jersey jackets, bolts of corduroy in extraordinary shades of plum and puce and pear. Sirena fingered everything with her eyes closed, as if the garments had messages in braille upon them—“It’s to know if I can work with this,” she explained, when I teased her. “Some fabrics, the synthetics, the fake ones, like some people, is this”—and she mimed scraping her fingernails on a blackboard.
“Are there people you don’t like, then?” I asked. It hadn’t occurred to me before.
“Nora!” She shook her head incredulously. “Aren’t there people you don’t like?”
“So many of them.”
“I can’t work with people I don’t choose, not in this way. For me, life’s too short. Yes? Life is too short. When they”—she mimed the fingernails—“then they must go. Like the fabric, I don’t take it home; so with the people, they’re the same. Not for me!”
“There must be a word for that,” I said. “What’s the word for that in Italian?”
“Respingere, maybe—to reject, to return something.”
“Re-spinge? I love that: ‘Spinge it!’ Ditch the dope and spinge the sponge! Spinge him again—re-spinge him!”
We were excitable enough to laugh even at this, and it passed then into our vocabulary, part of the lexicon between us, so that when I was annoyed with someone I’d say, “Spinge her,” or Sirena might complain, giggling, that we should “re-spinge the sponges.” It doesn’t seem very funny now, but it became one of our things, after that.
On the way home, we realized we were famished, that it was late. The afternoon sun, still bright, hung now coldly low in the sky, and the heat in the car had that prickling, parched quality that comes when it’s genuinely freezing outside. We decided to get something to eat.
I don’t know why I thought of the Italian bar up behind Davis Square. Mostly it was the sort of place you went for drinks, when it was too late for everything else; and it wasn’t a place where you thought of eating, much. But years before, before my mother was even sick, a lifetime ago in my artist phase, when I’d thought I might yet turn out to be the person that I wanted to be—whoever that person might have been—I’d spent a long afternoon there with two friends—a hilarious and beautiful gay guy, Louis, who cut hair fantastically well, and cut mine for a while, and who was killed a couple of years later on the Mass Ave bridge riding his bike in the rain at night; and a woman named Erica I’d known in New York, who’d been at law school with my boyfriend Ben but dropped out to work with the homeless, which makes her sound worthy, but actually she was as funny as Louis was, and maybe that’s why I thought of the bar, because we’d laughed so much that seven-hour afternoon, sitting in front of a superior tureen of Italian wedding soup made, I remember, by the barman’s Sicilian mom, and what amounted, in the end, to four bottles of a delicious Nebbiolo, a bit more than one each, which, drunk over seven hours, was the perfect amount. The bar had no windows to speak of and operated in an eternal darkness, out of time, so we went inside in one era and came out in another, like time travelers. I’d loved that stretch—it had happened only the once, when I was at an age where I thought that was, or ought to be, what artists did—and maybe for that reason, or maybe for the soup, I suggested that bar and we went there.
The owner was still behind the counter, fatter now, and balder, but he’d been both fat and bald all those years before. Sirena and he, with some kind of ethnic telepathy, seemed able to tell from looking at one another that they should speak Italian, and within moments they were deep in animated conversation, and he was promising to cook for us with his own hands his mother’s special pasta with broccoli and anchovies—it would seem that she had, in the intervening years, gone to meet her maker. He set us up in a corner booth, tufted oxblood leatherette up our backs higher than our heads, and on the walls the requisite photographs of Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani, and three whole candles for ourselves. Aside from an older guy having scotch at the bar, we were the only customers. When we came in, Sinatra was on the sound system, but the owner said something to Sirena and