One Italian Summer(17)

It occurred to me, while I was getting ready, that perhaps I hit my head harder than I thought. That maybe I was in some kind of fever dream—could my mother really be here? But I saw her before I fell, and the recent memory is too real to be an imagined fiction. I have no other explanation besides the impossible.

The clock sneaks to 1:00, and I look around with anticipation. A family with two young children walks up to the dock, but they’ve booked a private water taxi. As they climb inside, one of the children, a boy probably four years old, starts yelling, “Il fait chaud! J’ai faim!”

One o’clock gives way to 1:15, and I take a seat on the ledge of the dock. The sun overhead is high and beats down hard. I take some sunscreen out of my bag and reapply it on my arms, shoulders, the back of my neck.

One-thirty. I stand. An expectant bubbling in my stomach settles into a knot. No boat, no Mom. I shake my head. Stupid, foolish, that I thought she’d show. Maybe, even, that I thought she was here at all. How could I have let her out of my sight?

And then in the distance I see a boat bobbling on the horizon. A red wooden fish is fixed to the top with Da Adolfo printed on it.

“Da Adolfo!”

In a split second, two things happen. The first is that someone grabs my arm, hard. The second is that my sandal gets caught in the wooden slats of the dock. I wobble, swinging my arms to steady myself, but it’s no use. I’m right at the ledge, and before I can blink, I fall back-first into the water. It’s not until I hit the surface that I realize whoever grabbed my arm has toppled in with me.

I come up, splashing and gasping, to see my mother, next to me, bobbing to the surface.

“Katy!” she says. She flicks some hair out of her face. “We have to stop meeting like this!”

She smiles at me, and I burst out laughing. I tread water, overcome with a relief so strong it’s comical. I can’t remember the last time I laughed, and I let it take me over now. I float up onto my back, still hiccuping in hysterics.

“Out of water!” the driver calls. The boat hasn’t yet reached us but is beginning to slow down. I see that it’s small, a tiny speedboat, and I can make out the driver now that he’s close enough. He looks young, early twenties, maybe.

“Oy, Carol!”

A man on the dock waves, swings his legs over the edge of the dock, and reaches down his hand. Carol gestures for me to be helped first. I swim over and reach out my hand to meet his, and he grabs on. It feels like my arm is being pulled out of its socket, but once I’ve gotten a little height, I plant my free hand on the dock, and with every ounce of strength in my five-foot-four body, I hoist myself onto the dock. I lie there, breathing hard.

My mother’s rescue is much simpler. She uses one foot on the side of the dock for leverage and then swings her body over. It definitely helps that she’s taller.

We stand back on solid ground, looking at each other, the remnants of laughter still bubbling through our bodies.

Our rescue hero steps forward, and my mother makes introductions.

“Katy, this is Remo. Remo, Katy,” she says, still out of breath.

“Hi, Remo,” I say. “Nice to meet you.”

Remo slips his arm around my mother. My stomach tightens.

“Ciao, Katy.”

My mother wasn’t one to talk about the details of her past, romantically speaking. She was a woman with well-drawn lines around her life. She lived in color about so much—her sense of beauty, design, her love of community—but her romantic past always seemed off-limits. She’d say things to me like “That was another lifetime, Katy. Who could remember?”

I called her and told her when I met Eric, then when I realized I first loved him, but we didn’t talk about sex the way some daughters and mothers do. I didn’t ask her questions—about her own experience—or share the details of mine. There was nothing outside the walls of our relationship, really, but sex felt like it was right on the perimeter. And we just didn’t cross the line.

When she told me about this summer in Positano, she would say it had been magical, transformational, and full of good food and wine, but she never talked about another person.

Yet here Remo is.

The driver calls out to us. “Da Adolfo!”

“Antonio, aspetti, we’re coming,” my mother says.

She goes over to the boat, and the driver, Antonio, presumably, holds out his hand for her. She gets in, then me, then Remo. I’m soaking wet, the cotton of my caftan clinging to me like a second skin.

She is still in her lemon dress, and as soon as we’re seated she pulls it up and over her head, revealing a black one-piece with pinpoint polka dots underneath. She leans her head back and closes her eyes, soaking up the sun. I shudder to think of Carol Silver, sans sun hat, letting the rays into her skin like they’re welcome.

“I like your bathing suit,” I say. It feels stupid to compliment her like this, but I want her to open her eyes, to engage with me.

“Take off your dress and you’ll dry faster,” she tells me, eyes still closed. “That thing looks like a wet blanket on you.”

She didn’t like it when we bought it, either. “You look like a grandmother, but I know it’s the style now.”

The boat begins to peel away. Remo and Antonio speak in harsh staccato at the wheel over the increasing sound of the water.