Juliet. Anne Fortier

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       I.II

       Draw thy tool; here comes two of the house of Montagues

      As far back as I could remember, Aunt Rose had done everything in her power to prevent Janice and me from going to Italy. ‘How many times do I have to tell you,’ she used to say, ‘that it is not a place for nice girls?’ Later on, realizing that her strategy had to change, she would shake her head whenever anyone would broach the subject, and clasp her heart as if the very thought of the place put her at death’s door. ‘Trust me,’ she would wheeze, ‘Italy is nothing but a big disappointment, and Italian men are pigs!’

      I had always resented her inexplicable prejudice against the country where I was born, but after my experience in Rome I ended up more or less agreeing with her: Italy was a disappointment, and the Italians – at least the uniformed variety – made pigs look pretty good.

      Similarly, whenever we asked her about our parents, Aunt Rose would cut us off by reciting the same old story. ‘How many times do I have to tell you,’ she would grunt, frustrated at being interrupted in the middle of reading the newspaper, wearing the little cotton gloves that kept the ink off her hands, ‘that your parents died in a car accident in Tuscany when you were three years old?’ Fortunately for Janice and me – or so the story continued – Aunt Rose and poor Uncle Jim, bless his soul, had been able to adopt us immediately after the tragedy, and it was our good luck that they had never been able to have children of their own. We ought to be grateful that we had not ended up in an Italian orphanage eating spaghetti every day. Look at us! Here we were, living on an estate in Virginia, spoiled rotten; the very least we could do in return was to stop plaguing Aunt Rose with questions she didn’t know how to answer. And could someone please fix her another mint julep, seeing that her joints were aching something fierce from our incessant nagging.

      As I sat on the plane to Europe, staring out into the Atlantic night and reliving conflicts past, it struck me that I missed everything about Aunt Rose, not just the good bits. How happy I would have been to spend another hour with her, even if she were to spend that hour ranting. Now that she was gone, it was hard to believe she could ever have made me slam doors and stomp upstairs, and hard to accept that I had wasted so many precious hours in stubborn silence, locked in my room.

      I angrily wiped a tear rolling down my cheek with the flimsy airline napkin and told myself that regrets were a waste of time. Yes, I should have written more letters to her, and yes, I should have called more often and told her I loved her, but that was all too late now; I could not undo the sins of the past.

      On top of my grief there was also another sensation gnawing at my spine. Was it foreboding? Not necessarily. Foreboding implies that something bad will happen; my problem was that I didn’t know if anything would happen at all. It was entirely possible that the whole trip would end in disappointment. But I also knew that there was only one person I could rightfully blame for the squeeze I was in, and that person was me.

      I had grown up believing I would inherit half of Aunt Rose’s fortune, and therefore had not even tried to make one of my own. While other girls my age had climbed up the slippery career pole with carefully manicured nails, I had only worked in jobs I liked – such as teaching at Shakespeare camps – knowing that sooner or later, my inheritance from Aunt Rose would take care of my growing credit-card debt. As a result, I had little to fall back on now but an elusive heirloom left behind in a faraway land by a mother I could barely remember.

      Ever since dropping out of grad school I had lived nowhere in particular, couch-surfing with friends from the antiwar movement, and moving out whenever I got a Shakespeare teaching gig. For some reason, the Bard’s plays were all that had ever stuck in my head, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never get tired of Romeo and Juliet.

      I occasionally taught adults, but much preferred kids – maybe because I was fairly sure they liked me. My first clue was that they would always refer to the grown-ups as if I weren’t one of them. It made me happy that they accepted me as one of their own, although I knew it was not actually a compliment. It simply meant that they suspected I had never really grown up either, and that, even at twenty-five, I still came across as an awkward tween struggling to articulate – or, more often, conceal – the poetry raging in my soul.

      It didn’t help my career path that I was at a complete loss to imagine my future. When people asked me what I would like to do with my life, I had no idea what to say, and when I tried to visualize myself five years down the road, all I saw was a big, black pothole. In gloomy moments I interpreted this impending darkness as a sign that I would die young, and concluded that the reason I could not envision my future was that I had none. My mother had died young, and so had my grandmother, Aunt Rose’s younger sister. For some reason, fate was on our case, and whenever I found myself contemplating a long-term commitment, whether it was work or housing, I always bowed out at the last minute, haunted by the idea that I would not be around to see it to completion.

      Every time I came home for Christmas or a summer holiday, Aunt Rose would discreetly beg me to stay with her rather than continuing my aimless existence. ‘You know, Julie,’ she would say, while picking dead leaves off a houseplant or decorating the Christmas tree one angel at a time, ‘you could always come back here for a while, and think about what you would like to do with yourself.’

      But even if I was tempted, I knew I couldn’t do that. Janice was out there on her own, making money by matchmaking and renting a two-bedroom apartment with a view over a fake lake; for me to move back home would be to acknowledge that she had won.

      Now, of course, everything had changed. Moving back in with Aunt Rose was no longer an option. The world as I knew it belonged to Janice, and I was left with nothing more than the contents of a manila envelope. As I sat there on the plane, rereading Aunt Rose’s letter over a plastic cup of sour wine, it suddenly occurred to me how thoroughly alone I was now, with her gone and only Umberto left in the world.

      Growing up, I had never been good at making friends. In contrast, Janice would have had a hard time squeezing her closest and dearest into a double-decker bus. Whenever she went out with her giggling throng at night, Aunt Rose would circle around me nervously for a while, pretending to look for the magnifying glass or her dedicated crossword pencil. Eventually, she would sit down next to me on the sofa, seemingly interested in the book I was reading. But I knew she wasn’t.