Sisterchicks in Gondolas! (22 page)

“No thanks,” I called back.

“Wait!” Sue countered, turning and facing the young man in his tight-fitting striped shirt and black pants. He used the long oar to stop the gondola and direct it to the landing located a dozen stone-carved steps down from the bridge. As he looked up at us from beneath his straw hat, I realized he was the most suave gondolier we had encountered yet.

“Si, bella donna. What is your wish? I am at your
servizio.”

I was thinking,
Oh, brother!

Sue still was solving puzzles and collecting data. “How much do y’all charge for a gondola ride?”

“Depends. Where do you want to go?”

Sue paused, seeming uncertain.

The gondolier jumped in and made it easy for her by listing prices by the hour and the half-hour. He added some of the sights we could see in those time frames.

Sue looked at me, as if waiting for my approval to part with a whole lot of money for what I’m sure would be a memorable experience.

“Fine with me,” I said. “We could split the cost and just go for half an hour.”

“Okay. Good. I’m sure he’s going to ask for cash. Do we have enough cash on us, or do we need to find an ATM?”

“I might still have enough.” I pulled out my wallet and did a quick inventory of my diminishing euros. “If you have twenty euros on you, we should have enough.”

Sue smiled at our patient gondolier and called down, “Just a minute!”

“It is not a problem, bella donna. Take all the time you need. I will wait for you.”

“He’s smooth,” Sue muttered to me under her breath.

“No kidding.”

“I have thirty euros left,” Sue said. “That should be plenty.” She glanced down one more time and asked, “Do y’all charge more if you sing for us on the ride?”

He cupped his hand behind his ear, as if he hadn’t heard her. My guess was that he had heard but he couldn’t quite understand her drawl.

“You ask him, Jenna.”

I broke down the question into the key words and spoke them slowly and loudly, “What is the price if you sing?”

The young man removed his straw hat and dramatically held it over his heart. Looking up at us with a Romeo-like expression, he said, “Bella donnas, you must understand. There are gondoliers who sing and there are gondoliers who make love.”

With a passionate pause he added, “I do not sing.”

O
kay, yeah.
We didn’t go for a gondola ride that evening.

Sue turned a lovely rosy shade and called out to the “romantic” gondolier something along the lines of, “You better watch your mouth, young man! Don’t y’all realize we’re old enough to be your mother?” She said something else about how he had a proud heritage to uphold.

We picked up our belongings and left.

I wanted to laugh so hard. Sue still was fuming, so I kept my lips together and didn’t look at her. She had been hoping for a face-to-face encounter with a gondolier ever since my slightly embarrassing contact at the bakery. Now that she had a chance to see how smooth these professional tourist-pleasers could be, her opinion seemed to have changed.

By the time we returned to our apartment, her indignation was diffused, but she still wasn’t ready to laugh about it the way I was.

We unlocked all the doors and found the lights on in the entry room. A note from Steph waited for us on the table.

“Hi! I’m guessing you’re out having a good time. I stopped by this afternoon because my uncle asked me to do an odd favor for him. He told a friend of his that he could come by at nine o’clock tonight and pick up the two extra mattresses in the storage closet. I know it’s a strange time and a strange thing to loan a friend, but welcome to the Venetian way of doing things!

“I told my uncle I’d put the mattresses down in the wooden trolley cart along the side wall on the lower level. But when I went to pull out the mattresses, I couldn’t find them. Who knows where they ended up. My uncle probably loaned them to another friend and forgot all about it.

“Anyway, I just wanted you to know that when a man named Pietro shows up at nine o’clock tonight, please give him the other note on the table that I wrote in Italian. It explains that the mattresses aren’t here. You don’t have to do anything except hand him the note.

“I’ll call later this evening to check in. You have my mobile phone number, so please call me earlier if you have any problems.

“Again, I’m so sorry for the inconvenience. I hope you’re having a great time.

“Ciao,

“Steph”

Sue and I looked at each other. We wore matching “uh-oh” expressions.

“Those are the mattresses we hauled up to the roof,” Sue said. “That’s why she couldn’t find them. What should we do?”

“I think we should take them down to the cart in the entry area,” I said. “When Pietro comes at nine, we can just point to the cart and off he goes. I’ll call Steph and explain why she couldn’t find them.”

Sue didn’t appear enthusiastic about my suggestion. “That’s going to be a lot of work, hauling two mattresses down three flights of stairs.”

“It won’t be as hard as it was to haul both of them up those narrow stairs to the roof. We’ll be going downhill, with gravity on our side. Plus the marble stairs are nice and wide. I think we can do it.”

Sue reluctantly agreed. We went into the kitchen so I could call Steph while Sue checked on Netareena. The nest was empty. I put down the phone’s receiver.

“Do you think she managed to fly out the window?” Sue asked, looking around the kitchen to make sure Netareena wasn’t perched on a counter or hiding under the table.

“There she is.” I pointed through the open doorway into the dining room. She had roosted on one of the elegant glass arms of the chandelier over the table, causing the light fixture to tilt to one side.

“Oh, Netareena!” Sue hurried toward her and waved her arms. “You shouldn’t be up there! Do you have any idea how much that light costs?”

Netareena took the cue and fluttered haltingly over to the top of the china cabinet.

“She’s flying,” I said. “Good for her!”

“She needs to be outside, though. She can’t stay cooped up in here.”

“Tell her that.”

“I’m trying. Come on, girl. The window is just over that way. You keep going. That’s it.”

Netareena made a swoop of the dining room and fluttered back into the kitchen where she perched on the spigot in the sink. She bent her head and caught a drop of water in her beak.

“Smart bird,” I said. “Now, if she could only figure out where the window is. How can she miss it? It’s wide open. Try to coax her in that direction. I’m going to call Steph.”

I dialed the number and received a recorded message in Italian. The voice sounded like Steph’s, so I left a message in English, telling her we knew where the mattresses were and that we would move them to the cart. I apologized to her for the inconvenience and ended with “ciao.”

Sue and I spent the next twenty minutes flapping our arms at Netareena as much as she was flapping her wings around the apartment. We chased her in and out of nearly every room before we finally gave up.

“She’ll leave when she’s ready to,” I concluded.

“I hope she decides she’s ready to leave by tomorrow because we’re leaving the next day. Who’s to say the housekeeper or the next batch of tenants will be as understanding as we’ve been?”

“Let’s leave Netareena for the time being and attend to those mattresses,” I suggested. “I feel bad that we didn’t break up our rooftop hideaway this morning when we were cleaning the rest of the apartment. That way Steph would have found the mattresses in the closet where they belong.”

“And we wouldn’t have to be the ones hauling them down the stairs.”

“Come on. How hard can it be? We’ll figure out how to make a merit badge out of it. You would like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Don’t try to cheer me up,” Sue said. “I’m too tired. And I’m still mad at the gondolier. I was looking forward to that gondola ride more than you can imagine.”

“So we’ll go tomorrow. Domani. We’ll find a respectable, pudgy, middle-aged, gondolier, and we won’t even ask if he sings.”

Sue managed a half smile. “Okay. We’ll go tomorrow.
It’ll give us something to look forward to on our last night.”

“And we’ll make sure we have enough cash on us so we can go for the hour tour. I mean, if we’re going to do this, we should do it right.”

“I agree. You’ve heard my motto before, haven’t you?”

“I’m not sure. Which motto?”

“‘Buy the best and cry about it once.’”

My expression didn’t change.

“Don’t you get it?”

I shook my head.

“It means, if you’re going to buy something worthwhile, go ahead and pay for the best. You may cry about having to spend so much up front, but that’s better than buying something cheap or inadequate and then crying about it when it breaks or doesn’t work. You end up having to go back and purchase the best one later just so you have one that works.”

I still didn’t fully see how her logic related to the hour-long gondola ride versus the half-hour ride. But I did understand more clearly why it had been so painful to Sue last year when she and Jack moved into a smaller house and had to cut way back on any upgrades. All the extra money had to go toward accommodating Jack’s wheelchair. The front ramp, the walk-in shower, and the low kitchen and bathroom counters all had cost extra. Sue’s artistic touches were limited to a new bedspread and a larger mirror over the bathroom sink. I filed away her comments and
decided that the gondola ride was important to her because it was a final luxury on an already luxurious trip.

Sue checked on Netareena one more time, and then we headed up to the roof to dismantle our hideaway. We worked quickly in the gathering dark, pulling up the bedding first. Trying to remember the angle we had bent the mattresses when we brought them up to the roof, Sue and I figured out how to turn them to maneuver them down the stairs.

“You’re right,” Sue said after the first mattress made it through the narrow passageway. “It’s a lot easier with gravity on our side.”

With a concerted effort, we removed everything from the roof. Making sure the door with the ancient latch was closed securely, we shuffled the mattresses down the hall on their sides. Once we reached the front door, Sue and I each took one side of the first mattress and lugged it to the top of the wide, marble stairs. We only had to move it ten stairs down to a landing, then a turn, ten more stairs, a landing, a turn and ten more.

“Too bad we can’t just drop it out the window,” Sue said.

“This won’t be hard,” I said. “We probably could push it down, and it would slide on its own to the landing. Let’s try it.”

We placed the mattress flat at the top of the stairs and gave it a shove. It went down two stairs before stopping
and teetering. I walked down, bent over, and pushed it the rest of the way.

“You look like a mattress cowboy,” Sue said. “Should I get you a cattle prod?”

I maneuvered the mattress around on the landing and stopped at the top of the next level of stairs to catch my breath. An idea came to me.

“Sue, have you ever been mattress surfing?”

She looked down at me. “No.”

“Me neither.” Then, without stopping to allow even a glimmer of logic to speak up inside my head, I flung myself belly first on the positioned mattress and sailed down the ten marble stairs.

“Sweet peaches, Jenna! What are you doing?” Sue ran down the two flights of stairs and came to my side, looking ready to perform CPR.

I was laughing so hard I couldn’t tell her that nothing was broken. “That was awesome!” I finally peeped out.

“For you, maybe. I thought I was going to have to try to call an ambulance. How do they get an ambulance down these canals?”

“I don’t need an ambulance.”

“Who says the ambulance was for you? You’d like to have given me a heart attack.”

“Try it, Sue. It’s so fun. You’re well padded.”

“Thanks a lot.”

I laughed again at my grammatical blunder. “I meant
the mattress will protect you since the mattress is so well padded.”

“No thank you.”

“Fine. Then step back. I’m going again.”

Before Sue could protest, I positioned the mattress at the top of the final flight of stairs and did an even more daring belly leap onto the cushioned sled. As had been the case the first time, the front of the mattress hit the wall, stopping me unscathed.

“I can’t believe you’re doing that.”

I rolled over on my back and laughed merrily. The sound echoed up the stairwell. Covering my mouth, I lowered my voice. “I’ll come up and get the next one.”

Sue stood back, as I repeated my performance with the second mattress. For a girl who grew up in Minnesota with months’ worth of snow and every sort of sled and toboggan available, I was primed for this indoor event.

“Come on, Sue.” I felt rosy-cheeked as I looked up at her still-leery expression. “Didn’t you ever sled as a kid?”

“No.”

“Then think of it as busting a bronco. You just hold on for the ride.”

“I never busted a bronco, either. Why do people always think that, if you’re from Texas, you have experience with cattle?”