He drummed his fingers on his knees and picked his nose once, but I told myself I wouldn’t mind.
Later on we all gathered at the table. Serena had cooked lunch. When I sat down, Ettore said that sunbathing topless by the blow-up pool made me look like a poor man’s Lolita. “It’s very cheap and you’re distracting my co-worker,” he complained in Italian. Never mind that he and Serena walked around the yard completely naked every day. I was to follow different rules. Especially when Robert was present.
Robert was uncomfortable with his name being tossed around in another language. He was also uncomfortable with the quantity of food on the table and the number of family members gathered around it. Serena served spaghetti with fried zucchini flowers, humming over the awkward silence.
Robert stared down at his pasta and tried to roll it in his fork.
My grandmother sneered at him and pointed to his plate.
“Americans don’t know how to roll spaghetti.”
Robert looked at me for guidance. “What’s everyone saying about me?”
“She said you’re no good at rolling your noodles,” Timoteo explained.
I kicked him under the table.
Exasperated by his bowl of recalcitrant food, Robert finally asked my mother for a knife, but they all stared him down and shook their heads disapprovingly.
“Macché, knife! If you go to Italy and cut spaghetti, what will people think of you?” my father scoffed.
“That you’re an idiot! A dumb American idiot!” my grandmother lashed out.
Robert put his fork down.
“Was it too al dente?” Serena asked, desperate for approval. “You don’t like it? But you are like a skeleton! Do you eat at home?”
“We eat, just not all eat at the same time or around a table. Normal people don’t always eat together, you know,” Robert mumbled.
Timoteo translated for my grandmother.
“Normal people?” she said, gasping at his black lipstick and piercings. “He looks like the Antichrist!”
“What did she say again?” Robert asked.
“She thinks it’s not true American families don’t always eat at the table together,” I said, lying.
“That’s terrible!” Serena sighed. “Your mom doesn’t cook for you?”
“My mom is dead.”
Everyone finally shut up.
—
That night I had a high fever from extreme sun exposure. I closed my eyes in bed, hallucinating and meditating on the effects Robert and the necrophiliac couple had on me. I was a corpse dressed in rags, washed up on a riverbank. Robert carried my limp body in the moonlight. My consumed, translucent flesh—soft and covered in mud—was his. His bony fingers crept up my legs, pulling rags up my thighs. My impotence got him hard. He made love to me, respectfully at first and becoming progressively rougher, pulling clumps of dead hair out of my skull until, when my head was almost shiny, he shoved me firmly against a tree and fucked me. I came and then fell asleep. I dreamed I was Sue Lyon, the actress from Lolita, aged and overweight, sipping on milk shakes and chewing on pizza. A poor man’s Lolita.
4
After the first month of school I’d earned my right to attend a regular English class, but I soon realized it was just a few steps above the ESL class. Most of my classmates could not read or write. Spelling tests included words like “tomorrow” and “teenager.” Arash sat in my row and left the page blank. He did not speak to me in class, but when his friends weren’t looking, he rolled his eyes and asked me to speak Greek to him because he thought it was hot. I didn’t know what to say so I listed Italian food items.
“Prosciutto, mortadella, carciofi alla giudìa, melanzane alla parmigiana.”
“Man o bokon—have sex with me,” he answered, thinking I was trying to seduce him.
He spat out the window and whistled at the girls who passed by below our classroom. The teacher could not keep him or anyone else under control. The rest of the students only stopped screaming when she sniveled.
My most challenging course was Physical Education. A gigantic coach with shiny red hair who looked like a walrus commanded us to run for what felt like miles around a football field. My legs were long, but I was stooped and slow. There was only one person worse than me on the track—a tiny Persian doll with a seventies wedge hairstyle and a big mole on her chin. Her head was disproportionately large and looked like it would unhinge from her neck with a small push. Neither the coach nor any of our classmates seemed to have any interest in her. She could not run. She could not jump. She could not catch balls. Under a slight mustache her swollen lips exuded a patina of saliva. Nobody got close to her. She stared vacantly into space until she caught up with me on the racetrack. I was dragging my feet to finish my first mile—hand lodged over my aching spleen. We’d been lapped by our classmates and still managed to be the last ones running. She gave me her bony hand to shake. Her name was Azar and her wrist was the size of two fingers squeezed together. She looked ill and desperate and begged me to be her friend. “Or just pretend like you are my friend in this class,” she said. “Be my PE buddy, please.”
I agreed to be Azar’s friend in gym class, but when I saw Arash again during lunch break he said that was a terrible choice for a new girl in school. He tapped my shoulder in front of the football field, cigarette dangling from his lips, waiting for me. His theory was that as long as you kept moving nobody noticed.
“Azar is a weirdo. Like she’s actually half mentally retarded and has a growth disorder. If you hang out with her, people will think you’re a loser like her.”
“It’s okay. She’s not a loser.”
“I’m just saying. She’s totally uncool. She’s like a half cousin so I feel bad saying it, but it’s true. I’m just trying to help you out.”
We crossed a picnic bench area and Arash flipped his cigarette butt into the dirt, quietly agreeing to guide me through the school grounds so I’d get my bearings. He didn’t say it, but I knew that’s what he was doing and I was grateful for it.
“Hey, is it true women in Greece don’t shave their armpits?”
“Look, I’m Italian, not Greek. And anyway it’s a political choice,” I said, trying to defend myself.
“You go topless at the beach, right?”
“Yes, of course. We are topless and proud and we don’t get stupid tickets for being naked,” I insisted.
“You know what? You’re kind of hot the way you talk all strict and serious and shit. Makes me pop a boner.”
“Makes you what?”