Kirstin Allio: Clothed, Female Figure: Stories

Which is why I find myself in Italy and not on the banks of the Hudson River.

Rolls of gold straw, stubbly fields, combed and tufted pine trees line dirt roads off the highway. I look over and Emmie is closing her eyes at the wheel of the car we rented. The boys are bobbleheads in their car seats. For a long moment I think we will just lift off into the shiny sky which I’ve already decided is the essence of Italy. Then I realize that we are slowing down rather quickly and veering off the road rather dangerously.

I am too shy to wake up my professor! I put my hands on the wheel where they won’t touch her hands. I don’t even know how to drive in America, let alone Italy . I let the car swerve off the highway and roll into a ditch gently. Then I don’t know what to do so I turn the keys out of the ignition. I tell myself the car can’t spring forward with the keys severed.

How’s that for my first adventure?

Oh, that’s very fine for an adventure, Leah. I don’t know how to drive, either. Perhaps you remember the way I scuttled you across the streets in a state of clinical panic. I don’t trust drivers. I close my eyes against them, my breathing choked, irregular, not trusting death, either.

When we get to the compound (Emmie wakes up in the ditch and looks at me strangely; my mouth corkscrews instead of smiles), we are delirious. Felix begins vomiting. I stand back — surely this is Emmie’s department. Indeed, Emmie grabs my arm and says, Oh my God, I throw up when I see throw-up. She turns away and hurls.

Did I mention that we’re joining Emmie’s two best friends from college? They’ve each brought their nanny. There’s one nanny, hanging out a fan of laundry. The other is a button-nosed eunuch (I decide, cruelly) from Thailand (Emmie’s friend Hedwig tells me). She turns the hose on the vomit in the courtyard before she’s even said hello to us.

Hedwig, later: You’re Emmie’s student?

I wilt like a zucchini flower on the end of its phallus.

Certainly I was glad Virginia didn’t choose this moment to quake up the attic stairs with some scheduling conflict. I’ve always thought laughing was worse than crying because laughing, you have to pretend to be happy.

I made my decision it was not appropriate to write back to Leah. There were a multitude of reasons. I owed it to myself to remain utterly free of children in my unpaid hours. There was never any joy for me, with children. Indeed, sleepless nights worrying over Leah left me distracted, even depressed with Jack and Colin.

And yet when I received another letter…

You should see the clear-skinned, glinty-eyed women, Natasha. And the dark gangly men with lovers’ names. I get why my mother provided me with condoms.

We are invited to a dinner at midnight (I exaggerate the time but not the magic) and climb steep stairs, me carrying Felix, Emmie tugging Roman, to a sprawling red-tiled terrace furnished with monumental potted olives. Two cooks, three courses, faucets of wine in square juice glasses. All candlelight. Then Francesca, the hostess, a tycoon’s daughter, spies our children.

The little ones aren’t tired?

Emmie swoons into the lovely commotion even as her children are dismissed from the party. Crestfallen, I pull them inside the “apartment.”

But the sun is healthy, the Italian language is organic, the cheese tastes like meat, and the milk tastes like flowers! Smooth brown haunches in tiny swimsuits. I look down at my tissue-paper skin, grayish white, tattooed with the soot of NY City. Perhaps having inferior skin consistency makes me try harder at conversation.

Those other trees on the terrace are hazelnuts!

I told myself that Leah’s letters were poetic, but not personal. I told myself that I was never more than a stand-in, a warm body, for any of my children, and so was not, categorically, entitled to any sense of guilt I might feel at not writing Leah.

Emmie spends the mornings in a studio she rented. She comes back to the compound for lunch, upsets Roman and Felix with her managing of their diets, and then calculates — as if, every time, it’s a special exception — if I could put the boys down while she takes a breather, a.k.a. four hours. After siesta, she runs three miles with Hedwig to a polo field where they nuzzle the horses like infatuated schoolgirls. Then they walk back, all art and relationships.

Here’s how it started. Last semester I had an idea for a life-sized sculpture of a woman. The whole point was she would be clothed, suggesting the opposite of clothing. Like naked bodies are less sexy, actually, than bodies in bathing suits. Uh-huh, that’s my college for you. A clothed sculpture about nakedness, basically. Emmie was the one who drew me out, encouraged me. I told her about you, I admit, and I probably made you out to be some hammer-fisted, kerchiefed Stakhanovite. Emmie said my idea was very precocious. Then I had an idea that the body had to be yours, actually — I mean I became obsessed with likeness and proportion and even your particular wardrobe. I remembered, and it startled me, that you always looked as if you’d just stepped out of the collective closet of the Soviet Union. You looked as if you immigrated every day, to Chelsea.

(Not that my mother’s wardrobe was ever up-to-date, but did she ever even offer to walk you down Hudson to the church thrift shop?)

Emmie argued that the power of the work was that it was universal, you know. Woman’s lot and all that. I disagreed but didn’t know how to express myself. I just felt like it was mine . Even though it was yours, in a way, Natasha. Emmie said I didn’t understand art and I broke down in tears, knowing girlish capitulation was the only thing that would save the relationship. And here’s where the relationship has gotten me.

I was holding Felix on my hip yesterday — he’s the quiet one, with an amazingly gourd-like forehead. Roman hurled himself at me, across the lawn — his love is so boisterous. All of a sudden I remembered how I could disarm you by running into your arms, because you were so shy, for a grownup, and going for a hug was so unlike me.

I found myself wishing she’d return to the nanny on the lam, me, Natasha. I longed to laugh again imagining myself ducking some black market thugs, gumshoes wearing masks of Beria and Stalin. Admittedly, there was a hole in the logic of such letters — why did Leah write me? But I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t exalted. Emotions that would be embarrassingly simple in my psychology days, but now…well, I told myself, there was the possibility that I was a lonely old woman.

I came to New York at twenty-six and married the first man I met, literally and proverbially. He stuck his head around the fire escape. “Hey,” he said. “Neighbor.”

He had a loopy, charming grin and hard eyes the color of lapis. I had just brought home a pot of daisies (margaritka, in Russian), and I was setting them out on the little balcony. I wouldn’t have called it a fire escape. My English was good but not specific. He climbed over, still grinning, as if he were shy of my beauty but like a dog couldn’t help himself. He had long legs in tight jeans and white socks with holes in them. So already we were intimate. We had one son, Arturo, named after my husband’s father, the patriarch. The family business was Italian tiles. We were a mismatch from the beginning, although there were never any lighthearted fairies making fun of us.

It didn’t take more than ten minutes for me to look through my papers for a picture of Leah. With the way I move around so much I don’t have much of anything. No. In those days it seemed more exaggerated, deliberate to take a picture, and I wouldn’t have wanted Ivy to get the wrong idea. As I said before, there was already some sense, among my previous families, that I could be too vigilant.