“Oh, Jason!” she would exclaim. For she was growing restless and edgy. The more she felt herself loving him, the more it angered her to think that love was entrapment.

While it was still a trip, she was safe from those big decisions Jason wanted her to make. The Pooh language and allusions they used between themselves helped, too—it went back to her childhood, it had nothing to do with her future as a woman.

She tried to tell him.

“I don’t want to be financially and emotionally dependent on marriage. My mother was more interesting than anyone I knew, yet in the eyes of the world she was no one except her husband’s wife and her children’s parent. She wasn’t strong enough to be herself. Only old Umbertina seems to have done what she had to do in life. The other family women are like lost souls—only there to provide life-systems for the men and children.”

“Come on, Tina, everyone knows that things are different these days. There’s no danger, anyway, of anyone like you being submerged! Actually it’s probably the other way around; any guy would have to be pretty strong on his own to take on a full-blown temperament like yours. All that Castagna toughness—God!”

She laughed. “Does it scare you, Bear? Does it scare the Wasps because you’re the past but we’re new and emerging? That’s the great thing: You see, I have these two things in me that are beginning to be worked out, my work and my Italian-American identity.”

Jason looked at her quizzically. “You never used to say you were Italian-American. You went to great lengths to make it understood that your mother was American and your father Italian—separate things. No mix. You didn’t want any part of melting-pot Italian.”

“I know. But you know what, Jason-Bear, I’m excited by being here at the beginning of Calabria. I was never so far south before. I’m excited by being near Umbertina’s birthplace—and excited by her, by her story. Up till now I ignored all that part; my mother’s family just wasn’t up to my father’s side and so I ignored them. But the fact is, you see, that my father’s Venetian side is like being Wasp in the States: all well and good, but dying out, enervated, obsolete. The interesting part is the rise of all these new people who got where they are not by privilege or family or connections but just by sheer guts and working hard. I’m beginning to like the southern part of me.”

“That’s your trouble, Tina; you just don’t let both things blend naturally—no, you’ve got to make dramatic decisions and take one side or the other. Now you’ve got this thing about Wasp wispiness, as if we’re all dying out of sheer inertia.”