Show and Tell Fiasco

by christopher martin

The boy sat at the table as his grandmother pushed the empty bottle towards his eager hands. The boy picked up the wide piece of glass, running his hands over the straw skirt covering the lower half of the bottle. The boy looked in wonder at this strange object, a piece of history. He rotated the bottle, a faint smell wafting up from it, the smell of sophistication, he thought. He found the label on the other side, frayed and yellowed, its history written in a foreign tongue. He turned to his grandmother. She smiled at him, took a sip of her wine, and said, “that bottle — that bottle has a story.”

***

The boy was ten, and though born in Europe, he remembered little of his life before his move to the American South.

Among the magnolias and BBQ of Alabama, he felt European, and among the castles and culture of Europe, he felt American. He was caught between two worlds, a denizen of neither.

He tried to make friends in his new home, but he had no interest in American football, the only subject about which boys his age showed any interest. One day at lunch, several months before the show and tell, sitting alone, as he always did, he heard a group of boys discussing a football game his father had watched. A rare jolt of courage struck him. He took his tray and joined their table, interjecting himself into their conversation. He knew the shapes of the words he was saying, but he didn’t know how to use them. As quickly as the courage had come, it rushed out of him, leaving in its wake a wave of nausea. The scene in front of him came into focus. He stopped mid- sentence. A pause. Then crescendoing laughter filled the lunch hall.

***

The boy made his grandmother retell the story several times so the details would stick. While the bottle rested atop unread books about American football, he lay in bed, rehearsing the story he would tell the next day. He fell asleep, dreaming of the rolling hills of Italy, and the bottle, which he held aloft, the other boys, now his friends, cheering him.

***

His grandmother had visited Italy in the summer of 1953: a road trip from Milan to Rome. About two hours out of Milan she heard a pop, and steam rose from the front of the car. She drove on until she reached a small village with a mechanic. She left the car with him and strolled the cobblestoned streets, admiring the laundry fluttering in the mid-summer air. The town was deserted, and the air was stifling from the summer heat. She eventually came upon an empty cafe — dark and dingy, made cool by the bricks. An old man with skin like leather sat in the corner. He motioned towards the vacant tables and she began to ask for a coffee, but he silenced her. He disappeared, coming back with a bottle of wine. He poured a glass for each of them.

He sat at her table, and in his broken English said, “this wine has powers.” She drank it. It tasted of violets and cherries and figs. He poured out another glass, until at length the bottle was empty. “Keep this,” he said, passing it to her. “It will cure your loneliness.”

She tried to say she wasn’t lonely, but he wouldn’t listen. She stumbled back to the car, and being in no state to drive that night, she took a room at a local inn. The next day she drove on to Rome, the empty bottle riding shotgun. When it came time to return home, she wrapped the bottle in a jacket and put it into her hand luggage. “I sat in seat 31J,” she said. “And you know who sat next to me?” She turned her eyes from the boy to the mantlepiece, fixating in the centre, where underneath pictures of family, her eyes came to rest on a silver urn.

***

“That ain’t no magic bottle.” “Your grandma’s a liar.” Vicious whispers, like buzzing wasps, swarmed through the school, following the boy, mocking him, stinging him. “Why don’t you leave that here,” his teacher had said in an attempt to fill the silence after his presentation. He refused, carrying it around all day, including taking it to recess, where he sat at the edge of the playground, cradling it as a mother might her new-born child. That’s when it happened. “The movies got it right,” he thought, “everything does happen in slow motion.” He heard the shout as one of the boys threw a ball in his direction. He saw the brown oblong projectile cut through the air. Without thinking, his instincts taking over, he covered his face, and in so doing, for the first time that day, the bottle left his hands. He heard his own scream. He tried to catch the falling bottle, but his hands were too slow. It smashed onto the concrete; the straw basket wobbling around the speckled shards of glass.

***

His grandmother consoled him; told him not to worry, that what was important was not so much the container but the liquid inside; the liquid which was ephemeral, which had tasted of violets and cherries and figs. Of course his grandmother, American by birth, had never visited Italy. She had, the boy found out years later, bought that bottle, and many more like it, from a local supermarket. Each straw lined bottled was filled with a liquid that took her to that imagined place, that sun soaked village, made real not by the power of flight, but by the power of taste.

A liquid that transports the soul, the boy, now a man, thought; a liquid that captivates the mind, fostering spellbinding stories, whether true or not; now that’s something worth studying. And so that’s what he did; he started studying. He has yet to stop.