she laughed and he put on instead something older and nightclubby, a woman singing in Italian, and Sirena was loving it—she closed her eyes and swayed and hummed along, for a bit.
Sirena and I had our bowls of pasta and our red wine and our candles and our booth. We were tired from the long trek, and I had that tingling under my skin that comes after the cold, at once invigorating and strangely soporific. It was all feeling like a dream, and in the middle of this dream I had a revelation. Sirena was saying something, and I couldn’t quite hear it, or follow it, because of how I was feeling, so I was just looking at her, watching her talk, her elegantly inelegant stubby hand resting on her wineglass, the crinkles in the corners of her eyes, the crazy darkness of her brows and her tickly lashes, the glimmer of the candlelight on her dark irises and on strands of her hair. And suddenly I thought: “I want to stay with you. Actually, forever. I do.”
And she saw me looking at her, in a fond and foolish way, and she cocked an eyebrow—to say what? “I see you”? “I understand”? “We are here together”?—and took my hand in hers and held it as it lay on the table. “Today we had a great day, yes? If only each day was like this one, cara mia!” And I barely heard her, because I felt her hand upon my hand, all through my body. I felt her skin. I really felt it.
You don’t ask to have such a thought. You also can’t take it away, once you’ve had it. I’d never had such a thought about Sirena, not in all the time I’d been in love with her. But I had the thought unbidden, just like that, in Amodeo’s bar, and in the first instant of having the thought, I wanted to laugh, and I wanted to tell her. The only person I could think of who would really understand was Sirena herself. And then, at once, I had the horrifying presentiment of her recoil. What if she didn’t feel the same way? And what if she did feel the same way? And how could it be that all the great welter of emotion I experienced in her company would be somehow and suddenly summarized by—reduced to—this?
5
With the distance I have now, I can see that it was one small thought among all the other thoughts that drift like dust motes through a cluttered mind. But it was a thought I made an object, and held on to and turned over and over in my hand, as if it were an amulet, as if it gave meaning to what had come before; and holding on to it changed everything again.
If you were me, and you had this revelation—but lo, I don’t just love, I want!—and you wanted to but couldn’t tell Sirena, what would you do? You’d tell Didi. As it happens, if you were me, you’d find yourself unwisely telling both Didi and Esther at the same time, in the sticky booth at their favorite pub in Jamaica Plain, the very next evening, even though you knew you didn’t want Esther’s opinion. But your revelation was burning so in your hand that you couldn’t hold on to it a second longer.
If you were me, you’d be surprised by their unified reaction; and then surprised at your surprise.
They didn’t quite laugh, but Didi made a sound, with beer, in the back of her nose, that was infuriatingly close to laughter.
“You’re making fun of me? I tell you this huge thing—this huge thing for me—and you’re pretty much my closest friends, and you laugh at me? Am I going crazy here?”
“Hey, Nora Adora—”
“No. For real. I might have to—”
“Take a deep breath. I wasn’t laughing. Esther wasn’t laughing. Were you, sweetie? We love you. Calm down.”
“We somehow knew what you were going to say,” Esther said. “We were laughing at our goddesslike prescience.”
“Oh, fuck you,” I said. “You were laughing at the dumb straight girl who’s finally coming to her belated awakening, sad creature that she is.”
“Come off it, you know us better than that. You do. Honestly?”
Esther was making pug eyes at me, and Didi was holding on, rather sweatily, to both of my hands, as if they both feared I would bolt.
“Because we anticipated it—which wasn’t so hard—I mean, you did say you’d had a revelation yesterday and we