I was used to moving, used to packing up and following along like a robot, but I was tired of it. I wanted to stop moving and I wanted to be somewhere and stay somewhere and I wanted my family.
In New Mexico, I’d heard my mother tell Aunt Sandy, “Dinnie will be fine, just fine. She’s very adaptable.”
As I stood there in that busy Zurich train station, I was sorry I was so adaptable, and I promised myself that I was going to stop being adaptable.
It’s hard to change your character overnight, though.
“Dinnie! Dinnie!” Aunt Sandy called.
A small brown bird darted back and forth under the domed ceiling. At the far end of the station, near the f. There, I urged the bird, over there.
“Dinnie!”
Uncle Max heaved the luggage up onto the train and Aunt Sandy, now standing in the carriage, pulled it into the aisle. I—little adaptable robot Dinnie—followed Uncle Max aboard and the stationmaster closed the door behind us. A whistle blew.
The clock on the platform clicked as the train slipped away from the station, and I slid into a seat opposite my aunt and uncle.
“Oh, Dinnie!” Aunt Sandy said. “We made it!” She pressed her face to the window. “Look at it, look! Oh, Switzerland!”
Click, click, whoosh. The train rushed out of the city, around the edge of the lake, through a deep green valley, and then up, up, up into the mountains. Through dark tunnels. Up, up, up, crisscrossing the mountain, and down, down, down. Whishhhhh.
“Oh, I can hardly stand it!” Aunt Sandy said. “Look at this—”
Uncle Max pressed his hand against hers. Steep stone cliffs and high green pastures whizzed past as the train curved through the mountains. Gushing waterfalls came into view and then vanished. Clear rivers raced beside the train, looping and curving alongside the tracks. Little houses looked as if they were stuck into the side of mountains, planted there, blooming up out of the ground. Aunt Sandy called these little houses chalets. Chalets—it was a smooth word. I said it over and over in my mind: chalets, chalets, chalets. It made me sleepy.
The Dreams of Domenica Santolina Doone
I was in a box, swaying from side to side. The box was labeled ROBOT and was on wheels and it rushed down tracks which turned into a dinosaur’s spine and then into a river.
Through the Alps the train rushed, as if on a mission, urgent and efficient. Maybe they were really taking me to a prison, where I’d be chained up and fed moldy bread and brown water.
I started wondering if I could get used to moldy bread. I could even see myself nibbling at it, trying to keep my strength up. A nibble of bread, a sip of brown water. I could adjust to that. Then I thought, No! I won’t adjust! I won’t adapt! I won’t! I’ll rebel!
On the train, we passed a man and two children fishing in a mountain stream, and I had a rolling pang of homesickness. My father had taught me how to fish and often we’d sit on riverbanks, casting our lines into the water, sitting there quietly, hardly ever saying a word. He loved being outside. You could just see it on his face, a big grin as soon as we’d head off, a wider one when we reached the river, and loud sighs as we’d sit there staring at the stream.
When we’d get home, my mother would always say, “Catch anything?” Sometimes we had caught a few fish, but mostly we hadn’t, and at those times, my father would say, “Caught the sun! Caught the day!”
My mother loved that; she loved it to pieces. She’d kiss his cheek and say, “You are a prince among men.”
In the train rolling through Switzerland, I slept and woke, slept and woke, as it all raced by. Three hours later, the train rolled through gentler valleys and pulled into a hillside platform.
“Lu-gan-o!” the announcer called. “Lu-gan-o!”
We were deep in the foothills of the Alps, Uncle Max said, in the southern base of Switzerland. We stepped out on the platform. Across the street, and down below, the city of Lugano curled around a lake. Two mountains towered over the city, and their shadows fell across the water. The mountains stood dark against the sky, like giant guards. No sign of a prison yet.
We climbed into a taxi, which wound its way out of Lugano and up a rolling hill between the mountains and onto the Collina d’Oro, which meant the hill of gold, Uncle Max said, but it wasn’t gold. The hill was green and brown, the road was gray. Around the narrow bends the taxi raced until Uncle Max called—“There! That’s it!”
Near the road was a sign and off to the left, tucked in a rim of trees, stood an old red-roofed villa. From the outside, the villa looked dignified and sturdy and vast and frightening. Pale stone walls, iron balconies, tall black-rimmed windows. It looked like a picture in the book Sandy and Max had given me. In the book, a princess was locked in a tower of the villa.
Inside were dark wooden floors and dim, narrow hallways. Doors and shutters creaked and groaned. Dusty portraits lined the halls: grim-faced men in black robes stared directly, accusingly, at me, and some faced sideways, ignoring me. In the dining hall ancient armor and weapons splattered the walls: shields and spears and helmets, ghastly dark shapes. I listened for sounds of captive princesses.
This is the place that Mrs. Stirling had chosen to set up an American school for students from all over the world. This is the place where I’d go to school. I wouldn’t be alone, like the boarding students would be, Uncle Max said. I’d be living with him and Aunt Sandy.
I still thought they might be luring me to a prison, and I still didn’t understand why I was here, why I couldn’t be with my mother and father and Crick and Stella and the new baby. I thought it was because I’d done something wrong, and this was my punishment. Or maybe they had to make room for the new baby and one of us had to go. Me.
We crossed a courtyard and climbed a hill. “We’ll get the luggage later,” Uncle Max said. “I should have had the taxi drop us at the top of the hill.” We climbed steep stone steps, winding through trees—some with strange orange fruit and others with yellow flowers that smelled sweet, like jam. We reached the Via Poporino, a narrow paved lane, and passed a yellow house, a gray one, a pink one, and then stopped in front of a white one with a red roof. A chalet.
“Oh, Max!” Aunt Sandy cried. “I am in paradise!”
Uncle Max fished the keys from his pocket. It was cool and dark in the narrow entryway. Red tiled floors. White stucco walls.
“We have gone to heaven!” Aunt Sandy said. “Look at this—”
We followed her into a wide open room with a high beamed ceiling. The far wall was a bank of windows and glass doors. We followed her through the glass doors and out onto the balcony. “Have you ever in your whole life—?” she said. “Have you ever seen—?”
Across the valley was the lake. That evening, pale lights shone all the way down the hillside and crisscrossed the mountain opposite, like a string of Christmas lights. A single red light blinked at the top.
“The valley,” Aunt Sandy said, “the lake, the mountains—”
“What do you think, Dinnie?” Uncle Max asked. “Isn’t it great? Don’t you think it’s great?”
I thought about the hilltop village in New Mexico and I thought about Stella’s new baby coming home. It would all be new to him. I stared across at the mountain, huge and dark and vast.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s great.”
But I didn’t mean it. Later I would be able to look at this view and to see it and appreciate it, and it would affect me profoundly. But on that first day, I could only see what wasn’t there: my family.
4
The Two Prisoners
The Dreams of Domenica Santolina Doone
I was holding Stella’s baby on the balcony. The baby cried and cried. On the mountain opposite, my father was looking through binoculars. I waved and called to him, but he didn’t see me or hear me.
I had walked up the Collina d’Oro to the village of Montagnola and was coming down the back way, on a path that led from the village at the top of the hill and wound down past the headmaste
r’s house. It was Aunt Sandy and Uncle Max’s house now, and they called it their casa.
“Not a chalet?” I’d asked.
“Well, it is a chalet. That’s the style,” Aunt Sandy said. “But the Italian word for house is casa, so this is our casa.” They’d been trying to teach me bits of Italian because that’s what the local people spoke.
“Your chalet casa?” I said.
“Ours,” she said. “Our chalet casa.”
I was all mixed up about where I was. Uncle Max had told me we were in the Ticino, and in the Ticino people spoke Italian. In other parts of Switzerland, he said, people spoke German or French or Romansh.
“I thought we were in Lugano,” I said.
“Lugano’s down there,” he said, pointing to the city below. “And the village of Montagnola’s up there behind us.”
“So where are we?” I asked.
He shrugged. “In a casa on the Via Poporino between Lugano and Montagnola in the Ticino in Switzerland in Europe on the planet Earth.”
“Oh,” I said.
I put up a sign in my bedroom window that said, KIDNAPPED! HELD AGAINST MY WILL! but Aunt Sandy said, “People might not be able to read it in English.” She bought me an English-Italian dictionary.
On my way down the path from Montagnola, I was thinking about the two prisoners. It was a story that a boy, Guthrie, had told me the day before: There were two prisoners in a jail cell. They each looked out the same small window. One prisoner said, “Man oh man, what a lot of dirt!” The other said, “Man oh man, what a lot of sky!”
“That’s it?” I had said when Guthrie finished. “That’s all there is to the story?”
“Think about it,” Guthrie said.
So I’d been thinking and thinking about it. Beneath my feet was a crumbling stone path, splattered with rotting persimmons. Pieces of the orange fruit were stuck to my new shoes. Wasps dived in and out of the fruit, and a lizard darted along the edge of an old stone wall. What did the lizard see? Could he see only the path and rotting persimmons and wasps?
Then I looked up, like the second prisoner must have done. Ahead were palm trees lining the path, a blue sky with puffs of white clouds, and hills rolling toward the blue lake. Switzerland curled along one shore, and Italy sprawled on the other.
Mountains ringed most of the lake, with the two taller ones standing on opposite shores. On top of Mt. San Salvatore, the red light blinked, and on top of Mt. Bré was a ragged peak dipping into a shallow bowl. Guthrie had said that by October there would be snow on the top of Mt. Bré.
This seemed weird, that I could be standing in Switzerland and see Italy, and it was weird that palm trees and snow could be in the same scene. And it seemed weird that I was in that scene.
If I closed my eyes, maybe I’d feel as if I were in New Mexico. It didn’t smell the same as New Mexico, and the air didn’t feel the same, but still, if I kept my eyes closed long enough, maybe I could change it to New Mexico. Then I could look in the windows of our house and see my mother and father and Stella and the new baby. If they saw me, though, they might be mad that I’d come back.
When a persimmon fell on my head, interrupting my dream, I yelled at it and at the tree overhead and at the wasp that zoomed in on my hair. “Hey!” The lizard skittered up the wall, as if he knew where he was going. He had a mission. Could he see sky? Did I have a mission? If I were in prison and looked out the window, would I see dirt or sky?
I didn’t understand what I was supposed to see. It seemed like part of Guthrie’s story about the prisoners was missing.
There was still a week before school opened. Guthrie had said he was dropping off his luggage and then going on to stay with friends in Milan until then. It would be Guthrie’s second year at the school. I thought he was older than I was, but he said he was thirteen, just like me. “You’re going by yourself to Milan?” I had asked.
“It’s not far—heck, you can probably see it from the top of San Salvatore! Milano!” He kissed his fingers, and raised his hand to the sky, a gesture that seemed odd, foreign, and that made him seem worldy. I copied the gesture, and he smiled.
“How do you get there?” I asked.
“You just get on the train and off you go—presto! There in no time! You should try it. Come with me if you want—”
Guthrie might as well have suggested that I pack up and make my way to Africa. I was having enough trouble dealing with the small patch of Switzerland on which I’d been planted.
In the week since I’d arrived, I’d explored the areas around Max and Sandy’s house, in small chunks. I circled the campus on the first day. On the second, I walked the length of the Via Poporino, and today I’d gone all the way up the Collina d’Oro to the village of Montagnola and was coming home the back way, along the path. Tomorrow I was going down the hill, to the church of St. Abbondio. I was like a cat, scoping out my territory. This was something I did automatically, every place I lived.
Guthrie had asked where I was going until school started. “Nowhere,” I said. “I have to live here—with the new—with my uncle.” I didn’t want to say I lived with the headmaster.
“Have to live here?” Guthrie said. “I’d give my right arm to live here, all the time, all the whole year round.”
“Well, I wouldn’t,” I said.
And that’s when Guthrie had told me about the two prisoners.
When I got home that day, Aunt Sandy showed me a spider plant that a neighbor had given her. It had slender pale green and white leaves, stretching upward, and dozens of offshoots, which Aunt Sandy said were its children. The children had little roots dangling from them, in the air, as if they were reaching for the soil. That was me, I thought, a little plant with my roots dangling in the air.
That night I looked up kidnapped in my new dictionary. There were several choices, and I chose portare via a forza and made a new sign.
Aunt Sandy said, “I think that what you’ve written means take by force, like a command, as if you are asking someone to come into the house and kidnap you. Is that what you wanted to say?”
No, I did not. But neither of us could figure out how to change take by force to taken by force.
Next I tried Help! but there were so many choices for that one word that I finally just aimed my pencil and stabbed at one. SERVITEVI! I wrote.
When Uncle Max came in to say good night, he looked at my sign and said, “I think that what you’ve written means Help yourself! You know, as if you are inviting the burglars in to take all our belongings. Is that what you meant?”
5
Postcards
My father has two sisters, Grace and Tillie. They still live in Bybanks, Kentucky, the town in which both my father and I were born. Grace and Tillie were always big on writing postcards and letters, keeping us filled in on their news, but still I was surprised to receive a postcard from Aunt Grace just a few weeks after I arrived in Switzerland.
Dear Dinnie,
I hope you arrived at Switzerland okay and did not have any hijackers on your plane. I would of prayed for you but I didn’t even know you were going until after you’d gone.
How is it there? Do you need to speak Switz or what? Have you been fishing yet? Do you have different food? I made pot roast for tonight. It’s Lonnie’s favorite.
Tillie’s coming over any second and bringing some of that awful cheesecake jello she makes, and I got to pretend I like it.
I am sending you a bushel of hugs,
Love, love, love,
Your Aunt Grace
The next day this postcard came from Grace’s sister Tillie:
Dear Dinnie,
I had a call from your daddy and he was just heartbroke over you going all the way to Switzerland but he says it is an opportunity and he hopes you have the time of your life.
I was wondering if you have to wear those leather shorts and kneesocks or is that just boys? Are you still fishing?
I’ve got to go over to Grace’s for dinner. I’m takin
g her my cheesecake jello which won a prize, did you know that? Grace is having pot roast which don’t usually turn out too good, but she tries.
Here are a thousand kisses for you:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Love from your Aunt Tillie
What I didn’t receive was mail from my parents. They’d forgotten me.
I wasn’t all that surprised that they could forget me. Once, when we were driving from Oklahoma to Oregon, or maybe it was from Oregon to Texas, we stopped at a rest stop, and when I came out of the bathroom, the car was gone.
In the parking lot, a couple and their three children were climbing back into their camper. I wondered if they’d take me with them. If we couldn’t find my parents, maybe they would let me live with them.
But I wasn’t brave enough to ask, and so I sat on a picnic table and watched cars and campers come and go, come and go, and I was just nodding off to sleep when I heard Crick calling, “Dinnie! Dinnie!” and there they all were, piling out of the car and ruffling my hair and my mother was crying and my father was laughing and Stella said, “Dinnie! Don’t you ever do that again! You scared us half to death!”
For the rest of the trip, I did not get out of the car, even to go to the bathroom or to eat.
6
The girl
The air was hot and thick, the way it had been sometimes in Texas and Oklahoma, and clouds hung over the valley as I ran down the Collina d’Oro. Just past the far edge of the school campus, the road zipped left, dipped past a clump of old stone buildings, and zipped right. Then I could see the church spread below, and beyond that the hill dipped to the lake. Across from the church was Mt. San Salvatore.