Soggy Sugar and Wheat

Isabella wore shirts with comic-color pictures of sunflowers, ladybugs, and smiling gremlins that swayed with her as she told her Irish friends about Rome, the place in Santa Maria de Trastevere where she purchased her coral jewelry, the mountains of Abruzzo, and her home on the shores of the Adriatic. She laughed at silly stories and was happiest in the mornings when she woke and prepared for a new day.  

Once, she walked up to Richard as he sat beside a river reading a magazine, put her arms around him, and turned him to her. They kissed. It was bliss. It was also a long way off.

Their relationship was bound together as foreigners, choosing lines from friend’s jeers and applause, people’s judgments of what would bring a devout Italian and a rich American together in a city like Dublin. Richard and Isabella had their own images of themselves, walking tourists through Trinity College, watching people snapping pictures, visiting homes with low ceilings and storm windows, spending late nights with drunken crowds, whirling disputations and stories with morals, for them, as guests, as lovers, ignorant of Ireland’s charms, sodden and trodden during thick speech with others: mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends. They enjoyed the romance.

Richard said they were beyond their host’s images and with Lucina singing in her head Isabella decided he might be right.

She remembered watching swans glide along the blackest of slow rivers as he read his business journals. This wasn’t difficult. Glistening mementos after a long and bumpy ride are always part of the scenery. It could have been a dream. She might not have been there at all. Watching swans push upstream is a wonderful memory and one Isabella had time to remember in detail. It didn’t matter. She remembered it like it was real. 

Isabella tucked into his shoulder and threw a biscuit on the water. She watched a duckling swim up and dip its pimpled orange beak into the soggy sugar and wheat.

Or was it white? It wasn’t a swan yet.

 “Are you ready to go?”

“No. Let’s stay here for awhile.”

“Do you want another biscuit?”

“Si, amore.”

They were spinning.

Sometimes spinning pulls people apart.

Dorian LaGuardia

Circa 2002. From “Wedding to the North,” a book I wrote about four couples who fall apart while going to an Irish wedding. Write me if you’d like more.