Big Cherry Holler - Adriana Trigiani [71]
The new hairdo accentuates my face. The long, boring braid is gone; this is full and thick and much shorter, with loose waves that soften my cheeks and nose, and long, delicate spiraling down my neck. One of the shop girls, a birdlike brunette with perfect lips, took a tube of lipstick out of her apron pocket. At first I was clumsy with it, so she had to unscrew the Italian top for me (different from our lipsticks, there’s a latch on it). I put on the lipstick, filling out my full lips top and bottom, and my first thought was that it was too much. Too dramatic. Too purple! I felt like I was sporting a duck bill. But Violetta handed me a tissue, and after I blotted, the magenta with the little gold sparkles in it actually looked alluring. “Bellisima!” a customer under the dryer said, banging her head as she strained to get a look at me. I smiled and gave all the girls big tips. If I had a million dollars, I would have given it to Violetta. I needed this.
Nonna flipped for the haircut; she said, “Ornella Muti!” when I came into the house. Ornella, a Roman actress, is featured on the cover of this month’s Hello! magazine, which has claimed a permanent spot on Nonna’s coffee table. She grabbed it and pointed to the exotic green-eyed beauty, who, yes, has my haircut. Or more to the point, I have her haircut. I made Nonna take a Polaroid of me and my new hair to send to Theodore.
So it is with more than a little renewed self-confidence, a bright lipstick (God bless the kid; she gave me the tube), a new purpose, and a dazzling haircut, that I climb the Alpine trail like the Eye-talian native I would have been if my mother had not run off to America pregnant with me and without my father, Mario da Schilpario, and married Fred Mulligan instead. I look down at my thighs as I use them to power my short, quick steps up the trail. I shouldn’t have such muscles in them; I’ve been climbing around here only a week. But they’re there. I never got muscles like these hiking up Powell Mountain. The leather in Papa’s coat smells like him, clean and woodsy. I feel great. Maybe it’s the altitude.
I decide to take a new path today, the one that’s a little more finished-looking than the rest. There are actual stones that anchor either side of the path like a garden walk. At the very top of that trail, there is a plateau that piques my curiosity.
Once I reach the top of the ridge, I have to hoist myself up and over a small shelf of ground to reach the plateau. There, high above Schilpario, in a place where only goats go, is a field of bluebells so thick, they look like a carpet stretching across the expanse. So blue, it could be a lake, or the Mediterranean Sea. Bees buzz above the sweet blossoms, so many of them that they knock into one another in midair before they dive below to drink from the flowers. Beyond the blue carpet is a green field that leads to a ledge of rock dripping with vines. I won’t venture out to the edge. I know there is a drop there—probably one of those frightening gaps, so deep you cannot see the bottom. I sit down in the flowers; the only sound is the music the bees make. I think of Mrs. Mac. I must remember to bring Etta up here and tell her about the origin of the middle name that she inherited from her grandmother Nan Bluebell Gilliam MacChesney about the bluebells that bloomed in the field behind our house in Cracker’s Neck the day that her grandmother “got born.”
When I return from my hike, Giacomina announces that she and Papa are going to take us to a disco tonight. The whole family. (Except for Nonna, who tells me she would rather someone throw her off the mountain than make her go to a disco-tekka. Mafalda thinks Nonna is seventy-nine years old, but isn’t exactly sure because Nonna won’t fess up.)
Etta is back from Sestri Levante. Papa bought her a turquoise choker, which she vows she’ll never