“Something is hot in here indeed,” Valeria says, raising her eyebrows at me.
I top off my wine glass. “Do you know if Giac is, like. . .” I twist a lock of hair around my index finger, “. . . I don’t know, single?”
Valeria nods knowingly and leans in conspiratorially, like she was waiting for me to ask. “Since he doesn’t live here, I don’t know all the details, but what I doknow is that he did not bring a date to the end-of-term school banquet.” At my blank expression, she clarifies, “Everyonebrings a date to the end-of-term banquet.”
I take another sip of wine, smiling, stopping myself from immediately fantasizing about Giac.
After a moment Vincenzo hits his hands on the table. “Giac, my love. You meant Giac is hot in here. I get it now! You are so clever,amore mio.”
When I get home I collapse onto my bed, my head spinning from the alcohol. I open my computer to watch moreHousewives,but it erupts with a FaceTime call from my mom. I hesitantly click accept. Both my parents appear onscreen, scrunched together on a patio sofa, the rugged terrain of their Beachwood Canyon backyard visible behind them. “Izzy? Izzy, can you see us?” my mom says, moving her face closer to the screen as if that would help.
“Yes, Mom. I can see you. How’s it going?” I ask, knowing the point is moot because they’re calling for a wellness check. I don’t blame them for being concerned, considering how rarely I left my dark childhood bedroom in the months before I fled the country.
My mom sits back and turns to my dad. They’re coordinating in acid-wash button-downs. It’s early afternoon in Los Angeles, but they’ve probably already had a full day, hiking and gardening. “We’re fine. How are you? How’s Italy? Do you have everything you need?”
“Yeah, as it turns out, I’ve had everything I need inside me all along.”
I hear a sigh. “Izzy. . .”
“I’m good. Italy is good. I updated my data plan and bought soap, everything is fine,” I say. My mom asks if I have a plan for work, for my next step, for the future, and I shake my head.
“Why not, Iz?” my dad chimes in. “You need to keep yourself busy. You’re not an idler. You aren’t the type of person to sit around for more than a vacation’s worth of time. You need to be needed by something bigger.”
In the before-time, I would have agreed with him, but there’s no good way to tell the people who made you that nowadays you’d rather lurk in the shadows of the very edges of your existence, like an otherwise well-adjusted Phantom of the Opera. “I have a purpose. I’m adjusting to Italy and I’m making friends. My friend Vincenzo is teaching me Italian.In bocca al lupomeans good luck.”
My mother lights up. “Vincenzo?” She takes on an unnecessary and incorrect Italian accent to repeat his name. “Is he cute? Single?”
“He’s at least 45 and happily married. I love his wife too,” I reply, wondering if I should tell her about Giac, but what would I say? I briefly met the one handsome young man in town and got so hot and bothered that I could barely speak to him?
My mother sighs dramatically. “Izzy, youwouldmove to the one town in Italy with no eligible men—”
“Colleen,” my dad cuts her off. “She doesn’t need us to pressure her about getting married.”
“I wasn’t pressuring her—” my mother replies.
“I know,” says Dad. “But we said we’d focus on getting her back to her normal self and then we’d ask around for a setup.”
This is all news to me. “What do you mean, back to my normal self? And you arenotsetting me up with anyone. I’m an adult. I get to make my own choices.”
They share another look. As an only child, I’m used to playing two-on-one with my parents, but they’ve usually veered more on the side of supportive than manipulative. “You’ve been easy to raise, Iz,” my dad says. “We’re overdue for a parenting challenge.” He says it with a laugh, but it feels like a jab to the chest. They haven’t outright said they’re disappointed in me, but I know they are. I knew it as soon as my dad patted me on the back after my concession speech and said,“Two years to figure out how to beat him, Iz,”even though I had already decided I was never running for public office again.
“No one is setting me up,” I repeat, “and I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me.”
They share another look, still unconvinced. They’d never been prouder of me than on my swearing-in day. I kept a framed picture on my desk of their beaming faces standing behind me that day. It used to center me on hard days, to know that if all else failed, I had them. My mother kept the same photo tacked to the refrigerator with a K.C.R.W. magnet. They were supportive when I lost, but I knew it was as hard on them as it was on me. I couldn’t look at that picture afterward. I’d given it to Kate and asked her to makesure I never saw it again. When I got home, it wasn’t on the fridge anymore either.
“Look,” I say. “It’s late here. I should go to bed. It’ll take a good night’s sleep if I have to figure out the rest of my life come tomorrow.”
My father sighs. “We’re not saying you need to have it all figured out, Iz, but you can’t aspire to nothing now that your first dream is over.”
I consider. All of my life had been for this one thing and look how that turned out? “I don’t need another dream,” I say. “I need to aspire to nothing.”
“Well,” he says, “in bocca al lupowith that.”
We hang up and I try to go back to my housewives. My buzz has significantly worn off, and I need to hear a woman screaming at another woman or I’m going to have a panic attack. My phone dings with a text.
Marisol: don’t look at the news.
I sigh. Now Ihaveto look at the news.
