In the afternoon, the two women went out onto the porch.
Mrs. Marini asked whether Umberto’s cousins often came from Youngstown to help with her harvest.
“Yes, sometimes,” Patrizia said, suspending a rabbit from a hook in the overhang, its blood dripping into a bowl on the concrete slab of the porch. The porch was the only obviously sound structure of the house. Enzo had poured it. There was not a square angle to be seen anywhere else.
“I suppose there’s a crowd,” Mrs. Marini said, “a reunion atmosphere, and the latrine gets clogged.”
Patrizia sighed.
Mrs. Marini looked at her.
Do not look away from me! said the sigh. You were the closest friend I had in the world, and my husband dragged me out to this godforsaken place, where we don’t even have a toilet inside, where you knew I never wanted to come. I liked canasta on a Thursday night, like you. And you have let seven years pass without a single word. You could have said, “Enzo, let me come with you when you visit your mother-in-law. She must be lonely.” But you forsook me.
Patrizia cut the animal from its throat to its anus, then around the neck and the ankles, and ripped away its hide.
There’s no point in dressing properly, said the woman’s face. I have to listen to Berto and his idiotic plans and his raving about the eggs that are an hour out of the hen and the yolks are red, like they’re supposed to be. What difference does it make? Eggs all taste the same. Think of what I have for conversation here. Think of all the talking we used to have. Look at this house. Look at the paint coming off. We can’t afford paint. We don’t have time to paint. See the barn? See how it leans? A stiff breeze could knock it to a heap of boards on the ground. And I wish it would. I pray for that. We are bankrupt, and I am so glad! You thought we were poor before. And you left me here without even a little talking now and again.
“No more,” Mrs. Marini said to herself.
The records accompanying the deed showed that the Montaneros were the fifth owners of the property since the state of Connecticut had sold its colonial reserve (a 120-mile-long tract still called the Connecticut Western Reserve that formed the northeast corner of Ohio) to the Connecticut Land Company, in 1796. Why, what an unlikely piece of information! She could read it all right here in the cheery brochure from the real estate company.
Patrizia hacked the rabbit into pieces. Mrs. Marini got up and searched the purlieus of the house for dandelions to eat in the salad.
“The vineyards are so sharp and pretty,” she said to Patrizia, who was washing the pieces of the rabbit at the hand pump by the barn.
Patrizia shook off the meat over the grass. Indistinctly she pronounced a single English word.
“Beg pardon?” Mrs. Marini said.
“Herbicide,” Patrizia repeated.
Mrs. Marini washed the greens at the pump. It was incredible that water so cold was not frozen.
Patrizia made a pouch of her apron and bounced the rabbit parts in it to dry them, and faced Mrs. Marini as if she were speaking. A kerchief imprecisely contained her nappy hair. She had used to flatten it with an iron. Her face was utterly sad and in conflict. It said, You have not understood at all.
They went into the house. Patrizia browned the meat in grease and covered it in grape vinegar and simmered it on the stove. She went outside and honked the horn on Enzo’s car to let them know to come in for supper soon.
Mrs. Marini flattened the morning crossword on the table. Through the window, she saw Patrizia slam the car door and trudge, in unlaced work boots, through a depression of mud. Her body tottered like that of a man carrying a pail of water with one hand. Her breasts hung to her stomach. She was not wearing a brassiere. Mrs. Marini thought, I have committed a crime.
The sun fell into the frame of the window in the opposite wall. The young vineyard leaves were inky blue and still, and she was struck by the resemblance here to the view from her grandmother’s pantry, where a single window had overlooked a monotonous repetition of vineyard rows down a hillside. There was even a stump in the foreground, as there had been years ago, where the old woman’s lemon tree had grown.
Patrizia came in and slipped on her house shoes. Several sickening minutes passed as they did not speak, and Patrizia clapped a heavy knife resoundingly against the chopping board.
Mrs. Marini put down her pencil. She opened and closed her hands to stretch her creaking fingers. Outside, the hypnotizing rows of vines led straight and shimmering from the house, as neat as a typescript, and seemed even to meet under the sun, at the distant end of the woods.
At the train station in 1879, with one suitcase, with one bottle of water, waiting for the train, looking at the vast country, the terraced hills, the vineyards on the plain. If she had told anyone they would have locked her in a room. Running away to marry a man she had talked to three times, the loser of a footrace. I will never see them again. I will never see this place, ever again. Unable to find Ohio on a map, thinking, Maybe he meant Iowa, Iowa is right here, in the middle. Never having looked at the hills with anything but angry boredom, until today. One suitcase. One bottle of water. Never to see her mother or father again.
The silence went on too long, then continued.
Had they been strangers, if Mrs. Marini were lost on a country road and came in to ask directions, there would have been no disconcerting minutes while she thought of what she might say to ease the moment into familiar idleness or to bring about the crisis of saying the hidden thing out loud. With a stranger, one introduces oneself and transacts one’s business plainly.
Waiting at the train station to be a stranger to everyone. Waiting for the train to come and looking at the hills and actually stepping off the platform, back into the weeds. Maybe she could make it home without anyone noticing that she’d left. To have time to linger on the terrace of her father’s house and record each detail of the view, the elephantine limbs of the chestnut trees, the missing roof tiles, a view worth recording. Time to consider. Time to keep the promise she’d made to cut her sister’s hair. The weeds around the platform bending against her legs. What if this man beat her up? Who was she to go to where there was no one who understood the private language of her town, which even he didn’t speak? From inside the station, the eyes of the man who had sold her the ticket peeking out, a man she knew only in passing, who wondered, perhaps, why this girl was standing so still in the weeds around the platform. The expanse of sky. Her sisters would inherit her things. The light sparkling on the slag between the train tracks. With one suitcase.
Maybe Patrizia likes it here. Who knows?
They used to converse with only their eyes, as women will do among young children. Patrizia had had a gift for identifying what Mrs. Marini had eaten last by the way she held her cards during canasta, how often she reorganized her hand.
“You are so exasperating,” she complained to the wrecked crossword.
Patrizia stared spiritlessly into a saucepan.
Mrs. Marini stood to set the table. She had given up. She was through.
She opened the cupboard and recognized the gaudy china she had given away. She said, “I forget. Which glasses do you use?”
Eventually to forget the names of the streets. Leaving now meant never coming back. Wanting to keep in her brain the exact words her mother had used in forbidding her to go to the race but having already forgotten them. Wanting to keep the shrillness of the woman’s voice; though, remarkably, she could not call it to mind even now. One bottle of water. Phrasing the telegram she would send in New York to the man who’d said that he would wait for her, a man she would never have met if his brother had been ever so minutely slower of foot. Stepping on and then back off the platform. Then turning and seeing that nobody else was waiting there for the train. Nobody else was checking the clock. To her right, the opening in the trees from where the train would come; to her left, the opening where it would go away. To leave now meant that this was the last picture she would have of the place in her mind, that she would always think of it as looking the way it did that afternoon, and her mother, father, sisters, brothers, aunts, as looking just the way they had at lunch that day. None of these people would ever die. They would be fixed in Lazio, in time. She would send no address. She would receive no news. To leave now was to keep them.