Four ships were in front of them, one a cruise ship headed toward Genoa, the others tankers.
“Is he nice to you, Mom?”
Mary said, “He’s very good to me.”
“Okay, then. All right.” In a moment Angelina added, “And his sons? And their wives? Are they nice to you too?”
“Perfectly fine.” Mary waved a hand dismissively. “Look what Paolo’s done for me, honey. He downloaded all of Elvis’s songs onto my phone.” Mary reached for her phone, looked at it, then put it back into her big yellow pocketbook.
“You told me,” Angelina said. And then, in a nicer tone, Angelina added, “You’ve always liked yellow.” She touched her mother’s pocketbook. “And this is yellow.”
“I have always loved yellow.”
“And your yellow bikini. You crack me up, Mom.”
Another ship, far out on the horizon, appeared. Mary pointed to it, and Angelina nodded slowly.
She ran a bath for Angelina, like she had done for years, and she almost wondered if the girl would let her stay and talk, as she often did when she was little. But Angelina said, “Okay, Mom. I’ll be out soon.”
Lying on her bed—where she spent much of her days—Mary looked at the high ceiling and thought that what her daughter could not understand was what it had been like to be so famished. Almost fifty years of being parched. At her husband’s forty-first birthday surprise party—and Mary had been so proud to make it for his forty-first so he’d be really surprised, and boy he was really surprised—she had noticed how he did not dance with her, not once. Later she realized he was just not in love with her. And at the fiftieth wedding anniversary party the girls threw them, he did not ask her to dance either.
Later that year her girls had given her the birthday gift, she was sixty-nine, of going to Italy with a group. And when the group went to the little village of Bogliasco she became lost in the rain, and Paolo found her, and he spoke English, and she did not really think too much about his age. She fell in love. She did. He’d been married for twenty years, it had seemed like fifty to him, and now he was alone—they were both parched.
But she thought of her husband, her ex-husband, more often these days. She worried about him. You could not live with someone for fifty years and not worry about him. And miss him. At times she felt gutted with her missing of him. Angelina had not yet mentioned her own marriage, and Mary was waiting with real apprehension for her to do so. Angelina’s husband was a good man; who knew? Who knew.
In the bathtub, Angelina put her head back and smeared her hair with shampoo. She had been happy, swimming with her mother. But now, sitting in this horrible old tub on its clawed feet, trying to hold the odd little shower hose so water didn’t get everywhere, now Angelina felt the worst feeling of all, that of not being able to believe things. She could not believe that her mother looked so different. She could not believe that her mother no longer lived ten miles from her, from her grandchildren. She could not believe that her mother was married to a boring Italian man as young as Tammy. No, she wanted to cry, soaping her hair, No no no! Oh, she had missed her mother terribly. Day after day, week after week, she had talked of her mother incessantly, and Jack had listened, but then Jack had finally and suddenly left, saying, You’re in love with your mother, Angie, you’re not in love with me. And so she had come here to see her mother now, to tell her about her marriage: this woman—her mother—that she was in love with.
To have the pleasant-faced Paolo pick her up at the airport, standing next to this small, old, brown woman, her mother （！）， driving them here along these crazy roads, so what if he went to spend a few nights with his son in Genoa so Angelina could have time alone with her mother? Angelina hated everything about this place, the beauty of the dumb village, the high ceilings of this awful apartment, the arrogance of the Italians. In her mind now she pictured her youth, the long stretches of acres of corn beside their home in Illinois. Her father was a yeller, true. And he’d had that stupid relationship with that stupid fat woman for thirteen years, true too. But that was just pathetic, in Angelina’s eyes—painful, of course, but pathetic. Why couldn’t her mother see what she had done by leaving? Why couldn’t she see it? There could be only one reason: that her mother was, behind her daffiness, a little bit dumb; she lacked imagination.
Boo-hoo. Boo-hoo. This is what her father used to say to any of them when he found them crying, putting his face right up to theirs. He really was a mean snake of a man （but he was her father, and she loved him）， in favor of guns and shooting anyone who came into your house; he’d been raised that way, and had he had sons instead of daughters they might have been like that too. Angelina hoped he never got himself to Italy, to this awful little village, to find this nothing of a man Paolo who had taken her mother’s affections away from them so very late in life. If her father was sick again, really and truly going to die this time, he’d somehow get himself to this village, find this nothing of a Paolo, and shoot him in public and then shoot himself.