Friday 25 March 2004
My own afternoon at Santa Croce, getting sore feet, hating other tourists even though I hate hating other tourists, trying to love Giotto, reading in the sun in the cloister, being denied access to the Machiavelli chapel, buying postcards, writing them out with a cup of cioccolata calda & too-firm spoonable too-abundant panna (why is the word for cream so close to the word for bread?), then walking past the duomo against the blue dark sky with its fingernail moon, having dinner with Momma & her friend Ana--bruschetta, house red, a red candle, spaghetti in a light spicy tomato sauce with large pieces of raw arugula on top that darkened & softened & sweetened as you mixed them in with the hot pasta--Ana vociferous about her divorce, its inevitability, Momma vociferous, through a haze of red wine, about Caraway Jack, the inevitability of Caraway Jack in her life (& yet not really explicitly admitting anything about their relationship) and how the inevitability of Caraway Jack allowed her to finally, truly, purely love her husband, but not until after other trials, the drugs, the breakdown, the loss of her daughter, and gripping my hand across the table, tears standing in her eyes, her voice breaking, this is the only thing that really matters, love matters too, yes, but your children! and imagine having your child taken from you, by your own mother! That's a betrayal that you can't forget! Ana looking at us, her own face pretty flushed, and trying to be tactful while implying it was odd that my mother could have allowed that to happen, no matter how sick she was, and me sitting there between them and thinking it wasn't really appropriate for them to be discussing me in that way, in front of me, and trying to steer the conversation back to less explosive topics. Ana's disastrous marriage: fine. Better than the minefield of my mother's psychological landscape, our tortured relationship with each other, with Daddy, with Dottie.

Then we finished dinner and it was all sweetness and light, looking at shoes and candelabra in the shop windows.