Aunt Rose had generally taken the approach that it would all straighten itself out in due course, as long as there was an even distribution of love and candy. Whenever we applied to her for arbitration, she would be tired of the case before she even heard it-it was, after all, only one of many piling up around her-and would always give us a standard reply to do with sharing, or being nice to each other. “Come now!” she would say, reaching for the crystal bowl with chocolate pretzels sitting on a side table, within easy reach of her armchair. “Be good girls! Julie, be fair to Janice now, and let her borrow your”-whatever it was… doll, book, belt, bag, hat, boots-“so we can have some peace around here, for heaven’s sake!”
And so, inevitably, we would walk away from her with a whole new can of worms, Janice snickering at my losses and her own undeserved gains. The reason she wanted my things in the first place was that her own had broken or gotten “tired,” and it was easier for her to take over mine than to make money and go out and buy new ones. And so we would leave the armchair after yet another wealth redistribution that had taken away what was mine and replaced it with nothing but a dry chocolate pretzel from the bowl. For all her litanies about fairness, Aunt Rose was a perpetual generator of nasty unintended consequences; the whole hellish path of my childhood was paved with her good intentions.
By the time I reached high school, I didn’t even bother to go to her for help, but ran straight out into the kitchen to complain to Umberto, who was-in my memory-always in the process of sharpening the knives, opera blaring. Whenever I defaulted to the old, “But it isn’t fair!” he would counter with, “Who told you life is fair?” and, when I finally calmed down, he would ask me, “So, what do you want me to do about it?”
As I grew older and wiser, I learned that the correct answer to his question was, “Nothing. I have to do it myself.” And it was true. I did not run to him because I really wanted him to take Janice to task-although that would have been nice-but because he was not afraid of telling me, in his way, that I was better than her, and that I deserved more from life. But, that said, it was up to me to get it. The only problem was, he never told me how.
All my life, it seemed, I had been running around with my tail between my legs, trying to dig up opportunities that Janice could not somehow steal or spoil, but no matter where I buried my treasures, she was always able to sniff them out and chew them up beyond recognition. If I had saved my new satin ballet shoes for the end-of-season recital, I would open the box only to discover that she had tried them on and left the ribbons in a tangle, and once, when I had spent weeks making a collage of figure skaters in art class, she had inserted a cutout of Big Bird from Sesame Street as soon as I brought it home.
It didn’t matter how far away I ran, or how much rot I rolled in to camouflage my scent, she would always come running, tongue hanging out, to bounce around me with playful mischief and leave a steaming number two right in the middle of my path.
As I stood there in the Mangia Tower, it all hit me at once-my countless reasons for hating Janice. It was as if someone had started a slide show of bad memories in my head, and I felt a surge of fury that I had never felt in the company of anyone else.
“Surprise!” she now said, dropping the leather suit and helmet and opening her arms for applause.
“What the hell,” I finally gasped, my voice shrill with anger, “do you think you are doing here? Was that you, chasing me around on that ridiculous bike? And the letter-” I pulled the handwritten note out of my purse, creased it into a ball and flung it at her. “How stupid do you think I am?”
Janice grinned, enjoying my fury. “Stupid enough to climb up the friggin’ tower!… Oh!” She made a grimace of faux sympathy that she had patented at the age of five. “Is that it? You weally fought I was Womeo?”
“Okay,” I said, trying to cut through her laughter, “so, you had your joke. I hope it was worth the flight. Now excuse me, I’d love to stay, but I’d rather go stick my head in a bidet.”
I tried to walk around her to get to the stairs, but she immediately backed up, blocking the door. “Oh, no you don’t!” she hissed, her expression shifting from fair to stormy. “Not until you give me my share!”
I started. “Excuse me?”
“No, not this time,” she said, her lower lip trembling as she tried on the role of the wounded party for a change. “I’m broke. Bankrupt.”
“So, call the millionaire help line!” I retorted, falling right back into our sister act. “I thought you recently inherited a fortune from someone? Someone we both know?”
“Oh, ha!” Janice wrung out a smile. “Yeah, that was priceless. Good old Aunt Rose and all her gazillions.”
“I have no idea,” I said, shaking my head, “what you are whining about. Last time I saw you, you had just won the lottery. If it’s more money you want, I’m the last person you should be talking to.” I made another push for the door, and this time, I was determined to get through. “Get-out-of-my-way,” I said. And amazingly, she did.
“Why look at you!” she jeered as I walked past her. If I hadn’t known better, I might have seen jealousy in her eyes. “The little runaway princess. How much of my inheritance have you blown on clothes? Huh?”
When I just kept walking without even pausing to reply, I could hear her scrambling to pick up her gear and follow me. All the way down the spiral staircase she was hot on my trail, yelling after me first in anger, then in frustration, and finally in something as unusual as desperation. “Wait!” she cried, using the crash helmet as a buffer against the brick wall. “We have to talk! Stop! Jules! Seriously!”
But I had no intention of stopping. If Janice really had something important to tell me, why had she not done so right away? Why the shenanigans with the motorcycle and the red ink? And why had she wasted our five minutes in the tower with her usual antics? If, as she had hinted in her little rant, she had already managed to squander Aunt Rose’s fortune, then I could certainly understand her frustration. But the way I saw it, that was, for dead sure, her own problem.
As soon as I reached the bottom of the tower I walked away from Palazzo Pubblico and crossed the Campo with firm strides, leaving Janice to her own mess. The Ducati Monster was parked right in front of the building, like a limo pulled up for the Oscars, and as far as I could see, at least three police officers were waiting impatiently-muscular arms akimbo, sunglasses on-for the return of its owner.
MALÈNA’S ESPRESSO BAR was the only place I could think of going where Janice wouldn’t immediately find me. If I went back to the hotel, I figured, she would show up within minutes to resume her figure eights beneath my balcony.
And so I practically ran all the way up to Piazza Postierla, turning every ten steps to make sure she wasn’t following, my throat still tight with anger. When I finally came shooting through the door of the bar, slamming it shut behind me, Malèna greeted me with a burst of laughter. “Dio mio! What are you doing here? You look like you are already drinking too much coffee.”
Seeing that I didn’t even have air to reply, she spun around to pour a tall glass of water from the tap. While I was drinking, she leaned on the counter with a look of barefaced curiosity. “Someone… giving you some trouble?” she suggested, her expression hinting that if that were the case, she had a few cousins-apart from Luigi the hairdresser-who would be more than happy to help me out.