Copyright © 2002 LeeAnn Heringer
|
|
||
|
Copyright © 2002 LeeAnn Heringer
|
|||
buying a leather coat for Deanin Florence, there are narrow stone-paved alleys lined with workshops where you can peer over stone casements at Italians, their heads bent like ripe sunflowers, stitching on leather. Dean was determined to buy a jacket. we'd been to a dozen stores. before we'd met Mario who was telling us when he was old he would buy land in the hills of Tuscany growing olives and grapes. he would put his feet up with a glass in his hand and his body, like a jar, would fill up with silence. there was no silence in Florence. just Vespas and cars and more cars and noisy tourists led by tour guides with battery-powered microphones. the guy from the shop next door had come over to sit on the cutting table and joke with us because it was late in the afternoon and the tourists had begun to thin out. and when I convince Dean to buy the long straight-cut black leather rather than the old-man-bomber-brown, I kissed him on the cheek and mumbled an Italian endearment. the clerk from the next door shop laughed and asked how many children we had. there in a small room the size of a kitchen overstuffed with leather garments and the low autumn afternoon light bouncing back up from the cobblestone alley, I was caught between rudeness and self-confession. how do you tell a stranger you're barren. what do you say to the mother-in-law with her brochures for fertility clinics. what thank you is appropriate for the friend who gives you a bottle of champagne and tells you to just go to bed and stay there until it happens. because 7 years is long time to linger in bed. |
|||
