Featured in Fodor’s Travel: That Time I Shared the Honeymoon Suite With Mom in Italy (aka Learning the Language)
My mother has always looked at me like a crooked painting. She doesn’t mean to, we just aren’t into the same things. For one, she’s a little image obsessed and I’ve never been into fashion. Also, I’m gay and the way my mom charms men has been one of the strongest weapons in her arsenal. The fact that I never wanted to do the same was unthinkable.
After college, I moved to Venice, Italy and worked as a cocktail waitress/dishwasher. Traveling allowed me to discover a resourcefulness that I didn’t know I had and for the first time in my life, I was thriving. After a few months, my mom came to visit. She asked me to organize a trip for the two of us to Florence and Rome on a budget. I was nervous about it. It was the first trip that we’d taken since my dad died a few years before. We shared a language that my mom and I didn’t have and I knew that we would be forced to deal with each other without our usual escape routes.
I had only been in Venice a few months when she arrived. I was learning Italian from guys in the kitchens where I worked so the vocabulary I knew was crass. All she heard was the back and forth, the singsong nature of Italian conversation. When I tried to explain she wouldn’t have it. She was so proud.
‘You’re fluent Melinda. That’s all there is to it. I’m just excited to have an interpreter!” She said.
Our hotel in Florence brought the first of many realizations that we did not share the same definition of budget. The taxi stopped on a funky side street a few blocks outside of the city center. Two men were smoking cigarettes in white tank tops, leaning against the wall outside.
I hopped out to get our bags. Mom looked at the dingy building and the dingy men. She leaned out of the car window. “We’re not staying here.”
“Why?”
“It’s dirty.” She said.
Cars started to honk on the tiny street. “That’s ridiculous. We have a reservation.” I started for the entrance. One of the smoking guys flicked his cigarette and walked over to help with the bags.
She got out. “Oh my god, he works here. We’re not staying.” She said again.
Mom made me ask to see the room before we checked in. It didn’t bother me that the plaster walls were droopy or that there were weirdly five twin beds with mismatched sheets or that the window wouldn’t close (to which the guy said “Birds don’t fly in since we got the cat”) I thanked him and said I’d meet him at the front desk.
Mom came out of the bathroom. “The toilet is on the other side of the shower.”
“So?”
“So you have to walk through the shower. To get to the toilet.”
“That’s alright.”
Her eyes settled on a cigarette burn in one of the comforters. “Okay, this is what we’re gonna do. Tell them I had a heart attack recently and the stairs are too much. I’ll fake shortness of breath. Tell them I might faint.”
“But I don’t know the word for faint.” I said. She was already out the door. I grabbed her suitcases. “We’re going to lose our deposit.”
“So we can get Scabies? No.”
I walked slowly to reception, trying to think of the words I needed. “Pardon me sir?”
He looked up. “Si…”
“My mother…has the weak heart. She is not able to walk up stairs.” I could hear mom in the background saying she was sorry to some of the hotel workers in the lobby.
“She doesn’t like it?” He said.
“Oh, she does. But if she has to climb she will not have air and then…she will sleep…accidentally.”
“OK….”
I started to ask about the deposit but was interrupted by the sound of my mother’s voice. She was going downstairs, gesturing to her chest. “Bad heart! I am sorry. Sorry everyone! Bad heart!”
The host looked at me and then back at her. “I won’t charge you.” He said. “Good Luck.”
We found a hotel close to Palazzo Vecchio. We went to the Uffizi Gallery and saw Michelangelo's David. Mom wanted to go shopping. She insisted on buying me pastel linen clothes. I refused a scratchy, pink, linen blouse. It was just too much. To an outsider, I might’ve looked spoiled but I knew she thought that if she could just tip the frame maybe the painting would finally look straight.
She bought the blouse, saying it was for herself but that night she laid it out for me to wear to dinner. I refused.
“Pardon me for wanting you to look beautiful. I just don’t get it. You’ve lost weight. Men look at you, you know.”
“Ugh. I don’t care.”
“It’s just…You’ll never be prettier than you are right now. I wish someone had told me that.”
We took off to Rome the next day. The newness of the journey erased our discomfort. There was a handsome older man sitting across from us in the train hauling a trunk filled with books. He opened it.
My mom’s eyes widened. “Do you speak English?”
“No. Me despiace.”
“My husband loved to read. He died a few years ago. Melin…tell him…please?”
Past tense was a weakness of mine. “My father likes to read. He dead.”
“Oh. I’m sorry for your loss.” He explained that he was going to see his dying mother at a hospital in Rome. He was moving into her apartment to be closer. I told my mom.
“Just kill me Melinda. No hospital. Smother me or poison me or something, I don’t care.”
“So, I’ll be a murderer?” I said.
“It’s not murder if I ask you to do it.”
“I’ll just tell the jury about this conversation. I’ll probably get 20 years.”
The man must’ve understood some of our exchange. “What did she say?” He asked.
“She asks me to kill her if she’s too sick.”
He gasped. “Is she ill?” He asked.
I looked at mom gazing at us, waiting to hear what he’d asked. “Yes. She is. In the brain.”
There was a note of surprise from the concierge in Rome when we arrived. “Mother and daughter?” he asked with furrowed brows.
“Yes.”
“I thought you were reserving for man and wife.”
“Hmm, No.”
“What’s he saying?” Mom asked. I explained. “That’s funny. Why would he think that?”
“I dunno. Sometimes Italian’s harder over the phone,” I said.
He showed us to our room. “Good God.” I heard her say.
I turned to see that the walls were covered with erotic paintings. Some had a BDSM theme others were just very intricate portrayals of intense lovemaking. An ornate king sized bed was in the middle.
“Shit,” I turned back but he was gone.
“It’s okay Melin. Don’t worry.”
I took a shower. When I came out, mom gestured to the wall where towels hung over the sex pictures. “Look, I fixed it! I wanted to be helpful so I asked housekeeping and voila...”
As she pointed to her handiwork, one of the towels slipped off to reveal a couple sixty nine-ing. “Well, almost fixed it…look at them go.”
We learned from the Florence mishap. She spent the day shopping while I saw the Roman forum and Borghese Gardens. We met up in our honeymoon suite in the late afternoon and went to dinner . Afterwards, we sat in Piazza Navona and had ice cream.
“Your dad always said he’d take me here. But I’m glad I got to come with you.”
We met the boat to the airport in Venice a couple of days later. It was morning, still dark out. I was sad to see her go and I couldn’t believe it. We fumble around, mom and I, searching for words to explain ourselves. Not so much now, but for a while, we tried hard to force our language on each other.
She hugged me and told me she loved me.
“I know you think I’m silly and that I don’t understand you. I don’t...a lot of the time. We are So. Very. Different. You and I. But I admire your strength. And you’ll get it one day, how hard it is. How hard it is to let go.” That was the first thing she said that I really understood.
“I love you.” I said.
“I know.” She smiled.
Then, she touched her own luggage - for the first time since she arrived - baaaaarely pushing it towards the boatman before he grabbed it.
“Do you speak English?” I heard her say as he helped her aboard.
I turned to go down the crooked alleyway, nearly tripping over a paper bag she’d left behind. I grabbed it, ready to shout out to her when I felt the edge of the crisp, pink, linen blouse inside. “Son of a bitch.” I said.
‘YOU’RE A SPRING! WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!” She shouted as they puttered slowly towards the lip of fog that curled out over the water.