Joy For Beginners (13 page)

IN THE WEEKS before her trip, Henry was an invaluable source of information—telling her which drugstore would take her passport picture, both ears showing, smiling but without teeth in case she caught the traveling bug and wanted to go places where that might be a sign of aggression. He went through the things in her big suitcase and took out most of them, leaving her with featherweight black clothes that fit in a carry-on, a credit card, and a paperback book for the plane. He took her shopping for comfortable black boots and pitched her tennis shoes back into the closet.

“They’ll know you’re American,” he told her. “But you don’t have to advertise.”

And he listened as she described her contingency plans over and over—what she’d do if she lost her passport, how Dan and the kids could reach her, how she could always buy clothes if the weather was colder or hotter than she had packed for. He answered questions about Internet cafes and told her how to order coffee, gave her tricks to figure out the exchange rate and get over jet lag.

But one day he simply stopped.

“You’re not traveling if you already know everything,” he said.

While she understood the concept, it didn’t make her comfortable. Home was comfortable. She found herself waiting, almost hoping, for the disaster that would make her unable to leave—a snack assignment for the soccer team, an unforeseen deadline for Dan. She checked the twins hourly for runny noses. Surely they would need her to stay.

The night before her departure, Sara lay in bed next to Dan, watching the numbers on her clock change from one to the next. When she knew Dan was asleep, she took her pillow and slipped out of bed and into Max and Hillary’s room. Max had fallen asleep in his new big-kid bed, his back tight against the wall, his stuffed rabbit held in his arms. Hillary was on her stomach, one cheek visible in the glow of the night-light. Sara lay down on the floor between them. If she listened to every breath until she left, she thought, they would all keep breathing until she came back.

 

AND THEN, even as she was remembering that she hadn’t bought an extra box of Cheerios in case they ran out, she found herself on a plane about to head east, the sun setting behind her.

“It’s my first time to Europe,” she mentioned to the businesswoman sitting next to her. The woman nodded politely, pulled out a pillow and put on an eyeshade. An image of a lioness, regal and bored, came into Sara’s mind and she pulled her arm back slightly from the armrest.

Sara sat next to the woman, hearing the plane’s engines growl into action, feeling the rumbling movement as they began to taxi down the runway—the way it pushed her spine back in her seat, the opposing pull in the rest of her body, as if she was still holding on to her children’s hands, her arms stretching across the growing distance between them.

Stop it, Sara, she told herself. She tried to focus on the luxury of having an entire plane seat to herself, of a carry-on bag that held not a single board book or action figure or diaper. She stared at the flight attendant giving the safety demonstration and after the lecture was over she looked assiduously at the in-flight magazine until the seat belt light turned off. Then she went in the bathroom and sobbed, her face buried in a fistful of rough brown paper towels.

 

PARIS, where she changed planes, was a thunderstorm of languages, none of them hers. She had forty-five minutes to get to her next gate, without the first idea of how to do it. A line stretched down the hall toward an overhead sign that declared “customs.” After twenty minutes, a man from India standing behind her explained that she didn’t need to wait there.

“You need to go to terminal two,” he said, looking over her ticket. “Go to the line for station three.”

“Three?” she asked. “For two?”

“Exactly,” he answered, nodding matter-of-factly.

But the line for station three led down into the depths of the airport, and as Sara found herself descending deeper, escalator after escalator, caught in a rush of travelers with no option to turn back, she felt her anxiety level rising.

Where was she going? Maybe that man hadn’t known what he was talking about, or had sent her in the wrong direction on purpose. She would miss her plane and she didn’t know anyone in Paris. How would she get another flight? Could she possibly be failing already at something that should be so easy?

The crowd was going, it appeared, to a line of shuttle buses. With fifteen minutes left before her next flight, Sara looked about her in panic. Which bus? Everyone was moving quickly and purposefully toward vehicles that were rapidly filling. Sara felt the smell of sweat rising off her, the acrid scent of nerves and fear that reminded her of high school dances.

Scanning about her, she spotted a family—mother, father, two teenage children and a grandmother, all dressed in black, speaking a language she hoped was Italian. Sara reached into her jacket pocket and felt Kate’s smooth, round beach stone inside. She gripped the rock and blindly followed the family onto a bus as the doors closed behind her.

Oh God, she thought. Please don’t let them be going to Spain.

But they
were
Italian, and the teenagers spoke English and they walked her right to the gate and stayed with her until their line for Milan somehow diverged without notice from her line to Venice and she found herself on a plane, breathing hard—until she looked out the window as they soared over mountains that reached up to kiss their wings, and she thought, This is the most beautiful thing I have seen in my life.

SHE HAD HEARD HENRY’S Stories of Venice, about streets made of water and bridges that didn’t exist, of tides that could rise and cover the stone streets and piazzas, leaving tourists teetering along the tops of folding tables set up to cross San Marco Square. A city made of islands, buildings resting on what used to be the tops of trees, the forests of Slovenia re-created in the depths of a lagoon, held in place by mud instead of roots, made eternal in an underwater world without seasons.

Even so, she didn’t expect it, the way the city opened out in front of her as she left the train and walked through the gates, shifting from
terra
to
acqua
as effortlessly as an amphibian. The way the world changed—cars becoming boats, passengers slipping off their land-selves, laughing and taking pictures. The locals navigated with slick if somewhat grumpy ease through the flurries of tourists, ignoring the ticket booths, striding onto the public water taxis and taking their seats while groups of visiting college students, newlyweds, tired families and retired couples debated which side of the boat would have the better view, who would collect their tickets, how they would know which stop was theirs.

Sara sat among them, watching the light fall sideways onto the thick green water and the faded rose and ivory and terra-cotta facades that lined the canal. Through the huge windows of the elegantly decaying buildings she could just glimpse sculptured ceilings and chandeliers dripping glass; below, the lagoon caressed entry stairs, reaching for doors. The whole vision was so much more theme park than reality that she had to restrain the desire to check to see if the boat was running on rails. Their boat approached the ancient Rialto Bridge and the tourists around her cried out in recognition, raising their cameras like supplicants to capture the vision of the arch, the deeply green wooden doors of the old shops, the cameras aimed down at them. Sara wondered what Dan would photograph if he were here.

 

SARA COUNTED THE EXIT options carefully, concerned that she might float out into the lagoon and never be seen again, but in the end, her stop was obvious and she navigated her way off the
vaporetto
with only a modicum of bumps and apologies, her carry-on bag bobbling behind her across the metal ramp and the uneven wooden walkway. It was early evening at the tag end of winter, but the city still carried the vibration of movement, people walking purposefully or aimlessly over the bridge and down the stone streets. In the midst of all the people, the postcard stands and pizzerias and alleyways, Sara almost missed the hand-painted sign for her hotel, hanging above an arched, darkened alcove. With a mixed sense of victory and trepidation, she stepped into its gloomy embrace and the world outside diminished. She pushed the doorbell, the tongue of a bronze lion; with a raspy buzz, the door unlatched and she wound her way up the spiraling narrow stairway that rose in front of her.

The front desk clerk greeted her, selecting a key with a bronze fob the size of his palm and taking her down a slim carpeted hallway that sloped disturbingly toward the water. Etchings and posters lined the walls; a series of shelves held books in English, French, German, gifts or castaways, left behind for the next guests. In her jet-lagged state, Sara found herself wondering where the books would go after this. If they liked traveling without knowing where they were going, whom they would meet.

The desk clerk took a corner and pointed down the length of the hallway to the right, to the shared bathroom at its end. Turning to the left, he entered an almost hidden corridor and unlocked a narrow door. Sara could barely make out a twin bed, flush against the wall in the darkened space. A monk’s cell. Bypassing the light switch, the clerk walked down the aisle next to the bed and opened the glass window at the far end of the room. Sara heard the muffled sounds of water and boats. Then, with the practiced ease of a professional magician, the man unlatched the heavy wooden shutters and pushed them outward, filling the room with the evening light, the view of a golden palazzo and the white dome of a church beyond. Sara’s eyes widened. The clerk accepted her expression as his due and laid the key on the miniature desk next to the window.

“Breakfast will be at eight A.M. We will bring it to your room.” He nodded to her and left.

 

SHE CALLED HER FAMILY; after ten minutes of battling with her international calling card, the number went through but by that point Tyler was already on his way to school, Hadley and the twins likely out on a walk. The sound of Tyler’s voice on the message made her miss her family with a sharp and sudden longing. All she wanted was to curl up on her single bed and smell the fragrance of her children that still clung to her clothes.

“Enough of that, Sara,” she told herself. “You’re here; be here.” It was what she always said to Tyler when he was frustrated and wanting to be somewhere he wasn’t. It made her feel better to say the words aloud, as if perhaps he could hear her.

She washed her face and set off in the direction of a nearby
taverna
she had read about in her bright blue guidebook. After a wrong turn or two and the assistance of a helpful Australian backpacker, she found the restaurant and entered into its warmth, the smell of grilling meat and simmering tomatoes. A waiter approached and she signaled her status apologetically with an upraised index finger; he greeted her, mercifully, with a smile and showed her to a table tucked into a corner.

Sara picked up the menu. She was thinking of ordering pizza; the unrequited call home had left her desiring something familiar. But she remembered that her guidebook had recommended the homemade ravioli, and she found the dish easily enough on the list of offerings that was translated into three languages. An American woman at the next table saw Sara looking over the menu and leaned toward her.

“You know,” she said, speaking with the confidentiality and volume of a woman under a hairdryer at a salon, “I almost never go to a restaurant where the menu is written in anything other than Italian—they say those restaurants just aren’t authentic—but I had to pee, so here we are.”

Sara nodded, smiling politely, but in reality she was grateful for the familiar words on the menu, although even in English she wasn’t sure what the sauce for the ravioli was. She was even grateful when the waiter approached, took one look at her and shifted instinctively into English. She pointed to the description of the ravioli on the menu and he smiled knowingly and disappeared into the maze of tables behind him.

She picked up a bread stick and crunched into it, the taste of sea salt and butter surprising her with its delicacy. She took a sip of the mellow red wine the waiter had brought and its warmth soothed her. The world tilted with jet lag, making her feel somehow more above her body than part of it, in this place so utterly unlike her world of plastic Legos and sippy cups.

As she sat at her table, she observed the faces of the other diners—the way their gazes floated over the crowd and then caught at the strangeness of her solitary situation. As a woman alone, she was a source of speculation. She found herself wondering idly what stories people were creating for her, what identities she would make up for herself, trying them on in her mind one after another.

A middle-aged couple came into the restaurant with cameras draped around their necks. As Sara watched, the husband pointed to one of the tables, proclaiming its suitability, and started across the room. The woman paused and then followed him, her words swallowed like the first course of their meal. A few tables away a woman took off her sweater, revealing a backless black dress, wings tattooed across her shoulder blades. Outside, a pair of priests walked by the window, wide-brimmed black hats on their heads, their long dark cassocks fluttering behind them in the chill evening air. Amid the murmurings of the restaurant, Sara could almost hear the creaking of her imagination waking up.