Seven billion kisses,
Love from your Aunt Tillie, Champion Cheesecake Jello Maker
15
Percorso
One Saturday, Guthrie appeared at our door and said, “Get your tennis shoes on! We’re going on an expedition!”
I followed him up the path through Montagnola and down the narrow lane beyond, and three miles along, we came to a sign that said PERCORSO. A path led into the woods.
Guthrie started running, “Come on,” he said, “the rule is you have to run this. Don’t worry, there are places you have to stop, too.”
So I ran along behind him, and in the woods the trees were golden and the path was golden from the leaves which had already fallen. About a quarter-mile along the path, Guthrie stopped. There was a sign beside a climbing frame made of thick branches.
“See?” he said. “It tells you here what to do. Beginners cross it three times, intermediates cross it six times, and advanced cross it ten times. Watch.” He scrambled up the frame and reached for the ladder which was balanced across the top. Hand-over-hand he made his way across and jumped down at the end. “Your turn!”
I did three crossings; Guthrie did ten. And then we continued on. At regular intervals along the path were exercise stations. At one you clambered over tree stumps, each one a bit higher than the next, and at another, you walked across a slim beam suspended two feet off the ground, and at another you crossed a swinging bridge.
It was the most amazing thing. It was like a grown-up playground in the woods. Occasionally we met other people doing the percorso. We’d hear laughing and squeals and we’d come around a bend, and there would be a married couple or a whole family swinging from branches or tiptoeing across a beam.
We wound all through the woods like this, up and down hills, along cliffs and then veering back into the trees. At one point we came around a bend, and there, lapping at our feet, was the clearest river I’d ever seen. The water rolled and bubbled along over fat stones, and you could see the whole bottom as clear as anything.
“Do you think a person could fish here?” I asked.
“Don’t see why not!” Guthrie said.
And on we went, the path looping all through the woods in one big circle so that we ended up back where we began.
“Aren’t the Swiss brilliant?” Guthrie said. “To provide such a thing as this, and it’s free!”
One of the items in my box of things that I’d carried with me from move to move was a fold-up fishing rod that my father had given me for my eighth birthday. The day after Guthrie had taken me to the percorso, I went back on my own, toting my fishing rod.
I cannot even begin to say why I liked fishing so much. I didn’t really enjoy the part about catching anything and having to unsnag the hook and apologize to the fish and release it back into the water. Sometimes I didn’t even use bait. What I liked was casting the line and then sitting there, watching the water.
First I’d see the water and the banks, and then if it was clear like this river, I’d examine the bottom, and then I’d look at the riverbank and the trees, and then it would happen. I would see things that weren’t outside of me, but were inside me. And that day as I sat on the riverbank, what I saw was my father and my mother and Stella and Crick and the new baby and even Aunt Tillie and Aunt Grace. One by one, I saw them. They were in my mind, but they were more real here, as if they were floating out in front of me, rising up from the water.
And while I was seeing them I had two contrasting feelings. One was complete happiness, as if I was back in a comfortable place with people I knew and who knew me. The other feeling was complete and overwhelming homesickness. It was as if the two feelings were taking turns, and I was waiting to see which one would win.
In the end, neither won. They were both still there, but I packed them away inside my bubble and headed home.
16
Bloomable
Keisuke (pronounced KAY-sue-kee, he explained, after I’d called him Kee-sook for two weeks) was in most of my classes. He was full of surprises. He was slim and quiet, unlike the bounding, talkative, athletic Guthrie, but he and Guthrie were friends and they seemed to balance each other.
Keisuke often acted as if he didn’t want to do some of the impulsive things Guthrie suggested, like dashing off on a hiking trip or leaping into a creek or trying new foods, but he’d always go along or try the new foods, and even though he’d say something was stew-pod or dis-goast-ing, his grin would suggest otherwise.
In class, when he was asked a question, he would scrunch up his mouth and say, “Now that’s good question. I think about it.” At first I thought this was his way of saying he didn’t have a clue as to what the answer was or that he didn’t want to talk, but then, about ten minutes later, he’d pop up with something unusual and interesting.
In art history class, when he was asked a question about Picasso, he said, “Now that’s good question. I think about it.” Ten minutes later, he raised his hand, and, pointing to a painting in our book, said, “It’s like geometry,” and he went on to explain about shapes and perspective. When he was finished, he said to the teacher, “What you think?” and the teacher said, “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”
He mangled English, but the words he substituted were often better than the right ones. Plumpy seemed a better description than plump, and bloomable sounded much more interesting than possible. When he said running in my ears the bells, we knew exactly what he meant, and it seemed exactly the right way of saying how the St. Abbondio bells echoed in your head after they’d stopped ringing.
He and Belen were always together. Belen was outspoken, moody and, as Keisuke put it, “dead-drop beautiful.” She was dark-skinned with a long mane of black hair, and at the first dance, when she wore a simple black dress and red lipstick, the boys gaped. She looked eighteen instead of thirteen. Keisuke said, “She knocks my eyeballs.”
Belen usually said what was on her mind, or as Keisuke put it, “Holding with salami she doesn’t.” If she thought she’d received an unfair grade, she’d march up to the teacher and say, “Please explain why this gets only a C.” But she wasn’t argumentative like Lila was. When she got the explanation, she’d say, “Okay. Next one better, you’ll see.”
Belen told me that her parents had forbidden her to spend time with Keisuke. When I asked her why, she shrugged. “Because I like him too much.” I must have looked puzzled because she added, “I’m too young to like him so much, but I still am going to like him. My parents can’t see me here, no?”
Here was someone who was glad her parents couldn’t see her, who seemed happy to be making her own way, while I had been wishing that my parents could see me. At night I would beam them images of me, thinking, Here is where I am. Here is what I am doing and what I am thinking. Can you see me?
For the first time, I thought maybe I should just get on with it, maybe they didn’t have to see me, to actually be there with me. And then I thought how surprising it was that once, not very long ago, Guthrie and Lila and Belen and Keisuke had all been strangers to me, and I to them, but already I felt comfortable with them, and they were becoming as real to me as my family. Was I adapting? Was that a good thing?
I hoped that I wasn’t going to forget my family entirely, that I wasn’t going to replace them with these other people. Because if I could replace them, then they could replace me, too.
That night I wrote my family a long, long letter, in which I tried to describe the place where I was living and the people I’d met. And then I made a long, long list of all the things I was remembering about them. Finally, because I was feeling very soppy by that time, I added a P. S.: Don’t forget me!
Before I went to bed, I put a sign in my window: DOV’É DINNIE? (Where is Dinnie?)
Uncle Max came in to say goodnight, examined the sign, tilted his head, read it again, looked at me, looked back at the sign, and said, “In a casa on the Via Poporino between Lugano and Montagnola in the Ticino in Switzerla
nd in Europe on the planet Earth.” And then he kissed my forehead and smoothed the duvet at my feet and turned out the light.
17
Struggles
One day in November, I was sitting in English class, doodling in the margins of my notebook. I’d drawn a mountain, with a house perched on its peak. I was just about to add some people to the scene, when I heard Mr. Bonner say that a character in the story we had just read was struggling, and it was that struggling that made the character interesting. He wondered if we agreed with him and if we knew what the character was struggling with.
“Dinnie?” he said. “Any guesses?”
It had been a story about a boy who wants to run faster than anyone else, and so he runs and he runs and he runs, and he enters a race, and he runs like the wind, he runs and runs, faster than he has ever run before. But he doesn’t win the race.
“Dinnie?” Mr. Bonner said. “You awake? Any idea what this character is struggling with?”
“He wants something and he can’t have it,” I said.
“So is he struggling with the thing he wants?”
Keisuke said, “He struggles with legs. Too slow legs!”
Guthrie chimed in. “Himself? Is he struggling with himself? He wants to go faster, but he can’t, is that it?”
On and on people went. I found myself listening carefully. It felt as if there was something—right around the corner—maybe in what someone would say next—that was a key to something that mattered to me. Whatever that something was kept slipping away, though.
At the end of class, Mr. Bonner gave us our homework: to write about what our own struggles were. He said that we didn’t have to turn this homework in if it was too private, but we had to show him we’d done it.
So that night I spent three hours writing about my struggles. When I started, I couldn’t think of any struggles. No struggles! So that was why I wasn’t interesting.
And then I started thinking of struggling with moving and figuring out where I was and why my family had sent me away. I wrote about struggling with homesickness and with figuring out who I was. On and on I went. I was full of struggles! And that made me so happy: If I was full of struggles, maybe I was interesting!
The Dreams of Domenica Santolina Doone
I was bound up with ropes and chained to a wall, and I kicked and struggled, trying to get loose. I was not going to be defeated! I was going to get free!
A class of students were led past my cell. They pointed at me and said, “Isn’t she interesting?”
It made me struggle harder. I was a champion struggling person.
When I woke up, the bedclothes were all in a heap and my pillow was lying on the floor on the other side of the room.
18
An Announcement
School was due to break for the holidays mid-December. As the vacation neared, boarders were looking forward to home-cooked meals and reunions with their families, and they were looking beyond that, too, to the promise of the St. Moritz ski term at the end of the holidays, when school resumed.
In January, they would all return to campus and board the buses for St. Moritz for a two-week stay, where academic classes took second-place to ski lessons. Guthrie and other returning students spread the word that this was the highlight of the year. “Fantastico!” Guthrie said. “Meraviglioso! Dynamite!”
I wasn’t looking forward to any of it. I wasn’t going home for Christmas because it was too expensive. I’d had only six letters from my mother, none from Stella or Crick or my father. Tucked in one letter were pictures of Stella and the new baby. Was that Stella? Her hair was shorter, her face thinner. I’d find myself talking to the picture: Is that you, Stella? and I’d touch the baby’s face. What do you feel like, baby? The baby had a name, Michael, but it seemed odd to call a wee baby by a grown person’s name, and so I called him baby, just baby.
One night, early in December, as Lila and I were walking back from the library, she said, “I think you should know that I’m not coming back.”
The wind raced straight at us, pushing into my face, as if it would push me back over the hillside and down, down, down. “Not coming back?” I said.
“After Christmas. I’m not coming back.” Lila pulled her scarf up against her face, and the wind caught the ends and slapped them against my neck.
“But—but—” I pulled her coat sleeve. “Stop—”
“I just thought you should know,” Lila said.
Bare branches clicked overhead. “You can’t mean that. You’ll come back.”
“I hate it here,” she said.
“You don’t—” A notebook lay on the path, and the wind whipped through its pages.
“I do. Don’t tell me what I feel,” Lila said. “It’s a horrid place. I’m the kind of person who is very sensitive about where I live.”
At home, I found Uncle Max in his study, bent over a memo. “Lila isn’t coming back,” I said. “She hates it here.”
“She withdrew from school?” Uncle Max asked.
“Not yet—but she’s going to. What are you going to do?”
“I haven’t heard anything from her parents about this.”
“Maybe they don’t know yet,” I said. “But she’ll convince them. You ought to do—”
“Dinnie, do you know how many students say this at the end of the first term? It happens all the time.”
“But she hates it here—”
“And when she goes home,” Uncle Max said, “to the place and the people she has romanticized all these months, she’ll see that it isn’t all she imagined. She’ll be different, but they’ll all expect her to be the same. She’ll start thinking about school, and she’ll see some of the good things about being here. She’ll—”
Aunt Sandy appeared in the doorway. “I’d like to give that girl a good shake, that’s what I’d like to do.”
It seemed a big risk, to assume that Lila would change her mind. When I tried to talk with her more about it, she refused. “It’s decided,” Lila said. “It’s not open for discussion.”
I told Guthrie he ought to do something.
“Me?” Guthrie said. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. She listens to you. Tell her she’s got to come back.”
“Why is this so important to you?” Guthrie asked.
“Because—because—” Good question. She could be really annoying, but she was my friend and I couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving. I thought about all those awful times I’d had to leave a place, just when I was getting used to it. “Just because, Guthrie. Tell her she’s got to come back.”
Guthrie laughed. “It’s not exactly my style, Dinnie. Telling people what they’ve got to do is not exactly my thing.”
“Talk to her, okay?”
“Ecco!” he said. “I will talk to the pistol.”
I hounded Guthrie for days. “Did you talk to her yet? Did you?”
“Who?” Guthrie said.
“You know who—Lila.”
“Oh yeah, the pistol. Yeah, I talked with her.”
“Did you tell her she’s got to come back?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Guthrie grinned. “We talk about other stuff. I didn’t get around to ordering her what to do yet.”
On the night before the last day of classes, I met Lila outside her dormitory. I asked her if she’d talked with Guthrie.
“Sure,” she said. “Why?”
“About not coming back—did you talk with him about that?”
“Yes.”
The air was brisk and cold and still. I felt as if time were slowing, freezing. I was in my bubble and I was Dinnie the dot. “And—?”
Lila looked away, down over the hillside, toward the mountain opposite. She spoke in a monotone, as if she were reading the words off the side of the mountain. “He said he agreed with me. Guthrie said I shouldn’t come back if I didn’t want to. At least he understands how I feel. Guthrie said this was a str
ange place and it wasn’t for everybody and some people couldn’t make it here. I told him that it wasn’t a matter of ‘making it’ here. I could make it here if I wanted to. I just don’t want to.”
“Did he tell you about the ski term? Did he tell you about St. Moritz?”
Lila let out a bored, tired sigh. “Yes, he told me, but he said I shouldn’t come back just because of some old ski term. He said I might not like ski term anyway—”
Time wasn’t freezing. Time was rushing, rushing past. It was being swallowed up, disappearing. “Not like it?” I said. “Everybody likes it. They love it. It’s fantastico! Everybody says so. Everybody.”
“Guthrie said I might not like it. He said it’s just a bunch of people racing down the mountains, and if you didn’t like the people, you might not like being cooped up with them for two weeks in St. Moritz. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like being cooped up.”
“Cooped up? You’re not cooped up at St. Moritz. You’re outside all day. Everybody says so. It’s fantastico—it’s—you’re—”
Lila yawned. “Guthrie said a person really had to like adventure to like St. Moritz. I told him it wasn’t a matter of my not liking adventure. I’m the kind of person who loves adventure. I just don’t like this adventure.”
St. Abbondio’s bells rang once, twice, three times—
“Gotta go,” Lila said. “Don’t look so pitiful. I’ll write.”
19
Buon Natale
The Dreams of Domenica Santolina Doone
A long line of people were making their way along a narrow path. Bundles dropped off their backs and lay where they fell, tripping the people behind them. A baby fell off a mother’s back and rolled to the edge of the path and on down the hillside, down, down, down.