Now I See You Page 13

  On the walk home afterward, I flagellated myself. The doctor needed to know our medical background to keep Lorenzo healthy. Didn’t I want my son healthy? What the hell was I doing, putting vanity and fear before Lorenzo’s well-being? Hadn’t I just vowed, when he was born, to sacrifice everything for him?

  My eye disease didn’t belong just to me anymore; it was part of his story, too, and I no longer had the luxury of keeping it confidential. To take good care of him, I’d need to be honest about my limitations so I could enlist the help of other people, to measure out the Infant’s Tylenol, to locate him when he started walking, to check his head for lice when there was an outbreak at school. I had a long road ahead of me and I could not go it alone.

  I knew I’d have to come clean with my secret.

  I just didn’t know it would be so hard.

  Tip #12: On stepping in it

  Prepare to step in a lot of shit. I am speaking literally here. The world is full of canine excrement and when you can’t see out of the corner of your eye, there’s no way to maneuver around it. This is an unpleasant fact of blind life.

  Walking in dogshit, however, will seem positively delightful after you’ve slipped on the carcass of a dead animal. Like uncollected dog turds, sidewalks accumulate a rather revolting amount of roadkill—rats, squirrels, pigeons—and unless you shuffle around with your eyes glued to the pavement like a little old lady, eventually you’re going to place your foot right inside some slimy, flattened pigeon intestines.

  I have no advice to prevent this; I’m just giving you a heads-up so you can get yourself used to the idea. I do suggest, though, that you avoid sinking too much money into footwear, so that when it does happen and you’re hopping around the street shrieking, “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, MY FEET ARE FUCKING COVERED IN RAT GUTS!” you won’t feel guilty about tossing those shoes into the nearest trash can.

  12. THE MOTHERLAND

  There’s nothing like seeing a man cemented in volcanic ash to make you appreciate life.

  “Holy crap,” I marveled, turning to David. “Is this, you know, appropriate for the baby?”

  “He doesn’t know what he’s seeing,” David reassured me. “Besides, this isn’t a horror movie. It’s history. The kid’s seeing Pompeii and he’s not even two years old yet.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed.

  I stood there next to David and Lorenzo in his stroller, looking at the petrified corpse and feeling incredibly good about myself.

  We are a great family, I thought, and I am a stellar mother.

  My self-congratulation was pierced by a wail so thunderous it threatened to crumble the ruins.

  “Baaaaaaaaa-BUUUUUUULLLLL!” shrieked one-and-a-half-year-old Lorenzo, a sweating, writhing mass of limbs in his Maclaren Volo.

  “Where’s his bottle?” I asked David, translating from Lorenzese.

  “We ran out, remember?” He produced the empty bottle, an Italian biberone we’d bought a few days ago after Lorenzo had thrown his last American bottle over the railing in the Coliseum. He’d sucked down the last dregs of milk a few hours ago on the train from Rome and I’d made a mental note to fill ’er up, but as we weren’t traveling with our own cow (I had ceased being one a few months before), this was hard to accomplish.

  “Oh shit,” I said, biting my lip. “Now what?”

  The baby needed his bottle. If that plastic nipple was not shoved in his mouth in the next minute or two, sending gulps of creamy goodness down his gullet, we were going to have a situation. Imagine being stranded on an island with a toothless meth addict who’d just smoked his last crystal and you will get a sense of the panic and foreboding we felt then.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I instructed, grabbing the stroller handles. “Before he blows.”

  Before we’d come to Italy on our first family vacation, David and I had been in the process of weaning Lorenzo off the bottle, as per the recommendation of Dr. Frye. We had a very complicated weaning schedule which involved him reducing the quantity of milk he consumed as well as the frequency with which he consumed it. I’d spent weeks chastising my grandmother, who babysat Lorenzo, for caving and giving him the bottle before the appointed Bottle Time.

  “Eh-oh Mussolini! Wat’s a matter wit you?” Nonny rebuked me. “You making dis poor baby suffer! He’s a baby! He needs his baabull!”

  Of course now we were in Rome, doing as the Romans did, and that meant letting the kid drink as many bottles as he wanted. By Italian standards, he had another two, three years before we even needed to think about cutting him off. Ditto on diapers, and the paci.

  “Wow,” remarked David one night as we passed a boy in Piazza di Spangna cursing in Italian at his video game while sucking on his binky. “I don’t think they’d blink if I started using a paci again.”

  “Yeah, it’s no coincidence they use the word bambino to refer to kids until they’re teenagers,” I said. “Here, you’re a baby until you turn into a man.”

  I thought of my old Venetian beau, Benedetto, who’d be nearly forty now and probably still living with his mamma: “And then, in some cases, even after, too.”

  It hadn’t taken long, though, for our derision for Italian-style parenting to morph into jealousy. Sure, these kids stayed in diapers till they were almost old enough to say, “Mamma, I shit-a my pants!” but so what? Why the big rush to grow up, anyway? You were only a baby once, after all. And besides, it would make life a helluva lot more enjoyable not to be so exacting all the time. So, even though I knew Dr. Frye would pop an artery about it later on, we scrapped bottle weaning, and bedtime, too. Before you knew it, Lorenzo was chain-drinking milk out of Big-Gulp-sized bottles and staying up until midnight, after which point he’d climb into bed right between David and me.

  It felt fantastic to loosen up our terribly American rigidity—and between the laissez-faire parenting, the siestas, and the red wine at every meal, David and I were having one hell of a vacation. It was like a second honeymoon, only with a lot more scrubbing urine out of bedclothes.

  We needed it, too. The first few months of Lorenzo’s life had been hard on our marriage. It wasn’t just that Lorenzo woke us every two hours all night long like he was a Navy Seals drill sergeant until we cowered under the covers in fear, unable to sleep even when he was quiet. It wasn’t just that David had watched my body, previously an object of desire, transform into something that belonged in a medical encyclopedia. More troubling than all of this was the fact that David had been instantly demoted from the love of my life to the man who changed the diapers of the love of my life. David couldn’t help but feel like a third wheel as I nuzzled the baby and laughed at the baby and hung on the baby’s every gurgle as if he were Confucius. But by the time Lorenzo was about six months old, my body had recovered, his sleep had stabilized, and my hormonal monomania for the baby let up a bit, which allowed David and I to find our way back together again. And by the time Lorenzo started walking and talking, David had fallen in love with him, too.

  David could do stuff with Lorenzo now. He could read him his childhood copy of Where the Wild Things Are. Lorenzo danced along when David played Dylan and the Drive-By Truckers. The two of them could even have a conversation, albeit pretty one-sided, about the superiority of Marvel over DC comics. Whereas Lorenzo and I enjoyed a Vulcanesque mind-meld from the very start, it took David some time before he’d bonded; but now they were tight.

  It helped that Lorenzo looked just like David, with thin tufts of pale yellow hair and eyes the color of a swimming pool, a deep cyan. His eyes were so startlingly lovely—big and wide and blue like the sky, “celestial” my grandmother called them—that Italians would stop us to take pictures on their cell phones.

  It was a regular lovefest in our family, one that was only heightened by our transatlantic trip. Although now that we’d run out of milk in Pompeii, things were taking a definite turn for the worse.

  “BAAAAAAAA,” bellowed Lorenzo so ferociously he was forced to pause and take another
breath to finish the word, “BUUUUUULLLLL.” His face said, “Did I stutter? What is the holdup here?”

  I tried to hand him his lovey—a stuffed monkey named Earl—but ended up tripping over the cobblestones and tossing Earl into an ashy dirt heap, which might have been human remains. Those damn cobblestones were beautiful and all but not a friend of the tunnel-sighted. Which was unfortunate for me, since they were everywhere.

  “Let’s just head to the nearest bar,” I yelled over Lorenzo’s shrieks, dusting Earl off, “by the train station. We’ll buy him a glass of milk.”

  “Lead the way,” David agreed.

  “Me?” I protested. “You lead the way.”

  A half hour later, we were standing on a hillside covered in white flowers, watching a sheep amble by. We were approximately a hundred miles away from a bar, or any other evidence of civilization.

  “David,” I ventured cautiously, “can we agree now that we are—”

  “We are not lost,” he barked, turning the stroller in the direction of a dirt road. “I am sure we can get out this way.”

  “Baabull?” Lorenzo whispered weakly, looking up at me with hopeful eyes. “Baabull Mama?”

  “You should have let me ask someone where the exit was when there was still someone to ask!” I snapped.

  “You should have read the signs!” he snapped back.

  “You should have read them!” I shrieked. “I can’t see the print.”

  “Well I can’t read ITALIAN!”

  “Who the hell’s going to help us now?” I whined. “The sheep?”

  “Baabullbaabullbaabullbaabullbaabull,” moaned Lorenzo, in a real delirium now. He looked like a man in the throes of the Spanish flu, shaking and rolling his head from side to side. “Baabullbaabullbaabullbaabull.”

  “I am beginning to wish I was one of those guys encased in lava,” David said.

  At that moment, an explosive sound echoed out of the stroller. It was the unmistakable sound of a child shitting himself in his very last diaper.

  I gasped. “No. Fucking. Way.”

  After a pause, the thunderous sound commenced again. And again. And again. Lorenzo was taking a dump as epic as ancient Rome itself. We were up shit’s creek without a diaper.

  “Well, here we are. It’s us. We are the ruins of Pompeii,” David observed.

  “AIUTO!” I bellowed in no particular direction, “Help!”

  It only took five more minutes of screaming before a groundskeeper who looked to be about 110 hobbled over. He was very kind and insisted on escorting us to the road that led to the train station, although to describe the speed with which we walked to be a snail’s pace would be insulting to snails. An hour later, we reached the train station where we purchased a glass of milk for Lorenzo and a stiff drink for David and me. The bar didn’t carry diapers so we were forced to bring shit-encrusted Lorenzo on the train, and though we were humiliated by the grimaces of the other passengers, it ended up working in our favor. Turns out a kid who’s crapped himself is better than an unwashed homeless person to clear out a train car. There’s always a silver lining.

  The next day we boarded the train again, only this one was headed to the beach. We were traveling to Terracina, a coastal town about an hour south of Rome, where my mother and aunt Rita used to spend summers as kids. We’d be staying at my aunt Rita’s apartment, just in time for Ferragosto.

  Ferragosto is a fascinating Italian holiday for which there is no American equivalent. The date, August 15, commemorates the Assumption, which is when the Virgin Mary ascended into heaven. That, in and of itself, is cool. Mary deserves her own holiday, if only for not freaking out about the whole immaculate conception situation. Over time, though, the celebration, which you’d think wouldn’t get wilder than a bunch of lit candles and an all-Latin mass, has become a balls-to-the-wall blowout beach rager complete with skinny dips and widespread public intoxication. The Virgin Mary must have more fans than one would think. That, or August in Italy is party month and an Assumption is as good a reason as any, and better than most, to party hard.

  Starting the first week in August, Italian businesses in the big cities hang signs in their windows that read CLOSED FOR FERIE as inhabitants head to nearby beaches or mountain towns for the rest of the month. No one anywhere feels like working in August and in Italy, the cityfolk basically just agreed that they wouldn’t. Some Flavia or Fabio one day just said, “Oh, to hell with this daily grind. I’m fucking doing it; I’m taking the whole month off,” and then everyone started doing it and now if you find yourself in Rome anytime in August, your choices for dining out are McDonald’s or Burger King.

  By Ferragosto Eve, August 14, sleepy beach towns like Terracina are bulging with tourists who have perfected the art of partying over the past two weeks and are looking for a climactic night to take their revelry to the next level. The midnight ocean swim and subsequent all-night beach party is on par with New Year’s at Times Square, only with a lot less clothes and a lot more cigarette smoke.

  What made the celebration especially exciting for us is that Ferragosto Eve happened to be David’s birthday. We told Lorenzo that Italy was going to throw Daddy a huge birthday party with fireworks and music, where everyone in the whole town would go swimming in the ocean at nighttime. It would be, I promised, the crown jewel of our Roman holiday.

  Of course when the big night came, we were too tired to go.

  David and I were, that is. Lorenzo was all revved up, running around the apartment buck naked at eleven p.m.

  “Well, should we rally?” I asked David, turning my head on the pillow to face him. After a day of chasing Lorenzo on the train and in the beach and out of the street, David and I looked like we’d taken one too many horse tranquilizers.

  “Do you want to?” he muttered, hardly moving his lips. He was lying beside me on top of the sheets, eyes shut.

  “Do you want to?” I mumbled back.

  “Uhhuhhhhh,” was the sound from David’s mouth. It was more of a snore than a reply.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, rolling onto my stomach. The road to the beach was so dark and uneven, I hated having to brave it after sundown. The night before, we’d gone into town to get a gelato and I’d stepped directly into the slimy guts of a run-over pigeon, which were so slippery, I’d thought for a minute I’d stepped on a banana peel. I’d been wearing flip-flops and had to scrub my foot for a half hour before I felt clean, like a less poetic, more gross version of Lady Macbeth. Who wanted to repeat that? Better to skip the party this time.

  “YAAAAAAAA!” came a screech from the living room. It grew louder and louder until Lorenzo was shouting directly in my ear. He pounded my back and chanted cheerfully: “WAWA! WAWA! WAWA!”

  “He wants to go,” I told David.

  Lorenzo shimmied off the bed and began yanking on our feet, attempting to drag us out. By way of explanation he offered: “Wawawawawawawawawa!”

  “You sure??” David asked Lorenzo, his arms still folded in corpse pose.

  “Ya! Ya! Ya!” chanted the baby. I lifted my head to look at him and the thrill of getting eye contact set him a-chortling, his mouth gaping open so much it made the skin on the top of his nose crinkle and his tiny teeth show.

  “Okay,” David said, sitting up slowly, “Let’s do it.”

  A half hour later, we were standing in the sand staring at the dark waters of the Aegean Sea. Us and every other person with a pulse in Terracina, including a few very wrinkled old ladies whose pulses were pretty borderline. Techno music blared from the beachfront dance clubs and DJs were shouting into their mikes, pumping the crowd up for the countdown to midnight. Lanterns had been strung up along the boardwalk but it was still too dark for me to make out much of anything. I did discern a little boy in a Speedo drop trou and piss into the sand directly in front of us. Somewhere to my left, I heard clinking bottles and a bunch of teenagers cursing each other’s mothers.

  Lorenzo danced around the beach in his diaper, stomping on the sand an
d chanting, “Wawa! Wawa!”

  “Not yet, honey,” I told him, reasserting my grip on his arm to ensure he didn’t dart out of my sightline. “We have to wait til they yell, ‘UNO!’”

  “C’mere.” David lifted Lorenzo into his arms. “Daddy will carry you in.”

  The shape of the two of them was just barely discernable by the lantern light, more unseen than seen. But for me, the fact that I could make out the shine of Lorenzo’s eyes at all was a victory.

  I’m making it work, I thought to myself. Then Lorenzo squealed and pointed to the ocean where someone had released a fleet of paper boats carrying candles and I amended the thought.

  Fuck that, I thought, I’m kicking ass and taking names.

  When he was a baby, I’d been concerned that Lorenzo would miss out on things, that my handicap would limit his life experience. But in the past two weeks Lorenzo had lit candles at St. Peter’s, tossed a coin in the Trevi Fountain, seen (and become) the ruins of Pompeii. And now my son was about to swim in the Aegean Sea at midnight. The kid wasn’t missing out on much.

  Lorenzo wasn’t the only lucky one. I’d been fortunate enough to see all of it, every milestone, from his first bites of food (carrots), to his first steps (Halloween night) to his first scrape (elbow). I wasn’t missing out on anything either. My eyesight was mercifully holding steady, making me not only enjoy motherhood tremendously, but feel good at it, too.

  Boosting my confidence was the fact that I’d weathered the transition of Lorenzo becoming mobile. I’d been terrified of the kid learning to walk, and run, and climb, and now he was doing all of those things but somehow both of us were not just surviving, but thriving. Enough that I’d decided to stay in Italy with Lorenzo for another two weeks after David went back to work in New York.

  Sure, the kid narrowly avoided getting plowed down by Vespas on a daily basis, but that could happen to anyone, and besides, he hadn’t actually been hit. I’d managed to rescue him just in the nick of time, even with no peripheral vision.