
I watched them go, trying to stem the panic rising like steam in my chest. I had never been alone a day in my life.
There had been school and work, my family and friends.
If it hadn’t been for the fact that Hollingsworth was standing a few feet away, watching my every move, I might have sat down on the curb, hugged my knees to my chest, and cried.
Instead, I took a deep breath, threw my shoulders back, and asked Hollingsworth where I’d find the lending closet, which, as it turned out, wasn’t a closet but a whole room stacked with folding cots and sleeping bags, box fans and camping stools.
Some metal shelves had been installed along one wall, and on them were sets of Farberware dishes, cheap flatware, cooking utensils, and a variety of pots and pans.
The stuff was nicer than anything Paul and I owned, and a sign on the wall, written in big block letters, read TAKE WHAT YOU NEED, SIGN OUT WHAT YOU TAKE.
So I found an empty cardboard box and helped myself to a hot plate, a pot, a pan, a colander, two sets of dishes, two cups, two sets of flatware, and some basic kitchen utensils.
Back at the Excelsior, I unloaded the box.
The hot plate went on the bathroom counter, the utensils in the drawer of my bedside table, and the plates and cups and silverware on the windowsill.
When the box was empty, the room looked much worse—less like a hotel room and more like a junk shop—but I felt like I had done something good.
Since I was on a roll, I took my Italian phrase book down to the lobby and asked the guy at the front desk, who wore a name tag that read Michele, where I could buy a Styrofoam cooler.
Of course, the words Styrofoam cooler weren’t in my phrase book, but it didn’t matter.
He spoke some English, and after a little back-and-forth, he directed me to a grocery store called the Comiti Uno on the Via Terralugiana.
The Comiti Uno sat at the top of a steep hill on the outskirts of town, and the whole store delighted me for both the ways it mimicked an American grocery store and the ways it didn’t.
They had all the basics—a meat counter, a fish counter, and lots of fresh produce, but the selection was nothing close to what I was used to.
You know how you go to the grocery store now and there are fourteen kinds of Greek yogurt?
At the Comiti Uno, there would have been one.
Except that’s a bad example because I’m not sure Italians were eating Greek yogurt in 1974. I know we weren’t in Charleston.
The other thing I couldn’t get over was how small all the packages were.
Like, they didn’t sell flour in big five-pound bags but in these tiny paper sacks that must have weighed no more than a pound.
Milk and eggs, to my great surprise, were out on the shelves, not in a refrigerator, and I spent far too long studying the fine print on the back of a very small carton of shelf-stable milk, trying to figure out if I’d need to refrigerate the stuff once I opened it.
Conservare in frigo. Probably that was a yes.
I wandered the aisles, letting Italian words like olio and aceto wash over me.
Sometimes I could use context clues to figure out what the word meant.
Carrots were carote, rosemary was rosmarino.
But other words were less obvious. I stared at a can of fagioli rossi for a long time before realizing that what I was looking at was kidney beans.
I could buy only as much as I could carry, so I found the cooler, picked out a few essentials, and tried to figure out what I should make for dinner.
The pasta dish we’d eaten the previous night had seemed simple enough, and I knew Paul would go out of his skin if he arrived back at the hotel to find anything half so gourmet waiting for him.
So I located the fettuccini, a bottle of olive oil, and a block of Parmesan, which I’d have to figure out how to grate.
Against all odds, I convinced the guy at the meat counter to give me a half kilo of carne di agnello, which turned out to be far too much lamb, then I wandered back over to the produce section, looking for artichokes.
I found them right away, but as soon as I reached for one, a woman appeared out of nowhere and swatted my hand away.
I froze, not sure what was happening, but then she was yelling at me in Italian and I shrank into myself.
“Non parlo italiano,” I got out, thankful that I had memorized this one phrase, if nothing else.
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, the woman calmed down a little.
“Sei americana?” she asked, and when I answered affirmatively, she seemed to return to herself.
I watched as she initiated a complicated series of gestures that I understood meant if I wanted any produce, I was to ask her for it and she would bag it, weigh it, and label it.
Then and only then was I to touch it. It seemed like an extremely inefficient way to run a produce department, but this was not a conversation we were having so much as a game of charades, so I kept my opinion to myself, pointed at the artichokes, and said, “Uno, por favor.” Too late, I realized I was speaking Spanish.
At the checkout counter, things got worse.
I tried to count out my lire, but it was taking so long that I finally just handed it all to the clerk.
He counted it quickly, then shook his head, and I understood he was telling me I didn’t have enough money to pay for everything, so I pointed at a block of butter, which I guessed had been expensive, and made like I was slitting my own throat.
He subtracted it from the bill. We had another standoff when he realized I had brought no grocery bags with me.
I wanted to explain that I’d never heard of such a thing, but by then I just needed to get out of the store, so I packed everything up in the cooler and gave him a strangled “Grazie.”
“Alla prossima,” he said with a small wave, and had I known that he was saying Until next time, I might have been tempted to tell him there wasn’t going to be one.