One Italian Summer(31)

“Tell me more about California,” I say to her.

My mother is from Boston, born and raised. I know she moved to California five years before she met my father. That she worked in a gallery in Silver Lake called the Silver Whale. She would speak about that era with a whimsical detachment. I was lucky. I didn’t have a mother who longed for her youth. At least, I never thought I did. She embraced aging. I remember once noticing, on a particularly hot July day, that she never wore T-shirts anymore. When I asked, she told me she’d given them up years ago. She laughed when she said it—she didn’t seem attached to a younger version of herself, a younger body. My mother never put herself in the center of my drama, either. Whether it was friends or Eric or the uncertainty of work. She seemed to love the stage of life she was in—somewhere past all the figuring out. Somewhere solid.

But here, now, so firmly planted in Before, I want to know what her life is like. I want to know about what has brought her here, and where she thinks she is going.

Carol blinks at me, like she’s not sure what I’ve just asked. “California?”

“The gallery?”

Her face dawns in recognition. “Yes. Well, I’m just doing some assisting. It’s nothing special, really. Did I tell you about the gallery?” she asks.

I nod quickly. “We were talking about the hotel redesign, and you said you work at a gallery back home.”

All at once, her face lights up. “The Sirenuse. Yes! That would just be… I mean, it can’t happen, I know that. It would be impossible. I think they only took the meeting because one of the managers is a friend of Remo’s family. It was a favor. But I have this vision.”

I love seeing her so animated, so engaged. “Tell me about it,” I say.

The waiter comes over and plunks a bottle of red wine and a chilled bottle of white down on our table. Carol pours us both some of each.

“Have you been?” she asks.

“To the Sirenuse?”

She nods.

“No, never.”

Her eyes get wide. “It’s iconic Positano. Definitely the most famous hotel here, and probably on the whole coast, as well. Everyone must go once. Your trip wouldn’t be complete without it.”

I smile encouragement. This is the Carol I’m familiar with. My mother always had the answers, backed by strong personal preference, on what any one of us should love, on what constituted beauty, on what was valuable. She just knew.

The Beverly Hills Hotel was trash, but the Bel-Air was treasure. Bedding should be all white. Florals belonged indoors and outdoors. Birkenstocks were hiking shoes, not for the beach or lunch. Your closet should be color coordinated, and you could and should drink red wine all year long.

“The lobby is this beautiful, open-air place, but it’s so stuffy. They have love seats that look like they were stolen from Versailles, and there’s a wooden horse on the wall. A wooden horse!” Carol rolls her eyes. “I see this beautiful blue-and-white lobby that spills out onto the terrace. Mediterranean, clean, lots of tile and texture, white, yellow, and blue, complementing the colors of the sea.”

Carol gazes out at the ocean, lost in thought.

“Are you going to propose that?”

Carol nods. “They’re hearing pitches in a week. It’s very old-school. You show up with sketches and you meet with the owners. It’s a family business. Has been for decades. Most places here are. In Italy in general, I guess.”

“I don’t know anything about design, really,” I tell her. “But that sounds beautiful.”

I never had an eye for aesthetics the way my mother did. She picked out most of my clothes and furniture, designed my home. She had better taste than me, had seen more, been exposed to more, and had far more patience for the trial and error that comes with transforming a space. She knew how to eyeball a room; she understood spatial relation. She understood that however long a dresser was, you needed to factor in an additional six inches so the room wouldn’t look crowded. She could tell what would look good on me and what wouldn’t. She knew how to organize a kitchen so that all the appliances were exactly where you most needed them. The glasses were to the right of the sink, not the left, because everyone in our family was right-handed. The silverware was underneath the plates. The mugs were beside the coffee maker.

I think about the stories I’ve heard from my parents about their young marriage. My father started his clothing company, and my mother worked in the back office, keeping the books.

“She kept everyone in line,” my father used to say. “She was the lifeblood of my business.”

“Our business,” my mother would remind him with a pointed smile.

“It is,” Carol says. “The hotel, I mean. Beautiful.”

“You said you once stayed there with your parents?”

She nods. “The place means something to me, you know?”

All at once I remember that my mother lost her own mother, my grandmother, when she was just twelve years old. I was always disappointed that I never met Belle. She was gone far before I ever arrived. What was it like for my mom to meet my father without her? To be married without her? To become a mother without her? Her father remarried, soon after. What did it feel like to have her replaced?

“I do,” I say. “Very much so.”

She smiles. “I’ll take you there,” she says. “You’ll love it.”