Kirstin Allio - Clothed, Female Figure - Stories

Have you ever been to Italy? I can’t believe I forgot to ask you.

One of Francesca’s friends (Francesca, sorry: one of Mark’s old girlfriends, how we heard about these apartments) arrives from Rome to stay in the apartment upstairs from us. Her name is Giulietta, which is a whole different kettle of fish from Julie, isn’t it. Despite her name, she’s all bourgeoisie and gristle. She wears a big floppy sun hat and movie-star glasses. She brings her terrible son Brando and an American au pair from Vassar College. Why does the au pair seem more like a houseguest? Because she has some Feminist Theory 101 in her back pocket?

Last night we were hanging out on our dark lawn — Roman was waiting to catch a bat or at least hit one with the sand shovel he was waving — when a chair came hurtling through the air from the terrace above us. Brando was having a tantrum.

Mark came out of the tiled quarters. Everyone looked to him to see what was called for.

Vassar slunk down, whining, But why don’t they have shower curtains in Italy?

You lost a chair, said Mark, deadpan.

There’s a little cutout in the pine trees through which I could see the twinkling lights from boats on the water.

Al-lie? called Giulietta from the terrace above us.

Vassar shivered.

Mark laughed at her and she flickered up for attention. He said, You must be Allie. He reached out his hand for an introduction.

He said, Baths in the sea, Allie.

I happen to know he’s forty. He swings his hips when he walks, which might be embarrassing in a younger man but it makes him seem youthful.

My employer, Virginia, asks me, “Who are all the letters from, Natasha?”

She cocks her head, fleetingly curious, “I’ve never even asked you. Do you still have family in Russia?”

I look down at the letter in my hand, with its Italian stamp and Italian postmark. But my employer is not really a classy person. She works hard, she’s a doctor, but she started medical school when she was about fifteen (this is her joke, actually), and hasn’t seen the real world since then.

I am no longer in the habit of confessing anything. Oh, I’m friendly, and at once gentle and vigilant with the children. I’m always getting told by the mothers that I’m not like the stereotypical Russian nannies with spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child ideas about discipline. It’s funny because that phrase of course comes from the Bible, and wouldn’t be known to most Soviet Russians of my generation. Also, Russian mamas notoriously spoil their children. As if they had multiples, which they don’t, categorically.

I just stand in the hallway not knowing what to say to her. Which is the lesser of two evils? That I’m corresponding with one of my old children (like an affair, almost!), or that I do have family in Russia, with whom I have never, since I emigrated, exchanged so much as a sentence?

Of course, I am not, technically, corresponding.

Luckily Virginia doesn’t have the time to pursue it. She is already explaining to me some glitch in her schedule, some scheduling conflict, that is a favorite term with her, that overlaps with my afternoon off… All I can think as she’s talking is something from her boys’ swim lessons, to which I accompany them, which strikes me as very funny indeed, “bubble bubble breath,” which is Virginia talking.

It’s all about the women, here, Natasha. The men are spoiled and paunchy, spreading out in the vacated cities, sleeping late, earning money to pay the nannies. There was one flashbulb of awareness when they were teenagers, and the rest of their lives they try to get back to it. Their bodies were strong, a sheer drop. Their hair was black, they drank black coffee and liquor indiscriminately. The only consolation now is to make mad money. Yes, Mark has gone back to New York for a week in the middle of his vacation to make money.

And no, Mark isn’t paunchy. He’s spoiled; but he’s the only one who really pays me any notice. He watches me with Roman and Felix. I figure he’d say something if he didn’t like the way I was treating his heirs. They really look like him rather than Emmie. Mark says that one way to travel is to love everything, revere it. I tell him I think the sunbathers on the rocks look like browning dumplings. I tell him I love to watch the family picnics beneath the pine trees. He smiles as if I’ve just said something very esoteric and he alone understands it.

I don’t think she can see it coming. I don’t think she’s old enough, or pretty enough, to see it coming.

And if I wrote her?

I laugh at myself harshly. I’d disappoint her with my old woman’s voice, I’d hurt her with my lack of belief in her beauty.

This Mark, her professor’s husband, will come back from his business having justified it to himself — every man can justify it — and Leah will be a bird in the hand before she’s even sited properly in the binoculars.

I take my afternoon off in Central Park. The commuter rail is empty at one o’clock on a Wednesday, and so I have the sense of swooping silently upon the city. I take a little picnic, and Leah’s most recent letter. After I finish eating, I wander around for a bit until I find a nice shady rock to sit on — private but not too private — and listen to the xylophone of bird voices. When I close my eyes for a moment, they seem to be elongated, like raindrops, and when a gust of wind comes up, there is a sudden discordance as if the notes are all struck together.

Dear Natasha,

I’m on the lawn again, looking through the keyhole of hedges to the marine blue (today) Mediterranean. Felix is sleeping. Roman is watching the idiot box with Lorene’s kids; Hedwig’s husband has actually taken his boys out fishing, so that he won’t have to do another thing with them all of August. Everyone else (if I say “the others” it will really sound like a novel, won’t it) is out on the count’s sailboat. Breezing along the Mediterranean in their sexy skins beneath their sexy sail. Molly and Eveline went into the town — I offered to watch Eveline’s charges. I could have taken Felix in his carriage. To town. But I thought I might get points from Emmie for reaching out to Eveline. Ah! I feel like the Christian fundamentalist in an apron and a bonnet making quilts past the year 2000. Life is a sacrifice of the soul; children are the refining fire. Mark said that, with a half smile.

I really can’t say you shouldn’t have left, Natasha, because that’s worse than underpaying, or paying for a single doctor’s visit instead of health insurance — you can be sure my mother’s all over labor violations. I can’t say you shouldn’t have left, because it sounds controlling. But when is love not controlling?

Here comes Mark. Ah! It seems like he’s smiling in spite of himself, you know? Like he genuinely likes me.

Yes, I’ve been to Italy. My husband took me, and Arturo, when Arturo was a ten-month-old baby. There was a great hassle about my passport. I had been planning never, ever to leave America. That was my thinking. But with the problems at the consulate, my husband began to suspect me of a covert Russianness.

“One thing,” he said. “If you’re my wife, you don’t draw this kind of attention.”

We fought all the way to John F. Kennedy Airport. Arturo wailed in the backseat and I twisted around to look in his wobbly eyes. I reached my hand back to his soft knee and he hiccupped. I looked in his wet light eyes and thought to myself that there was no reason under the sun, as they say, why he should stop crying. I knew that things were never going to be good between me and his father. Indeed, Arturo began to wail with renewed passion.

“Oh you’re a good a mother!” my husband shouted.

I was always the crazy one, as if it had to be one of us. My husband said he should have seen it. He claimed that I mumbled certain things in my sleep.