Florence Waited

A quartet played on a small platform under the arch. The clarinetist was skinny and small; the trombonist was tall with long arms; the bald guitar player was chubby, and the young woman playing the string bass was voluptuous – the musicians’ shapes mimicked their instruments. Julie laughed and woke herself up with a start. She’d never dreamed of dancing in Pennington. It was midnight. She closed the balcony doors, got undressed, and slept until morning.

As Julie ate a late breakfast, she made a plan. She didn’t want to squander a moment but was paralyzed by what to do first. Coming to Florence had been her nightly fantasy for decades to see the art and architecture she’d loved and studied in college. But it was more of a prayer to relieve her frustration than anything else. She never thought it could happen. Her brothers, who’d come home for their mother’s funeral, insisted Julie take whatever money was left, including the insurance money and the proceeds from the house, to repay her for all the years she’d cared for their parents. Julie was relieved. She could do whatever she wanted. It was daunting.

After idling for an hour in the Medici garden, enjoying the fruit trees and flowers in bloom, Julie wandered south and was soon at the Piazza del Duomo, the heart of Florence. The Cathedral, the Baptistery, and the Campanile were enormous, much larger than she’d imagined from the pictures in Jansen’s History of Art, her bedtime storybook for years. They loomed over the crowded plaza. Like a quilt, green, pink, and white marble in intricate patterns covered every inch of the façade. The complex embellishments made her eyes vibrate. The stained glass windows and the elaborately carved doors were more beautiful than the pictures. 

Dozens of leather vendors created a ring surrounding the small plaza packed with people checking their cell phones, sitting on benches eating gelato, taking pictures, or hovering near shouting tour guides with numbered placards. Hundreds of conversations in a host of languages all chattered at once. The plaza sizzled in the afternoon heat with the smell of smoke, leather, sweat, and fish, all melded into a reeking stew. 

The sound of her name amidst the clamor made her search frantically, but she couldn’t see anyone familiar. Julie always hated being surrounded by intense noise. She couldn’t bear to take a long shower until a few months ago because she’d heard her sick parents crying her name over and over, pleading for her help in the sound of the gushing water. 

Disoriented, she needed to leave. Julie searched for a break in the building facades, twisting back and forth between the shifting clusters of people. She spied a gap and wiped the sweat from her forehead as she pushed through the surging crowds. Too short to see where she was going, Julie pressed blindly on and eventually found a quiet side street where she slumped against a wall and caught her breath, her heart beating hard. The cold stone touching her back made her shiver.

She recalled her panic attack at JFK Airport when the taxi dropped her at the Departures level. She paced from one end of the walkway to the other outside, dragging her rollie bag, resisting her desire to escape and return to her now empty house. After an hour, she mustered her nerve to enter the glass doors, go through the TSA line, and find her gate. It took all the courage, or desperation, she possessed to get on the plane. But she’d done it in the end. However Julie hadn’t buckled her seatbelt until the flight attendant noticed. She took one of her mother’s sedatives and slept all the way to Rome, where she changed planes for Florence. 

“I can’t do it. There are too many people. I won’t be able to climb up to the Dome,” she said. Her mother always insisted she had the resolve of a doormat. 

 “Hi, there.” 

Julie looked up, and Lucy was leaning against a wall opposite her. She forgot her distress and disappointment. “Lucy. Where did you come from?”

“Did you decide to go up in the Duomo? You’ll love it. I’m sure,” she said.

“I came for that, but it’s too crowded. It’s so hot and smelly and noisy. I got all turned around and panicked, I guess.”