Bloomability

  It was odd how the mountain seemed to loom there. From my bedroom window, it seemed that the mountain faced me, the house. But from this different angle, there it was again, the mountain, but now it faced the church.

  Boom! Boom-boom-boom! That morning, I’d been standing on the balcony at Uncle Max’s when I’d first heard the sound. Boom! A loud, dull thundering, followed by its echoes through the valley.

  I’d rushed inside. “We’re being bombed! We’re going to die!”

  Uncle Max followed me out to the balcony. Soon there was another Boom! Boom-boom-boom!

  “We’re going to die!”

  “Dinnie—” He placed his hand on my arm. “It’s not a bomb. It’s military practice. They do it every weekend.” He said he’d reacted much the same as I had when he first visited the school a year ago.

  “You did?” I said.

  “Well, I didn’t think I was going to die, but yes, it did sound like bombs going off.”

  “But why do they have military practice? Switzerland is neutral—”

  “Neutral doesn’t mean you don’t have to be prepared to defend yourself,” Uncle Max said.

  Boom! I was standing on the road near the church, listening to the continued booms in the valley. Leading up to the church was a walkway, a long, narrow path, with a double row of cypress trees lining it. The trees were tall and thin, like dark unlit candles stretching to the sky. At the end of the path sat the church, square and built of yellow stone, with a tall clock tower rising up from its center.

  Midway down the path was a girl. She was wearing a white shirt and shorts, moving slowly along toward the church, as if she were being pulled toward it by an invisible rope. By the time I reached the path, she had entered the church. The only sound was the distant hum of cars along the autostrada across the valley. All else was quiet. No birds, no people, nothing but that hum. It was five minutes to ten.

  The church door was open. Inside it was dark except for a spot of gold light coming through a round window high on the far wall. It was cooler here, and even quieter, and I listened for sounds of the girl, but I was thinking of Stella and Crick and my parents and the new baby, listening for them, too.

  I stood at the back until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Gradually, I made out the row of dark pews, the center aisle, and then I saw her, sitting at the far end of a pew. Her hands were folded in her lap and her head was tilted up toward the window with the golden light. I imagined that it was Stella sitting there, and we weren’t in Switzerland at all. We were in America.

  I went back outside and leaned against the cool wall. Just as the girl came through the door, the bells began tolling the hour. “Oh!” she said, startled. She looked at me and up at the tower where the bells were swinging. “Listen to that! It sounds so—so—”

  “Weird?” I said.

  “No, not weird!” she said. “Amazing—and incredible—and—” She stepped toward me. “Are you American? I’m American!”

  “Me, too,” I said. I hoped she wasn’t going to ask me where I was from. That was always a hard question to answer. Did people mean originally or most recently or what?

  “Are you going to the American school here? I am,” she said.

  “I guess I am.”

  She squinted at me. “You guess? Don’t you know?”

  I’d been thinking that I was going to escape before school started, or that my parents might come and rescue me, but what I said to her was, “My uncle’s the headmaster, so yep, I’ll be going to the school.”

  “How exciting!” she said. “I’m going to start fresh here!”

  I wondered what she meant by that and thought she might explain, but instead she chattered on about other things, telling me that she was staying with her parents in a hotel up in Montagnola and that they were going off traveling for a few days and then she’d be back for the opening of school, and then her parents were returning to Saudi Arabia, where her father was working. “I’m Lila,” she added. “Who are you?”

  Her name had a nice sound: Li-la.

  “Me?” I said. “I’m Dinnie.”

  “That’s a funny name,” she said, but before I could be insulted, she grabbed my arm. “Come on,” she said, “we’ll walk down to Lugano!” Just beyond the church, in the next village, she phoned her parents. I heard her say, “She says she’s the headmaster’s niece. I’m sure she’s safe, Mom.”

  On the way down to Lugano, she said, “You’ll live here all year then? Imagine living here all year. It’s like—like—I don’t know—like a paradise.”

  “Sometimes it rains,” I said.

  She laughed—a laugh that began way back in her throat as a soft bubbling, and then it rolled and curled out of her mouth and into the air until it wrapped the trees and bushes. I would have laughed with her, but I was sure that my own laugh would sound inferior in comparison.

  I asked her if she’d met any other students yet. “Only one,” Lila said. “The other day—a boy. Guthrie, that was his name. You know what he did? He invited me to go to Milan with him. Milan! What a crazy guy. As if my parents would let me trundle off to Milan with some stranger! He seemed nice, though, you know?”

  So Guthrie had invited each of us to Milan. I’d only just met him, and I knew nothing about him, but I was disappointed that he hadn’t invited just me. I would have confided this to Lila, but I’d learned the hard way that you shouldn’t confess too much to people you’ve just met. On my second day of school in California, I told a girl that I had a crush on one of the boys. By lunchtime, that news was all over the whole school. Two girls accosted me on my way home and told me, “You think you’re special because you’re the new kid? Well, let us tell you something. That guy’s already spoken for, and you’re nothin’ special.”

  So, even though I was disappointed that Guthrie had also invited Lila to Milan, I didn’t say so to her.

  In a wide, open square in the heart of Lugano, we sat at an outdoor café and, after much pointing at the menu, ordered pizzas. Mine came with strange brown things on it.

  Lila said, “Those are anchovies.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t know what anchovies are?” she said. “They’re intsy bitsy fishes. Very salty.”

  I stared at them. They looked like smashed centipedes. I picked them off and hid them under a piece of crust.

  “Listen,” Lila said. “No one is speaking English! Isn’t that neat? We could say anything, and no one would understand.”

  “My uncle says that most people here know English. It’s just that we can’t understand them.”

  “Really?” Lila said. “Well, I’m glad you told me that. I might have said something I’d regret.”

  But I couldn’t imagine her saying anything she’d regret, or minding if she did. I liked being with her at the outdoor table, as if I had a friend, squeezed in among so many strangers.

  In the center of the square, a juggler was tossing red balls. Pigeons pecked and wobbled across the pavement. On all four sides of the square, tall buildings stood. I couldn’t see the mountain. It was there, I knew it, beyond the buildings, beyond the trees, but from where we sat, I couldn’t see it, and I felt safe.

  That mountain had seemed to stare at me, and it was so dark and big, always looming there, blocking out everything behind it. It also reminded me of mountains where I’d lived with my family, and because of that, it was a constant reminder of their absence.

  I would sometimes be caught off guard, thinking about something else—maybe the bells of St. Abbondio, maybe the narrow, curving streets of Switzerland—and then I’d see the mountain and be reminded of my family, and I’d feel guilty that I hadn’t been thinking of them, and that I was actually liking some things about this new place.

  What if I adapted completely, what if I forgot about them, what if they forgot about me?

  When we returned to Lila’s hotel in Montagnola, her father was sitting on the terrace, his face turned toward the sun. Lila intro
duced me.

  “American?” he said. “Your uncle’s the headmaster? I hope he knows what he’s doing.” He laughed, but his laugh was not warm like Lila’s; it was cold and mocking. Beyond him, a slim Crossair jet slipped through the slot of the valley, skimming low, like a slender white and red flying fish.

  As I left, I turned to look at them one more time. Lila was facing her father and his finger was pointed at her, as if warning her. She patted his shoulder and laughed, and I could hear that laugh as I walked back down the hill. I heard it all the way back down the Collina d’Oro, long after it would have been possible to hear it, even if she had continued laughing.

  The Dreams of Domenica Santolina Doone

  I was an anchovy, floating on a cloud, and a bird flew by. The bird was laughing, laughing, laughing. It was flying toward the mountain. I wanted to say “Watch out, watch out!” but I was not a talking anchovy. And then I slipped through a hole in the cloud and fell down, down, down. I never landed. I woke up.

  7

  The Queen

  Mrs. Stirling, the school’s founder and owner, swept into town the day before school opened. From the way the faculty and staff were fluttering in anticipation of her visit, you’d have thought the Queen herself was arriving. And in a way, once you’d met her, you felt as if maybe you had met the Queen.

  I don’t know how old she was. She said she was a hundred and five, but she was joking. Some people guessed sixty or sixty-five or seventy. I didn’t have a clue. From the way she acted, you wouldn’t even think she was sixty.

  She had a puff of salt-and-pepper hair and always wore low-cut black dresses, a long string of pearls, huge sparkly earrings, and spiked black heels. This was her uniform, altered only occasionally and only slightly, with the exchange, say, of spiked red heels for the spiked black ones. She was very elegant-looking, and when she glided into a room, everyone turned to look at her. Mrs. Stirling knew nearly everyone’s name and spoke fluent English, French, and Italian, and she could switch from one language to another in the blink of an eye.

  Her house, Casa Stirling, a rambling four-hundred-year-old stone building with a tall bell tower, sat on the edge of campus. She also had homes on the campuses of her other schools in France and Spain and England, and she had a villa in Italy, and she spent her life dashing from one school or home to the other, usually spending a week at a time at each.

  Mrs. Stirling drove a blue Volvo and was known for careening around curves and challenging the speed limits. She’d pick up at a moment’s notice and say, “I’m off to England,” and she’d get in her car and drive all day and night up through Switzerland and France and hop the ferry over to England and continue the drive on up to the school there. If she was in a hurry, she took a plane.

  I first met her on the day the boarding students arrived for the opening of school. She was holding a tea on her patio, and people were mingling in and out. Uncle Max said that I had to go along with him and Aunt Sandy, that Mrs. Stirling was “very eager” to meet me. I couldn’t imagine why, and it made me nervous to think that she might take one look at me and say, “Off with her head!”

  But she wasn’t anything like that at all. She took both my hands in hers and said I had a charming name and a charming face and she was enormously pleased that I was at her school, and she was enormously pleased that Uncle Max and Aunt Sandy were there, too.

  I thought maybe she was a figurehead, like the Queen in England, and that maybe she didn’t really do anything, but I was wrong about that. Uncle Max said, “She knows everything that goes on, and if she doesn’t like it, she says, ‘Change it!’ or ‘Fix it!’ And she means, now, instantly!” He looked a bit intimidated by that.

  “But I thought you were the boss,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “She’s the boss, and I’m glad of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she knows what she’s doing. I might not always agree with her—we’ll see—but she’s got good instincts. Look at what she’s pulled together here—” He waved his arm across the campus beyond, taking in the villa, the rolling lawns, the indoor pool and dormitories, the parents and students of mixed nationalities wandering here and there. “She started with nothing and with only two students, her own children. Now look—”

  Mrs. Stirling breezed toward us, fishing in the bodice of her dress as she did so. From within her dress, she retrieved a tube of lipstick, which she opened and applied (without a mirror—that impressed me) and then stuffed the lipstick back inside her dress. “Dear,” she said to Uncle Max. “See if you can find that charming family who came all the way from Osaka this morning. I think there is a problem about the tuition. Will you fix it up with the business office?”

  She smiled down on me. “Domenica—such a lovely name!”

  “Do you really have a house in Italy?” I asked her.

  “I do! And it’s in the most perfect spot in the world and you must come there with me some day soon. You and Max and Sandy.”

  “And where is it in Italy?” I asked.

  But she wasn’t able to answer because she’d spotted Guthrie. “Peter, darling!” she called. Peter? Had I gotten his name wrong?

  Peter/Guthrie blushed and came toward her.

  Mrs. Stirling tapped his name tag, which read Guthrie. “Dear, you have a perfectly lovely first name. Why must you insist on being called by your last name?” She patted my shoulder. “Domenica, dear, have you met Peter? Peter Lombardy Guthrie the Third.”

  “Guthrie,” he mumbled at me.

  “Peter is the most charming young man,” Mrs. Stirling said. “A prince!”

  Guthrie did not seem all that thrilled to be called a prince, but he smiled at Mrs. Stirling.

  “Guthrie!” a voice called. From behind him stepped Lila. “Oh hi, stranger,” she said to me.

  Stranger? This hit me wrong. Why was I the stranger? I was no more a stranger than she was. It reminded me of all the times in all the towns in all the schools when I’d walk in and someone would say “Who’s the stranger?” and they’d all look at me as if I were exactly that, strange. At the same time I’d be looking at them and wondering who all these strangers were.

  “My name’s Dinnie,” I reminded Lila.

  “I know that,” she said.

  She was wearing a white cotton dress and sandals and looked very clean. I’d slopped most of a cherry tart on my sleeve.

  “And who are you, my dear?” Mrs. Stirling said, cupping Lila’s chin in her hand.

  A stranger, I wanted to say. She’s a complete and total stranger. Just like me.

  Lila reached up and tugged at a tiny pearl earring. “I’m Lila,” she said. “I’m American.”

  “But of course you are,” Mrs. Stirling said.

  “Are you the owner of this place?” Lila said.

  “This place?” Mrs. Stirling said. She sounded offended. “This school, you mean? I am the founder.”

  “And the owner, right?” Lila said.

  Mrs. Stirling turned to Uncle Max. “Oh, these Americans, how direct they can be,” she said.

  “Could I talk to you about my room?” Lila pressed.

  Mrs. Stirling waved at someone across the patio. “Max?” Mrs. Stirling said. “Perhaps you’ll assist this young lady with rooming questions?” She smiled at each of us, and moved on to another group.

  By the time Uncle Max straggled home that evening, he had a list of twenty-three things that Mrs. Stirling had requested be fixed or changed.

  “She doesn’t miss a trick!” Aunt Sandy said.

  “We’ve got our work cut out for us,” Uncle Max said, but he didn’t seem deflated. Instead he seemed revved up, charged, as if he wanted to get the year under way and he wanted it to be brilliant, as brilliant as Mrs. Stirling expected it to be.

  He reminded me of my mother, of how excited and eager she would be each time we reached a new town. “We’d better get busy!” my mother would say. “Lots to do!”

  I asked Aunt Sandy if she k
new where in Italy Mrs. Stirling’s house was.

  She was trying to read the directions on a cake mix. “Not exactly. Somewhere near Florence, I think,” she said. “I have no idea what these directions say. I either have to add two eggs or two something-elses. Would you hand me the Italian dictionary?”

  Because Mrs. Stirling had a house in Italy, I linked her with my grandma Fiorelli. Maybe they’d known each other once. Maybe I’d see where Grandma Fiorelli grew up. And even though I realized that my grandma Fiorelli didn’t know me any better than Aunt Sandy or Uncle Max did, I still wanted to go to the place my grandma had lived. If I went there, maybe someone would see me and say, “Oh I know who you are! You are the granddaughter of Mrs. Fiorelli!”

  And I would walk the streets where my grandma had walked, and I’d go into the house where she had lived, and I’d be home.

  Back in the kitchen with Aunt Sandy, I said, “Do you know where Grandma Fiorelli lived in Italy? You know where she came from?”

  Aunt Sandy was picking eggshells out of the bowl. “Ma? Where she came from? Good question. Campo-something. I forget.”

  “Mrs. Stirling invited us to go to her house in Italy, did you hear her?”

  “I heard. But I think I’m going to have to practice my manners first. And I want to wait and see if we still have jobs come next week. I’m not sure I’m up to all this.” She glanced across the room at Uncle Max, who was sitting at the table, working on his list. “But I hope he is,” she said. “It scares me half to death, the responsibility of several hundred teenagers day and night.” She shuddered. “I can’t even remember to feed the cat!”

  “You don’t have a cat,” I said.

  “See! I can’t even remember I don’t have a cat!”

  8

  An Italian Tongue

  Guthrie was like an electric cloud of whirling energy. He loved everything—classes, sports, field trips, food, people. But most of all, he loved Switzerland. “Svizzera!” he would boom. “Bella, bella, Svizzera!” He reminded me a little of my father, the way he bounded around, full of enthusiasm.