buonasera! you’re in for a bit of a different treat tonight.
i’ve been toying with the idea of releasing fiction on my substack in a serialized way, a la charles dickens, and i think this end-of-summer romp is the perfect place to start.
in an essay (calling my substacks essays feels very hannah horvath) we’re generally operating in a shared world, the one you and i both live in, where the rules are agreed-upon. but fiction requires trust in me. it’s a world i’ve constructed and made the rules for. you have to believe that this imaginary scaffolding is solid to buy what i’m trying to say.
so, i invite you to trust me, and enjoy the first part (of two) of my short story, “the kiss of venus”. best served with italian ice, aperol spritz, warm bread with the dippy-dippy seasoned plate of olive oil, and/or maybe a cigarette if you’re into that but only if you’re having it on the side of a cobblestone road with a cappuccino and someone’s nonna.
ti amo! enjoy!
10:32 a.m.
It’s a hangover so noxious, so all-consuming, it makes me want to repent.
Midday, short-shorts and all, in an empty basilica just outside of Bologna’s city center, I drop to my knees at a creaky, Old-World pew, feeling puny under the gargantuan vaulted ceilings, and pray. To what or to whom, I don’t know, but it takes the shape of please please please please make it stop make it stop make it stop, whispered at a rapid clip under my breath. My head throbs. I pepper in the few lines of the Lord’s prayer I can remember. Give us this day our daily bread et al. The throbbing sharpens, intensifies.
It was Violet’s plan to stay at the convent for the bit. A funny footnote in the long list of cheap, questionable rooms we’ve been shuttling our overstuffed duffle bags to and from during our three weeks in Italy. A blip: not even forty-eight hours in Bologna before hopping on a train to Venice.
We meaning the three of us: Violet, Kaya, and me, a friend group forged in the fire of our early teens, still fused together in our mid-twenties. The other two are snoozing next door, unfazed by the hourly church bells that had rattled me from our nap. Last night, our final act in Florence, we had gone out with Kaya’s friends from study abroad, forever ago, a cabal of rabid partiers from three continents. The night has left me with a still-blooming bruise on my ass (the unfortunate result of too many Negronis and ancient stone stairs) and a still-tangled knot in my hair.
I’ve thrown up twice already on the train ride, in the bathroom sink. Excellent start. We’d arrived just after nine this morning in the most modest outfits we could conjure from three laughably immodest suitcases-- paper-thin sundresses, strappy tank tops, and thrifted jean shorts, pulled across as much of our sun-fried and sloggy skin as possible. I’d watched Sister Giorgia, the warden of the convent’s guest house, widen her eyes at the silver glint of Kaya’s bellybutton piercing before shooing us inside.
My aching knees decide we’re done begging for absolution. I throw in some freestyle well-wishes: ummm… safe travels… world peace… hangover cured by 3 p.m. at the latest…St. Anthony please find Violet’s charger… good health for Mom and Dad… thank you Grandma and any ancestors who were not bad people amen. I perform a half-hearted sign of the cross for virtually no one but God, whoever She may be, and the elderly tourist couple taking their seats three rows back. I sling my cobalt-blue belt bag across my chest and set off to wander the grounds.
Browsing in the gift shop, eyes roving over the chic, plasticky renderings of saints, I almost trip over my own sandals when I see the woman warding the counter. Someone has decoupaged the ambiguous face of any one of my former crushes on top of a nun’s uniform with dull collage scissors. I can’t compute her. Am I already tired, horny, and overheated enough to be having religious visions? All of the sisters I’ve seen so far, flitting in and out of their quarters, border on five hundred years old. This girl’s face, bored under the fluorescent lights, is unmarred by the grooves of worry lines and sun damage. She fiddles with her waist-length braid, weaving and unweaving the strands of hair. There’s a book on the counter next to her, a receipt wedged between the pages as a bookmark: an it-girl, literary-fiction bestseller I’d read not even a month ago, translated into Italian.
I greet her with a perfunctory hello, sliding my spoils across the counter: postcards for my parents and matching saint bracelets for me and the girls, the kind with wooden beads that were popular when we were in middle school. My confirmation saint was Joan of Arc, as any annoying queer femme teenager is wont to choose, and after perusing a rack at the register, I throw in a flimsy silver necklace with a pendant commemorating her, too.
“Hello,” she says. “American?”
“Is it obvious?”
“Always. But I’ll give you a pass. We never get young people around here,” she says. “I hope you’re enjoying it.”
“Just got here an hour ago,” I say. “It’s beautiful, but I’m violently hungover, not gonna lie,” I whisper, testing the waters, and she laughs, polite, tight-lipped. I pause for a moment before continuing: “How old are you?” Her face twists. I wonder if I should beeline back to the pews before I tack on: “if you don’t mind me asking.”
“Twenty-five,” she says.
“Jesus, girl,” I answer. Her eyes widen. “Oh, shit, sorry. Sorry for using his name in vain. And for saying shit. Shoot. Sorry. I thought we might be around the same age, and we are.”
“It’s a long story.” She cranes her head past my sunburnt shoulder, shining with aloe. She summons the elderly couple armed with wood carvings of the Virgin Mary to the register with two fingers curled in staccato. “Stay here,” she says in my direction, an afterthought.
I linger by the bookshelf and eavesdrop on her conversation with Peter and Louise from West Virginia. My fingers trace the spines of Bibles in every language. They are attempting bad Italian with overextended vowels and buying nearly everything in the store. I want to turn around and catch the nun’s eye. To lasso a chord of in-joke knowing on both our wrists, tying us together. I take a book and thumb through. Some Mother Teresa biography. I reread the same sentence about her move to Kolkata three times before I’m summoned back to the counter.
“Do I get to hear the long story now?” I’m overpowered by the clatter of Peter and Louise at the door when I say it, all windchimes and small talk with the other tourists shuffling past.
She shakes her head. “Not yet.” A smile warms her stoic expression. She takes a tin of salve out of her pocket and applies it to her lips. She watches me watching her pointer finger moving in slow, hypnotic circles. Her smile widens. This is when I would usually elbow Kaya and recruit her as my interpreter: is she flirting? hissed into her ear like an impatient diplomat.
I clear my throat and start to fan myself with a prayer booklet. “Fair play, Sister. Do you know any good places for lunch around here, at least? Can you leave?”
She twirls the end of her braid around her finger. “No, I have to stay right here, at this register, all day, every day. It is my divine calling from God. I sleep, eat, and shit right here at this stool,” she deadpans.
“I like you,” I say, reaching out my hand, where the plastic Thank you for visiting Sisters of the Divine Redeemer / Grazie per aver visitato le sorelle del divin Redentore bag hangs from my wrist. It shakes with the laughter barreling from the center of my chest. “I’m Teagan.”
“Francesca,” she says, “and I’ll tell you the only place you should eat lunch.” On a notepad with La pace sia con te letterhead (“Peace be with you”, as a quick search later confirms), she scrawls directions to, in her words, “an institution so old they can’t be found on Google Maps.”
Her handwriting is slanted and loose. She loops her lowercase ts. I’m always like this. Zeroing in on people who are hot and withholding, then making a game out of scenting for something I can cling to. A key detail that might pry them open like an old locket. I thank her and pocket the note before I get caught staring at it for too long.
“How long are you here?” She asks.
“Just tonight. We leave tomorrow afternoon.”
She nods. “Any plans after lunch?”
“Ungodly activities,” I tease. “I won’t scandalize you with the details. Confession-booth material, I fear.”
That gets another laugh from her. “I might have a recommendation for those activities, too.”
“Sister Francesca!” I clasp a faux-scandalized hand over my mouth, looking over my shoulder towards the door. Through the glass, I can see Peter and Louise are still chatting with their fellow sun-chapped seniors, eyes squinting in the bright daylight, hands on cargoed hips.
She rolls her eyes. “You don’t need to call me Sister. Too formal.”
“Tell me.”
She leans over the counter, twining her fingers together. “The last night before I gave my life to God, I went to this brilliant warehouse party.”
“Oh my fucking God. Wait, sorry. No, I take it back, I think the name-in-vain was justified there.”
“I’m throwing in a rosary for that mouth of yours,” she says, sliding one out from a drawer behind the register, Pepto-Bismol-pink plastic. Her fingers encircle my wrist, firm, and she slides it into the tiny opening of my bag. I’m sweating.
“And?”
She tears another square off the notepad. Underneath another La pace sia con te heading she writes a neat, bulleted list of directions. “That one’s on the map. But the cab drivers never know how to get there.”
I pocket this too without looking. She’s leaning back in her chair now, still twirling her braid around her pointer. I am soft-jawed and sliding full-tilt into enamored. “What if you came with?” I ask.
Francesca tilts her head, considering. I wonder which saint could pull the lever that will get her to surprise me and say yes. We simmer in quiet for almost a minute before the windchimes startle us again: another couple, Peter and Louise’s courtyard counterparts, all too-sure limbs and too-loud conversation.
“Depends on who’s up late tonight. Here’s where I usually am.” On a third note, she draws a bird’s-eye view of the guest house, the sisters’ quarters, and the basilica. She draws a lopsided star to mark the side entrance. “Knock four times so I know it’s you.”
I nod and give her a salute. “Ciao, Sister,” I call over my shoulder, and I don’t have to look back to know she’s rolling her eyes again.
***
12:17 p.m.
Traveling with Violet and Kaya is like meeting them for the first time again and again. In each city, we relearn new idiosyncrasies. We discover new products in each other’s makeup bags. We’re jolted by the mundane-- ah, right, yes, Kaya’s a night showerer. Violet wears a cat-ear headband to apply her skincare, despite being allergic to cats. I have to stretch my hips in ungodly contortionist twists before open my eyes. Violet is constantly arguing in favor of not buying train tickets. Kaya thinks that every time we don’t buy train tickets the conductor will come check. Bad karma. I am willing to do whatever wills their fiery stubbornness into silence. In sum: Violet throws the itinerary to the wind and Kaya catches it.
I am a secret third archetype. I am late to bed and early to rise. Frenetic. Too much potential energy. I have never been able to nap, not really. Place me in a bed that is not my own and my body acts like she has never known sleep. And yet this trip was my idea.
My idea plus Kaya’s insistence plus Violet’s fuck-it-I-booked-the-flight spontaneous thirding. A hypothetical whispered while clutching flimsy programs in the pews of a church I had only been to on holidays. They read Il Capo Forever. I’d already crushed one in my purse on accident. My sweet Caps’ handsome face, a portrait taken when he was younger than me, crinkled in printer ink. I was cracking jokes and not making sense. None of it made any sense.
Except you’re not supposed to say that someone dying at eighty-eight doesn’t make sense. But I couldn’t help it-- I’d grown up thinking my grandfather, who we affectionately called Caps, a riff on Il Capo — the boss— transcended age. He was immortal, with his long neighborhood walks and nightly boxed red wine. He was sharp. He was pleasantly surprising his doctors. He traveled.
More than that, he took a keen interest in me, the ways I rubbed up against everyone else. When he died I wondered if I would ever have that kind of blind, unconditional backing again. I’m still wondering.
All I could say was “I never got to go to Italy with him,” as the slideshow containing his entire life replayed for the fifteenth time. Violet and Kaya rubbed my shoulders in silence while I pressed a tissue to my nose, a caricature of a grieving granddaughter. A ridiculous thing to whine about at a time like that. A luxury. I was too sleep-deprived and too devastated to pretend like I didn’t have a childish outlook on death, one that dealt solely in selfish wants for stolen time.
“What if we went together?” Kaya asked, a soothing rhetorical meant to humor me.
“What…. iffffff… we went together?” Violet echoed, and I saw the plans, the Italo-disco pregame playlist, the Lizzie-McGuire Vespa ride, swirl in her irises.
“Allora, what if-a we went-a togeeeeether,” I mimed in my worst accent, and we hid our faces in our hands to stifle our laughter. All I could think was: he would love laughing at his own funeral.
I didn’t want a weepy pilgrimage. I wanted fistfulls of bread. I wanted dance floor makeouts. I wanted aperol spritz mainlined in an IV drip. I wanted Pinterest board. I wanted a White Lotus season wherein the only casualty was my bank account.
I slot myself between them. We’d pushed the beds together as soon as we arrived in the room. A habit shared amongst the three of us: sleeping like puppies, shoulder-to-shoulder. “Good morning,” I coo, and I meet Kaya’s eyes, half-lidded.
“What time is it,” she asks, too slow for a question mark.
“Past noon,” Violet chimes in from the other side.
“Teags! You could’ve come up sooner! We’re wasting precious daylight!” Kaya stands up from her divot in the mattress, pulling her jean bermudas back on.
Violet groans and pulls the top sheet over her head.
“I was busy,” I say, sitting up. “Securing us a plan for lunch. And for going out tonight. Not to mention praying for your asses. You’re welcome.”
“Pray for your own ass,” Kaya snorts. “How’s the bruise?”
“So bad,” I whine, pulling up the bottom hem of my shorts. She gasps. I roll onto my side, wincing. “Hip’s kinda gnarly too.” I slide the elastic downward.
“Tattoo’s still readable, at least,” Kaya says, kissing two of her fingers and laying them sympathetically on the site of the crime.
The first of many small spirals on this trip: a small phrase inked into my hip, cent’anni, the Italian version of “cheers” that translates to may you live a hundred years. It was exactly the kind of thing Caps would hate, but I wanted some kind of physical proof that my life had changed forever. (At least I had the decency to get it in a place that neither God nor Caps could see.)
“I’m fine,” I continue. “I’m prescribing myself pasta and wine to get over it.”
“Pasta, wine, magical cure, I’m up,” Violet says, jutting one foot out of her cocoon.
“That’s universal healthcare, baby,” Kaya says.
All I can think on the way to our hole-in-the-wall refuge is that death feels both so final and so flimsy. I feel Caps in the cobblestones. I see him in the man running the small restaurant, mustachioed and long-limbed, who throws his arms around us and asks how am I getting you girls drunk today? while his wife laughs in the kitchen and lifts long, silky strands of linguine from their drying racks and into a waiting pot.
I think that’s why I still cling to some bits of Catholicism even as I’ve disowned it. I like the neatness of capital-H Heaven. (I try to forget the arbitrary barriers to entry.) I can’t compute anything else. I’m not equipped to deal with the Schrodinger’s-cat dead-forever/not-dead-forever/who-fucking-knows agnostic ambiguity.
We’re eating perfectly-cut strawberries off an eggplant-colored plate at the end of our meal, sated into silence. I’m not sure how to artfully introduce my morning encounter. “I met a girl in the gift shop,” I start.
“Oooooh,” Violet coos.
“I invited her out with us tonight.”
“Ooooooh.”
“There’s something you’re not saying,” Kaya says.
I hold up a quieting palm and order another glass of wine. “You’ll see.” The gift of the secret third: I’m able to keep a few tricks in my pocket.
***
9:42 p.m.
When we approach the side door, the asymmetrical star on Francesca’s hand-drawn map, the girls are a chorus of confusion. Through dinner they’d pressed for details I wouldn’t give. All I’d said was we’re picking up our fourth before leading us into the dimly lit basilica courtyard. I shush them and knock four times.
Upstairs I hear laughter float out of the window, loud and uninhibited. Voices chattering in rapid Italian. No one comes to the door. My forehead dots with sweat. I knock again, four sharp raps.
The upstairs conversation pauses. I hear footsteps. The door swings open: Francesca, clutching a cigarette between two fingers. Her salve, pink-tinted, has left a mouth-shaped ring around the filter. Her hair juts out of her braid in loose, wavy pieces. Her linen sleeves are rolled up to the elbows.
“You came for me,” she says. I’m already unraveling.
“I did. And I brought friends,” I say, with a blanket of nervous laughter. “Kaya, Violet, this is Sister Francesca.”
“Solo Francesca,” she says, and she summons us inside with the same surefire fingers I’d seen in the shop earlier.
“She’s hot, I get it,” Violet whispers, curling her hand around my bicep as we step into the den.
“What,” Kaya asks without punctuation, taking my other arm in hers.
It’s a sparse, open room, with a crimson rug sidled underneath drab dorm-room furniture. All the windows are open, and a group of eight nuns are gathered around a wood-carved coffee table, holding cards and wafting plumes of smoke from their boisterous mouths. Jewel-toned poker chips gleam in the middle of their circle. They greet us with polite nods and smiles, and Francesca makes herself comfortable on the floor. She pats the space next to her.
“Sit, sit,” she commands. All the sisters’ sleeves and linen skirts are rolled up. As I cross my legs, I’m struck by how similar our calves all are. Shining and curved in the dim light. A few of them have shaved.
The oldest sister in the room, all graying eyebrows and knowing lips, leans down to Francesca and asks something in Italian. She gestures to us. Francesca says something in return, places a reassuring hand on her sister’s knee, and winks. The older sister laughs and takes a drag.
Francesca leans over. We’re so close I can see the freckles between her eyebrows. “She asked if I was getting into any more trouble tonight,” she says.
“Are you?” I ask.
“Depends. You’ll have to go through Sister Agostina.”
“Can we borrow her?” I ask. Francesca translates. Sister Agostina considers, takes a long inhale. Violet is getting a light from another sister across the table, sun-spotted fingers flicking the lighter in tiny jolts.
She speaks, clipped, before she nods.
“What’d she say?”
“Return her in one piece.”
Calista Dickens!!!!!
I love love love this story! Need part two immediately