Calendar of Regrets

February

January February March April May June July August September October November December   & & &327' At the top of the next hill, Nayomi’s story falling behind you, you don’t find an extension of the country road you’ve been following. You find yourself veering unexpectedly back onto the Autostrada, traffic interlacing frantically around you. You crest 130 kilometers, 132, your mind hazy with speed. Above, the sky has begun paling into a shimmering wheat, the afternoon taking its first steps toward sunset. The landscape is the same landscape you’ve been driving through since late this morning. Nayomi must have been leading you in an enormous meandering circle, spilling you out almost at the same point you started. Your husband’s body is no longer rigid. Robert is slumping in his seat, as if he has somehow gotten used to this new situation. He is still alert, but there is something almost relaxed in his pose. This is where we are, it tells you. This is what is happening. Because he can’t do it, his body is adapting for him. You tune in to what Nayomi is saying just in time to hear her announce you are nearing a medieval village called Viterbo. This is where, she explains, she spent two nights last autumn in a hostel with her friends. The village sits atop a hill just as villages do in early Italian Renaissance paintings. In the middle rises a castle. Every June, Nayomi says, Viterbo hosts a beautiful cherry festival. She wishes she could attend someday. She wishes she could do many things someday that it now appears she won’t be able to do. Isn’t it amazing, she asks, how life becomes a series not so much of choices as negations of choices? To want this, you have to give up that. Every day a few more options fleck away. In the end, you’re 328 b & LANCE OLSEN ' left with only one. While in Viterbo, she ate nothing but the village ’s famous cherry tarts. For breakfast, lunch, dinner. They were the most delicious pastries she had ever tasted, rich and buttery and full of tang. Her friends and she picnicked on benches at the base of the castle, talking about what they would do after the holidays and how. Back then their plan seemed like a dark electric fairytale. Now she is living it. You are reasonably sure you remember seeing a red star labeled Viterbo on the map this morning at the car rental office in Rome. If you’re right, if that’s where you are, then you are no longer traveling north. You are traveling south. Nayomi is aiming you back toward the capital. Maybe that’s why traffic has started condensing around you, why you have to swerve in and out among more and more cars and trucks and busses and motorcycles to maintain your speed. You are sensing the first pulses of rush hour. Faster, Nayomi says. You can go faster. You crest 135. You crest 140. You hear the engine straining beneath you. It takes all your resolve to maintain control of the car. You’ve been hoping Nayomi’s ramble will help your children remain under. They’re exhausted from the string of early-morning wakeups to catch this plane or that train, this ferry or that bus, exhausted from the sense of perpetual motion that vacations like this engender. You’ve been worrying that their immune systems are wearing down, that they’re due for colds, which means you and Robert are due for colds, too. It seems right that all they’ve done is come awake long enough to rearrange themselves more comfortably in the backseat, Nayomi their beanbag pillow. But even as this idea orbits inside your head, Celan says: I have to go pee-pee. Your breath catches. Your grip tightens on the steering wheel. This time he doesn’t sound groggy at all. This time he sounds wide awake, full of honesty and need. My tummy’s sloshing, he says. Nadi joins in: Me too. I have to go, too. Nayomi says: It won’t be long now, munchkins. We’re almost there. Das macht nichts. Celan says: I can’t hold it. Nayomi asks Nadi: How about my princess? Can she hold it a klitzeklein bit more? An itsy-bitsy bit? Nadi takes the question very seriously, [3.143.4.181...