One Italian Summer(18)

I exhale. Then I peel up the hem and yank it up and off. My sun hat flies against the back of my head, kept in place by the string around my neck. I’m wearing a pink-and-yellow bikini, tied on the side. The wind picks up as we get moving, and she yelps, pulling her hair back.

“Antonio!” she yells. “Take it easy! Katy hasn’t been on a death ride before.”

“This is a place for lunch, right?” I yell to her.

“You’ll love it!” she says to me. “It’s a restaurant in this little cove. They have the best seafood!”

How do you know all of this? I want to ask. Who is Remo? How long will you stay? But the boat is moving fast now, and all my words are caught up in the wind and tossed out to sea before they can be heard.

I take out my camera, an old Leica, the one Eric bought for me after our honeymoon. He told me the photos on my iPhone were grainy. Back then, he was right. I haven’t taken a photo in forever—it’s something I used to love, another thing that has been lost to the Time Before.

I take the lens cover off, and I aim the camera at her. The boat jostles me around, the water kicking up and dusting us as we move. She stretches her legs out on the seat and tosses her head back, her lips parted. I snap the picture. I feel a tug of something so deep down inside me, so hidden, I wonder if it belongs to me at all.

This is my mother. My glorious, dazzling mother. Here, now, in all her glory. Unencumbered, I think, by anything that comes after.





Chapter Nine


My parents had a good marriage. Was it great? I think maybe, probably, even, but I’m not sure I can be the judge. I only know that when it came to my family, it often felt like my father was an outsider, the one observing the natural rhythm of my mother and me. I knew they loved each other. I saw it in how much time they chose to spend together, the gifts my father would bring home to my mother—flowers, clothing, the special-occasion necklace she had seen and loved but would never buy. I saw it in the way my mother made his favorite meal every Friday night, did all of his shopping, and, for thirty years of marriage, cut his hair. I saw it in the way he looked at her.

What I wasn’t sure of, what I did not know, was if they were soul mates, if they even believed in them. I did not know if my father lit my mother up on the inside. I did not know if they had the kind of marriage that made you say: I just knew.

Chuck and Carol were set up through mutual friends. She was a young gallerina from the East Coast, and my father was an up-and-coming clothing designer, born and bred in LA. They bonded over a shared love of Casablanca, guacamole, and Patti Smith.

“He used to play me records until three o’clock in the morning,” my mother would say.

Did she recognize him when she saw him? Was it love at first sight? Or was it the quiet recognition of the possibility of a good life?

The boat slows, and Antonio hops out, wading through the water to pull us to what can barely be described as a pier. It’s really just a wood plank that leads up to the shore of what surely is the world’s tiniest beach, if you can even call it that. Women in bikinis and men in swim trunks lounge atop rocks and in green-and-white-striped canvas chairs wedged into the rocky-sand beach. Behind them are two restaurants—an all-white building and the blue of Da Adolfo.

Remo hops onto the dock and offers his hand to my mother, who nods to me. “Katy first.”

The boat wobbles violently, but I’m still wet from our prior encounter, so what’s the worst that could happen?

I take Remo’s hand and make it to the pier. She follows. And then the three of us make our way to shore.

“Come back when you come back!” my mother calls to Antonio. Her hand is holding her hair back like a clip.

There is an ease, a casualness to her that I’ve never seen. Or if I have, I don’t remember it. Come back when you come back? Who is this woman?

Remo gets us a table close to the sea, and we sit. A basket of bread and some olive oil is already waiting for us. The oil comes in a little blue-and-red ceramic dish outlined with white fish. Black flies land periodically on the table, but the wind keeps them away, for the most part. The ocean crashes on the rocks next to us, and two couples lounge in beach chairs by the edge. Otherwise, it’s empty.

“You are lucky to be here now,” Remo says. “Another three weeks, and Positano is infested.”

“Tourists,” Carol clarifies. “Not bugs.”

“Same, same,” Remo says, smiling.

They sit on one end of the table, and me the other. I study my mother. Again and again and again. The living, breathing beauty of her now. So current, so present, practically overflowing, that I feel if I squeezed her, I’d be able to capture the runoff.

“Remo, do you live in Positano?” I ask.

I take a moment to really look at him. He’s handsome, there’s no doubt about that. He looks a little like a Roman god. Tanned torso, locks of curly brown hair, and crystal-blue eyes.

“I live in Naples, but in the summer I come to Positano because in the summer, that is where the money is.”

“Remo works at Buca di Bacco,” she says.

“The hotel?” I remember reading about it during our research for the trip.

“Hotel e ristorante,” Remo says. “I am a cameriere, ah, waiter.” Remo smiles.

“It’s a very respected profession in Italy,” she says. “It’s a shame America doesn’t really have the same tradition.”