Only in Naples (8 page)

I
was in a flannel robe on the Avallones' living room sofa one evening watching a horrendously dubbed version of
Diff'rent Strokes
when I heard,
“Egoista! Sei un egoista!”

Benedetta was screaming. Nino was booming. Salvatore and his mother were trying to make peace. All four of them were in Nino and Raffaella's bedroom with the door closed.
Egoista,
Benedetta was calling her father, and though I didn't know exactly what that word meant, I knew that it had to be something pretty bad.

The suffix -
ista
in Italian signals a vocation. So
autista
is a driver,
dentista
a dentist. My all-time favorite word in Italian is the term for the person at the beauty parlor who shampoos:
shampista.
I figured that
egoista
must be someone who was so into their ego that it became a profession (I now know it just means selfish).

Benedetta and Nino were fighting about her fiancé, Mauro. Benedetta had met Mauro only eight months before, and he had proposed almost immediately. Benedetta had had several previous relationships, all of which had lasted for years. Raffaella told me that three of these boys had become part of the family, and that when Benedetta had broken up with them (it was always she who ended it, always the turquoise eyes), Raffaella had been heartbroken. “They were like sons! And I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye!” When Benedetta dumped Andrea, the last one, Raffaella made her promise that the next man she brought home would be the one that she would marry. It just wasn't fair to put Raffaella through that again.

Mauro was a short cardiologist who, unlike almost all of Benedetta's previous boyfriends, did not hit it off with any member of the family. So for once the tables were turned: In the bedroom it was Nino who was attacking, and Benedetta who was defending her fiancé. The first time Mauro came over, I later learned, he had opened the refrigerator, taken out a little plastic container of soft
stracchino
cheese, found himself a fork, and started eating. The refrigerator of his future in-laws! Without even asking! Where had this guy grown up?

He used the informal
tu
form for
you
with both Nino and Raffaella. (In English there is only one form for
you
, but in Italian, there are two: the formal
lei
is used when you don't know someone or you want to show respect, while the informal
tu
shows chumminess. Or friendship. Or
dis
respect. I don't know! I still don't know. I
do
know that you have to conjugate all your second-person verbs based on where you think you stand with someone. And often, the move from using
lei
to
tu
in a relationship is scarier than asking someone to the senior prom.)

The Avallones were not a formal family. They did not stand on ceremony, and were far from judgmental. But really, this guy pushed the limits. Salvatore explained part of the problem when he told me that Mauro was a communist. Wow, I thought. Italian communists open the refrigerator without asking. They have the balls to use the
tu
form with everyone. It was kind of refreshing to see someone who totally disregarded Neapolitan bourgeois social norms (which I was just starting to understand myself).
Insomma,
I liked the guy. He made me look good.

That is, I liked him until he embarked on an anti-American tirade one evening at dinner that ended with the phrases “capitalist imperialism” and “worse than fascism” and lots of spit on the table. Now I agreed with Nino. You do
not
open the refrigerator in someone else's apartment without asking.

While Raffaella kept her reservations about Mauro to herself, Nino did not. That evening everyone in the apartment building heard about Mauro taking his shoes off and filling the Avallones' apartment with the stench of his smelly feet (with Nino, it always came back to the
puzza,
the peeyew). Benedetta kept countering with
Egoista! Egoista!
I had never been party to such a row in someone else's home. Part of me was embarrassed and wanted to slip out without making a noise, and another part of me rejoiced in a stunning revelation: families other than mine—even happy, functional families—fought. They didn't just disagree, with respect and calm voices. Other families had it
out.

I felt perfectly at home.

“
Aaayyyed!
The ambassador's here!” My mother's West Virginia twang turned my father's two-letter name into one with three syllables, all diphthonged vowels. It was an early summer evening in the 1980s and my father was doing his laps in our pool. He swam with no bathing suit. “It slows me down,” he would tell us.

Ed Wilson didn't like to be slowed down by anybody or anything.

My father grew up rich in Chicago. His grandfather, Thomas Wilson, was a captain of industry who had immigrated to the United States from London, Ontario, at the turn of the century. He worked his way up from cleaning manure in the Chicago stockyards to becoming president of the third largest meatpacking company in America. As president, he changed its name to Wilson and Co.

A lot of the canned meat that was unloaded by American GIs in the Bay of Naples and given to starving Neapolitans during World War II was Wilson. The hams baked by my maternal grandmother in a small West Virginia town in the fifties were Wilson.

My great-grandfather, instead of throwing away the cowhides and intestines of the animals, started producing footballs, baseballs, and tennis rackets:
We use every part of the pig but the squeal!
was the slogan. Wilson Sporting Goods was born. Thomas Wilson made the footballs that American kids played with and the hot dogs their parents grilled.

Little Ed was the first grandson, and he had everything he could ever want: his own horse, a chauffeur, tickets on luxury liners to Europe at the age of nine. After Princeton and Oxford, he got his PhD at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, where he met my mother, at a reception for new students in 1967.

“He looked like a Kennedy, but fat,” she told my sister and me.

When she became Mrs. Wilson, Bonnie Salango gave up her job at a Washington think tank to become a full-time wife and mother. My father was at the Department of Commerce, where he worked with the Bureau of East-West Trade to investigate market opportunities in Eastern Europe. My mother accompanied him to places like Bucharest and Sofia, and at home cooked Italian American meals for pudgy communists.

A
think tank
? I now wonder. A
government job
? The two of them could have taken their Bonnie and Ed show on the road; they could have fought it out in an Edward Albee play, or started a puppet theater for underprivileged toddlers. We would have been better off. But they both had advanced degrees, and they both shouldered lots of parental expectations. It was 1970, and they made “respectable” life choices.

I was embarrassed by my father, always. He couldn't get in a taxi without speaking some exotic foreign language with the driver; he couldn't be served at a restaurant without making sure the Czech waiter saw his imitation of Václav Havel. While the dads of our friends at the country club wore bermudas with little frogs or ducks on them, my father wore a tie that Romanian dictator Ceau
s¸
escu gave him (“I'm telling you, Bonnie, the guy likes me,” he told my mom, who ignored him) with sheer white bell-bottoms. Ed Wilson needed to be at center stage—he had to be
noticed.
With his clothes and accessories (an obscure Central Asian medal of honor from the last century, an antique walking cane that he didn't need), my father begged to be asked, Where did that come from, Ed? Tell us the story.

My mother hated the way he dressed. She called his see-through pantwear
diaphanous.

That particular evening, she had told my father that there was no time for him to swim, much less to swim bare-assed. My father paid her little mind, shouting as he dove in, “There is absolutely time, and I can't hear your screaming underwater! Ha!”

Splash.

Despite her anger and embarrassment, I think my mother felt some genuine, if vindictive, joy when the Polish ambassador rang the doorbell and she escorted him outside to see my father freestyling in his altogether. I remember her crouching down with a grin at the end of the pool to catch her husband when he came up for a breath. “Your ambassador's here. Aren't ya gonna come say hi?”

Who knows, maybe this kind of vaudeville-meets-
Deliverance
was just what Polish-American relations during the cold war needed. For my sister and me, it was just the first act in the show that was dinner at the Wilsons'. Our job as daughters was to entertain and to look beautiful as we did it. After the meal, we might perform an Andrew Lloyd Webber duet or a dance routine to “Endless Love.” Anna, just one year older than me, was blond and thin. She was more beautiful than me, played the piano better than me, danced better than me, and was cooler than me. I was not only overweight but severely nearsighted. I had tinted glasses (blue on the top and pink on the bottom—I thought they were
very
cool) and, my sister tells me, I smelled like peanut butter.

I could not compete with my Claudia Schiffer sister (no amount of lemon juice at the beach could get my hair so blond; no diet could make my thighs as skinny), so I excelled at school and played the clown at home. It was left to me to perform the postshow (that is, after-dinner) imitation of Ambassador Wisniewski, snorting as he tried to shell grilled shrimp with his Stalinesque fingers.

We were so unlike the families that we socialized with in suburban Washington. Our friends were always at peace with each other and with the world. Girls wore Laura Ashley, boys J. Crew. Everyone used soft, respectful voices in the dining room of our country club. In the midst of “Could you pass the salt, Chet?” and “How was field hockey practice, Ashley?” we were different: theatrical and argumentative and, I realize now, so very Neapolitan.