Only in Naples (17 page)

“
F
idarsi è bene, non fidarsi è meglio,”
Raffaella reminded me on the phone when I called from Washington. Again the trust thing: to trust is good, not to trust is better.

Raffaella was using the expression not in reference to a person, however, but in reference to hamburgers. I had said that I was missing Italy but enjoying American hamburgers. “Better not to trust hamburgers?” I asked.

“When you eat at restaurants, you don't know what they put in the food.” She worried about me like I was her daughter, and she doubted my judgment. Now that I was far away, she realized that I was naïve, a babe in the woods. I needed her protection. For all she knew, I was living on the edge, performing daredevil maneuvers like ordering meat in restaurants where I didn't know the owner. American restaurants where I didn't know
anyone
in the establishment! How could I be sure that the meat was decent?

“Mi raccomando,”
she said, using a term that means, Watch out! Heed my advice! And keep me in your mind! all at once. “When Salva arrives in Washington, you two can cook at home.”

Salvatore had started planning his trip to the United States as soon as I left Naples. We missed each other and he wanted to see America. “Yes!” I said, “Come visit! We can see Washington and New York! I'll introduce you to American food courts!” I was thrilled.

He bought his tickets. “
Allora,
I arrive on July fifteenth and leave on August thirtieth,” he told me over the phone. Wait, I thought. Did he just say a month and a half? I couldn't wait to see him, of course, but I was taken aback. A month and a half under my parents' roof?

Words like
visit
and
vacation
are tricky. You think they can be easily translated from one language to another, from one culture to another.
Una vacanza
is a vacation, right?
Visitare
is to visit someone. But for a Naples university student,
vacanza
meant, apparently, between one and two months. The translation in American English would more accurately be a “summer internship” or an “experience abroad.” It could even be translated as “taking up an alternative residence.”

In my family, anything that lasted over two weeks was the stuff of résumés and college admissions. Vacations, on the other hand, were no longer than two weeks and usually meant a cruise. Our Wilson grandfather traditionally took our family on vacation every other year, alternating with my father's brother's family. My mother and aunt planned these vacations, which meant that while our friends from Washington went to Hilton Head or Cape Cod, we went on a cruise in Southeast Asia or the Galápagos.

My mother couldn't admit that we cruised because it was a fun thing to do, and because our grandfather was paying for it. She would come up with creative reasons for why it was “imporTanT” (with the pronunciation of the two
t
s very marked when it came to talking about spending money on oneself) that the children
understand the differences
between Asia and America. Or that they
experience firsthand
the ecosystem of the Galápagos.

Anna and I pretended that we were Captain Stubing's daughters from
The Love Boat
. We relished the fact that there was no argument between our parents over where to have dinner, no battles over the price of entrées. A cruise director could direct the show that was our family, and we could be kids in between the ports of call.

Salvatore arrived in America with gel in his hair, wearing a checked dress shirt tucked into beige pants. He was carrying a man-purse and pulling a suitcase packed with gifts for every member of my family. Raffaella had bought an Armani scarf for my mother, a Marinella tie for my father (a brand that is worn by Berlusconi and sold only in Naples), a necklace for my sister, and a number of other gifts that she instructed Salva to give to “aunts, uncles, godmothers…whomever you think appropriate.”

For me, she had packed Neapolitan
taralli
crackers, made with lard, pepper, and nuts.

My parents were standing in front of the ornate columns of their big suburban house when I pulled up with Salvatore after getting him at the airport. They seemed to be on unusually good behavior. My father welcomed him with
“Benvenuto!”
and my mother smiled. Who were these people?

We showed Salva into our modern, gray kitchen. I thought he would be taken aback by the size of the room and the fact that it looked out over our pool and extensive lawn. But he seemed unimpressed. He started fumbling around in his suitcase to find the wrapped gifts, and handed them to my parents, saying, “For you.” I'd never heard his accent so thick, or so adorable. He was sweating, even with the freezing American air-con.

“This will go great with my Bali pants,
grazie mille,
” my father said.

My mother spun around the Formica island trying on her scarf in different ways, and cooed,
“Gentilissimo grazie grazie Salvatore!”
She'd gotten a
Parlo Italiano
audiotape and was listening to it every day in her car so that she could outdo my father linguistically when Salva arrived.

He blushed and laughed. I'd never seen him blush. I'd never seen him at a loss for words.

“I didn't know what form of
you
to use with your parents,” he told me later, “I wanted to show them respect!”

I reassured him that there was only one form of
you
in English, and that they would happily answer to Bonnie and Ed (or Bony and Head). He relaxed and started to enjoy the antics of what he considered a “typical American family.” (
Typical American fathers do not swim nude
, I had to remind Salva when we got back to Italy.
They do not make loud animal noises in elegant French restaurants; they also do not buy live lobsters at Whole Foods so they can swim with them and then boil them for dinner.
)

My mother planned three weeks of travel for the four of us. While a Neapolitan
mammà
would have spent time organizing and preparing typical dishes for my boyfriend to taste, Bonnie Wilson was compiling a folder with maps, brochures, and tickets for the Show Salva the U.S.A. tour. We hit New York and Los Angeles, Boston and San Diego. My mother organized the strategic strikes with great efficiency: Who knew if Salva was ever going to come back to America? We had to get as much in as possible.

At the end of the trip, she booked us tiny, internal cabins (we certainly couldn't afford a porthole!) on a Carnival cruise going to the Caribbean. If Salva was ever going to really fit in with the Wilsons, he had to know how to cruise.

Salvatore's English was improving, but he had begun to develop his linguistic trademark of adding one incorrect letter to English words. (Years later, at our son's Catholic school, the teachers were
nunts;
my best friend Leo from college was
Lero.
) What we took to the Caribbean was a
cruiser.
My parents and I regularly corrected him with a loud
crooooozz
in unison over the racket of steel drums or announcements about muster stations. Salva snapped his fingers to the beat of the reggae, ignoring us.

My father's clothing choice and loud voice fit in, and Salva ditched the Armani suits his mother had packed after the first day and pulled out his T-shirts with bubble letters. We rocked the cocktail bar and the karaoke lounge. When he got back to Italy, Salva told his friends how much fun the cruiser had been. It was a shame, though, that we hadn't really stopped at any ports of call.

“What do you mean?” I asked him. “We went to the Cayman Islands, Cozumel—”

“But the ship only stopped for a few hours. We didn't
visit
those places.” There was that verb again,
visitare.
For Americans like us, cruising was a way to
get in
lots of places in a short time. We
did
Grand Cayman, Cozumel, Belize…in just one week. What more could you want? But for the Neapolitan in Salva, we might as well not have gone. When you dock at 9:00 and leave at 4:00, you don't even have time to taste the island's typical dish.