Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir Read Free Page A

idea of sleep in a new time zone. My mom kept coming up to check on me, but I wanted to stay with the talker.
    The next morning my mom and I sat at a little table on the same rooftop, where breakfast was being served. It was included in the price of the room, so we weren’t going to miss it.
    “Where are the pancakes?” I asked.
    “Here, try these,” my mother said, pointing to the words fresh figs on the menu. “It’s fruit.”
    “I want pancakes. Where are the pancakes?”
    “Here, have some bread and cheese.” She pointed to another item on the paper.
    “I’m hungry. I want a real breakfast.” I was not going to be tricked into believing that bread and cheese was breakfast. “Is there any cereal?”
    “This is breakfast in Italy.”
    I wasn’t sure about Italy.
    From bustling Rome we boarded a creaking train and headed to towns pulled from my mother’s memory, places she’d visited when she was younger. Our cash reserves were sparse and the school year was starting soon, so the need for a job was growing urgent.
    I watched from the train windows as countryside and beach sped by, a blur of sun, water, and sparkles. Farms that looked like places I’d only seen in picture books, old women dressed all in black, and chickens running across dirt streets.
    At each new town, my mom scanned the phone book for private language schools and placed a cold call, offering her services as an experienced teacher of English as a second language. Her résumé included years in Peru, Barcelona, New York City, and most recently Seattle, where she taught refugees from Africa and Asia to speak the language of their new rainy home. She was no college student backpacking through Europe. She was a professional, with a master’s degree in ESL and a child to support.
    We quickly developed a system for boarding the trains. The second-class cars were the Southwest Airlines of Italian travel, with people waiting in line outside the train doors and scrambling to find seats once they opened. Small and quick, I was able to squirm past the grown-up-sized bodies and suitcases and, if lucky, find two seats together. Then I would lay my body across both seats and avoid eye contact with the Italians, who were annoyed they’d been outpushed by a foreign child. My mother followed, her arms overflowing with our five matching suitcases. When we didn’t get seats, we were crammed in the walkway, sitting on the bigger bags, trying to catch a breeze from the open windows.
    The small factory town we landed in was not the picturesque village my mom envisioned when we started on our Italian trek. Terni is nestled between Florence and Rome in the region of Umbria, which is famous for its hill towns: Perugia, Todi, Assisi. Towns surrounded by stone walls built to protect them in medieval times and perched on hills with centuries of history at every step. But Terni, a major train-switching spot, had been bombed during World War II. Quaint and historic were replaced with high-rise apartments from the sixties and seventies. It was our landing spot because, not surprisingly, no other Americans wanted to live andteach English there. Unlike the postcard-worthy towns, Terni had a job for my mother.

    Nearly thirty years later, these stories of my childhood feel disconnected from my life as a married mother of four. My current routines of making school lunches, scheduling around naptimes and church on Sunday, don’t match with the continent hopping of my early years. But I think my eight-year-old self would have liked to know where her life was headed, because the downside to adventure is insecurity.
    Even as I write these pages, I have a wheezy baby on my lap, home only hours from our latest visit to the emergency room. I have a toddler napping in a crib that she doesn’t want to admit she’s outgrown, and two reading and writing freckled girls who need to be picked up from school. That eight-year-old girl in Barcelona, that only child, would have been