In Florence my father spent his days translating Gramsci’s works into English. At lunch he took a break, walked down the hill to his favorite porchetteria where he stood in the sun and ate pork on a bun. My mother, a journalist for a small neighborhood newspaper in Minneapolis, had taken the year off. She took Italian lessons in the morning at Dante Alighieri. After lunch, she drove and parked in the school parking lot with Margot, an artist she’d met in her conversation class. They hiked the roads and paths around the school, then waited together in the parking lot. I was relieved my mother no longer stood alone.
“Is that your aunt?” Aria nodded at Margot standing next to my mother.
Margot could have been my mother’s older sister, her hair a coppery tint, two shades darker than my mother’s. Margot was taller, too, with freckled cheeks and fiery green eyes. Recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, she had left her husband and teenage children in London to study art in Florence. “My philosophy is to live the rest of my life for myself,” she said, raising her swollen hands, fingernails crusted with paint. “Forty-four is not too old to start over.”
She painted huge pomegranates, eight-by-ten canvasses, glistening red seeds spilling from torn skins. Margot’s own parents had been “in service” to a wealthy family—her mother a cook, father a gardener. She despised what she called “the bloody gentry” and often teased me about my school. As my mother backed the car out of the parking space and I waved at Aria standing beside her mom, Margot smirked. “Be glad you don’t have a mother like that. Takes a lot of maintenance. The way people look means something.”
“Don’t.” My mother glared at Margot. “She likes her school.”
“You wouldn’t wear a fur coat, would you?” Margot asked me.
I shook my head.
“I used to stick gum in fur coats,” she told me. “I’d ride the bus in London and if a woman had a fur collar, I’d sit behind her, chew a wad, and stick it deep when the driver hit the brakes.”
“If you don’t behave,” my mother warned her, “I won’t bring you anymore.”
“Cheeky cow,” she laughed.
We ate earlier than Italians, and Margot often lingered until she was asked to stay. “I grew up in a apartment like this,” she said when she first saw where we were living. “Stone floors do wonders for your joints.”
My father found Margot amusing. “What does your husband do for a living?”
“He’s a solicitor.”
My father’s eyebrows lifted. “That should make your divorce interesting.”
“He thinks I’ll come back when my joints flare. He thinks I won’t be able to paint, and I’ll come crawling back, beg him to have our old life back.”
“Will you?”
“We’re completely different people.” She tore off a piece of bread and soaked up olive oil on her plate. “I keep telling him it’s over, but he doesn’t want to believe me. I can’t do my art and stay married to him. We live in different worlds.”
“Your kids?” my father asked.
“They’re invited to visit.” She nodded. “They understand.”
“Don’t you miss them?” I asked.
“Honestly? They seem to be doing fine without me.” She breathed in, her voice unfettered. “They have their own lives to live, and so do I.”
“Doesn’t sound like a clean break.” My father refilled her wine glass.
Margot glanced at my mother. “He’s a clever one.”
My mother smiled, alluding to the Guggenheim grant paying for our year abroad: “Hard part is getting his head through the door every night.”
As my parents laughed, she glanced between them with a wicked smile. “What a tragic loss, to be happily married whilst living in Italy.”