Abroad Read Online Free Page B

Oxford. My mother was bereft, and I couldn’t stand it. In desperation, I finally said it had turned out that Sean was homosexual.
    Leah Deacon sat back, and then reached over and patted my hand. “It’s a complication,” she said. “But nothing we can’t master.”
    “Mom! No, it’s over. Really.”
    “Well. We will be more careful next time,” she said, sighing.
    Careful! I wanted to say. How? There was no manual for a girl like me. We were fondled, sucked, dropped, and we learned to do the same to the boys until we were all pliable and porous as old sponges. But for my mother, the story would be different. After all, I wanted something different. In her mind, I was taken to country inns, to long dinners in London, college dances, picnics in St. James’s Park.
    And now I was going to Italy. What fantasies I would create for her there! Or maybe the storytelling would end, and I really would meet someone we both thought was wonderful. Someone who wouldn’t fall out of love with me the minute I was out of sight.
    Once I arrived in Grifonia, I called my mother daily. She hung on to every word—about my classes, my friends, my new home.
    “A cottage !” she cried. “How darling. And have you met any boys yet?”
    Oh yes, I said. Many, many charming boys.
    “Ahhhh. Can you send pictures?”
    “I will, when I think of it.”
    “Ah! Sweetheart. You are dreaming. You are dreaming.” She loved to say that. I think it was a bit of Hebrew that didn’t quite translate properly. I never contradicted her. She hated it when we corrected her English, and anyway, she was somewhat right.
    *   *   *
    Those next few days, I saw Jenny only once. Well, that’s not true. What I mean is, I spoke to her once. I saw her quite a few times, gliding across the main piazza, flanked by two other girls, a thin redhead and a tall black girl, all three dressed in long jewel-toned sundresses that flapped behind them in the late summer wind. They were an arresting threesome, promenading along the via there, and I watched as men and women alike turned to watch them as they passed. The scene reminded me of a bad painting my father had of the Greek Muses, holding their various instruments of art. It hung in his office at home, and as a little girl I used to stare at it, wondering who these women in the clouds could be, what their lives were like. And now, here they were, marching to Hotel Nysa for a Negroni.
    The first time I spotted her I waved from the palace steps, but Jenny seemed not to see me, so from then on I kept to myself and simply followed the three girls’ movements, which seemed focused and secretive. Sometimes they turned down a side alley, as if looking for something. Twice they stopped to speak with a small pod of Italians, but after a few words the three of them moved on just as quickly, their steps perfectly in sync. I couldn’t help admiring how at ease they looked, as if they’d grown up striding through Italian squares, leaving cawing men in their wake, and I was filled with a flare of desperate envy.
    My own social start in Grifonia was rather less easy. Other than directions and instructions on where to buy things, Gia and Alessandra, as warned, offered little help. There was a Welsh girl named Marcy who took an overly eager liking to me after singling me out at an Enteria orientation picnic, and, as I had little else to do, I obliged her by meeting her for drinks that night. But as soon as I approached the table my heart sank, as she had apparently put the call out to all the mousy girls in the program. I didn’t like to think of myself as a wallflower, but I was, I suppose, the type who could go either way, and dear Marcy had picked that up about me. I had never seen so many eyeglasses or baggy cargo pants at one table. Amassed in the middle was a tower of guidebooks, in every language the Lonely Planet series had to offer.
    “So what we do, everyone says, is have drinks here first. Then eat at Etrusco or