Chapter Seven
Jill
Ifound the cooking class the way I found most things that week, by walking until something caught my attention rather than searching for it in advance, a chalkboard sign outside a small storefront kitchen advertising a pasta class starting in twenty minutes, hand-lettered in looping cursive with a drawing of a wooden spoon beside the text, and I signed up before I could talk myself out of it, paying in cash to a young man who barely looked up from his phone before waving me toward the back room.
There were six of us total, gathered around a long wooden table dusted with flour, the surface worn smooth in places from years of hands kneading dough exactly where mine now rested, and the woman beside me introduced herself as Lola before the instructor had even finished her opening remarks, a tall American with cropped gray hair and a laugh that carried across the whole kitchen, loud enough that the instructor paused mid-sentence to smile at her before continuing.
"Divorced, three years, and this is my second trip to Italy alone," Lola said, by way of explanation for why she was standing in a Roman kitchen at eleven in the morning learning to make tagliatelle from scratch, flour already dusted across one cheek from an enthusiastic gesture.
"You've got the look of a woman currently in the middle of figuring something out. "
"That obvious?" I said, glancing down at my own hands, already unsteady with the rolling pin.
"Honey, we're all figuring something out in this kitchen. That's usually why people end up here alone, learning to make pasta from a woman named Graziella instead of sitting in a hotel room staring at the ceiling."
Graziella, small and sharp-eyed with forearms that suggested decades of exactly this work, moved down the table correcting our grips, pressing her palm over mine to show me the right angle for the rolling pin, tutting good-naturedly when my dough tore at the edges.
"Too much fear," she said, not unkindly, taking my hands in hers and guiding them through the motion again, slower.
"The dough knows when you're afraid of it.
Be confident, even if you have to lie to yourself a little. "
Another woman in the class, younger than the rest of us, introduced herself as Priya, visiting from London on a solo trip of her own, and she leaned over at one point to whisper that she'd signed up for the class because her sister had insisted solo travelers needed structured activities or they'd spend the whole trip crying in cafés, and the observation was close enough to the truth of my own week that I laughed harder than the joke probably warranted, drawing a curious glance from Graziella that softened, once she understood, into something like approval.
We worked the dough together, taking turns at the long table while Graziella moved between us correcting grips and offering encouragement in accented English, and Lola narrated her own divorce in fragments between instructions from the teacher, an eighteen-year marriage that had ended through the slow accumulation of years spent accepting less than she wanted, leaving having always felt harder than staying, until one ordinary Tuesday it hadn't anymore, and something in the rhythm of her telling made me laugh, really laugh, for the first time since I'd left San Francisco, a laugh that startled even me with how unfamiliar it felt in my own chest.
"What finally changed on that Tuesday?" I asked her, my hands still working the dough, flour dusting my forearms.
"Nothing, really," Lola said. "That's the embarrassing part.
He didn't do anything worse than usual. I just woke up and looked at him across the breakfast table and thought, I don't want to spend the rest of my life explaining myself to a man who's stopped listening.
That was it. Eighteen years, and it came down to a Tuesday and a plate of scrambled eggs. "
I told her, in pieces, about the conference room and the ring on the pillow, my hands still working the dough as I spoke, and she listened while she rolled her own sheet thin enough to see her hand through it, nodding at the right moments without ever once interrupting, and when I finished she didn't offer advice, which I was grateful for, because I had come to Italy specifically to escape people who thought they knew what I should do next, an entire life's worth of people who had opinions about what a good wife did in situations exactly like this one.
"You don't have to know anything yet," she said instead, cutting her sheet of dough into long, even ribbons with a confidence that suggested this wasn't her first time doing it.
"You just have to keep doing things until you find out what you actually want, instead of what you've been managing for somebody else. "
When the class ended, Graziella insisted we all sit and eat what we'd made, the six of us crowded around the same table now set with mismatched plates and a bottle of wine that appeared from somewhere in the back, and Lola raised her glass toward mine with a small private toast neither of us explained to the others.
"To figuring it out," she said, and I clinked my glass against hers and drank, the pasta simple and perfect, better than anything I remembered eating in months.
Priya, sitting across from us, asked what had brought each of us to Rome, and the question moved around the table, a retired accountant celebrating finishing chemotherapy, a young couple who'd missed their connecting flight and decided, on a whim, to simply stay a week instead of rebooking, Priya herself between jobs and unsure what came next.
When it reached me, I found myself saying only that I was figuring some things out too, and nobody pressed further, the table absorbing my vagueness the same easy way it had absorbed everyone else's reasons, no story required to earn a seat.
After the class, walking out into the early afternoon with flour still dusted on my forearms, I brought my camera into the city for the first time since landing, and my early photographs were stiff, over-composed, the instinct of a woman who had spent nine years photographing catered events and knew exactly how to make a room look impressive and had forgotten how to look at anything for its own sake, framing and reframing a simple market stall three separate times before I finally lowered the camera and just looked at it instead, the crates of lemons stacked in uneven pyramids, the vendor calling out prices in a singsong rhythm that needed no translation.
The vendor caught me watching and waved me closer, holding up a lemon the size of my fist and saying something I didn't understand, clearly proud of it regardless of the language barrier, and when I finally raised the camera he struck a small exaggerated pose, one hand on his hip, grinning at the lens with the shameless confidence of a man who'd been performing for tourists for decades and had never once tired of it.
The photograph I took of him in that moment, unguarded and delighted, became one of my favorites from the entire trip, proof that the best images sometimes arrived the moment I stopped trying so hard to compose them.
I walked for almost two hours, past shops and small piazzas, stopping wherever something caught my eye rather than following any planned route, past a shop selling only buttons, thousands of them in glass jars arranged by color, past a man restringing a violin in a doorway, the instrument braced against his knee while he worked, utterly absorbed, and I found myself, toward the end of the afternoon, sitting on the edge of a fountain photographing a group of children chasing pigeons, their delight uncomplicated and total, and I realized I hadn't checked my phone in over three hours, the longest stretch since I'd left San Francisco that Robert hadn't occupied some corner of my attention.
Lola found me there, apparently having wandered the same direction after the class ended, and she sat down on the fountain's edge beside me without asking, watching the children scatter and regroup.
"You're better at that than you're giving yourself credit for," she said, nodding at the camera. "I watched you back at the kitchen. You kept apologizing for taking pictures of the pasta, like you needed permission."
"I used to do this for a living," I said. "Sort of. Before I got very good at doing other things instead."
"What kind of other things?"
"Managing a calendar that wasn't mine. Making a marriage look effortless from the outside. That kind of thing."
Lola was quiet for a moment, watching the water catch the light. "You know what's strange," she said finally, "is that from where I'm sitting, that sounds like its own kind of skilled labor. Just nobody ever paid you for it, and nobody ever called it a career, so you stopped counting it as one."
I turned that over for a while after she said it, the fountain's spray catching the last of the afternoon light, and something about hearing my marriage described as unpaid labor, plainly, without cruelty, without an agenda, cracked something open that I'd been holding closed for longer than I wanted to admit.
That evening, sitting at a café near the Pantheon with a cappuccino I'd ordered despite the hour, aware and unbothered that I was breaking some unspoken Italian rule about when coffee like that was appropriate, I opened Robert's messages again, all of them still unanswered, and I read through the newest one slowly, twice, letting each sentence land before moving to the next.
*I meant that I should have waited until I could give you the life you deserved. Not that I regretted you. I've never regretted you, Jill. I'm sorry you heard it the other way.*
I set my phone down and drank my coffee and watched the square fill slowly with the evening crowd, tourists and locals moving past each other in the particular choreography every city develops around its own landmarks, and I thought about the sentence for a long time before I picked the phone back up and typed a reply, the first one I'd sent since leaving, my thumb hovering over the send button for a full minute before I let it go.
*I believe what you meant. I also believe what our marriage became.*
I sent it before I could second-guess it, and I put the phone away without waiting for his response, watching instead as the light shifted across the Pantheon's ancient facade, the stone going from gold to something closer to rose as the sun dropped lower, because for the first time in years, I wasn't interested in managing how Robert felt about what I'd said.
I finished my coffee, watched the light change over the piazza, and let myself simply sit there, unhurried, belonging to nobody's schedule but my own, a small and unfamiliar luxury that felt, in that moment, more valuable than anything in the house I'd left behind.