“Stew-pod,” Keisuke said. “Ashes more easier.”
“Okay, fine,” Guthrie agreed. “If you don’t want to drag my body up here, Dinnie, my ashes will do. Scatter them when you’re skiing down the mountain. Like this—” He swung his arm across the table. “A little of me here, a little of me there—”
“Demente,” Belen said. “You have crazy brain.”
“You know what it feels like when I’m up here on this mountain?” Guthrie asked. “It feels like—like angels are flying all around in my head!”
“Completely demente,” Belen said. “Loco.”
“Stew-pod,” Keisuke said.
22
St. Moritz
Back at the Hotel Laudinella, I headed straight for the school’s office. Uncle Max was standing just inside the doorway.
“No Lila yet,” he said. “Sorry.”
“No fax? No call?” I said.
“Nothing yet.”
I was rooming with Belen and another girl, Mari. Lila’s name was also on the roster for our room, but none of us expected her to show up.
“Too bad,” Mari said. “I was looking for a good dose of complaining.”
Belen, to my surprise, said, “She’s not so bad, that Lila. You just have to stay out of her way.”
This was new for me, boarding with the students. Back in Lugano, where I had my own room at Uncle Max and Aunt Sandy’s, I was often glad for the silence when I’d leave school and go home. But sometimes at school, when the others were talking about something that had happened in the dorm the night before, or when they seemed as if they were sharing secrets exchanged in the late hours, I felt excluded from a secret society.
Now, in the Hotel Laudinella, I was watching, listening, trying to pick up the routine. At ten o’clock, Signora Palermo, the teacher in residence on our floor, knocked on our door to see that we were accounted for.
“No Lila?” she said. “Seven thousand demerits! I joke, yes?”
By ten-thirty, I’d brushed my teeth and gotten in bed.
“In bed already?” Mari said.
“I thought lights-out were at ten-thirty.”
She and Belen laughed. “Watch,” Mari said. She put a towel under the door. “Presto! Lights out!”
Belen showed us pictures that Keisuke had brought back for her. There was his house near Osaka, and his parents, his sister. There was Keisuke at home, Keisuke on the subway, Keisuke using chopsticks.
Mari asked Belen if she’d talked to Keisuke over the holiday.
“What, are you crazy?” Belen said. “My parents would shoot me if they knew about Keisuke!”
“Why?” I asked.
“He’s Japanese, that’s why. They want for me a nice Spanish boy.”
Mari giggled. “Like Gherardo. Or Pablo. Or Manuel—”
Belen made a face. “No Manuel, please no Manuel! He eats like pig!”
Mari said, “My parents are the same. They expect for me to talk only about Italian boys. If I mention Fadi—”
“Ooh, Fadi!” Belen teased.
“If I mention Fadi, they say, ‘Is that girl or boy? Better not be boy you talk about!’”
“What about you, Dinnie?” Belen said. She was sitting on the floor, leaning against my bed. “Who do you like?”
“No one in particular,” I said.
“Not Guthrie?” Belen asked.
“Guthrie!” Mari said. “Guthrie? I thought Lila had him staked out—”
“Lila?” I said. “And Guthrie?” I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me. Is that what people thought, that Lila and Guthrie were a couple?
There was a knock at the door.
“Are we in trouble?” I asked.
Belen threw her pillow at me and answered the door. It was Aunt Sandy. She didn’t seem surprised or bothered that our lights were on.
“You all okay in here?” she asked.
“Any word?” I asked her. “About Lila?”
“Not yet. You girls need anything?”
“Sure,” Belen said. “I need my Keisuke.”
“A bottle of wine, Signora?” Mari joked.
“Very funny,” Aunt Sandy said. I was surprised that they would joke with her like this, and that she seemed so at ease with them. Aunt Sandy had done loads of nighttime check-ins at school, but I’d never actually pictured her doing that before.
“And you, Dinnie?” Aunt Sandy asked. “You need anything?”
Belen and Mari said, “Guthrie! Bring her Guthrie!”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard!” I said.
“Stew-pod?” Belen said. “Is it stew-pod?”
After Aunt Sandy left, Mari and Belen talked on. They talked about what they got for Christmas and about their friends back home and about clothes and makeup.
“You know what makeup is called in Italian?” Mari said. “Trucco! It means trick! Don’t you think that’s funny?”
They told me they liked Uncle Max, that he was “a good guy.” And then Belen remembered something Uncle Max had said in an assembly once. “Remember after Bork was expelled and your uncle gave that talk? Remember? He asked us that question: What would you do if you knew you wouldn’t be caught? What a question! And didn’t he say you could judge a person by what he would do if he knew he wouldn’t get caught? I think about that all the time.”
And so she and Mari talked about what they might do if they knew they wouldn’t get caught. Would they steal a wallet? A television? Would they sneak out of the dorm? Would they kill someone?
The Dreams of Domenica Santolina Doone
I was running through the snow with my box of things, and I kept looking behind me to see if someone was chasing me. The box was taped up tight and there was a word written in black marker on the side: GUTHRIE. I had stolen Guthrie.
Twelve inches of snow fell overnight. I awoke to the sounds of booms: Boom! Boom-boom-boom!
“Military practice? At St. Moritz?” I said.
“That’s not military practice,” Mari said. “It’s anti-avalanche stuff. Detonation.”
“We’re going up there? Where they’re blowing up the mountain? Trying to set off avalanches? Trying to kill us?”
“Oh, Dinnie. It’s to prevent an avalanche. They toss some dynamite or something up there to loosen the snow so it tumbles down before it all piles up into a big dangerous lump. Something like that. They’ll be finished by the time we get up there.”
The sky was clear by ten o’clock in the morning when we assembled on the mountain to split into ski groups. The sun beat down on the snow, and I took deep breaths. The air was different here. It was clear and thin and made me dizzy. Above was pure blue, and below was white, white, all the way down to the dots of brown chalets in the town below. In the distance, mountains lapped mountains as far as I could see.
When we’d boarded the Signalbahn below, a red sign was flashing, displaying words in German, then French, then Italian, and finally English: AVALANCHE WARNING. Uncle Max huddled with the ski instructors. “No, no,” they said. “No worries. It’s on the other side. We’ll tell the kids not to ski off the posted runs. It will be fine.”
I was terrified and woozy. I didn’t want to go up the mountain, and I didn’t want to ski down it.
Guthrie and Keisuke were in the most advanced ski class. I was standing with the beginners. Some in my group had put their skis on already and were sliding and falling, crashing into each other. There were ten students in our group, two teachers, and the ski instructor, whose name was Simone. In the distance, I saw Aunt Sandy in another beginner’s group. She was laughing and brushing snow off her arms.
Simone said we were going to do a few exercises and learn how to put our skis on and take them off and how to fall. You could learn how to fall? Maybe I wouldn’t faint right there on the mountain before the lesson began. Maybe I’d live through it.
In the distance, Guthrie’s group was skiing toward the chair lift. They swished across the snow like skiers you see
in movies. It looked so easy. A girl in a bright-pink ski jacket skied up behind Guthrie. Lila? Was it Lila? I called to her, “Li-la!” She turned vaguely toward me, but didn’t see me waving my ski poles. “Hey, Guthrie! Lila!” I called, but my shout bounced back to me and rolled on down the mountain.
23
Downfelling
Lila was back, and she was different. She smiled and laughed, she embraced everyone she met, and she seemed bent on meeting everyone she didn’t already know. She was a regular walking, talking Miss Personality.
Everything was “marvelous” and “brilliant.” Everyone was “terrific.” Switzerland was fantastico.
At first, people said, “What happened to the pistol?” and “Did she get a brain transplant or what?” But that didn’t last long. If you were going to make a new start, there probably wasn’t a better place to do it than in St. Moritz, where each day’s new snow made the world seem like a clean canvas, and where, at the end of the day, your body was too tired and too full of fresh air to be cynical.
That’s the way my body felt, at least. My body was a pitiful mass of aching muscles. Everything hurt: my legs, my feet, my arms, my hands, my neck, my back. Even my eyeballs hurt.
I had learned how to fall, and I did it frequently. I toppled putting on my skis and taking them off. I tumbled trying to get on the T-bar and trying to get off it. I’d get fifteen feet down the mountain, braced in snowplow position, lurching about one inch a minute, and I’d sprawl, a tangle of skis and poles.
I was a really good fall-er, a champion falling person. I could fall on my back or my right side or my left. I could flop on my face or on my ear. I could pitch forward onto my stomach. I could—and did—fall in every position you could imagine.
When Guthrie and Keisuke and Belen and Lila and I would meet up at the café for lunch, I’d be a scraggly mess, with snow melting in every crevice of my clothing, snow in my hair and my ears, my ski suit ripped or torn in some new place. I’d be minus a glove or my goggles. My ski poles were bent into contorted shapes, and my skis looked as if I’d battered them against a rock.
“You do much downfelling,” Keisuke said.
But they all looked glamorous. Their cheeks were tanned, their clothes dry, their poles and skis and boots intact. I’d clatter in saying, “I think I’m gonna die. I know I’m gonna die,” and they’d be sitting there sipping hot chocolate, talking about the great run they’d just had and what a marvelous, fantastico day it was.
“Don’t you just love this place?” Lila asked me one day. “Isn’t it such the best? Isn’t it fantastico?”
I wanted to slug her. “It’s stew-pod,” I said. “Completely stew-pod.”
But it wasn’t stew-pod, not really. I liked the abbreviated academic classes in the morning, and the fresh air all day. I liked coming back to the hotel and sinking into a hot tub and then scurrying on to the remainder of the academic classes and then scomfing down dinner and lazily staring at my books during the shortened study hall and then collapsing into my bed each night. And by the second week, I’d gone all the way down the beginner slope without downfelling once, and I’d even managed to do it without snow-plowing the whole way down. I, Domenica Santolina Doone, was a skier!
The Dreams of Domenica Santolina Doone
I leaped off the chair lift into the new snow and skied down a mountain and even up a mountain and down again. I leaped over a wide, wide crevice and sailed down the mountain and zipped around moguls, and at the bottom, everyone cheered. I won. I don’t know what I won because I woke up.
24
Disaster
Too soon the two weeks were over and we were back in Lugano, and there we learned about Disaster.
We weren’t completely ignorant. We knew about disaster from our previous schools and previous lives. We’d had access to televisions and newspapers. But the return to Lugano marked the beginning of Global Awareness Month, and in each of our classes, we talked about disaster: disaster man-made and natural. We talked about ozone depletion and the extinction of species and depleted rain forests and war and poverty and AIDS. We talked about refugees and slaughter and famine.
We were in the middle school and were getting, according to Uncle Max, a diluted version of what the upper-schoolers were facing. An Iraqi boy from the upper school came to our history class and talked about what it felt like when the Americans bombed his country. Keisuke talked about how he felt responsible for World War II, and a German student said she felt the same.
We got into heated discussions over the neglect of infant females in some cultures, and horrific cases of child abuse worldwide. We fasted one day each week to raise our consciousness about hunger, and we sent money and canned goods and clothing to charities.
In one class, after we watched a movie about traumas in Rwanda, and a Rwandan student told us about seeing his mother killed, Mari threw up. We were all having nightmares.
At home, Aunt Sandy pleaded with Uncle Max. “This is too much!” she said. “You can’t dump all the world’s problems on these kids in one lump!”
And he agreed. He was bewildered by it all, but the program had been set up the previous year, and he was the new headmaster, reluctant to interfere. And though we were sick of it and about it, we were greedy for it. We felt privileged there in our protected world and we felt guilty, and this was our punishment.
It took the wind out of Guthrie. He slumped along, muttering to himself. “What are we going to do, Dinnie?” he’d say to me. “What can we do? We’ve got to do something!”
He talked about leaving school and going to war-torn Rwanda to help. “You’re too young,” someone told him. “You wouldn’t get across the border.”
He wrote to the American president and the Swiss ambassador. He joined Greenpeace and Amnesty International. He started an after-school discussion group called UP—Unite for Peace. After a week of that, he said, “It’s awful. It’s just talk, talk, talk. Talk gets nowhere. People are dying, Dinnie, they’re dying all around us, everywhere. People are starving and sick and they’re being murdered and tortured.”
I knew it. I thought of it day and night. One night, after a recurring nightmare about refugees, I woke Uncle Max up. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you helping the refugees? Why did you bring me here? Who’s paying for me to be here?”
Aunt Sandy woke in the middle of my tirade and said, “Dinnie?”
I had a sudden recollection of something that had happened one Thanksgiving in Oklahoma. At my school, we’d been asked to bring in canned goods for “needy families.” The school was going to assemble boxes for these families, and the county was donating turkeys for them, too.
The teacher said that anyone who wanted to volunteer to go along and help distribute these items on Saturday should meet in the parking lot, where other community volunteers would meet us.
I went there on that Saturday and joined two of my classmates in a car with a woman named Mrs. Burke. She was very cheery. “Okay!” she said. “I have a list here and the addresses, so here we go!” And for the next few hours, we distributed boxes to families in rundown houses. Some of the families were very happy to see us, but some were not, and I couldn’t understand why. One man refused to accept the box and chased us out of his yard.
“Okay!” Mrs. Burke said. “Two more to go. Let me check my list. One’s out on Colby Road—we’ll go there first.”
“I live on that road, too!” I said, and I wondered what family we’d be visiting.
“Wonderful!” Mrs. Burke said. “Then you can show me the way if I get lost!”
We drove out into the countryside and she found Colby Road without any trouble, and as we were driving along, she looked at her list again and said, “Okay! Now we’ve got to look for 499—”
“But—” I said.
“We must be close,” Mrs. Burke said. “That’s 455—”
“But—”
And then she was pulling into my drive, and I was dying, dying a thousand de
aths. I sat there, frozen, as Mrs. Burke and my classmates hopped out and and took a box from the trunk and started for the house.
My mother opened the door and had such a puzzled look on her face. She glanced toward the car and saw me sitting there, frozen, and then she smiled at Mrs. Burke and took the box and thanked her, and then I got out of the car and said to Mrs. Burke, “I live here. Am I done now?”
Mrs. Burke turned very red and put her hand to her mouth and leaned down and said, “Oh, honey, thank you for coming with me, I’m sorry if—I didn’t know—I wouldn’t have—”
“It’s okay,” I said, and I went inside and my mother was staring at the box of food and she said, “Dinnie, we are grateful to have this food right now, and you did a nice thing today, so don’t you feel bad about it.”
But I did feel bad about it and I didn’t want to go back to my school, and fortunately for me, my father found a new opportunity somewhere else, and so a month later we were gone.
I was thinking of all that as I stood in Aunt Sandy and Uncle Max’s bedroom that night, and I said, “I’m a charity case, aren’t I? I don’t belong here. I should be with the refugees. You should, too.”
Uncle Max went and made a pot of coffee, and when he returned he said, “Dinnie, kids here have problems, too. You don’t see them, but they’re there. They need someone to help them, too.”
“Who’s paying for me?”
“Not everyone here is rich, Dinnie. There are lots of students on financial aid, and lots of students are here because their parents’ companies pay for them to attend.”
“Who?” I said. “Name some.”
“I can’t do that,” Uncle Max said. “And besides, what difference does it make?”
“I just want to know.”
“Dinnie,” Aunt Sandy said. “You’re here because Uncle Max is the headmaster. It’s like a bonus in his job. You get to attend. No one has to pay. It’s a privilege. You’re lucky.”
“I don’t want to be a lucky one. I should be suffering, like the refugees.”