From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(3)

Connor was a senior and New England blueblood who had family in Italy. After one late-night romp in his bedroom on the top floor of his frat house, I helped him clean up beer cups while he helped me decide to take a semester abroad in Italy.

He assured me it was the only way I could achieve fluency, and I could also take a much-needed break from the confines of small-town Connecticut and still graduate on time. He suggested Florence. He had a sister there, Sloane, who had cast off the idea of an undergraduate degree from Vassar College in favor of life in Italy as an expat. She was a few years older than I was and had a long-term Italian beau, Giovanni, with whom she had gone into business, opening a bar called No Entry. Connor assured me that she would take me under her wing. His instructions were simple: “Find the nearest pay phone when you arrive in Florence and call Sloane—she’ll introduce you around.” Her number was tucked inside my passport when I boarded the Alitalia flight from New York.



* * *



The reward of jet lag is a new set of coordinates, a new language, and local delicacies. Italy did not disappoint. Eating my pastries as I looked out the window, on the bus ride from the Rome airport to Florence, I watched the passing cypress trees, hills, and farmhouses. It was like seeing a place for the first time that you felt you had known your whole life. When we finally made it to Florence under the midday summer sun, we stumbled out of the bus near the church of San Lorenzo. By then I realized I couldn’t wait to get away from the bulk of the girls on the exchange program. One transatlantic flight and then a two-hour bus ride was enough.

Unlike them, I wasn’t in Italy to shop and hang out with my sorority sisters. I didn’t have my parents’ credit card in my wallet, and I wasn’t looking for a tryst with an Italian boy and trips to Paris once a month. I had a semester’s worth of modest spending money, and I actually wanted to study art history. There was more I wanted, too, from my three-month stay. It was a yearning I couldn’t put into words yet.

After I gathered my duffel bag from the luggage compartment of the bus, our large group was divided and shuttled off to a series of pensioni near the train station for the first night or two until we would all be assigned and delivered to our Italian host families. The first thing I did after walking up three flights of a narrow stone staircase to my three-person room was put my duffel down and get into line to use the telephone in the main entrance. I did what every other girl did: I called home. Or two homes, actually—first my mom’s and then my dad’s—and assured both of them I had arrived safely. Then I called Sloane.

“Ciao, Tembi!” Her voice rang out as if we had just seen each other a couple of nights before over an aperitivo. “Connor told me about you. I knew you’d call. Where are you?”

“I’m near the station at a hotel.” I didn’t say pensione because I wasn’t sure I’d pronounce the Italian correctly.

“I’m coming to get you,” she said in a smoky New England lilt overlaid with an Italian cadence. I knew in an instant that she was more European than I’d ever be. “Let’s have dinner. I have to be in the city center tonight anyway for work. Pick you up at eight.”

It was sometime after lunch when I hung up the phone, as best as my jet lag could tell. Time enough to nap and then shower and be ready for my first real Italian dinner. When all the other girls began joining up and making plans to explore the area around the hotel, perhaps window-shop and get something to eat, I declined their offers to join them.

“I have a friend who is picking me up later,” I explained. It was the kind of understated brag that didn’t win me any friends.

Sloane whizzed up to the pensione at 8:45 p.m. in an old bluish white Fiat Cinquecento. It was a car I had seen only in I Vitelloni, a movie I had watched in my Italian Neorealism film class. She pulled it up onto the sidewalk, hopped out of the driver’s seat, and came around to throw her arms around me. Apparently, we were long-lost friends who had been dying to get reacquainted. She had curly auburn locks that fell at her tan cleavage, which she managed to somehow have even though she was braless. Her smile was as bold and bright as her pastel Betsey Johnson floral minidress. But it was her infinitely long legs that I couldn’t take my eyes off of. Connor had mentioned that she had been a theater major, and that made perfect sense as she carried herself as though she were stepping onto or off of a stage. Standing next to her I felt like a troll in Gap jeans, V-neck T-shirt, and lace boots, a look that had seemed so cool while walking across the lawn back at Wesleyan.

“Hop in!” she said when she finished hugging me. She opened the door on the passenger side and crawled over the gearshift to take her place behind the wheel. In the process, she threw her fringed leather purse into the back seat, then, on second thought, reached back, put it onto her lap, and pulled out a joint.

“Want some?”

“No, thanks.” It looked as though she had already had a few drags. There were lipstick stains on it.

“Later then, there’s time.” She turned the motor. “We’re going to meet my friends near San Casciano first. Dinner at their house. He’s a painter, she does the window dressings for Luisa. Then we’ll all head to the bar.” She took a long drag, then extinguished the joint on the floorboard of the car.

“Put this in back,” she said, handing me her bag. “And yours, too,” she added, lifting my maroon canvas backpack from my lap.