What They Said

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by Jacqueline Goyette

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One life isn’t enough. You need a backup, they said. So they constructed the girl from feathers, candle wax, plywood, plastic coated paper clips, a leftover sewing kit with two needles missing. They dipped her in the melody from Stevie Wonder’s Superstition to remind her of the drive through Adams Morgan with the windows rolled down, that April evening when her brother was visiting and the moon was high, and she sang her heart out. They cut a baby blanket in half and tied it to her, told her to drag it around until she remembered her summer toes in the creek water off Pleasant Run, sun tea in glass jars on the neighbor’s driveway, her grandmother’s fingers rolling lumpia into tight parcels ready to fry in bubbling oil. Vinegar and garlic. Butterscotch breath and Filipino kisses, nose pressed against her cheek. The closet from when she was little and the smell of her mother’s scarves. The bike rides and the gravel roads. Summer lawns and the way the fireflies crinkled in yellow light, spectacular, on late July nights — the twinkle of her childhood on the tip of her tongue.

She began to ask for things, and they listened. Nourishment: so they gave her the recipes her mother had given her when she first moved to Italy: her grandmother’s flan, her grandfather’s adobo. The lemon cookies that she used to make with her mother at Christmas, tangy and sweet: delicious. A place to live: and they gave her a new continent, spoke to her in Italian each new word like a melody that she repeated, entranced. Love, she told them, and they handed her a shoemaker for a husband in this new language, and she took him, practiced her broken Italian on him, blew him kisses, made lunches for him. She learned to cook pasta the way his mother had: red pepper and onion chopped up, sizzling in the pan. Add tomato and oil, toss with penne and a handful of fresh mozzarella. They tucked more recipes into books and corners and her back pocket so that she wouldn’t forget. They put flowers there as well — lilacs and hydrangeas and lilies of the valley. To remember, they said. They told her there would be so much to remember, and gave her a notebook to write it down.  They wrote out the days of the week in Italian and pushed her toward them. Let’s go, they said. Andiamo.She got on a train with them on her shoulders and cut through the countryside like fabric split in two. They gave her sunlight and fifty euros and a half empty bottle of wine.

But she had forgotten to tell them that she was an expert at misplacing things. That the arrowhead her father had given her was left on her second grade desk, thrown away perhaps – long gone. That she lost 30 dollars once, buying Christmas gifts at the Woolworth’s at East Gate mall. She lost a language, dropped the words off in an envelope, left it in the cool swing of someone’s letterbox. She lost her own mother, let go of her hand for a single second in the crowded roads of the city and that was enough. Lickety split. She was gone with all the other lost things. Piles and piles of them – the lost key rings and the loose leaf papers, the half eaten croissants and the wasted afternoons. All of it forgotten. On the drive to Rome this morning she even lost the mountains themselves, left them under a blanket of sea foam fog, waited and waited for them to return, but they didn’t. So she took the feathers from her back pocket and sewed them to her shoulders. This will have to do, she said. She aimed her forehead at the moon and looked both ways before she jumped.

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