Italian for Beginners Read online

  I nodded warily. “Okay.”

  “Good,” Karina said. She seemed to be waiting for something.

  “Wait, now now?”

  She looked bewildered. “Of course. You have the money?”

  I hesitated. This was foolish, wasn’t it? For all I knew, I’d never see this woman again. But there was something about her that struck me as honest. Sure, I was being foolish and making a decision I never would have made at home. But in my gut, I felt like it was the right thing to do.

  “Yes,” I said. I pulled out my wallet and counted ten twenty-euro bills into Karina’s outstretched hand.

  She smiled once the counting was done. “Good. Shall we go? I will help you with your bags. I told my boss I needed just a half hour, and he said fine. We are not busy.”

  I nodded and stood up, prepared to take the handle of my suitcase. But Karina grabbed it instead and began dragging.

  “Wait, I can do it,” I said.

  She shook her head. “You are a wimp,” she said over her shoulder. She was already pulling it down the street. She was freakishly strong.

  I hurried along after her with my duffel and purse slung over my shoulder. Karina chattered along the way about things we were passing: the meat market where she liked to buy sausages, the greengrocer who stared at her chest whenever she picked out fruit, the wine shop that gave her a discount if she tried a new kind of wine. After we’d walked a couple blocks, zigzagging in and out of alleyways, she stopped in front of a tall, old-looking building that was painted a faded copper color.

  “We have arrived,” she said. She dug in her pocket for a moment for her keys and turned one in the front lock. The massive wooden door cracked open, and Karina threw her weight up against it and tumbled, along with my suitcase, into the foyer. “Sometimes the door sticks,” she said. “You have to push.”

  I shook my head and followed her inside. She glanced back. “Can you help me with the suitcase?” she asked, pointing to the stairs.

  “Of course.” Together, we lugged my bag up three flights of stairs. I was sweating again by the time we reached the third-floor landing, but Karina looked as cool and unfazed as ever.

  “Wait here,” she said crisply. She turned another key in the lock of a door just to the right of the landing, and I craned my neck a little to catch a glimpse inside her apartment. All that I managed to see before she slammed the door were her burnt-orange walls, her cream-tiled floors, and several pieces of dark wood furniture that seemed to match beams on the ceilings. It looked nicer than I would have expected for such a wacky waitress.

  She emerged a moment later and held up a single key. “Yours,” she said simply. She nodded back to the stairway and added. “Up one floor.”

  Lugging the suitcase once more, we walked up one more flight of stairs. Karina turned the key in the lock of a door just at the top of the stairway and pushed it open. “Welcome home,” she said cheerfully.

  I stopped in the doorway and stared. The room was tiny; it looked more like a converted walk-in closet than an actual apartment. There was a twin bed pushed up against the far wall, and there appeared to be a complicated set of drawers underneath the mattress. Gauzy white curtains fluttered at the edges of a big picture window above the bed. Against the right wall was a small door that I guessed led to the bathroom. Against the left wall was a small archway.

  “There’s a little kitchen in there,” Karina said, following my eyes. “You’ll find a little closet in the kitchen where you can hang your clothes.”

  “In the kitchen?” I asked tentatively.

  “I didn’t say I was renting you a palace.”

  “This is definitely not a palace,” I said under my breath. I swallowed hard and gazed around. It was even smaller than my college dorm room.

  “I know it is small,” Karina cut in, her voice softer around the edges now. “But please. Before you judge, look out the window.”

  I took a deep breath, crossed the room, and knelt on the bed to push the curtain aside. The sight made me gasp.

  The noon sun was beating down on the streets of Rome, and from my fourth-floor vista I could see the ancient roads stretching out before me, with angular, brick-red rooftops, short chimneys, and arched windows the only signs of modernity. Straight ahead, down a dusty brick road, behind a series of stout apartment buildings, the Pantheon loomed, immense, hulking, its sturdy walls scuffed from nineteen hundred years of wear. From where I sat, I could see three of its great columns holding up the entrance, the base of the dome, and its curved side disappearing behind a neighboring building.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said softly.

  Karina was smiling when I turned around. She shrugged and held her hands wide. “Naturalmente,” she said simply. “It is Rome.”

  Karina had to return to work, and she invited me to come back with her, but I shook my head and told her I wanted to unpack and settle in. The truth was, I just wanted to be alone. The enormity of my decision to stay in the tiny maid’s quarters belonging to the crazy friend of a cheating jerk from New York was weighing on my mind.

  Karina told me she’d come back after her shift. After she left, I spent thirty minutes unpacking my suitcase, hanging dresses, skirts, and shirts in the little kitchen closet, folding pants and underwear into the drawers beneath the tiny bed.

  When I was done, I gazed out the open window for a while, watching the people below pass by. I felt like I was some sort of secret voyeur, high above the action and undetectable, as raven-haired young mothers in long skirts and floaty blouses strode quickly down the street, clutching the hands of toddlers who were trying to dawdle and gaze into shopwindows. A pair of old women dressed in black, their heads bent together conspiratorially, hobbled along the road, one of them using a cane, the other one drawing her head back every few moments to emit a guttural laugh that sounded far away. Two elderly men, one in a tweed golf cap, one with a huge pair of dark-framed glasses, set up a chessboard outside a small coffee shop just down the way and began moving their pieces slowly around without saying a word to each other.

  The apartment was situated on a side street, so although we were near a touristy area, the view from my window seemed purely residential, purely Italian. For a moment, as I gazed out, I felt almost Italian, too, as if by virtue of overlooking these private, everyday scenes, I belonged here.

  I thought for a moment of my camera, which hadn’t seen the light of day since Becky’s wedding. The street scenes below almost begged to be captured. But there would be time for that. For now, I needed to sleep.

  I pulled the blinds and tugged the gauzy curtains closed over them. I changed quickly into a T-shirt and sweatpants, pulled my hair into a ponytail, and crawled under the covers of my new twin bed.

  But despite the fact that I was exhausted, I couldn’t seem to drift off, no matter how much I willed myself to. I tossed and turned for hours. As the daylight disappeared from behind the blinds, I snapped my light on and tried to read a book for a while, hoping that it would make me sleepy. No luck.

  Finally, in desperation, I resorted to taking one of the prescription sleeping pills Kris had pressed into my hand before I left. “In case you need them on the plane,” she’d said. I had protested that I’d never taken anything that strong before, but she had insisted they would change my life.

  I was reluctant to try, but I couldn’t quiet my racing mind. I swallowed the pill, and moments later, I felt it beginning to take effect.

  And finally, finally, as my bedside clock neared 10 p.m., I fell asleep.

  “Wake up!”

  I awoke with a start to a shrill voice, inches from my face. My heart nearly banged out of my chest. I sat straight up and screamed.

  “Rilassati!” Karina said, backing away with an amused look in her eye. “Relax!”

  I stared at the crazy Italian woman in disbelief. She was perched on the edge of my bed, not looking the least bit embarrassed to have broken into her new tenant’s apartment.

  “Wh
at are you doing here?” I demanded. I blinked groggily at her. She looked blurry. The room swam in front of me. It took me a moment to realize that I was still very much under the influence of the sleeping pill.

  She looked at me blankly. “Waking you up,” she said slowly, as if talking to someone with comprehension problems.

  “Yes, I got that. But why are you waking me up?”

  She stared at me for a moment. “Because, Miss America, you have been in your room all day and evening. You are feeling sorry for yourself. And that is not permitted here.”

  “What?”

  She shook her head triumphantly and whipped out a sheaf of papers from somewhere in the folds of her skirt. I recognized my rental application from this morning. She pointed to a paragraph on the third page, a quarter of the way from the bottom. I had skimmed it, my tired eyes registering only that it required me to give seven days notice if I wanted to renew my monthlong lease, that it asked me to keep hot showers to a minimum since we shared a water heater, and that it required me to take out the garbage at least once every three days to prevent bad smells from drifting through the pipework into Karina’s apartment.

  But now, Karina was jabbing at something near the bottom of the page. I blinked a few times, clearing the sleep from my eyes, and bent forward to look.

  Tenant will not sulk, the contract read in Karina’s scratchy handwriting.

  “You have to be kidding me,” I said. “You put a no-sulking clause in the contract?”

  Karina shrugged. “No one forced you to sign it.”

  “Karina, I could barely read your terrible handwriting,” I protested. “This is ridiculous.”

  “Well, you should know better than to sign something you can’t read,” she said. She shook her finger at me. “What if I had required you to give me your firstborn child? You would have just signed away your rights to your baby.”

  I stared at her. I didn’t even know where to begin. “You’re insane,” I said.

  She shrugged, widening her eyes in faux innocence.

  “Plus,” I continued in a mutter, “it’s not even like I’m ever going to have a baby, at this rate.”

  Karina leapt to her feet dramatically, startling me. She jabbed at the contract again. “You are doing it again!” she exclaimed. “Sulking! Feeling sorry for yourself! How do you know what your life will hold?”

  I blinked at her.

  “Anyhow,” she said a moment later when I didn’t answer, “it is time.” She brushed her long dark hair over her shoulders and stared at me, as if I should know what she meant.

  “Huh?”

  “It is time,” she repeated.

  “Time for what?”

  She clapped her hands together. The sound made me jump. “Time to get up and go! Time to get out of self-pity mode. Time to stop sulking!”

  I shook my head and sighed. “I’m really not in the mood for this right now. What time is it, anyhow?”

  She checked her watch. “Eleven.”

  “At night?” I asked, incredulous. I’d just taken the sleeping pill an hour ago. No wonder I felt so woozy. I was supposed to be fast asleep.

  “Sí. You are being lazy. It is time to get out of bed.”

  “But…”

  “No buts!” she interrupted. “Now get up. If you’re not dressed in five minutes, I will revoke the rental contract.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  Karina smiled thinly, flipped a page of the contract, and pointed out a chicken-scratched clause on page 4. Laziness may result in eviction at landlord’s discretion.

  “What?” I exclaimed. “I never saw that! You just added that in!”

  Karina shrugged. “I guess we’ll never know. But there is your signature at the bottom, Miss America. So I suggest you get up and get dressed immediately.”

  I gaped at her. “Why? Where are we going?”

  Her wide lips curved into a smile. “Out,” she said simply. “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  She shot me one last evil look and disappeared out my door, her hair and skirt swishing behind her. “Five minutes,” she repeated, before slamming the door behind her.

  I stared at the door. “She can’t make me go out,” I said to myself stubbornly. And yet a minute later, I found myself standing up and heading into the kitchen to examine my outfit choices. I’m not going out, said the voice in my head, but if I was, this floaty white blouse and this A-line skirt would look nice, right? Maybe with my long gold necklace, a pair of gold hoops, and my gladiator sandals?

  Five minutes later, when Karina walked back in my door, I was standing in the bedroom, my hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail, all dressed to go. It was like this Italian nutcase had some sort of power over me.

  “Wow,” she said, regarding me with amusement. “Impressive.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I have no idea why I’m even doing what you say.”

  “It’s because you know I’m right.”

  “Or because I think you’re crazy and I’m afraid of what you’ll do to me if I say no.”

  Karina’s lips curled into a slow smile. “Perhaps,” she said. “But either way, you are dressed.”

  She looked me up and down and then laughed. She shook her head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You Americans are funny,” she said.

  I looked down at my outfit. I thought I looked cute— especially considering I was dressing inside of a teeny kitchen. “What’s wrong with the way I look?”

  She laughed again. “Nothing,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You look lovely.”

  Confused into silence, I followed her out of the apartment, wondering just what I was getting myself into.

  Chapter Ten

  Five minutes later, we were on our way through the backstreets of the city. I was practically jogging to keep up, and my knees felt wobbly beneath me. I thanked my lucky stars I’d decided to wear flats tonight; otherwise, I surely would have caught a heel in the cobblestones in our massive, inexplicable rush.

  I had no idea where we were going, and I got more and more lost by the moment as we wove quickly in and out of back alleys and side streets. Everything felt like a blur; I was growing increasingly sure that it was a horrible idea to have taken a prescription sleeping pill and then to have departed for a night out on the town with a woman who may or may not have been entirely crazy. I looked in vain for a street name I recognized, but we seemed to be working our way deeper and deeper into Rome through secret back roads.

  “Um, where are we going?” I asked as we ducked into an alley that seemed darker than the rest.

  “What is wrong?” Karina asked in amusement. “Don’t you trust me?”

  “Should I?” I grumbled.

  Karina stopped in her tracks and turned to face me.

  “Listen, Miss America,” she said. “I have not decided yet whether I like you.”

  “You haven’t decided whether you like me?”

  “That is what I said. You may not realize it yet, but I am a good friend to have.”

  “Yeah, who couldn’t use a friend who breaks into her apartment?”

  Karina glared at me. “It is still my apartment, even if I am renting it to you. I did not break in, as you say. I am trying to help you. A little gratitude would be nice.”

  “I’m supposed to say thank you for dragging me out at midnight?”

  Karina grimaced. “No,” she said. “You are supposed to thank me for taking a little lost American under my wing. You do not think I have enough responsibilities?”

  I was sick and tired of being the little lost American. “I think you needed the rent money,” I said.

  Karina gazed at me evenly. “You do not know as much as you think you do.”

  She started walking again at double her previous pace. I stared after her for a moment and then jogged to keep up. “Look,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  She waved a hand dismissively.

  “It’s just been a long couple of days, you k
now?” I tried again.

  “You are not the only one with problems,” she said.

  Just then, she veered sharply off to the right, turned down another alley and, with me following, finally emerged onto a bustling street. “We are here,” she announced abruptly.

  I looked up, catching my breath from the hurried walk, and saw that we were standing in front of an old-looking building with two torches burning outside lighting the awning-covered entrance to a bar that spilled people into the courtyard outside. Loud music and raucous laughter greeted us, and dozens of Italians seemed to be clustered outside the doors, smoking cigarettes, or taking big swigs of beer and small sips of wine.

  “Oh,” I said, regarding the place warily.

  “Now what’s the problem?” Karina asked with a sigh.

  “I didn’t know we were going someplace so trendy,” I said. “I feel underdressed.”

  Karina rolled her eyes. “Oh, come off it, Princess Ann. You look fine and you know it.”

  “Princess Ann?” I asked in confusion. But she only rolled her eyes again and turned away, gesturing for me to follow. I paused, then hurried after her.

  Inside, the room was dimly lit with two long, stained wood bars lined with people. A cover band was playing at high volume in the corner, rocking out to an old Beatles song. From the sounds of it, they were most likely Italian without a full grasp of English; the lyrics were just slightly off. Somehow, they had managed to change “Love Me Do” into “Love Me Too,” which, when you thought about it, actually made more sense.

  “Over here!” Karina beckoned. “I know the bartender!”

  I followed her to the far right corner of the bar, where she led with her chest and a smile and squeezed between two men who didn’t look the least bit annoyed to be pushed aside. If anything, they looked grateful as they eyed her up and down. She grabbed my hand and pulled me in with her until I was pressed up against the bar, too. I glanced back and was surprised to realize that the men were also giving me the eye.

  “Ignore them,” Karina said without even looking. “They’re stallions.”