Free The Best American Short Stories® 2011 by Geraldine Brooks

second closed around her ring finger, made her, she realized, unable to remember what being nineteen or twenty had felt like. Looking into the anime innocence of these American girls' faces was to discover the power of new anxieties and the stubbornness of old ones.
    At the bottom of the stairs three tanned and lithe young Italian women walked unknowably by. She often felt herself bend away from people who knew how good they looked, but these women had such costume-party exuberance it seemed a waste not to stare. The belt? Three hundred dollars, easy. She somehow counted five purses among them. She hated the farthest girl's rimless aviatrix sunglasses only because she knew she could never wear them without fearing she looked ridiculous. It seemed impossible to her that the sun that turned these sprites clay brown was the same sun whose apparent gamma rays burned and peeled her. She looked down at her gray, pink-accented Pumas and then over at one of the growingly distant Italian's sassy red pumps. She had worn the Pumas only because she felt marriage should annul the desire to impress strangers, a thought that made her feel at once happy and vaguely condemned.
    "That
was
creepy," he said as they turned toward where Via Veneto terminated at Palazzo Barberini. "Those bones actually kind of freaked me out."
    She was still staring at her stupid shoes. "We could have spent that time looking at Bernini sculptures."
    His hand lit upon her back. "We could still do that. I'd be happy to."
    "No, it's okay. I'm tired anyway."
    "You want to go back to the hotel?" His hand sprang away from her back as he checked his watch. "It's not even three yet." The hand did not return.
    She did not say anything, thus sealing their hotel-bound fate. The next block or so was passed in silence, and they turned onto a tight, unremarkable side street (if any street in Rome could be considered unremarkable) made even tighter by the chaotically fender-to-grill-parked cars along both curbs. This was as residential as central Rome had yet seemed to her: hugely ornate wooden double doors with five-pound brass knockers and black-barred ground-level windows. The only word she could think of to describe it was
post-imperial
, which she knew was not even close to being historically correct. She liked this about Rome: whether you knew anything at all about history—and she knew a little—it forced you to think about history, even if in variously crackpot ways. In many cities, history was a loud voice at a party at which one felt underdressed. In Rome she felt history pressing in on all sides of her but in a pleasant, consensual way. Rome's weight was without expectation.
    "Not entirely sure I like it here," he suddenly said.
    She turned to him. "That's not a nice thing to say."
    "No, no. I like being here with
you.
I mean I'm not sure I like Rome. The city. In and of itself."
    She supposed she would have to hear this out but let his opportunity for explanation dangle a moment longer than felt polite. "Why not?"
    "It really bothers me that everything is closed from noon to four, for starters, and that if you order a cappuccino after breakfast you're a barbarian. And I realized yesterday that I don't like how Italians talk to one another. Everything is so
emotional.
Like those women sitting next to us on the stairs the other day. Listening to them was like overhearing a plot to kidnap the pope. And when I asked that kid what they'd been talking about, he said, 'Shoes.'"
    "I thought that was funny."
    "You know my friend who lived in Rome for a while? What I didn't tell you is that his first apartment burned down—I guess the wiring was all fucked up—and after the fire was finally put out he and some firemen went inside to see what survived. Exactly one wall did, in the middle of which was this scorched crucifix that had been hung at the insistence of his landlady. There were any number of reasons why this wall survived the fire, but when they saw it all the