Free Advice for Italian Boys by Anne Giardini

between—black jeans, a close-fitting white T-shirt, a jacket cut from soft, cinnamon-coloured calfskin. He smells—she has occasionally manoeuvred herself close enough to him to take in his scent—like starch and musk, with a slightly acrid edge of tangy male-ness. Even the memory of his scent makes her mouth water. He moves through her yearning vision as if under water, like a great fish, slowly and with a surfeit of grace and without any evident consciousness of the way he refracts the light. He is as without flaw and as remote as a cloud or mountain or god. It makes Marietta weak to gaze at Mario for longer than a moment, and she tests herself every Saturday. Standing behind a wire shelf with its display of pasta and canned Roma tomatoes, she stares at Mario until she feels the tips of her fingers begin to tingle. Then she rests her eyes on the dark blue boxes of Barilla penne rigate, which she pretends to straighten on the shelf although they are almost always already in perfect order. She has, in this manner, memorized every word on the Barilla box, and the phrases printed on the box have taken on a deep, Mario-tinted significance: COTTURA 11 MINUTI. N° 1 IN ITALIA. There are for Marietta no words more charged with romance in any language of the world than these. COTTURA 11 MINUTI. N° 1 IN ITALIA .
    Once Marietta has soaked up as much of Mario as she feels she can bear, and if she is not too busy serving other customers, she might watch Paul for a while, since he is infallibly splendid, although not nearly as good looking as Mario. Paul’s jeans and colourfully striped button-down shirts are always crisply ironed, his boots polished, his black leather jacket stiffly assertive, his belt buckle almost aggressively large and glistening. He sometimes wears a black cashmere scarf loosely knotted around his neck. Marietta has sometimes thought that if Mario were to dress as Paul does, he would be too much to endure, and she is grateful that Mario sticks, on Saturday mornings, to jeans and T-shirts.
    Marietta pays no attention to Frank, who is shaped like her father—short, with a mild face, rounded torso, and a humble walk with no bravado or swagger. Frank works on Saturdays, and comes in for coffee during his break, dressed for work in blue canvas overalls with the name CORELLI’S AUTO BODY stamped on the breast pocket. She hasn’t ever seen Italian paintings or sculpture, and so doesn’t know that Frank has a classic, slanting Roman profile, the profile of a nobleman, a silhouette surely intended for coins and for marble busts rather than the muddy, greasy undersides of cars.
    Marietta knows Nicolo best, in fact Nicolo is the only one of the four she has ever spoken to, since she often takes his orders, but he has always treated her like a child—she is sixteen—and so she assigned him many years ago to the category of adult. As a result, she now perceives him to be middle-aged and therefore entirely beyond any possible romantic significance.
    That Saturday morning, Frank was the next to arrive at the bakery. He slid into the chair across from Nicolo, the seat closest to the high glass counter with a good view of the parking lot, his usual place because it allowed him to keep an eye on his car, a sherbet-yellow 1988 Corvette, to make sure no one placed a foot on its bumper or leaned on its hood or came too close to its recently waxed surface in manoeuvring through the constricted parking lot.
    “Hey,” he said to Nicolo. “Whatcha doing?”
    “Reading,” Nicolo replied. He folded the covers of the heavy book closed. “It’s for a class I’m starting.”
    “Look at our good wittle Nicolo, weading his book.” Paul had arrived. Except for Mario, who had recently completed a real estate course, none of them had studied after high school; they had all fallen into work that they liked well enough and that provided the advantage of reliable pay without requiring diplomas or degrees.
    “Yeah,” Frank said,