“Where is Remo tonight?” I say.
“Working,” she says. “But this place Bella Bar has a dance party at night. He’ll meet us there after dinner. You must come. Honestly, I’m not giving you a choice!”
I think about my mother, dancing the night away in a club in Positano. She always loved music, loved to dance. But the only songs I can remember her moving to are Frank Sinatra at a wedding or Katy Perry at a cousin’s bar mitzvah. This is something else entirely. “That sounds great,” I say.
The trip up to the restaurant is a winding, fairly nauseating forty-five minutes. It gets so bad at one point that I have to stop talking.
“Just look to the front,” Carol says. “The horizon—that’ll help.” She puts a cool palm on my mid-back and holds it there.
We pull up to the restaurant what feels like hours later. I walk out wobbly. By the side of the road there is a round sign that hasFattoria La Tagliatapainted on it. We walk through an archway and then down a flight of stairs. We’re surrounded by gardens, flowers, the sweet smell of the arriving summer.
The restaurant is no more than a tree house. But this tree house, like so much of Positano, has a sweeping view of the sea. Because we are so high up, you can see all the way to Capri, even. And it’s early—the sun is still hours from setting.
“Wow,” I say.
Carol smiles. “Right? Pretty special.”
We’re greeted by a boisterous man at the door. “Buonasera!” He kisses Carol first, then me, once on either cheek. “Welcome, welcome! You will dine with us! Let’s go!”
We are shown to a table while he continues to greet the guests from our bus as they come down the path. There are maybe four diners, no more, already seated in the small room.
I learn from Carol that there are two dinner sittings—5 p.m. and 8 p.m. There are no menus, as she said, and the wine flows freely.
“This doesn’t seem real,” I say. “I’ve truly never seen anything like this.”
Our table is situated in the corner of the room, right by what would be the window, but instead of a window, it’s just open air, punctuated by a wooden guardrail that I can rest my elbow on from our chairs. White linen curtains sit pooled by two woodpoles on either side of the room. Everything is light and open. Like we’re having dinner in the sky—we are.
I look at her, my mother. She’s thin, she always was, but there’s a roundness to her, a fullness, that she lost in later years. That, or I’m incapable, now, of seeing her without illness. I close my eyes and open them again.
“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.”
