She visibly relaxed when Nicole dropped the subject. Nicole sighed. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” she murmured in English, and started, painfully, to laugh. Julia’s startled expression only made her laugh the harder.
Family you could escape, but even in West Hills it was sometimes hard to escape the neighbors. Not that, there, they dropped by and wanted to borrow a cup of oil and stay on for a chat; it was more like hard rock at three A.M. and dog poop in the front yard.
In Carnuntum, there wasn’t anything at three A.M. but maybe an early rooster crowing, but during the day plenty went on. The day after Brigomarus came to pull his sister into line, Nicole looked up from chopping scallions to find herself face to face with a vaguely familiar figure. It was the voice that jogged her memory, high and rather thin, with a touch of what people in Indiana used to call adenoids.
The owner of the voice, Nicole realized, was rather obviously pregnant. She didn’t seem to be blooming, but rather the Rosemary’s Baby type: wan and hollow-cheeked, but in this case irrepressibly cheerful. She held up a cup and said brightly, “Good morning, Umma! It’s been absolute days since I saw you. Here, look, I have an excuse. I’m out of oil and my dear woollyhead of a husband has gone off all day drumming up clients, and it’s such a long walk to the market.”
Nicole was no recent expert in cup-of-sugar diplomacy, but she’d seen plenty of it when she was growing up. If it wasn’t sugar, it was coffee, or maybe, in extremity, a cigarette: a transparent excuse to come by, camp in the kitchen, and chatter the morning away. Housewives did it to lighten the monotony, or to get out of washing the ceilings, or to drum up sympathy for this or that husbandly stunt.
In Carnuntum, apparently, the medium of exchange was olive oil. Nicole spared a half-instant to wonder if Umma actually gave away what she sold to regular customers, then shrugged and dipped the cupful. Her neighbor, as she’d expected, didn’t just thank her and leave, but perched on a stool near the counter where Nicole was working. It was a slow time of day, as she must have known and calculated. She looked as if she was a regular occupant of that same stool, easy and comfortable — surprisingly so for someone whose pregnancy didn’t seem to be treating her well.
“So,” she said. “How is everything, then? Do you believe what Valentia got up to with that traveling eye-doctor? Why, I hear her husband whipped her black and blue — then she made him feel so guilty he gave her a new necklace! Imagine that!”
Nicole hadn’t known she was tense till she felt the muscles of her back and shoulders relax. This was the easy kind of neighbor, then, the one who never let you get a word in edgewise. She didn’t appear to notice anything odd about Nicole, nor did she expect any answer to her rapid-fire questions — just rattled right on through them. There was something strangely soothing in the endless flow of her voice, names and events that were as alien to Nicole as the far side of the moon, but so many of them were familiar, too: this couple married, that one divorced (“And he tried to pretend her dowry was his own family money, can you believe that? Got slapped good and proper for that one, you can be sure!”), a third blessed with a son, “and about time, too, after six daughters — they had to expose the last four, they just couldn’t feed them.”
The woman sighed. Her face, for a moment, was almost somber. “Some people have children and don’t want them. Me, I want them and neither of my first two saw even one birthday.” Nicole heard her with grim astonishment. Things like that didn’t happen in California. No — they did, but rarely enough that they put you on the talk-show circuit with your anguish. Well, Nicole’s neighbor was on the talk-show circuit, too. She sighed and patted her belly. “This time, by Mother Isis, everything will be fine. It will.”
On and on it went. Somewhere in the middle, Julia came down from cleaning upstairs, greeting the visitor with a smile of honest pleasure and a delighted, “Fabia Ursa! How good to see you. You’re looking well.” Which gave Nicole a name and a respite, while they chattered at each other for a while — till Julia seemed to remember her status and excused herself to take the heap of soiled bedding and filthy clothes across the street to Titus Calidius Severus, who would trample them in a tub full of water and fuller’s earth. No washing machines or laundromats here. No Tide, either, worse luck.
Nicole realized as the morning went on that she liked Fabia Ursa. She also realized she couldn’t say that of anyone else she’d met in Carnuntum, even Lucius and Aurelia. It was odd, because back in the twentieth century she’d cordially despised the kaffeeklatsch queens, as she’d liked to call them. Fabia Ursa was a cheerful soul, happily married to a somewhat feckless but much beloved husband, whose foibles she was not shy about sharing. She had two slaves who did everything, as she professed, and had not much to do, it seemed, but trot about and discover who was doing what to whom. She did it with such relish, and with such a clear sense of vocation, that it was impossible to dislike, still less despise her.
Yes, Nicole liked Fabia Ursa. She was not so sure at all that she liked Titus Calidius Severus. Sometimes she did. Then he’d say something, or do something, to set her off again.
He waved to Nicole whenever they saw each other outside their front doors. She always answered politely, and she remembered to use his praenomen. Past calling him Titus, however, she gave him nothing he could take for encouragement.
Although Julia clucked like an unhappy mother hen, Nicole wasn’t altogether unhappy when the fuller and dyer stayed out of the restaurant for a few days after her trip to the market. She hoped that meant she’d made him stop and think. No one, she told herself fiercely — not Umma’s brother, not Umma’s lover, no one — was going to take her for granted here.
Despite that determination, her nerves twanged like a Nashville guitar string when, two or three days after she and Brigomarus had got nowhere, Calidius Severus walked in with a man about half his age who otherwise looked just like him — and, unfortunately, smelled just like him, too. They sat down together like an identical-twin act, exact same stoop, exact same turn of the head, even the same shift and hitch on their respective stools. Nicole, watching them, felt a small, distinct shock, a Why didn’t he tell me? shock, much the same as if she’d found a wedding ring on Calidius Severus’ finger. But he couldn’t be married, could he? No. Julia had said he was a widower.
She’d tangled herself in a brief knot, and he was speaking, ordering dinner with perfect and not perceptibly strained casualness. “Wine and bread and onions for both of us, Umma, “ he said, “and what else have you got that’s good?”
“Snails fried with garlic in olive oil?” she suggested. She’d been holding her breath, she discovered, but she’d had to let it out to play the polite proprietor. “I had Lucius bring me back a basketful of snails this morning.” And Lucius, no doubt, had had as much fun catching them as an eight-year-old boy could. An incongruous bit of English doggerel went reeling through her head: Snips and snails and puppy dogs’ tails.
“Those do sound good,” Titus Calidius Severus said. Nicole had to clamp down hard on a giggle. His son, whose name Nicole resigned herself yet again to having to pick up from conversation, licked his lips and nodded, smiling widely. The smile, at least, was different from his father’s. Titus Calidius Severus was much too sure of himself to indulge in such a goofy grin.
Nicole would sooner have done the snails in butter herself. They had butter in Carnuntum — had it and looked down their noses at it. It was their last resort when they couldn’t get olive oil. No accounting for taste. Nicole thought, the phrase forming in her mind in English and Latin at the same time. De gusttbus non disputandum.