I hesitated, wanting to leave room for Isabella. “I’m too nervous to sit up front,” I said, taking a bench in the middle.
Greta gestured to a chalkboard propped against the window. “Do you think when—”
The door opened and Signora Moretti entered. “Buongiorno.”
She began to speak rapidly in Italian. Greta turned around and glanced at me in panic. I feared for a moment I’d gone into the wrong room.
Signora Moretti sighed theatrically and put her finger to her lips. “We will not speak English here. Only Italian. For today only, I make an exception. And then—” She mimed a throat being cut. “Let us begin.” She pointed to herself. “Mi chiamo Elena Moretti, e—”
At that moment, the door opened and Isabella pinched my arm before sliding behind the desk next to Sally. I smelled a bitter gust of cigarette smoke on her clothes as she passed.
I stared at the back of her head, stunned. Why would she sit there and not next to me? My stomach swiveled. Did she do it deliberately? Was I being punished? Or worse—perhaps she had taken the seat without even thinking of me at all. I surveyed Sally. Was there something especially appealing about her I had underestimated? She was terribly blond. I chewed the end of my pen. That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair if it was because she was a blonde. Blondness was something I had no hope of achieving.
“Mi chiamo . . . ,” Elena prompted again, looking pointedly at Isabella.
Isabella crossed her legs. “Mi chiamo Bella,” she said.
Elena cheered.
Sally and Greta turned to look at Isabella and grinned.
I felt a queasy premonition. Isabella had such a certain kind of boldness, it was hard to tell how the other girls would take to her. How much she would be hated, or loved.
8.
August
And so our year at the academy began. In the mornings Isabella and I sat side by side in the refectory, drinking milky coffees from heavy bowls, dipping soft rolls into the froth. Then Italian lessons, according to our three levels. Only Nancy and Ruth were in the top set. They spent their mornings reading the Inferno under the tutelage of Signor Patrizi, a retired lecturer from the University of Milan. He traveled to the academy every day on a battered scooter, and we could predict his arrival by the desperate coughing of its exhaust as it battled up the hill. Katherine, Sylvia, Bunny, Barbie, Joan, and the two Marys were composing letters of complaint with Signor Moretti, Elena’s husband. Greta, myself, Patricia, Sally, Joy, Betty, and Isabella, meanwhile, were still struggling to conjugate basic verbs and spent our mornings loudly declaring the meal to be delicious, or the operator to be unavailable.
Italian lessons were followed by a light midmorning lunch of miniature ham sandwiches left for us in the refectory. We served ourselves, leaving our plates on a tray for an unseen sister to clean up later. Then we had a two-hour break. Usually, Isabella and I retreated to our rooms for clammy, restless siestas. Or else we stripped down to our slips and sprawled out on the twin beds in my room, smoking and reading novels. Some of the girls climbed down to the lake and snuck in a quick dip, turning up to our afternoon lectures with damp hair and sunburned noses.
The afternoon lectures were delivered by Signor Patrizi and took place in the lecture room off the lobby. Although thankfully they were conducted in English, he spoke with a pronounced accent that made his words so rounded you could slip off the end of them. Combined with the dim light and the whir of the projector, the lectures were deliciously soporific. The far window faced out onto the lake and I let his words roll over me, stupefied into a half doze on Isabella’s shoulder as sparrows wheeled over the water.
Lectures finished just before four p.m., at which point we joined Vespers in the chapel. We were all supposed to attend, even Nancy, who was Episcopalian. Then we had an hour free to rest or to wash and change before supper. Supper was two courses and fruit, with the obligatory pitchers of hard cider. The meals were simple and glittering with salt. After supper, we were free to do whatever we wanted until curfew, at ten p.m.—which meant hanging around our bedrooms or the common room, which was tucked into the southeast corner of the upstairs corridor.
Isabella wanted to be thorough about exploring the academy, so I helped her chart our new home. We startled a brood of gray-feathered chickens in a coop at the end of the orchard. We discovered that the back left alcove of the chapel was a gruesome ossuary cabinet with twelve shelves of bones arranged in order of size, as slender and brittle as ivory combs. My favorite place by far was the kitchen. The room was cavernous and cool, stocked with a paint box of treasures: lemons in straw, scarlet-speckled borlotti beans. The first time Isabella and I dared to peek past the heavy kitchen doors, there was a diminutive, elderly nun standing on a stool to chop onions at the counter. The nun looked up and gestured for us to enter. Her cheeks were slack, and one of her eyes was white with a cataract. I followed in after Isabella, desperate to open the doors to the larder and investigate the alchemical substances within. The nun motioned for Isabella to approach, then clamped her hand over Isabella’s and forced the handle of her knife into Isabella’s palm.
“No fair,” she gasped, as the nun gestured for her to take over slicing.
As the nun climbed down from the stool, I stared around. Hanging from nails on the right-hand wall were puckered red chili peppers and bulbs of hirsute garlic. At the back on the left was a dark cubby containing waxed rounds of provolone, gleaming behind a net screen. At home, Mama bought cheese that came in slices, and somehow I’d thought the blocks would be square. The sister pointed at a deep iron saucepan on top of a silverware cabinet. I used the stool to climb up and retrieve it for her. It was sticky up there, the top of the cabinet lined with yellowing newspaper academy girls must have left behind, since the section underneath the pan boldly advertised the figure-trimming benefits of Caspar’s girdles. As a reward for our labors, the nun pressed upon us a handful of striped green tomatoes. They smelled gloriously of dirt and geraniums and tasted so sweet my eyes watered. Isabella was eyeing mine greedily, so I gave the rest of my handful to her.
Although we were permitted to go to La Pentola, our options for entertainment were slim. It was a tiny village, with a post office that opened only on Thursdays, attached to a kiosk selling dusty bottles of Cinzano and Coke. There was a drab harbor with several chipped rowboats, a whitewashed church, a defunct drinking fountain, and two taverns. The academy girls favored the enoteca, run by Signora Bassi, a middle-aged woman with curly black hair. It was supposedly a wine bar, although I rarely saw people making a fuss over the choice of vintage. Instead, Isabella and I went there to drink her cheapest, wateriest red wine. Katherine and Sylvia were regulars, and we sat all together outside at a table near the harbor, listening to the glug of water against the dock, swatting away mosquitoes. The locals stuck to the other taverna after term had begun. I suppose after many years they had tired of schoolgirls using them as test subjects for their verb endings.