on my shoulder as if to say, “Love, we’re with a homemade “J” tattoo). I thought in love, and there’s nothing anyone can of all the fun I’d had, playing along the shoreline with my sisters, and all the say about it.” difficult moments of my less-thanIt was my turn to have that experience, perfect childhood flitted away. and in the end it was the money, I think, that proved the best argument available Simone, already in tune with the fact to me in terms of coercing him to accept that frowns have a tendency to escalate, Nonno Marcello’s offer. It would change stroked my head and gathered my braids. nothing except our next continent of “You want me to redo them?” I nodded travel, and it would speed up the process yes. He grabbed my daypack from the train’s overhead rack, took the brush of saving. from the side zipper, and started to comb. Thus, we were headed to Luxembourg. After a few minutes he asked, “What are We were exhausted after traveling days you thinking about?” across the U.S. to catch our flight out of Baltimore, and Simone fell asleep. My voice broke as I said, “We bought I fiddled with the horse-hair bolo tie one-way tickets.” The feeling of finality my father had asked a Navajo friend was overwhelming, and as we neared to bead for him as a wedding gift, and Stazione Garibaldi in Milano, he had remembered the two of them joking the to remind me that I was the one who night before we left. We were standing fought to come to Italy. Why was I so in the front yard of my childhood glum? I couldn’t say. I’d never been the home. Dad pointed to the grandpa- homesick type, yet suddenly it felt like sized cottonwood that jammed our I was betraying my family. I mourned windshield wipers every fall with a mess the traditions I was leaving behind, an unusual thing since I was always very of crunchy leaves. progressive. When my Native friends “If my daughter gets hurt, that’s where played powwow tunes, I put on David I’ll hang you,” he said. The three of us Bowie. I claimed to thrive on change. giggled at the joke, but I noted his concern and the fact that nearly all of my elders were sending me off with a mixture of happiness and agitation. Why? I didn’t foresee the difficulties of a multicultural marriage. I didn’t consider how it would feel if the child I had raised ran off and married a stranger, or how it would feel if that stranger was from a foreign breed. My curiosity to keep having adventures with Simone outweighed any reticence.
“He took my hand as he told me he couldn’t wait to show me the Duomo in Milan.”
My nerves didn’t awaken until we landed in Luxembourg, transferred from bus to train, and jostled through the French countryside. Night fell. The fields and homes outside the window faded, and the glass turned into a mirror. Suddenly there I was with two braids, next to an unshaven boy who I had known for less than a year. The ground between my He said we’d take his motorcycle to childhood and future yawned open. Lake Como, and visit all the museums I was headed toward a life that had I wanted. He said I would love Italy’s taken on a serious element of mystery artwork. He knew exactly what to say. and suddenly my resolve waned. I But if Simone knew what to say, he thought about my father coming home didn’t know that Europe had detonated after work. I remembered him fishing, an ugly bomb in me, a small sliver of his eyes darting side to side, scanning irritation that came from comparing his the surface of the water for a ripple of lineage to mine. movement. I could see the thick ball at the center of his top lip, the meatiness I couldn’t express any of this back then, of his steak-size earlobes (the right one and even now it’s complicated. Yes, I
missed my parents and felt frightened to meet his. Yes, I was afraid to lose my traditions. And yes, I felt that his people’s achievements were, in some ways, bigger than my own. I wanted to blame someone, and it scared me. Was I gracious enough to love him? Was I generous enough to appreciate his culture like he had mine? “Our cultures are so much alike,” Simone said when I continued to pout. He explained that Italy was a museum culture focused on the past. He said he’d studied ancient Rome ad nauseam in school. We opened the door and stepped into the foggy Milan night. “No one expects me to speak in dialect or wear Renaissance clothes every day of my life,” he said. “Don’t you know you’re allowed to be free, too?” I wish I could say I never resented Simone for this too-simple comparison. He was encouraging me, and I needed his support to move out in the world. All these years later I know that love is often a desire for what is missing, and that leaving my homeland made me love it even more. I followed Simone into Stazione Garibaldi where we realized his parents must have gone to Stazione Centrale. We took the subway to Stazione Centrale while they drove their car to Stazione Garibaldi. Without cell phones, the four of us circled around missing each other for an hour. As Simone and I went back and forth between the two train stations, all I could think about was a premonition I had as a fifth grader. Our teacher said we had to pick a country in Europe for an annotated report, and she read down the class roster, asking each student to claim their country. I had my world geography book open to the page with the map of Europe, and my finger trained on the stylish boot kicking Sicily out to sea. I was in the clear until the teacher called on the girl who sat in front of me. When the teacher wrote her name on the board alongside Italy, I deflated. “What now?” I thought. Thankfully, it came quickly as I only had a nanosecond to think. “Luxembourg,” I whispered. It was tiny, and I’d never heard of it before, but it jumped off the page. I covered the X with my finger and repeated, my voice louder and clearer the second time. “I choose Luxembourg,” I said.
VOLUME 15 // ISSUE 3
2016 Travel Issue 3 Personal Essay Deborah.indd 2
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