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up.
    “Oh, good, here’s my daughter now. Sylvia, come meet Joan. Joe—
ahhhn
!” Franny waved her over. Sylvia shook her head and stayed put in the shadows. “Sylvia, what’s the matter with you?” Franny felt her soft, melty feelings about Joan begin to move toward embarrassment at her daughter’s childish behavior.
    Sylvia dragged herself into the dining room, moving as if her bare feet were made of glue. Glue that very recently had been seen almost entirely naked.
    “This is Joan, he’s going to be your Spanish tutor,” Franny said, gesturing to the man, who Sylvia now was forced to shake hands with.
    “Hi,” Sylvia said. Joan’s grip was a little bit soft, which made it easier to keep breathing. She might have died if he had a handshake as good as his hair.
    “Very nice to meet you,” Joan said back. There was no wink, no acknowledgment of the run-in at the bathroom door. Sylvia slid into the chair next to her mother without taking her eyes off him, just in case he did make a gesture that indicated he had seen parts of her body that he shouldn’t have.
    Franny had slept with a Spaniard once, when she was at Barnard. He was visiting for the year, and lived in the dormitory on 116th Street, just across the street. His name was Pedro—or was it Paulo?—and he had not been an expert lover,but then again, neither was she, yet. Like most things, sex got better with age until one hit a certain plateau, and then it was like breakfast, unlikely to change unless one ran out of milk and was forced to improvise. All Franny could remember was the way he murmured at her in Spanish, a language she didn’t speak, and the sound of those
r
’s rolling off his soft, persistent tongue. Franny had hoped for some love letters in Spanish when he returned home, but by the time he left New York, they weren’t even seeing each other anymore, and so she hadn’t gotten any. Pedro-Paulo hadn’t been nearly as good-looking as Joan, anyway. The boy at her dining room table was built like an athlete and wanted to be a doctor; he had a strong chin with the slightest hint of a cleft at the center. He hadn’t come from church—he’d come from playing tennis with his father. They played at a tennis center about fifteen minutes away, the home turf for Mallorca’s most famous son, Nando Filani, who had won two grand slams already this season. Now all Franny could do was picture Joan in a sweat-drenched T-shirt, the muscles in his arms flexing as he ran for a shot. If Sylvia had been a different kind of girl, Franny might have been worried about leaving her alone with Joan for so many hours over the next two weeks, but things being as they were, she wasn’t.
    “Mom?”
    “Sorry, sweetie. Did you say something?”
    “We’re going to start tomorrow at eleven. Is that okay?”
    “Perfecto!”
Franny clapped twice. “I think this is going to be so much fun.”
    They all stood up to walk Joan to the door, and Franny grabbed Sylvia by the hand as he climbed into his car and did a three-point turn to drive back down the hill.
    “Wasn’t he
gorgeous
?”
    Sylvia shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know. I didn’t really notice.” She spun on her heels and ran up the stairs to her bedroom, shutting the door with a loud clunk. As Franny suspected, she had nothing to worry about. It was only after Joan had gone home and Sylvia had gone upstairs that Franny realized that the age difference between her and the tutor was as wide as the difference between Jim and that girl, which made her audibly gulp, as if she could swallow her sickened feeling like a bit of traveler’s indigestion.

    Everyone agreed that an early dinner was best. While she was boiling the water for the pasta, Franny put some olives out in a shallow bowl, with a second small bowl for the pits. She sliced the dried sausage and ate a few pieces before returning her attention to the capers and cheese. The sausage was a little bit spicy, with flecks of fat that melted on her