by Don Wallace
Distracted and brusque, Gwened hadn’t supplied a map of the island or even a coherent description of where the village lay. Fortunately a paper place mat from the harbor café where we had our last coffee before boarding the ferry revealed the island’s contours. It looked like a sole or flounder lying on its side, a thought that only made us hungry.
Staggering in our backpacks down the gangway, we mounted the wet stone quai. We’d made a sign using the place mat, writing “Donnant,” the name of a big beach we thought might be close to Gwened’s village, and stuck out our thumbs. The few cars on the ferry departed swiftly. It was blustery, cold, dark. Just as we were giving up, a car that had passed us did a U-turn and pulled up. A brother and a sister, older than our parents, were headed for their family’s home.
“Donnant is our village, but we don’t know you,” the man said to Mindy. “And we know everyone. Where are you really going?”
• • •
Where are you really going?
Good question. If Mindy had followed the course laid out for her, she’d likely be practicing law in Honolulu, not wandering around a French island with her thumb stuck out. And if I’d followed my birthright as a third-generation Californian, I’d be on another path, too—probably working some newspaper job that secretly bored me, while boring other people with boasts of how I’d rather be rambling down Mexico way to drink mezcal and warble with mariachis.
Funny how Belle Île would change all that. But first we had to get there. And before that could happen, Mindy and I had to meet, marry, and muddle our way into a cul-de-sac from which we saw no escape. This was easily accomplished by deciding to be writers. While our respective universities were seventy miles apart, once we stepped into that writing river, the current swept us away and eventually deposited us in the same eddy in Iowa City, where as two westerners at the Writers’ Workshop, it almost seems inevitable that we would walk into a bar, glare at each other, swap insults, and fall in love.
Just a couple of heedless kids with windblown hair who thought they were going to conquer the world with their portable electric typewriters, Mindy and I then brought our glowing smiles and infuriating self-assurance back to the lands of our mothers. We’d originally decided to marry in a county courthouse in Iowa City, but now there would be a proper Hawaiian wedding in Honolulu.
We stopped for a weekend in Long Beach, where my parents reserved the big table at the country club to show us off. One of our family’s oldest friends lurched up and planted his hands on the tablecloth and gave Mindy a long look. “Well,” he said, “thank god she isn’t black!”
This was a direct shot at me and my father. While in high school and in the throes of the Civil Rights spirit, I’d brought a black friend, Michael, to the club’s heretofore unintegrated mixed grill. Next Dad had proposed a black family friend, Bill, as a member. After Bill was rejected, my father was shunned and harassed. Someone actually stole his golf shoes from his locker, but more seriously, his law practice lost clients. This was on par with the treatment my mom had been getting as president of the school board after she imposed busing on the district as a way of balancing racial demographics in the high schools.
For a moment I was too stunned to react to the comment about Mindy. Then I rose and was cocking my fist (something I could barely recall how to do) when family thankfully came between us. I turned to Mindy, who looked shell-shocked. Welcome to Long Beach, honey.
Honolulu was much more welcoming. At the reception at The Willows, guest after guest rose to perform an impromptu hula in our honor while the Irmgard Aluli Trio played. It was big, beautiful chaotic fun—Koreans and Hawaiians and WASPs and Japanese and surfers and hippies and the Honolulu police chief—and then we spent the rest of the summer writing and surfing and barbecuing with family on Diamond Head.
But there were tensions here, too. Mindy’s mother was a diminutive Korean beauty dipped in gojujang, hot pepper sauce, a pineapple plantation-raised former piano prodigy and serial marrier of inappropriate men. As our departure neared, she began to mutter and stalk Mindy around the house. Several times, dinner table talk centered on her or her sons laughingly describing the “lickings Mom gave”—with the most extravagant always given to Mindy. When I questioned this later, I was told “this is just the way Mom is.”
Well, my mother-in-law looked like a serious case of Jekyll and Hyde to me. We started staying away all day and barricading ourselves in our room at night. On our last evening, she came at midnight, battering on the door and telling me to let her in because she needed to deal with Mindy and her “stink expression” once and for all. Her voice was icy and deeply scary. She returned with a key and got the door open, but I put my body between her and my new wife. The desire to do violence poured off her like some exotic perfume.
We flew the next day, arrived late, and slept safely and gratefully in my childhood bedroom. In the bright morning we came down too late to join the family at breakfast, due to some messing around. The long dining table had a bright new tablecloth and a floral decoration and pretty Italian plates with fresh cantaloupe. I was bringing Mindy her coffee from the kitchen, having greeted my mother with a kiss, when I caught one of the house cats licking Mindy’s melon. “Hey! Get off!” I cried, and brushed the cat off the table.
Ten minutes later, we were packed and driving away, kicked out by my diminutive redheaded beauty of a mother, the piano-playing, Ivy-League-educated daughter of a Southern cotton plantation family whose aristocratic airs had always seemed as nebulous as cotton candy to me. Mom didn’t give us beatings growing up, like Dolly gave Mindy, but the searing verbal blast she hit us with as we tumbled out the door that day exceeded anything I’d ever experienced, anywhere. And all over a ball of white fluff named Precious.
What had happened here that, in less than twenty-four hours, both our mothers had independently reached the same boiling point? With Dolly, there’d been inklings of resentment against her only daughter for finally running away to have the life she’d wanted, instead of staying home to support Mom. Dolly had finished her music education in Iowa, too, and even audited Writers’ Workshop classes. But she never did anything with her education and lived off her parents and child support. Now, according to Dolly’s crude financial calculus, our marriage was threatening her main source of future earnings, her presumably beaten-until-malleable Mindy, whom I was dead set on whisking away, once and for all.
With my mom, the cracks had also been showing for years. She wasn’t a born politician, as her job demanded, nor was she a natural or comfortable person outside of our tight little family. Taking on the job of being a Civil Rights figurehead in a town and school torn by riots was no small thing, of course. But it was also a declaration of independence from her own diminutive, fiery, Southern, piano-playing mother. As most of us find out, you never can escape that maternal grip.
I think she also underestimated or never acknowledged the neurotic tension that came of being from a Southern family whose black maids helped raise her, and later, having a social life centered around a country club that admitted neither blacks nor Jews. When Mom drew her own line in the sand—the day the club asked her to remove a Jewish friend from a PTA lunch—she probably didn’t realize she’d have to draw it again and again for the rest of her life. Once she backed busing, she let herself, and us, in for more than fifteen years of obscene phone calls and death threats taken seriously enough to warrant police protection.
I’m proud of my mom: she never backed down. But as her four children went away to college, I guess she transferred a little too much of her affection to her cats. With the Civil Rights movement safely in the past, she was looking forward to retirement from the school board to a life of golf and bridge. And then I’d thrown her social standing into disarray by threatening to punch an old racist and elbowing her beloved Precious aside.
So off we went, Mindy and I. It’s good to be young and talented and running for y
our lives, but having a plan helps. We didn’t. As a result, a couple of years after getting married, we found ourselves living in Ivy Towne, a four-hundred-unit apartment complex in a one-stoplight cowtown in California’s Central Valley. While Mindy attended law school, I was living the life of a roving temp, swashbuckling among the specialty offices peculiar to an agricultural university, most memorably the Meat Science Department. It was a long two years before I landed a job as a sportswriter at the local paper, the Woodland-Davis Daily Democrat (circulation 12,000).
One morning, we raised our heads from our oatmeal and stared around us at another rainy winter’s day.
This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful life. And you ask yourself…
It has been said of Americans that we have one answer to all of life’s problems, and that is to move. In our case, we decided to double down on our first lover’s leap. Mindy had won a writing grant while in law school and was determined to take another shot at a literary life. As soon as she graduated and took the bar exam, we’d make a really big move and head to New York City. There we’d force-feed our novels to any agent who left his or her door ajar. And then we’d keep going, off to Paris with no return ticket.
Although we were financing the trip with wedding cash meant for china, not France, I was more than happy with the notion of renting a cozy Paris apartment and writing at adjoining marble-topped café tables on the Boulevard St. Germain. It would be good to shake off the pesticide dust of the tomato factory farms that surrounded Ivy Towne, to feel what it was like to wander and think and stroll together in a foreign place, to check our American concerns and baggage at the border. I’d just turned twenty-seven and was already in a state of premature burnout from my sixteen-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week grind as the paper’s only sportswriter. I covered the gamut from eight-year-old Little Leaguers to the eighty-eight-year-old bowler who’d just thrown his first strike. (“Time to Spare” was my headline for the latter, which somehow our publisher found offensive.)
Our families, of course, had other ideas. They said we were crazy and worse—“lifelong moochers” was the phrase Dolly flung at us when we announced our departure. But we didn’t have to answer to anyone: it was our money and our lives. Being in the midst of a crushing recession actually helped. Nobody was hiring newly minted lawyers or small-town sportswriters, especially ones who’d rather be writing long, lyric novels, like Mindy, or loose, baggy novels, like me. And if we did actually deposit our precious manuscripts in the hands of agents, maybe we would wake up one fine morning in Paris and find out we were glamorous expatriate successes, like Fitzgerald, like Hemingway, like Mailer.
Later we’d rationalize our bad luck by noting that we were a bit at sea psychologically after Mindy took the bar exam. We’d immediately closed down our California life, putting everything in storage or with my parents, and then holed up in a mountain cabin to finish our books. There was no real hurry, but for some reason we’d insisted on adhering to a self-imposed deadline so we could go to Europe by September.
Rushing to finish the very things upon which we had staked our future—our books—we only ensured that future was less likely to come to pass. In the meantime, instead of setting forth in summer, our delay meant we’d cross the Atlantic into the teeth of an early and nasty winter. But we went for it anyway.
The first chapter in what was supposed to be a year in Paris began in a charming rue Mouffetard flat, pittoresque et vivant, sandwiched upstairs-downstairs between deaf and angry senior citizens who stamped around in wooden shoes, blasted the radio all day, and hung Waffen-SS ceremonial plates on their walls. Fleeing this retirement community of Nazi collaborators—the lederhosen should’ve tipped us off—we’d barely settled into a second flat when its windows and skylight were covered with a tarpaulin and workmen started cutting sheet metal with electrical saws and peering into our bedroom at six o’clock every morning to see if we were having fun.
A yearlong renovation that our landlord had neglected to tell us about was commencing. Gloom, rain, snow, and the shrieking of electrical saws and rat-tat-tatting of rivet guns: this was not the Paris of our dreams. Another crushing realization—we arrived sixty years too late to meet Gertrude Stein!—was only made worse by running into packs of Americans with the same haunted look.
If there is one detail that stuck a pin in my little balloon of confidence—the belief that we were doing something original—it was how many expat Americans had toilet paper shipped to them from home. Believe me, nothing is more likely to bring your dreams down in a heap than to be taken aside by your host at an expatriate dinner in the 16th arrondissement and offered a good deal on a six-pack of Charmin.
One cold, dark day in December we cracked and fled Paris. Next stop, Sofia, Bulgaria, in a blizzard, then Athens, with the same epic storm on our heels, so on to Crete, and finally Santorini. By the time the hail and snow and hurricane winds caught up to us again, we’d rented a cave perched at the edge of a thousand-foot cliff overlooking a smoking volcanic caldera. The cave was chilly but nice, plastered inside and whitewashed outside, with a rooftop rain cistern for tap and shower water.
Although we didn’t know it until later, the village had been abandoned after a terrible earthquake thirty years before—perfect for a couple of writers on the lam from their nosy and disapproving families, as well as our embarrassingly shattered dreams. If our shelf of housefronts fell into the sea one stormy night, taking us with it, no one would be the wiser.
No matter what we were writing in our cave, day after day, it faced serious competition from our skybox view of the smoldering volcano, which also kept our noses pressed up against Europe’s worst weather in twenty years. To sit without shivering, we wrapped ourselves in every piece of clothing we owned and drank Nescafé at half-hour intervals. We lived off cabbage and feta and yogurt and tinned sardines and round loaves of bread.
We had a single book, Ulysses, which we cut into sections for reading. We had a manual typewriter, which we shared. A ream of paper. When we went out for long tramps along the cliff, earthquake-shattered hillsides exposed gaps and fissures from which skeletons leered out of disturbed sarcophagi. In the island’s two smoke-filled cafés, we alternated between puddles of pasta from the steam table and piles of fried smelt on oil-soaked brown paper.
We recognized that this was a low point in our lives. Our dreams were a joke. Our novels had been rejected. We couldn’t figure out what to do next. We hated the idea of going home. We could barely talk to each other.
I recall the worst moment, for me. Desperate to reach Mindy, to find something that might inspire her, inspire us, I spread tourist maps on the cold floor and called out the names of islands all over the Aegean Sea, the Ionian Sea, the Adriatic. Nothing, nothing… Mindy was mute.
“We could go back to Athens…” My voice trailed off at her look. “I hear Rhodes is nice. But it’s really close to Turkey, and I guess we don’t want to go there.”
“Do you?” she flung at me.
“No.”
“So what do you want?”
“I want you to be happy, for one thing.”
“What’s so important about me? What about you?”
“I guess I’d be happy if I knew you were.”
She stared at me. “I can’t believe you even said that.”
We dragged ourselves back down to the same old café. Lunch had been pasta, so dinner would be little fried fish. And yet those little fish tasted so damn good. Merides, they were called. You ate them with your fingers, like popcorn.
In the cave upstairs were our only neighbors who spoke some English, including a daily “Good morning, America!” down our chimney. Like us, they were artists on the run: Raili, an ethereal older Finnish painter, and Michele, a Swiss sculptor and draft dodger (ironically a very serious crime in neutral Switzerland). We also had an overbearing young landlord, Yanni, the kind of sharpster who snaps up e
arthquake-condemned caves to rent to unsuspecting tourists. He spoke some English and brought us a set of fluted, bone-white coffee cups and saucers in which we were expected to serve him and his friends their afternoon Nescafé.
Yanni also interrogated us daily on our “modern” marriage: “Do you have sex? In Greece, man has sex one time with wife, on wedding night. After, no sex.” “Did you have sex today?” “How many times did you have sex today?” “German woman will have sex with man, and husband does not care. Does your husband care?”
I figured that it must be obvious that we weren’t having sex. We were too cold and depressed. He must see this every winter. Yes, I decided, every winter Yanni sharpened his pitch and played on his new captive couple’s nerves until they snapped. Inevitably they did, breaking down in the way that all the literary short stories and foreign films tell it, with the wife going with the hairy, lusty, garlic-smelly lout of a landlord, who in these bleak surroundings personifies life, and the husband taking his wounded pride and humiliated manhood off to the taverna to drink ouzo.
This was our society. Instead of Hemingway and Stein and Scottie Fitzgerald trading bon mots at Café Les Deux Magots, we got Yanni and his friends, and his father and mother, in whose parlor we were expected to pay Sunday afternoon calls—payback for loaning us what turned out to be their precious wedding coffee set. We also received midnight visits from a cracked old expatriate English couple, who slung plastic amphorae of nektari over their shoulders and spoke in alcoholic riddles. They’d come for the ruins in Akrotiri, then just being excavated, and had stayed to become ruins themselves.
But we didn’t stay to become ruins. We didn’t snap. We’d listened to enough Joni Mitchell songs to recognize the looming cliché. Eventually, we shook off our worries and came away with cleared heads and ragged wool sweaters that stank of lanolin. We began to amble out again, through rain and hail, poking into Minoan gravesites and Orthodox shrines of luminescent marble tucked into narrow mountain defiles. We even listened sympathetically when Yanni wept over his lost love, a German woman who’d come for a summer and never once wrote after that.