I grew up watching American movies. I wanted a pick-up truck, because it was cool. I wanted a cowboy boots; I wanted to hold the top of my hat like a hero when I trotted away on my horse. I wanted lockers at school, I wanted prom; I wanted to have garage sales and sell my shit instead of throwing it away, because reselling second-hand stuff in Italy is poor taste. I wanted barbecues in the front yard and large take-away coffees and doughnuts and I wanted a wholesome American family with a Golden Retriever running in the yard. I wanted to be a skinny, blonde sorority girl who looked good in an oversized sweatshirt.

I had a beautiful body, culture, and country to love, but I wanted to be someone and somewhere else. American movies told me to dream of all that, and I trusted them.

Badababoopi (exclamation).

Shortly after I moved to America, a football player jock yelled “badababoopi” at me to take me to bed (he eventually did), and kept saying it like it was the funniest joke ever, as if he had made it up himself instead of stealing it from Family Guy. That’s how I sound to Americans when I talk to my mom on the phone, when I say oh mio Dio or sì in bed; when I order at Olive Garden and I use the right pronunciation of the dishes, and the waiter goes, what, so I say it again, in American English, because the desire to be understood and accepted is stronger than the one to be true – and I also don’t want to sound like a dick.

Dramatic hand gestures, mamma mia, mangia!, badababoopi: I never complain, because being Italian in 2020 America is much better than what it used to be, and much better than what it is for many people who are actually American, but don’t have a white skin like I do. On Google you’ll find many Americans asking what race are Italians, but they could just look at me, and they’d know. So, in 2020, the worst I can get is being mistaken for a woman of Hispanic descent and getting a “we’re in the United States, speak English!”, a mamma mia, a mangia, a badababoopi, a dramatic hand gesture like Americans saw in the movies, but somewhat worse.

Bodacious (adjective).

My mom used to tell me that Italians know what beauty is, which I guess is a pretty fucked-up statement. Italians eat great food and want to stay skinny, because that’s what beauty is: skin with no flaws, perky, fit; nothing is supposed to hint at decadence. Skin that stays perfect for a lifetime and more, as if we were statues made by Michelangelo instead of breathing human beings.

“You’ve got a fat ass,” this bartender guy told me once, as I put my panties back on. This was my second month in the US. My butt cheeks bounced under the elastic. He was lying on his bed.

“Oh,” I said, shocked. In Italian, culo grasso is bad. That’s what Silvio Berlusconi, one of our most infamous prime ministers, said of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor: culona inchiavabile, unfuckable fat-ass.

“Fat-ass is a compliment,” the guy reassured me when he saw my expression. “In English, it’s a compliment.” He hung my bra from his window like a prize. He never wanted to give it back.

When I asked a friend about it, she used “bodacious” to explain what the guy meant. “You’re bodacious,” she said. Bodacious: sexy, voluptuous.

When I told another American lover that the standards for beauty in Italy are skinny bodies and blonde hair – mainly because we don’t naturally have either – he was shocked. That’s not how Italians are in movies, he said, his thick Southern accent slithering between his teeth. “Are there even blonde Italians?” he asked, and then tried to make me feel better. “You’re like Sofia Loren or Monica Bellucci. No, that’s not right. You look like Sofia Loren and Monica Bellucci had a kid.”

Which was, as always with men who claimed to have Southern charm, total bull-shieeet.

Sofia Loren was the Italian Marilyn Monroe. There are so many pictures of her eating pasta, scooping spaghetti and shoving them into her black-and-white lips. In a famous scene of Ieri, Oggi, Domani (Then and Now), Sofia Loren strips for Marcello Mastroianni, who literally howls in ecstasy. She flicks her garters away, revealing her thick thighs, inspiring total rapture in Marcello and in the audience. “Everything you see,” she said once, “I owe to spaghetti.”

When Sofia was starred in her first Hollywood movie, The Houseboat, Cary Grant fell in love with her real hard. He was thirty years older than her, and married to his third wife. Sofia was one of the most beautiful women in the world, and my body looks a bit like hers. Bodacious.

Later, I found out that bodacious also means remarkable. Noteworthy. Brilliant. Bold. Nothing to do with the size of Sofia Loren’s or my breasts, my butt, my hips.

Bodacious: remarkable, like Sofia Loren, who won an Oscar for Best Actress in 1962, and was the first actress ever to win with a foreign-language performance – but not many people remember this about her. People remember that she was bigger than what’s now perceived as the “standard.” People remember this woman with thick thighs, who “made it to America,” and, most of all, made Cary Grant fall head over heels. I mean, I get it, it’s Cary Grant. Still.

Dumb Bitch (adjective + noun).

“The guy you’re fucking,” a friend told me recently about the Southern guy who told me that I looked like Sofia Lauren’s baby, “is smarmy.” I didn’t know what “smarmy” meant.

Here’s a short list of some of the expressions my friends or acquaintances used to refer to the American guys I’ve encountered romantically, words I looked up throughout my time in the US: fuckboy, clingy, insane, piece of shit, jock, abusive, gross, boring, aggressively okay, redneck, skeezy, sketchy, douche, garbage, and, obviously, my favorites: homie cornrow (a white guy), and “prince hooch the trash can.”

“What does smarmy mean?” I asked my friend. Smarmy: I repeat the term in my head to add it to my English vocabulary. It sounds like a word you’d use to describe the corpse of a jellyfish melting on the sand after stranding on the shore. When my mom brought me to the seaside in my hometown in Italy, I could literally scoop the jellyfish from the sand and use it to build weird, shiny sand castles. The jellyfish corpses stung just a little, the venom melting under the sun, between my fingers. Smarmy. Words you don’t know always remind you of something else in your own language.

“He looks like a car-dealer,” my friend explained. “Just be careful,” because she loves me, and, “don’t be a dumb bitch.”

According to Urban Dictionary, dumb bitch usually refers to a girl who isn’t particularly bright but thinks she’s hot shit. When I look it up, I wonder if it’s true about me: I try to believe smarmy American men when they tell me I look like Monica Bellucci and Sofia Loren had a baby; I think I know what beauty is because I’m Italian, but I look in the mirror and see everything that is wrong with my body. For everything I see, I blame spaghetti.

Maybe I’m a dumb bitch: I feel embarrassed when I stumble on words, ask for their meaning, don’t get the jokes; I am a dumb bitch, because I always wanted to be American, touch the brim of my hat, trot to the west alone. I’m a dumb bitch: I repeat the English (wrong) pronunciation of the name of the dish at Olive Garden, because being Italian, being other, seems to be a weakness instead of an asset.

In the meantime, my brain turns new words into shiny, jellyfish castles.

Rachele Salvini is an Italian woman based in the U.S., where she's doing her PhD in English and Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. She spent most of her life in Italy, and she writes both in English and Italian. Her work in English has been published or is forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine, Necessary Fiction, Takahe Magazine, Sagebrush Review, Sarah Lawrence College Review, and others. She's represented by Zeynep Sen of Word Link Lit Agency. She's also a translator, and her translation work has appeared or forthcoming in several literary journals, including Lunch Ticket.