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“Fina is a very clever girl,” I heard Cetti brag about me to the old woman. “She is at the top of the class. They have invited her to be the first girl to go to Sciacca to study.”
When I turned away from the books the woman motioned for the two of us to sit at her table. I pulled my hand away from Cetti’s grip and tucked it into my lap, squeezing my palms together between my sweaty thighs. My friend’s free hand moved to caress my back, running her index finger up the knots of my spine.
The witch nodded to a plate of bread smothered in honey and fresh fruit, sliced apricots and ripe plums with their maroon skin scored to allow the ruby pulp to ooze onto the plate. I hadn’t realized I was ravenous until that moment. I’d hardly kept food down in weeks, but I’d tried to hide the sickness from Mamma, making sure to leave our house early in the mornings to empty my stomach into the alley.
We filled our mouths before speaking.
“Tell her,” Cettina finally urged me.
“Tell her what?” I replied, as if we’d just walked all the way to this strange place for nothing more than a meal.
“Everything. You can start from the beginning.”
Something about the warm hovel and the woman’s calming silence made me feel like it would be fine to repeat the things I’d previously only told Cettina. This witch on the edge of the world possessed a kindness I hadn’t expected. Sunlight snuck through the slanted window, sending a sliver of light over my face, the warmth a false comfort.
I went back four months ago, to the start of summer. Papa had come home after spending two months in Palermo, where he’d been digging out ditches for the new grand road that would circle the city. He had a little extra money and he wanted to take me and my little brothers down the mountain to the beaches at Eraclea Minoa. He could get us there in half the time it usually took because he’d gotten the mayor’s son a job with the company that was building the grand road and the mayor returned the favor by letting him borrow his modern carriage and his fastest horses. Three of us children crowded onto the front bench of the cart. There was never a question about whether my mother would accompany us. She had to stay home with the littlest ones.
I’d never seen anything so spectacularly perfect as the sapphire sea emerging from the edge of the soft pine forest. Pristine white sand stretched for miles. A small patch was speckled by striped umbrellas and blue and yellow chairs. Papa parked the mayor’s carriage right up at the edge of the beach, and everyone stared at our scraggly family as we tumbled down.
Papa handed some coins to a boy at the entrance, and he gave us an umbrella with three chairs. I had no proper swimsuit, since Mamma told me it would be sinful for me to wear one. I stretched out on a chair like a wild cat in a warm patch of sun and listened to the waves lap against the shore. I knew it was exactly what heaven would feel like. When I opened my eyes my brothers and father had gone to the edge of the sea in their short underpants. I watched Flavio, always the most daring and headstrong of the boys, dive under the waves and held my breath until he resurfaced.
A woman and a man curled up together on the chair in front of me. The woman’s hair tumbled in tight dark curls down her bronzed back and she wound her fingers around the man’s neck. She couldn’t have been much younger than my own mother, but she was an entirely different creature than the stooped and wrinkled figure stuck at home with a baby suckling at each of her breasts. I couldn’t take my eyes off the lovers, at the way the woman pulled back from him and teased him, at the way he gazed at her as if she were the most perfect thing he’d ever seen. My stomach tightened and tumbled as I imagined what it would be like to have that kind of power over a man.
When the woman walked to the toilets, I followed.
By the time I reached the small cabanas with a hole dug out of the ground that served as a latrine, the glamorous woman was applying a deep red color to her lips.
“Would you like some?” she asked innocently. I nodded. She steadied my face and painted the bottom lip, then the top.
“You are beautiful as golden grain,” she announced when she was finished. My face went hot when I looked in the small, cracked piece of glass that hung on the canvas wall of the tent. It was such a small thing, to have fiery lips, and yet also so wonderfully different.
“Are you from here?” I asked her.
“No, no, my pet. I’m on vacation from Naples. Just a holiday to your gorgeous island.”
I’d never thought of my home as gorgeous, or as anything special at all. I would have given almost anything to travel to where this woman was from, a place where ladies wore bright red lipstick and kissed men out in the sunshine, where they went on holidays to foreign beaches. My eyes crawled over the woman’s body. Her stomach was flat in a way that announced she had never carried children. The curves of her breasts pushed up over the scalloped edge of the top of her red bathing uniform. She smelled like salt water, sunburnt skin, and men’s cologne.
“What do you do there? In Naples?”
“Many things. I’m an adventuress.” Her silky voice made me want to wrap myself up in her words. “I’m teasing. I work in a shop sometimes. Sometimes a restaurant. That is where I met my love.” She did not call him her husband.
It was sinful to brag, but I wanted to tell her everything about me, how I had only recently learned about my high scores in school, how I had been recommended for the special classes in Sciacca, how one day I too might make it to Naples, but I merely thanked her for painting my lips.
By the time we’d trudged back through the trees to the sand I had already swiped away the red makeup with the back of my arm, knowing my father wouldn’t approve.
An hour later my family piled back into the carriage to make it home before Mamma became cross, all of our skin pink, sand between our toes.
The next night the village celebrated the Feast of Saint Antonio with dancing, masquerading, and feasting. Boys dressed as old men and played practical jokes on us all. Liuni put on the costume of a circus bear and begged for sweets. The wine flowed freely for everyone and the usual lines of decorum blurred. Rich mingled with poor, young with old, boys with girls. Feast nights were the only times when fathers lost track of their daughters.
The four of us danced away from the crowd. Me, Cettina, Liuni, and Gio. I was already too tall for most of the boys in town, but not for Gio, who grew like a weed and was already a head taller than me. Gio, or rather Giovanni, even though no one called him that, was the only boy who met my eyes when I talked to him, who didn’t have to look up at me. We wandered out to the fields to look at the moon and the stars. Liuni had swiped two bottles of wine and we passed them between us. Eventually Cettina and Liuni wandered off over to the other side of the hill. I kept drinking the sweet liquid while Gio lay on his back and invented constellations in the sky—the angry dragon, the lazy sheep, the tipsy priest, the horny old man. He traced their outlines on my palm with the tip of his finger. I could still feel the woman from the beach’s hot breath on my cheeks and the traces of red paint in the grooves of my lips. When I closed my eyes, I saw the woman grip the back of the man’s head and pull his face into her own, bending him to her will. That scene played over in my mind as I rolled toward Gio and gripped his dark curls. I lost time after that.
Gio was a kindhearted and gentle boy. He never would have done anything without my permission, and I knew I had given it to him that night. He showed up at my house in the following weeks and we held hands when no one was looking. He was quiet and listened when I talked, laughed even when I wasn’t very funny. He never did more than kiss me again with both of our mouths closed and he always asked before he did it. I would like to kiss you now, may I?
A month or so later my breasts began to swell and my blood didn’t come. I didn’t bleed the next month either, or the month after that. Cettina was the only one I told.
“We’ll have a double wedding. Liuni and I will get married earlier than I planned.”
“But I don’t want to marry Gio.”
