Free Living in a Foreign Language by Michael Tucker Page A

on the
persiane
, the heavy wooden shutters that covered all the doors and windows, and finally got myself into the kitchen. There, in the middle of the floor, were eight giant cardboard boxes that we’d shipped over the month before. More pots and pans, exercise equipment, blankets and comforters, underwear and socks, hiking boots. We had a lot of unpacking to do.
    That’s when the idea of garbage came up. What do we do with it? Do they pick it up? Do they recycle? Do they separate? Does some guy come by in a truck? The house isway out in the middle of nowhere. And if he does come by with a truck, how do I know which day?
    Garbage is big for a guy. I think it goes way back, maybe all the way to the hunter / gatherer time. You gather; there’s garbage. And you can be damn sure the little cave woman isn’t going to help you schlep anything out to the curb. I called JoJo.
    â€œNo. Nobody’s gonna come by and pick up the garbage. You take it to these bins—they’re all over the place, you can’t miss ’em. Green for bottles, blue for plastic, gray for everything else. Just take it with you every time you leave the house.”
    All right. Cool. They recycle, they separate—this is not an alien planet, after all. I felt a tingle of imminent masculine achievement coursing through my loins. Yes, my Italian was limited to words like “pencil” and “banana”; admittedly I lacked the courage to venture out into the passing lane on the autostrada—but I knew where our garbage was going, and that was enough to awaken in me a sense of competence, of leadership, of, dare I say, power? Garbage is big.
    I did a reconnoiter. While Jill was putting the clothes away in tiny wardrobes that tried to pass for closets, I snuck out in the car to pin down the location of our bins. And they were everywhere! About a mile down the road, just off to the side next to a field was a gray one. That’s for food scraps and the like. But a little farther down—right as I got to our little village—was a veritable gold mine. A blue one, a green one and two gray ones—all lined up on the back side of the church, which, by the way, dates all the way back to the thirteenth century. This was the place. This was my local.
    When I got back to the house to announce my discovery,I found Max and Isaac zonked out on the couch in the living room. For the past three weeks, they had been on a strict regimen of partying and club hopping and then using the daylight hours—much like vampires—to regenerate themselves. I’d just gone into the kitchen and opened one of the boxes containing my beloved pots and pans in order to get them organized when I heard Jill’s voice calling from the bedroom upstairs.
    â€œHoney, could you help me for a minute?”
    I climbed the tiny stairs from the kitchen, taking care not to bump my head on the steel girder cleverly tucked behind the ancient wooden beam that made the kitchen so authentically seventeenth century. Bruno had subtly retrofitted the whole cottage for earthquakes. That we were now splitting our time between Northern California and Umbria, two of the world’s more active fault areas, seemed somehow appropriate.
    Jill was making up our bed and wanted me to help. As I fitted the corner of the bottom sheet onto my side of the mattress, I felt her eyes on me. I looked up and saw she had that expression on her face—the one that said we weren’t just making the bed, we were
making the bed
.
    â€œHow many houses now?” she asked softly.
    And we both started to count silently the places we had lived, the beds we had made together since that first little apartment in Washington, D.C.
    â€œI get twelve,” she said finally.
    â€œNo. This is thirteen.”
    We went over them all together and I reminded her of our first New York apartment—the sublet on East Fifth Street where we had to step over the drug addicts