what are you doing?
A Note: a special extra from me has been put in the mail for Founding Members: it is so wonderful to me that anyone would support my work like this and I hope you like what is winging its way to you.
I travelled to Italy, a large estate atop a hill, ice-cold pool down the rise and draughty windows flung open. Spindly, dark spiders hiding between the sheets of our narrow single beds. Me: killing mine with a wooden spoon, my heart shuddering. We were half an hour into the country outside of Florence, nineteen years old, on a term break. A large group of us: me drawn in because of my extroverted friend California. That was not her name but it has been decades since we were friends and what remains is the bubbly, specific sense of her home state. Without California, I would never have been invited.
I tend to wake before others, though on this trip there was another early riser—a girl with a name like Marisa, fit but stocky, a gap between her two front teeth. Very well liked by the group. She and I would sit on the porch that wrapped all around this huge home, each with our journals in our laps, watching the sun melt over the valley below. Down the hill we were on, a long path of parallel planted trees. I was writing about loneliness. Marisa was writing about God.
Marisa was also a good cook relative to the rest of us, searing tissue thin crepes in old dark pans over a massive gas range. I dusted my crepe with powdered sugar, took it to the porch before I realized everyone else was eating inside.
One evening we brought loaves of fresh, crusty bread, crags of parmesan, and bowls of buttery noodles down the hill, through the path lined with trees, to the large dining table set at the edge of a flattened part of the hill overlooking land: gold-drenched and pocked with blue pool fragments. Bottles of wine bloomed along the length of the wood table.
It's a dream, I thought, sun gilding everyone’s skin. It’s beautiful.
It is true I was not having a good time.
Later, long after dinner, me and California and another girl who is now a shadow in memory, as well as Marisa at the wheel, would take the small rental car through the dark, twisting roads in search of more alcohol. We would end up at a bar that was also a convenience store, the man serving limoncello shots besides Kit Kats. We took one of each. Pop music about a bleeding heart was so loud in the car that it shook the frame. I looked at the fragmenting light of the bar fading into the dark of the road and held the bottles of clear spirits tightly between my knees. That night, I drank so much vodka I’d puke into the ancient toilet for ages, but quietly, in the dark. I would not think to clean the toilet prompting Marisa to wonder the next morning and I would shrug with everyone else, as if I was also unsure who it might be. I haven’t had so much as a sip of vodka since.
The kitchen that morning was a mess of plastic cups and empty bottles. There was no food for breakfast and no one was awake except Marisa and myself, California, woken by me stirring and another girl with gold tousled hair who looked at me like she knew I was the one who had thrown up. The four of us took the car out into the pale morning, intent on reaching the market, on finding fruit and flour.
The road to the bar had been twisting but relatively flat; the road to the market was knotted and elevated with harsh inclines that challenged the small motor of the car as it chugged and gasped its way upward. California and Marisa were the only two who drove stick and Marisa didn’t want to so it was California at the wheel, the girl with the tousled hair riding passenger because she was car sick, Marisa and myself folded into the two small back seats.
Upon one especially steep incline, the car stalled, the engine choking to a halt. California worked her feet and hands rapidly while tousled hair leaned her head against the window. It was fine until Marisa looked through the rearview and saw the metal exhaust pipes of a semi-truck bearing over the hill behind. Bearing quickly and resolutely. Bearing horn blaring, the driver’s frantic waving for us to get out of the way more terribly visible the closer the truck drew to us.
The girl with the tousled hair screamed so loudly it startled me out of myself.
Stop! I told her. That’s not doing anything.
California was frantic but the car was not moving. I looked at the rearview; the truck was not going to stop. Could not stop. Marisa was frozen. The tousled hair girl was now screaming at me for telling her not to. In the rearview window, the truck was a mountain, took over the whole glass landscape.
I reached over and unbuckled Marisa’s seatbelt, then mine.
What are you doing? she said, grasping the belt retracting over her chest. What the hell are you doing?
I was watching the truck, not replying because I was rehearsing the motion in my mind: crank the door handle, leap from the car. But how close would the truck need to be to do it? How close warranted action?
The tousled hair girl was screaming again but then the car was shaking, this time with motion. We were swerving onto the other side of the road, which was empty of ongoing traffic. The wind force of the truck passing by rocked us from side to side. We were merging back onto the correct side of the road. We were almost at the top of the hill. The girl with the tousled hair was finally quiet.
What were you doing? California asked me later. Unbuckling her seatbelt like that?
We were each tucked into our beds. The legs of the dead spider brushed over my toes in the dark. What each of us do with our fear. I have no way of explaining it.
When have you been asked what the hell are you doing?
Comment with your own answers (or if you want to respond privately: I hope you will write to me directly) and I hope you will ask me your questions so that I can write about them too.
Your words always stun me and move me. Thank you for sharing ❤️
Every time I see the words "from the bottom of everything" in my inbox, I pause whatever I'm doing in that moment to read. Your words carry me into an imaginary world that almost seems more real than life. Today's story was the same! I, like your grandma, think I held my breath through the whole story and finished it with a smile. What I'm smiling at, I'm not sure but of this I'm positive - your writing is a gift to the world! Keep creating!