GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

(Disclaimer: I have no business connection with JOAN. My only purpose in writing this story is to have fun and maybe share it)

(Author's Note: This story is part of a series that takes place in the years after the JOAN OF ARCADIA TV show ended. A listing of the other stories is on my profile. The main events that have happened since May 2005 are

(1) Joan has let Grace, Luke, and Adam into her secret

(2) Joan and Adam got married in June, 2006.

(3) Joan, Adam, and Grace have graduated from high school. Luke was jumped a year and allowed to graduate with them.

(4) Grace went to Europe in the sunmer of 2006 for training in a famine-relief organization. Joan, Adam, and Luke accompanied her for two weeks but returned to the States at the end.

(5) Grace has told Joan's secret to an Italian friend, Marghareta..

This story starts in August, 2006)

Chapter 1 Alone in Rome

Amazing how quickly things can become prosaic.

I never would have said so out loud -- it would completely ruin my image as Cynic Girl -- but Italy during the first two weeks had seemed like a wonderland. In the States I had considered myself at war with Society, but I didn't feel the same impulse here, because I didn't know enough about the social background. I knew of course about Renaissance tyrants like Alexander Borgia and the tormentors of Galileo, and of Mussolini's dictatorship in the twentieth century, but this was a new generation of Italians that I was dealing with, with no black marks that I knew of. They had a lovely language and a sense of art that, at home, I had only seen in Adam.

I could indulge one of my favorite hobbies, horseback riding, under the pretext that I was practicing for life in a primitive country.

There had been darker moments -- arguments with Luke over our future and whether You-Know-Who was interfering with it, and Joan's quest for "roots" that ended in the discovery of a dying aunt. But they seemed like problems that we had brought with us, nothing that I could blame on Italy.

Of course it was all subjective. I didn't know Italian at first, and so I was cut off from local newspapers and TV, which might have told me dispiriting news. Pretty sounds could convey dismal ideas -- Italian was after all the language of Dante's Inferno.

Also, to be frank, sex played a big role. Luke and I had arranged to share a room and a bed, and had taken full advantage of the opportunity. Now Luke was an ocean away and likely to remain so for several months at the least. Of course I still felt a bond, just as I did during the two years of acquaintance before we consummated the relationship, but I was feeling a letdown.

Electronic communications did not quite compensate. I had used Email two years ago to make my one big revelation to Luke -- MY MOTHER DRINKS -- but it was hard for me to write love letters, and even harder to type them into a machine. Much easier to make practical requests like "I won't be back in the States for months; you might as well sell my horse."

There were no revelations from Her, and that was probably a relief. She never dropped in from heaven just to say Shalom. She always had a mission in mind, and I wasn't in the mood for that.

The week after my friends went home I threw myself into studying -- the Italian language in the mornings and agriculture in the afternoon. The studying was a lot more enjoyable than it had been at Aracadia High, but by Thursday I was bored by the routine. I went to a popular bar near my new flat. As the daughter of an alcoholic I still had inhibitions about what I drank, but I was able to order a Coke and sat sipping it.

"Bon giorno, Gracia," came a voice from the entrance. It was our friend Marghareta. "How is it going?"

"Fa bene," I said; it was a tag I had learned in class yesterday.

"Non fa troppo bene," Marghareta replied, and in response to my chagrin at not understanding the reply, she laughed. "I said, things don't seem to be going TOO well."

"Right. I'm sort of bored."

"Lack of Luke?" she asked, apparently finding the alliteration funny.

"Partly."

"This weekend, I'm going hiking in the mountains with un'amica." I caught the feminine ending: the friend was a girl. "Want to come along?"

"I've been in the mountains," I said, recalling how Joan and I had made our way up a steep trail to her reclusive aunt's home.

"I remember-- but Francesca lives in the mountains in Tuscany. Easier road and more beautiful scenery."

I thought about it. Hiking was not my thing and, in the States, I probably would have said no. But in the States I had friends to fall back on -- Joan, Adam, Maggie, even the Friedmanns. Here I needed to make friends, and I was not going to do that by reflexably turning down invitations.

"OK, I'll come."

Francesca, Marghareta's amica, was an effusive, athletic girl who seemed to act on impulse. I didn't know anybody else quite like that. Everybody I knew had some sort of emotional baggage that kept them from uninhibited enjoyment of life: my mother's drinking, the suicide of Adam's mother, or the auto accident that had paralyzed the Girardi's eldest son. It seemed rather typical of Francesca that she did not map a route through the hills ahead of time, but merely chose a fork or turn when we came upon them. She knew the area well enough not to get lost.

Apparently it was also typical that she had not anticipated just how hot walking could get in August. I commented that it was "90 in the shade", a remark that confused the other two until I converted the degrees to Celsius units. But Francesca promptly came up with a solution.

"I know of a little lake near here. No pollution, few people know about it. Let's go for a swim."

"Una bella idea!" cried Marghareta.

"But I didn't bring a swimsuit," I said.

Marghareta laughed. "You don't need a swimsuit to go swimming."

"Perhaps Americane do," Francesca said, "Very puritanical, I hear."

Given her personality, Francesca probably regarded that as harmless teasing, or a rough attempt to let me bow out. Perhaps she didn't know that I was Jewish, and even if she had, she probably didn't realize how irritating it was for me to be lumped in with a Christian sect whose politics were far different from mine. So I erred in the opposite direction. "We do swim in the nude sometimes. We've even got a word for it -- skinny-dipping."

"Quella parola -- skinny-dip!" said Marghareta, always willing to learn English slang. But I had protested too much, like the lady in Hamlet, and now they thought I was in agreement. About a kilometer later they turned onto the path which, Francesca said, would take us to the pool. Great.

I was by habit a loner, not fond of intimacies with other people. I had grown up an only child, no sisters to exchange girl talk with. I had never let any of my friends, with the obvious exception of Luke, see me naked. Oh, there had been a few harmless accidents, usually on occasions when I was staying overnight with Joan, but none of them deliberate exposures. But now I was expected to go skinny-dipping with two girls whom I knew far less than I knew Joan.

I wished I had stayed back in Rome, being bored. What would I do now?

TBC