Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) by Delia Ephron

mini lotions, and a manicure is an elevator floor away. Once Richard and Julia talked us into a walking tour in Cinque Terre. This is such an English thing, walking tours, only it isn’t walking, it’s hiking. Cinque Terre consists of five little villages nestled together in the mountains on the northwest coast of Italy. If you take a train from one town to the next, it takes five minutes. Maybe three. Through a tunnel. If you walk from one to the next, it takes eight hours up the world’s steepest hills and, even worse I discovered, down them. My hips were crying. After the first day, Jerry, Richard, and Julia hiked and I took the train. On the fourth day, in a wisp of a town called Riomaggiore, Jerry and I found ourselves in a hotel room so small, I tripped over myself. Some bugs, too. Outside the window was a stucco wall. I reached out and touched it.
    As only a girl raised in Beverly Hills can, I freakedout. I was so freaked, I figured out how to make a call on an Italian pay phone (I don’t speak Italian), got an Italian operator (who didn’t speak English) to find a hotel in the next town, called the hotel, and booked a reservation and a taxi to take us there. When I knocked on Richard and Julia’s door to tell them we were moving on to Porto Venere and would meet them there, they were in their tiny room, happy as can be, lounging on the bed, drinking Chablis. Admittedly their window did have a view, but still.
    To recap the trip: horseback riding, flamenco dancing, couch surfing. And we were going to stay at a monastery for some serious silence (what could be harder?) and spiritual rebooting—or I should say
booting
, as
rebooting
implies that I was at some point spiritual in my past.
    No sooner had we settled on this journey, which would take us from Madrid to Seville to Barcelona, than I began to have fantasies of the nightmare variety. I slip on a castanet and end up in traction. I fall off a horse and end up in a coma. My plane will crash and I’ll end up dead.
    A note about this. Last week I had lunch with a friend who told me that worrying is a depletion of your power. Then someone else told me that worrying is negativegoal-setting. Then someone else told me worrying is about having negative expectations. I’m planning to give up worrying. I want to, but I’m worried I won’t be able to.
    Furthermore, about this trip, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I had never flown across the Atlantic alone. Everyone I know takes off for parts unknown at the drop of a hat, but travel is not easy for me and never has been. I’m always ambivalent. And by the way, I really have to mention here that the other week I got on a plane for Tulsa, and, just before takeoff—the doors were closed, as they say—the pilot got on the loudspeaker and this is what he said: Something has fallen off the plane. I forget what because it took me by surprise, but the thing that fell off began with an
F
—not a fuselage but like a fin or a flipper. “That’s not a problem,” the pilot said. “There’s a small hole in the plane as a result.” I am not quoting exactly, but nearly. “That’s not a problem, either,” he said. “We just have to fly slowly.”
    As far as I could tell, no passenger even blinked except me. I said to my husband, “Should we get off?” He shrugged. We went to Tulsa. It took forever to get there, but we did, which, as we all know, is the important thing. I am not a fan of flying.
    Nevertheless, I was going to Spain.
    Then, a couple of weeks before we were supposed toleave, my editor announced something that should have been obvious from the start. The magazine was planning to send a photographer with us.
    Suddenly I wasn’t getting on a horse. I was getting on a horse and being photographed doing it. For all I knew, I might need a stepladder to get on a horse. I had even learned a useful sentence: I want a short horse.
Yo quiero un caballo corto
. I had learned another phrase—
una copa de