Blue Plate Special (43 page)

E
very day, at around two o’clock, Brendan and I took the same walk, a big loop that brought us along a high ridge, through vineyards, and down tiny Tuscan country roads to the village, where we often had a little coffee and bought supplies—clementines, a whole chicken, romanesco—before climbing up the steep hill through a big olive grove and home again. On the ridge, we could see Florence down below on the left and on the right, a lush terraced valley and mountains with long fingers of fog in the high gulches.

Once home, Brendan cooked us classic, simple, rustic Italian dishes he’d learned from his father: spinach
gnudi
with a butter sage sauce; roast leg of lamb with green pepper-apple-onion curry, arborio rice, and mango chutney; tender osso buco; a
peperonata
over polenta so silky it melted in our mouths; lasagna with veal Bolognese and béchamel; breaded veal cutlets, crisp and thin, with a fresh chopped garlic-tomato-and-basil sauce; a Sicilian eggplant pasta known as
alla Norma
, a pure alchemy of olive oil, garlic, eggplant, fresh basil, and
ricotta salata
, mixed well into a bowl of hot, freshly cooked penne.

He made pizza from a recipe invented by Marcella, the villa’s retired cook and housekeeper. On a rolled-out rectangle of golden-white dough rubbed with olive oil, he spread chopped black olives, capers, and anchovies; thinly sliced mozzarella and prosciutto cotto; and a sauce of strained tomatoes with more olive oil, oregano, basil, and salt. Then he baked it hot and fast. It was the best pizza I had ever eaten.

One day, we went with Brendan’s father to Perugia, the medieval mountain town where he and his five siblings grew up while Brendan’s grandfather Robert Fitzgerald was translating
The Odyssey
. We had lunch in their old family villa, a huge, drafty, very beautiful old place with a view all the way across the valley to Assisi. It was bitterly cold that day, and the massive stone house was like a walk-in refrigerator. We all sat hunched for warmth by the kitchen hearth at a long wood table while Brendan’s aunt and uncle, who lived there with their young son, served an Italian Sunday lunch—spaghetti
al pomodoro
(I gave up and ate gluten in Italy and was therefore bloated and churlish much of my time there, but it was almost worth it), then flank steaks and cauliflower—they grilled the steak on the open kitchen hearth. We drank prosecco first with olives and cheese, then Chianti with lunch, and for dessert,
vin santo
with pears poached in red wine and cinnamon and sugar, along
with the pignoli cookies we’d bought in town before lunch. It was a memorable, dreamlike afternoon.

F
or two weeks during the holidays, we stayed in Rome in Brendan’s friends’ apartment, a large aerie overlooking the Piazza di San Cosimato in Trastevere. We were dog-sitting an ancient female yellow Lab. We called her Mrs. Walrus because she was portly and philosophical and possibly very dumb. A few times a day, we took her down to the piazza in the creaky old elevator and shuffled beside her as she made her lumbering but enthusiastic rounds. Her gnomic, sweet disposition struck me as something to emulate in old age.

On Christmas Eve, Brendan made a
bollito di manzo
, the traditional Italian Christmas meal, a shoulder roast boiled with vegetables and herbs. When it was done, he took the meat out and set it aside and cooked tortellini in the broth, soup to start. The meat was sliced and served with
salsa verde
—a thick, savory sauce of blended hard-boiled egg, anchovies, garlic, parsley, capers, and olive oil—and arranged on a plate with sliced boiled potatoes, tomatoes, and hard-boiled eggs.

After dinner, we walked to midnight mass at Santa Maria in Aracoeli to see the famed Gesù Bambino. It was a warm, wet, windy night. The old cobblestones were gleaming, the river was wild and rushing, and everything was lit up. In a tree by the Tiber, thousands of tiny birds crowded the branches, singing. We climbed a mountain of slippery steps to the church and sat with a crowd of yuppified, bourgeois Roman families in the pews, all of us awaiting the Bambino. After the oddly cheesy, subdued mass, he was finally released from his cabinet near the altar and grandly processed about the church. Brendan and I started giggling; he looked exactly like a dark, dried pineapple.

On New Year’s Eve, because we’d forgotten to make reservations,
we landed in a cynical restaurant for an overpriced meal that gave us both intense stomach pains immediately afterward—the condition of the kitchen and food-handling standards were nothing I cared to think too much about. Brendan had described the Roman New Year as a kind of Mardi Gras—wild decadence, fireworks everywhere, the city exploding with abandonment, people fucking in the streets, drunk and high and lost in pleasure. I had been understandably excited to see this, but we had to go straight to bed after that dinner; also, a thunderstorm with wild wind and rain competed with the fireworks, so being inside seemed doubly attractive. We crawled into bed, and the poor terrified Mrs. Walrus came with us. We fell asleep well before midnight, huddled together warm and snug as the thunder and fireworks blasted all around us. The next morning, we awoke fully recovered.

During the following spring, spending most of our time back in Brendan’s farmhouse together, it began to dawn on me that I had actually left New York.

I remembered one morning, a month or so before I’d fallen in love with Brendan, when I had awoken trapped in my bed, listening to clanking, roaring garbage trucks outside, choking on cigarette smoke from the apartment downstairs, sensing the seething millions of people around me, pressing on my skull. That morning, I saw the city clearly, suddenly, as if for the first time—it was loud, dirty, crowded, touristy, expensive, maddening. Had I changed or had New York? Was it me or it? It didn’t matter. From that moment on, I had to leave.

In my mind, of course, I was still a New Yorker, just an expatriated one. New York was the only place I’d ever felt I belonged. Whenever I went back, I felt the startling relief of hearing my own language, and every block shimmered with a ghostly overlay of memories. But nothing made me want to live there again.

I loved the deep, total quiet of the farmhouse. I loved not seeing any lights at night, only the Milky Way arching over the sloping fields. One morning, we saw a coyote foraging for fallen crab apples; that afternoon, we walked down to the clean, wild lake as the sun set and stood on a dock listening to the spooky, theramin-like singing of the freezing surface.
On a faraway ridge, a line of shaggy old hemlocks marched along like primordial beings. The next day, a hawk landed in the meadow below the house and sat in the sun for a while, apparently daydreaming.

I
n July 2010, just as I finished writing
The Astral
, I heard from my mother that my sister Emily with Campbell and their four children had come out of the Twelve Tribes. They had left Australia altogether and moved in temporarily with Campbell’s parents in the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand. After all these years, she was back in our family, and without any strain or strangeness; that was never Emily’s way.

But, she had told our mother, it was wrenching for her to be away from the community she’d lived in for so many years, where she’d met and married her husband, where all her children had been born, where her closest friends lived. They had all raised their kids together. Emily had been the community’s teacher. Now, their little family was isolated in a small, suburban New Zealand town where Emily knew no one except her in-laws, where she and Campbell had no jobs, no home of their own. She told our mother that she was having a very hard time adjusting to life outside of the group. She needed to feel close to her family again. And we needed her just as much.

My mother had been planning to spend most of December in Amsterdam with Susan and Alan and their two sons, Milo and Luca, so she offered to fly Emily there, and of course I decided to go, too.

And suddenly there we all were, the four of us, together again in Amsterdam. Everyone still looked the same. We all shared the same old jokes. We were a little rusty with Emily, and she with us, but only at first. The habits of being in a family are deep and ingrained. Over the decades, during all the rifts and schisms and confrontations and silences and offenses
and resentments, something had been at work, a strong undertow of love, in all of us. We sat around Susan’s table on our first night and looked at one another, smiling, hardly knowing where to begin. All four of us were adults now, all of us were settled in our far-flung lives: Susan in Holland, where she ran a yoga center and was raising her two boys with Alan; me in New England; our mother in Arizona with a huge group of friends, a full social life, and a lot of adventures; and Emily in New Zealand—all of us with some combination of life’s natural weight: friends, husbands, kids, dogs, houses, in-laws, work, regrets, triumphs, and histories. It was a cold, snowy December in Holland, but we were warm, inside and out.

We took Emily shopping in Amsterdam’s finest thrift stores and bought her a whole new sexy, stylish wardrobe to replace her community clothes. We got her hip-length chestnut-brown hair cut into a sleek and shining mane that fell to the middle of her back. I took her to get waxed. When she emerged from her baggy modest dresses and heavy braid of hair and sensible sandals, she looked about the same as she had at seventeen, when she’d left to marry Claus: willowy, curvy, beautiful, leggy, and suddenly confident, suddenly laughing a lot more, her once-drawn face alight again, full of fun. We went to pubs and ate mounds of
fritjes
all afternoon, while the boys drank sodas and we adults had beer and wine. We cooked big dinners together. Susan, who is an ayurvedically trained vegetarian cook, made beautiful, simple meals. I made vegetable curries and homey soups. Emily, who isn’t fond of cooking, happily chopped and peeled whatever she was asked to. Our mother ate whatever we put in front of her and gushed over it.

After we ate, Emily sat at the piano and Susan and I stood around her with our glasses of prosecco or wine, and we sang all our old three-part songs, the ones we’d performed all those years ago at the Reed coffeehouse the year they’d visited me in Portland, the winter Emily and I had fought so bitterly. We
sang “Moonshiner” and “Star of the County Down” and “Home in Pasadena” and Mozart’s “Laudate Dominum,” our mother listening on the couch and smiling with tears while the three of us fell easily into our old harmonies, our voices, older now, rusty, and sometimes even creaky (and sometimes I had to sing through a lump in my throat), blending just as naturally as they had when we were young girls. All our differences seemed to melt away—all the things we’d ever disagreed about, all the things we’d been so angry at one another for through the decades. While we sang together with our eyes on each other’s faces, smiling, we were as close as we had ever been in our lives, maybe closer, for having been separated for so long.

Our family was so much bigger now than it had been when we were young. It had expanded to encompass so many other people—my six nieces and nephews; Alan and Campbell, and Jon, too, who’ll always be part of my family even if our marriage is over; and Brendan; and Caddie and Thea, our half sisters, and their husbands, Pop and Vin, and Caddie’s daughter, also named Thea. And now that Emily was back, the circle was well and truly complete.

After two weeks of food and wine and laughter and the occasional flash of ancient annoyance (families never change) and overwhelming, amazed, grateful joy, I flew back to New England. Brendan and Dingo picked me up in Boston, and we drove north through a dark, snowy, cold evening. I was so happy to see them again, so happy to be back home in New England where I belonged. We drove the last miles slowly along the pitch-dark, empty dirt roads back to the farmhouse. We slept deeply together in the absolute quiet and dark, woke to the morning light on the mountains, coffee with half-and-half and honey, and warm soft-boiled eggs with buttered toast.