Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir Page 3

  It was my first day here and reality had already punctured my expectations.

  At dinner, I discovered that Meredith’s friends fit the reserved British profile. I’m sure I struck them as a stereotypically loud American. I was energetic and outspoken, even by nonconformist Seattle’s standards, and I was probably louder than I meant to be. While we were sitting around the restaurant table sipping wine and eating pizza, I started singing some song that was popular then. But what drew laughs in Seattle got embarrassed looks in Perugia. It hadn’t dawned on me that the same quirks my friends at home found endearing could actually offend people who were less accepting of differences. A person more attuned to social norms would probably have realized that immature antics didn’t play well here.

  So I was glad I could hang out with Laura, Filomena, and Meredith at home. Even though Meredith was definitely more mainstream and demure than I’d ever be, and Laura and Filomena were older and more sophisticated, I felt comfortable in their company. They seemed to accept me for me right from the start.

  During my first month in Perugia I spent more time with Meredith than anyone else. I liked her a lot, and she seemed to enjoy being with me. I could already see us keeping in touch by e-mail when our year abroad was over. Maybe we’d even end up visiting each other in our hometowns.

  The University of Perugia started earlier than the University for Foreigners, so Meredith was in class on my first full day living in Perugia. I went exploring alone, stopping at the only place that was familiar—a small café where Deanna and I had eaten all our meals in late August. I decided to go and say hi to the tall, balding, good-humored barista who’d figured out our ridiculous espresso + milk + chocolate mixture. I couldn’t remember his name, but when you arrive knowing no one, you’re grateful for any friendly acquaintance. It turned out, however, that he’d moved on. His replacement was an athletic guy about my age named Mirko. He had black hair, blue eyes, and a huge grin. I told him I was new in town, a student. He said he was more into work than study. By the time I left for home that day I had the slimmest inklings of a crush.

  During the lull before my semester began I dropped by the café several afternoons for a caffè macchiato or a glass of white wine and a little flirting. After my oral-cold-sore-inducing make-out session with Cristiano, this was sweet and innocent.

  My new favorite pastime was the old Italian custom of long, relaxed lunches at home. Meredith and I ate with Laura and Filomena, who changed from skirt suits into cut-offs and flipped on the TV. Their soap opera was just background noise for me. I’m not a TV person at all, much less a soap opera fan, but I thought it was funny that the dialogue in theirs sounded exactly the same as any American soap. Understanding about one word in five, I could still follow what was happening. You slept with WHO?! Let’s run away together! Soap operas, I learned, are another universal language.

  When Filomena and Laura went back to work, Meredith and I would sunbathe on the terrace and talk. She read mysteries. I was teaching myself to play Beatles songs on the guitar. One day she said it reminded her of when she and her older sister used to turn their CD player way up and sing along.

  I loved our easy togetherness. We told each other about life back home and what we were thinking about doing after we graduated. She said she might want to become a journalist, like her dad. She lent me clothes—her feminine look was more in keeping with Perugia than my old jeans and boyish T-shirts—and she helped me with my Italian grammar. Before beginning classes at the University of Perugia, Meredith had taken a crash course at the University for Foreigners, to brush up on her language skills. I introduced her to new music and listened to her stories about her family, especially her mom, whose bad health worried Meredith so much that she didn’t go to the corner bottega without her British cell phone in her pocket.

  I told her about my parents and stepparents—that Dad had been with Cassandra since I was little, and Mom had met her husband, Chris, when I was ten.

  And we did what all girls do: we talked about the guys we liked in Perugia and the ones we’d left behind. I told her about my growing crush on Mirko and about my ex-boyfriend from Seattle, DJ. “DJ and I were together for eight months,” I said. “We broke up because I was coming here and he was going to China for the year. We’re still friends, though.”

  “What’s he like?” Meredith asked.

  “Completely eccentric,” I said. “He has a Mohawk, wears this shabby red kilt, and goes everywhere barefoot, except when he goes climbing. Then, I promise, he wears shorts and shoes.”

  Meredith laughed. “He sounds like your type. Do you think you’ll get back together?”

  “I can’t tell,” I said. “What about you? Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “I dated a guy pretty seriously,” Meredith said. “We were together for a few months. I have real feelings for him, but I’m too young to get serious. I still have two more years of university. We broke up right before I came to Italy.”

  “Well, you don’t want to feel weighed down by decisions while you’re figuring life out.”

  We encouraged ourselves with affirming smiles and cheap local red wine.

  Meredith and I did a lot of routine things together—like walking to the grocery store and going to the rental office. She asked me to snap photos of her standing in front of the picture window in her bedroom. “I want my family to see my view,” she said.

  One afternoon, when I discovered a vintage clothing shop downtown, I was so excited that I went home and immediately brought Meredith back with me, the sort of thing I’d usually do with Brett or Madison.

  “These clothes are definitely more offbeat than I’m used to,” Meredith said, “but they’re awesome.” She tried on a few things, coming out of the dressing room to model each one and discuss all the places she could wear it. She bought a sparkly silver vintage dress she said she’d wear for New Year’s Eve in London.

  It made sense that Meredith and I were closer to each other than to our other flatmates—we were both trying to learn a city and a language we didn’t know. Filomena and Laura were longtime friends, older, finished with college, and Italian. To them, Perugia was the same old, same old.

  While I waited for the semester to start, I tried to read in Italian and tested new vocabulary wherever I could. One day, I went to the Coop, a supermarket in Piazza Matteotti, gathered my groceries, and went to the register to pay. “Busta?” the cashier asked me.

  I didn’t know the word. Was it envelope? Was she asking me if I wanted to buy envelopes? I could feel the people behind me in line shuffling impatiently. I was about to respond no, but she read my confused expression before I got the word out. She shook a plastic shopping bag in my face. “Busta?”

  I reddened. “Sì, sì, busta. Grazie. Scusa,” I said.

  I knew I shouldn’t have been embarrassed, but I didn’t want to be regarded as a tourist. I didn’t want attention brought to my ignorance of the language.

  I didn’t let my mistakes keep me from getting to know my neighborhood or my neighbors a little better. Each time I went to the Internet café to Skype with DJ or chat online with Mom, I’d talk to the guy who ran it, Spyros, a Greek in his late twenties. We talked about the same things that filled my conversations with my UW friends—mainly our ideas and insecurities. He graciously welcomed my sputtering attempts to speak in Italian about more than the weather. This was a little different from home, where Laura and Filomena found my deficient Italian entertaining and chuckled at my slipups.

  A few times a week I hung around the coffee shop chatting with Mirko about what we each liked to do and about our personalities. Me: serious, goofy early bird. Him: playful, easy-going night owl.

  One afternoon I asked, “Do you know where I can go hear live music?”

  “No, I like sports,” he said. “Do you like Inter?”—Milan’s popular professional soccer team.

  “I prefer to play soccer than watch it. I was a defender on a premier team,” I said. I could tell he w
as picturing me in a kid’s church league.

  “Are you good?” he asked.

  “Do you know the American expression ‘sly like a fox’?” I asked. “That’s what I was—fast and reliable for finding an opening and stealing the ball. My teammates nicknamed me Foxy Knoxy.”

  The next time I went to the café, I watched him work, looking for signs of a connection between us. There was music playing in the background—popular dance music from a local radio station. “Do you like music?” I asked.

  “I like to dance,” he replied. “Do you?”

  Is he a lowbrow party guy? I wondered. That’s not what I was hoping for. “I’d rather sing and play guitar,” I answered.

  Maybe we had reached an impasse. Just then, Mirko said, “I thought of a place you’d really like—for pizza.”

  “Let’s go sometime,” I said. I thought, I can’t believe I just asked him out.

  “How about today?” he asked. “I get off at five.”

  I was excited. Mirko was nice, laid back, and interested in me.

  When I arrived back at the café to meet him, he was just taking off his apron. We walked down Corso Vannucci, Perugia’s main commercial street, and turned onto a quieter side street of shops and restaurants. People were lined up outside the pizzeria, waiting for a table.

  “Do you want to eat at my place?” Mirko asked. “We can watch a movie.”

  “Sure,” I said, and instantly felt an inner jolt. It came from the sudden certainty that we would have sex, that that’s where our flirtation had been heading all along.

  We carried our pizza boxes through Piazza Grimana, by the University for Foreigners, and down an unfamiliar street, past a park. Mirko’s house was at the end of a gravel drive. “I live here with my sister,” he told me.

  During dinner at his kitchen table my thoughts battled. Was I ready to speed ahead with sex like this? I still regretted Cristiano. But I’d also been thinking about what Brett and my friends at UW had said. I could picture them rolling their eyes and saying, “Hellooo, Amanda. Sex is normal.”

  Casual sex was, for my generation, simply what you did.

  I didn’t feel that my attitude toward sex made me different from anyone else in my villa. I knew Meredith hadn’t been with anyone since her serious boyfriend in England. Filomena had a steady boyfriend, Marco Z., in Perugia. And while Laura was dating and sleeping with a guy she thought was sweet but clingy, she encouraged sex outside relationships.

  From the start, all four of us were open to talking about sex and relationships. Laura insisted that Meredith and I should just have fun. Filomena was a little more buttoned-up. She couldn’t understand how, with our history together, DJ and I could just be friends and inform each other about our romantic exploits over Skype.

  I considered Mirko across the checkerboard table as he devoured his pizza. He was part of the small circle of familiar faces I’d started to create for myself in Perugia.

  We didn’t talk much at dinner. I dawdled, asking him the standard questions about himself. He dodged them and asked, “What movies do you like?”

  “I like anything that’s not scary,” I said. “I’d really like to see a classic Italian film.”

  “I have a funny one on DVD,” he said.

  Of course the TV was in his bedroom.

  “It’s a little cold. Let’s get under the covers,” he coaxed.

  I did, fully clothed except for my sneakers.

  The movie was so juvenile I could barely pay attention. I was mostly focused on how the night would unfold. I liked Mirko, but I didn’t know him. He was attractive, and his confidence was charming. His taste in movies was bad, though. Still, I told myself, People have flings.

  When the movie ended, Mirko clicked off the TV. Without speaking, he leaned over and kissed me. I kissed him back. It was happening.

  As soon as it was over I quietly got back into my clothes, wondering what I thought of my newfound freedom. I was proud of myself for having a no-strings-attached consensual encounter, but I felt awkward and out of place. I didn’t yet know if I’d regret it. (Nor could I anticipate that my private, uncertain experiment would become my public undoing.) “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you have to go now. My sister will be home soon. I’ll walk you to the University for Foreigners. You can find your way from there.”

  We didn’t talk as we walked past the park. When we reached the university, he kissed me good-bye on both cheeks. The standard Italian hello and good-bye among casual friends was as unromantic as a handshake would have been in America. “We should do that again sometime,” he said. I nodded, perplexed by the disparate emotions bouncing around in my head.

  I walked back to the villa alone, feeling both exhilarated and defeated.

  The next morning, I told my roommates I’d had sex with Mirko. “I feel conflicted,” I said. “It was fun, but it was weird to feel so disconnected from each other. Is that just me?”

  Laura absolved me. “You’re young and free-spirited. Don’t worry about it.”

  That made me feel a little better.

  A few days later, I stopped by the café, and Mirko invited me to his place again. I shoved my ambivalence aside and agreed. As we walked from the café, he smiled at me and asked me how school was going. “Fine,” I said. “How’s work?”

  “Pretty slow, now that the tourist season is over.”

  We didn’t hold hands.

  I followed Mirko down the gravel drive and into his house. I wanted to turn around and run, but somehow I couldn’t. I found myself inside his bedroom. Mirko playfully pushed me on to his queen-size bed, but when he put his hand down my jeans I balked. “I have to go,” I said. I didn’t say why. I just threw on my shirt and left, walking alone up the road, past the park, past the University for Foreigners, home. I didn’t feel free or sophisticated. I felt a twinge of regret.

  I was too ashamed and embarrassed to go back to the café after that. Was there something wrong with me? Or was it with him? Either way, I couldn’t bear to run into him again.

  I was alone with Meredith when I told her about fleeing from Mirko.

  “I feel like an idiot.”

  “Amanda,” she said, consolingly, “maybe uninvolved sex just isn’t for you.”

  Months later Meredith’s friends, our roommates, and especially the prosecutor would say that Meredith’s and my relationship had soured—that we had fought over men, my manners, money. This wasn’t true. We never argued about anything. We were just getting to know each other, and I thought we’d developed a comfortable familiarity in a short time—a process that probably moved faster because everything around us was new and unfamiliar. We shared a house, meals, a bathroom. I treated Meredith as my confidante. Meredith treated me with respect and a sense of humor.

  The only awkward interaction we had was when Meredith gently explained the limitations of Italian plumbing.

  Her face a little strained with embarrassment, she approached me in my room and said, “Amanda, I’m sorry to bring this up with you. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but with our toilets, you really need to use the brush every time.”

  I was mortified. I knew that Meredith was uncomfortable saying it. I would have been, too. I said, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I will totally check and make sure I leave it clean.”

  We laughed a little nervously. We didn’t want to hurt each other’s feelings.

  For two weeks in mid-October, tents and tables filled all the squares around Corso Vannucci for the annual Eurochocolate festival. The smell of chocolate around town was inescapable. Laura told me about the chocolate sculpture carving. It was done in the early mornings, so the next day, I went to Piazza IV Novembre to watch. The artists started with a refrigerator-size block of chocolate. As the chiseled pieces flew, assistants gathered chips and shavings into small plastic bags and threw them to the rowdy crowd. When a chunk of chocolate with the heft of an unabridged dictionary fell, onlookers screamed and reached across the barrier. I was shorter tha
n most of the people around me, but I jumped up and down, yelling, “Mi, mi, mi!”

  I was amazed when a worker plopped the chocolate in my arms. People reached at it, picking little pieces off as I disentangled myself from the crowd. I rushed home, trying to get there before the block melted on my shirt. I unloaded it on the table and said, “Voilà!” Later, Meredith and I made chocolate chip cookies out of part of my winnings, trying to recreate the Toll House recipe from guesswork and memory.

  Another afternoon, I returned to the festival with Meredith. I flipped the video switch on my camera and acted like a TV journalist. “Tell me, Meredith, what do you think about being here at the Eurochocolate festival?”

  Meredith laughed and said, “No, no, don’t film me.” She pushed the camera away. She didn’t like being the center of attention.

  Neither of us felt we had to go far to be entertained. More days than not, three of the four guys who lived downstairs—Giacomo, Stefano, Marco M.—and another friend, Giorgio, dropped in during lunch and again after dinner for a stovetop espresso and, almost always, a joint. A few years older than Meredith and me, they were each equal parts big brother and shameless flirt. Students at the University of Perugia from Marche, the countryside east of Perugia, they’d sit around, get high, and gab about soap operas and game shows, movies, music—nothing in particular. Of the four, Giacomo, tall and sturdy like an American football player, with pierced ears, buzzed hair, and doe eyes, was the quietest and shiest. He played the bass, studied Spanish, and spoke English better than his roommates. When the guys weren’t at home, upstairs at our apartment, or at school, they were often playing basketball on the court in Piazza Grimana. One day, hoping to replicate the football games I loved to play with my guy friends at UW, I asked if I could come shoot hoops with them. “Sure,” they said. But when I got there I realized they thought I meant only to watch them play. It was another way in which my Seattle upbringing had left me unprepared for the cultural strictures of my new environment.