No One But Us

1

A long, unmarked bus, silver on top, a weathered blue on the sides, entered the piazza. At the same time, thousands of miles away, a B-52 sailed through the sky, its long, silver body weathered by the equatorial sun. Bombs laddered down on a stronghold of the North Vietnamese Army that might, in actuality, have been a school full of children, and as the plane slipped back into clouds, the settlement that had been its target burst into fire. Meanwhile, in Rome, the bus circled the fountain and discharged its payload, a pack of children who attended the international school. The younger ones raced down the sidewalks that fed into the piazza while the older ones stayed where the bus had let them off, talking and dancing about, the more sophisticated among them lighting smokes. Vespas and cars zipped around the fountain, tables and chairs stood before a coffee bar, and at the top of a building, Petula Clark, coming soon to Palazzo dello Sport, gazed from a billboard.

The bombing appeared on page four of the Rome Daily American where the purpose of the targeted building wasn't discussed. A mother knelt in the dust; she saw a charred notebook at the edge of the rubble, her son's name on the cover. With a stick, she brought it towards her, everything still so hot, but no one took a picture.

In Rome, the last two children crossed the piazza. They were the same height, but one was skinny and girlish while the other had a mature shape. They seemed related; they didn't talk, and the more developed one trailed behind the other. They went into a bar, came back with coffees, sat at an outdoor table.

"So, happy vacation!" Eleanor, the skinny older sister said. She was in her own life now. Our narrator must pull back, allow her to have her own life.

"Yeah, some vacation," Melinda replied. "How come you don't have to go to summer school?"

"You know why."

"Well, it's not my fault. It's that stupid teacher. I did all the work, I can't help it." Melinda groped in her school bag, pulled out a compact and quickly brushed color onto her cheeks. She snapped the case shut and dropped it into the bag. Only then did she lift her coffee and take the first foamy sip, looking not at her sister but outwards, at the small, sealed world of the piazza in the afternoon.

Every day after school they went to that coffee bar, and in the month that Petula Clark had been gazing down at them, her power never diminished. They knew the words to her hit song, "Downtown," and whenever it spilled out of radios and TVs they sang along, their voices joining the great ballad of female loneliness sweeping across the globe. The singer's longing was their longing, a promise of the sadness that came naturally with adulthood.

Eleanor looked up at the billboard. The parted mouth, the black lined eyes, the sculpted bouffant were an image of perfection so far off, so unattainable she worried she would never come close despite her sacrifices, the nights sleeping on plastic rollers, the early mornings at the mirror with the tiny jar of makeup and the impossibly small brush. And not only that. She saw the blood-stained panties Melinda tossed in the wash and how, when she picked up her bookbag to resume the walk home, she lifted her head only once to Petula, giving her the quick, admiring glance of a peer.

As her sister maneuvered through the empty tables, six Vespas buzzed to the curb. Melinda ignored them, her patent leather shoes tapping the pavement, her hips rolling beneath the emerald skirt she had worn to school every day that week despite their mother's initial, halfhearted complaint: It's too short and too tight and filthy besides.

The Vespas followed for a while, but by the time Eleanor caught up, they'd disappeared. When the girls turned onto their street, they shot down from the block above, six machines swooping in...