My gelato skirt | The Narrative Ark

When I was a teenager I had a tiered skirt that I loved. I thought of it today on a walk when I encountered the breeze of a rose and the memory flooded me. When I came to have this skirt it must have been the summer of my 16th or 17th year of life, in Cetona, and I remember that my legs were thin, muscular and tan, never showstoppers but pretty enough. I had loved the skirt in the window of my friend Antonella’s boutique, in the corner of the piazza where Marina now sells fruits and vegetables. I don’t remember how I came to have it, but probably Antonella gave it to me, as she often did with things I liked that no one would otherwise buy me. This skirt, short, a good bit above the knee but not scandalously so, had a tier in chocolate brown, a tier in white, and a tier in pink the color of Japanese cherry blossoms, the rose of a delicate spring bloom. The colors remind me still of gelato we bought on hot lazy summer afternoons at the Bar Sport, in the cradle of our town, sitting outside in the plastic chairs that cut into our legs and the jukebox playing Endless Love or Kiss on My List, and specifically lemon, strawberry, and chocolate, the winningest combination that Lillo would pile atop the cone precariously till it dripped and boys watched us lick it though we didn’t yet know why or pretended not to. I had taut leather white flats to go with my skirt — white flats that on the dirt road to my house I labored to keep white — and I remember my bony foot and skinny leg that perhaps for a moment, a single moment, I felt had no faults. They were, indeed perfect. Perhaps it was the daintiness of my skirt that made me feel that way, delicious as the ice cream I remember, flouncy and girly. I felt good and whole like simple color on fabric, untainted. When I put the skirt on with the white T-shirt I made sure was perfectly dried on the line in the sun and ironed straight from the laundry I felt supernaturally perfect like something had come together to make me the prettiest I could be, like I would never be again, even on a wedding day many years later. In fact, I was far from perfect — flat-chested and skinny, aware already of that which I did not have. Back then everyone made fun of me for everything I was not. Ma le pocce dove l’hai, they would say. Where are your teats? Yet, with my little white T-shirt hugging my bare flat belly and chest and my white flats, with my well-wrought arms and legs, empowered by the specialness of something lovely to wear that looked a lot like gelato, I felt good enough to move forward, well-equipped, shielded even from meanness in the folds of a skirt the color of strawberry and vanilla.