Free The Love of My Youth by Mary Gordon Page A

it.
    She looks at her watch. If she doesn’t hurry now she’ll be late for her meeting. She can’t afford to slow her pace for him. She walks quickly toward the stairway saying over her shoulder, “You stay here, I have to rush. Tomorrow, I’ll meet you at the Campo dei Fiori. How early can you get there?”
    “Nine-thirty. I leave Lucy at her school at nine.”
    She would have preferred an earlier time, so that the choice of fruits and vegetables wouldn’t be diminished by the industrious early risers, those ancient ladies with their baskets and string bags: implacable, unerring, unconcerned for manners, justice: wanting what they want. But Adam has a duty to his daughter, and that must come first: as a mother this is something she will never be able not to know. A parent must always put responsibility to the child before pleasure. Not in this case, she thinks, impossibly far ahead.
    When we knew each other before, she thinks, we weren’t parents. And then she thinks: It’s not only that we weren’t parents, it’s much more than that. We weren’t who we are. We were young; we were younger than his daughter, Lucy, is now. There were things we believed; there were things we wouldn’t have even begun to imagine. He thought he would be a great musician; I thought I would change the world, which I believed was open to me and everything that I would bring about. We thought that we would be each other’s one true love. We believed in that idea: the one true love. Now, it is impossible that we should believe that, living as we have lived, having loved others. It is not the case that he was my one true love. Only that he was my first. First. One . The two words, so similar, yet calling up radically different conceptions of the world. One: the only. First: an accident of order: a series. Nothing fated. Nothing not susceptible to change. Change, therefore, loss.
    She wonders: Is this the most important thing that can be said about us, that we are not who we were.

Thursday, October 11
THE CAMPO DEI FIORI
“You Might Be Surprised to Know I Cook and Garden”
    It is difficult for him to find her in the riot of colors: fruit and flowers, cheap goods for sale—most undesirable to him: wool hats, plastic shoes. He considers buying a set of white ceramic cups, an aluminum pot for heating milk. Then he sees her; she is examining a hill of different-colored eggplants: blue-black; white and variegated, a marbling of dark red and cream. He sees from her posture that she is happy.
    She is carrying a bright blue plastic bag.
    “What’s in the bag?” he asks.
    She opens it; he looks inside. A jar of capers, the size of the ones they’d eaten at Valerie’s (so she’d been taken by them, too); two cellophane envelopes, one of beans of various colors, one he can’t identify. He asks her what the grain is called.
    “Farro,” she says, “a kind of barley. It’s hard to find in America, but very common here.”
    “What will you do with it?”
    “Eventually, when I take it home, I’ll make a soup. With it and with these lovely beans. Look, Adam, the stripy red and white, the ruby colored, then the black and among them all the ordinary bright green peas. Aren’t they wonderful?”
    “You’ll make a soup? You?”
    “Yes. You might be surprised to know I cook and garden.”
    “Well, I am surprised. You who were so hostile to domestic life. My mother understood that; she said you should never learn to cook, you didn’t enjoy it, it would become a tyranny. You would ask her to teach you and she would say, ‘No, just talk to me, tell me something interesting, something I need to know.’ She said she cooked because she loved it, so it would never be a tyranny for her, it was a friendship. But for you … she didn’t want you to be enslaved to it, like so many women were. But then, you know, after she went back to school, particularly when she started law school, she just sort of stopped. She’d cook for special