I’m in the bathroom of a hospital room that overlooks the Atlantic. My belly is a full moon under a gown that ties halfheartedly at the back in two places, as if to say, Here is your allotment of dignity. Otherwise I’m bare. Well, I have on a pair of polyester-spandex-blend underwear crafted by Nurses Choice. They have a high waist and would repel even the horniest of fraternity brothers. Even a young man who has paid forty-seven dollars for Kamikaze shots, who finally has the girl back to his place, who has dimmed the damn lights — even that young man, if I stripped down to my Nurses Choice, would glance at his cellphone and say, Oh, man, I gotta go. This is underwear made for old women who were never young, who live in hillside towns like the one my mother was from in northern Italy, where there is a woman they call La Befana who wears all black and has looked seventy-five for all of my thirty-five years.