Awayland

by Ramona Ausubel

  Our guests are Russians and Brits who are fat and white when they arrive and fatter and red when they leave six nights, seven days later. Most of the staff is Ukrainian, but I’m from California. My job is to be the Wizened Storyteller. I wear a distressed robe, rope sandals and a fake beard. I sit in a hut all day and tell Greek myths to whoever comes in. It’s kids in the morning, almost exclusively. The afternoon hour is a mixed bag of people who have been in the sun too long, people who have been at Club Zeus too long in general and have exhausted all the other activities, and more kids. Some people just nap. At night I get drunks.

  I can tell whatever story I want, so I tailor it to my audience. The drunks get the sexier stories and violence: Odysseus trapped on Calypso’s island; Odysseus stabbing the giant, dumb Cyclops in his big eye; the sirens. They tip very well if things get hot or bloody. At the end of the hour I pass around a burlap satchel, hoping that guests will drop in some of their Leto Liras, which they can use for any of the extra-cost items, like fake tattoos or sunscreen rubdowns by the roving belly dancers, and which I will trade in for postage stamps, gum and phone cards.

  I came here to escape but so far the pleasure has eluded me.

  * * *

  —

  MY ROUTE TO Club Zeus began with my mother’s recent midlife swan dive into the pool of Faith. When she discovered spirituality her whole person sprouted as if there had been nothing there before. As if she had been an empty suitcase, waiting to be packed. I was fifteen.

  I had never noticed anything about our home’s furnishings until they were replaced: a flowered sofa was traded for a low Indonesian bench with throw pillows; white curtains were given away for brightly colored ones. The kitchen counter became populated with an army of spice jars: star anise, cumin, coriander, fenugreek, sumac, saffron. Mom purchased a meditation cushion and various beads to slip mindfully through her fingers. She wanted her awakening to be inclusive, all-encompassing, so there were rosary beads as well as Hindu prayer beads. She had a book of Sufi stories on top of a book of Zen koans. Saint Francis, his arms beleaguered with birds, looked down upon a singing crystal bowl meant to cleanse the soul. My mother was happy. This cocktail of religions calmed her loneliness as if by prescription.

  Before this, Mom had been normal—the same hair and makeup as all the other moms, the same clothes, the mid-forties divorce, stucco fake-fancy house, ambient depression. She had the same three to five glasses of white wine at dinner, the stream of dates with tanned faces and yachts and shitty work hours and insufficient capacities for commitment. This is what it is to grow up in white Orange County; variation is a nonexistent principle.

  I did the taking-care-of in our house. I was the one to scramble the eggs and clean the hair out of the drain and Mom was grateful, always grateful. She told me every day that I would grow up to be the kind of man who knew how to treat a woman, that I would be the one good specimen in a state full of assholes. I was happy because I was needed.

  Then an unreasonably good-looking blond guy with orange robes and a necklace of marigolds rented what used to be an ice cream shop and hung fabric on the walls and an Open sign on the door and pretty soon Mom started going for morning meditation and then afternoon meditation and then evening meditation and then she went to church, too, and we lit candles on Friday nights and ate challah and she did sage purification ceremonies and got a guy who said he was Cherokee to put a sweat lodge in our backyard. And Mom was suddenly able to take care of herself. She did the dishes, she cooked, she swept the floors. She had been saved and I had been made obsolete.

  The deeper Mom went into her spiritual seas, the lonelier I got. One day in November of my junior year, in my fifth semester of the washboard scrape of high school, the geography teacher told us that high school is the stepping stone to college and college is the stepping stone to a good job and a good job is the stepping stone to wealth and isn’t that the point of life, isn’t that the great dream? It was clear to me that what high school really is is a holding pen: we were too young to be trusted and too old to be cute. The teacher unfurled a map of the United States and opened a box of red-headed pins, which he would press to our dreamed-of college towns. “University of Kansas,” said Ethan Peters and the teacher pinned and said, “Lawrence. Lovely town.”

  “Harvard,” said Jessica Stride, who was pretty enough to risk being smart, and the teacher stabbed Cambridge. Everyone spouted their list of reach schools and safety schools. They were believers. They were on the path.

  The teacher came to me and I stared at that map and all I could see was the Pacific. All I could see was the edge, a place to leap off and escape, and it struck me, bricklike. All that ocean, all that land, the entire rolling globe, and I just beat a path from my unremarkable front door to this yellow-walled school, gum stuck under every desk, so that I can go somewhere in-state so that I can get a job so that I can raise my kids to do the same? The best we can hope for, the very utmost dream, is to be naked with someone our own age or a little older and muck around with them in the dark? And I thought: The ocean, the whole entire ocean is right there, walking distance from where I sit. That day was the day of open eyes, of open roads, and my map included everywhere, just everywhere.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

  From point A, which was Room 203 of Newport High School, there was a very obvious path: Coast Highway, Bayshore, stop for a few sandwiches to hold me for a day or two and as much cash I could withdraw, across the bridge to the little cottage-riddled island, wade into the bay to the most seaworthy-looking dinghy I could find, oars in oarlocks, and out. The destination hardly mattered—there were other cities, other towns, islands a few miles offshore, another country not far south—what mattered was the departure.

  I rowed past the gigantic houses with their columns and statues, the big as-if of them. I rowed past sea lions fatted out on the decks of yachts despite the netting the owners had installed. The yachts bowed waterward under all that amphibious weight. I glanced over my shoulder to keep a straight path, then turned and rowed hard.

  Within fifteen minutes a police boat zipped in, flipped its lights on. I looked at my sandwiches in the hull, mayonnaise yellowing against the plastic, and I stopped dipping the oars. My big world shrank back down to the size of a postcard.

  The arrest was a surprise. I had never done anything bad or wrong, had always associated police uniforms with the Fourth of July parade. They were nice to me, sort of, not mean anyway. No handcuffs, but they put me in the back of their car and read me my rights and the jail cell smelled like microwave popcorn and wet concrete. I thought, Shit. Oh, well. But still: Shit. My hope turned pocket-sized, and then I couldn’t even find it anymore. The warm feeling that had filled my chest, the feeling that maybe I would live a whole life after all, had cooled to ash.

  My mother brought me a Zuni fetish when she bailed me out. It was a little beaver the size of a fingernail, carved out of jasper. It had a tiny real stick in its mouth. “Because you are so industrious,” she said. “Don’t stop being that way.” She never asked me why I stole the boat or where I thought I was going. It was as if she already knew, had waited for this day to come, as if she had done it once, too. At home, she made me a sandwich since mine had all been confiscated. It was dark by then, and we sat at the table together. She drowned and saved her tea bag over and over.

  “You want to go somewhere?” she asked.

  “God, yes.”

  “OK.” So, as a gift for the first time I had ever gotten in trouble—and that’s just how my mother put it—she would send me to Turkey for the summer. She had a friend who had an aunt who had a room to rent and they were sure they could find me a summer job. I promised to finish the school year, not to try to run away, not to steal anything. She promised to find me the keys out of Orange County.

  * * *

  —

  FLYING INTO the quaint coastal town made me sic
k in two ways: the choppy air rolled the plane back and forth, and the color of the sea was so rich it almost ached. The land was pine-scrubby and dry, and I could make out wooden ships floating on the water.

  My mother’s friend’s old auntie lived in a little wooden house at the edge of town, which I walked to wearing my backpack, following a hand-drawn map. Jet lag felt like a wool coat I couldn’t take off. I was sweating and hungry and overjoyed. The old woman met me at her iron gate, which had been devoured by bougainvillea. She showed me my room—a single bed, a dresser—and then sat me down in the kitchen and poured me a cup of deep red-brown tea in a delicate tulip-shaped glass. She put out a plate of sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, apricots, and a piece of crumbly white cheese along with a basket of baguette slices and a jar of sour cherry jam. It was the best meal I had eaten in my life. I looked up at her, and she looked fuzzy, almost not real, like a half ghost. “What time is it?” I asked, suddenly aware that I had no idea when I was.

  * * *

  —

  I WAS WOKEN a few hours later by an announcement over loudspeakers, saying what, I did not know. I joined the old woman on her small porch, and she made me another cup of tea, the second of ten thousand I would drink in the coming weeks. The tiny deck looked out over first the cemetery, then the roof of the corner store, then the road, then the harbor. Most people would try to ignore the foreground filled with human remains and enjoy the sea in the distance. The old woman seemed to do the opposite. After they repeated the broadcast on the PA, I asked her what they were saying. I wondered if she spoke more English than she let on because she answered right away. “Some man, he died,” she said.

  “Do they always announce that?” I asked. She looked at me blankly. Then she trained her eyes on the cemetery again, like a dog waiting for its dinner. By the time the funeral party arrived an hour later, she had made some syrupy pastries and arranged the brightly colored gummies of Turkish delight into a box and pressed her black dress before heading back out to the balcony to observe the grieving.

  We watched together. A pack of strays was circling the sparse crowd. I had been studying up on the myths in preparation for my job and I thought of Hades, god of the underworld, and his three-headed dog. After the coffin was lowered into the rectangular hole the old woman sent me down to the funeral party with the sweets she had prepared. I didn’t know who to give them to. I stood, stupid, for a long few minutes before she yelled something in Turkish and one of the older ladies came and took them from me. I said thank you and she patted me on the head. Then, remembering a contraption I had built for my tree house back home, I went inside and rigged up a basket on a string tied to the balcony so that the old woman could lower her offering herself and I could stay safely out of other people’s funerals. Her face brightened when I showed it to her.

  “How do you pronounce your name?” I asked. I pointed at myself and said, “David.” Then I pointed at her with a question mark in my eyes. She made a series of sounds beginning with a G, but when I tried to make them back, I spit out an ugly knot. She raised her eyebrows and gave me a look that said, Do not do that to my name. So I said, “I’ll call you ‘Grams.’ It’s a term of endearment. It’s nice.”

  She gazed out at the cemetery. She must have known which dead got fake flowers and which ones got real. Which dead got tears and which ones got a guilty kneel in the dirt for a second or two and then a fast exit.

  * * *

  —

  MY FIRST DAY at work was fun because I had never been to an all-inclusive resort and I’d had no idea how absurd it would be. My boss, Emir, was Turkish but spoke good English. He told me I was better-looking than my photo and then slapped me on the back of the head. The second day was exactly the same as the first, and less fun because of it. The third day I felt a small weight in my stomach, as if a stone had buried itself in the soft muck. The rest of the staff was oblivious to me and the summer-camp camaraderie I had hoped for did not surface. I had imagined that my US passport would get me laid, if nothing else. I could lead a foreign girl to think she might marry me and my long American dollars. But my country’s mystique seems to have faded. The Ukrainians hang out together in their dorms at night, the Turks go home to their families, and I go back to Grams and sit on the porch, watching over the dead.

  For six weeks I have repeated the pattern: tea and bread with Grams, beard and myths in the tent, meals alone in the staff cafeteria, tea with Grams above hundreds of graves, sleep. The only pleasurable part of the day is when I swim in the sea, cold and wine-dark. Each week, from the other side of the world, my mother asks, “Have you been to a mosque yet?” and each week I have not.

  * * *

  —

  I SIT IN the story tent, waiting for customers. I tell one straggler how Cronus, believing he would be overthrown by a son, swallowed his first five children. “How bloody fun,” the straggler says in a British drawl. I try to think of something lighter but the only myth that comes to mind is about Hera forbidding all the gods, goddesses and nymphs to allow Leto to give birth on land, forcing the laboring woman to row across the sea for days until she found a rootless, drifting island surrounded by swans.

  The straggler falls asleep. My beard is hot and itchy. What kind of escape is this? In two weeks, I will go home with nothing but a handful of odd details to show for my summer. I imagine the other kids coming back from summers spent surfing every day. I imagine Ethan Peters and Jessica Stride lying side by side on his surfboard, floating out past the break, their skin salty and freckled. They’d kiss—they’d have to, it’s the perfect teenage moment for kissing. The long casts of their friends’ voices would reel them slowly in, but they’d remember the waves rolling under them, their bodies pressed together trying not to tip the board, their warm lips, and paddling back, each using one arm.

  Madeleine Reagan is in Italy studying Shakespeare’s plays and sketching marble statues with missing anatomy. I imagine a fly landing in those empty penis holes, buzzing around. I already know that Madeleine will come back feeling changed, that she will have had a crush on an American boy in her group who paid no attention to her and that she will have slept with an Italian without meaning to, and that she will be a little carved out by this but also a little proud. It will be a story she continues to tell in college, a small badge of adult credibility. Marcello would be his name, and he will become a conveniently unknowable person, someone she can change depending on her current needs—he can be a tool to make another boy jealous, he can be the partner in sex acts she pretends to have practiced.

  Everyone, it seems, will have had a summer that means something. I can already hear the buzz on the first day of school, five hundred teenagers with stories to tell.

  And me? I won’t know how to explain anything. I spent the summer at an all-inclusive resort on the Turkish coast with a slew of sunburned Ukrainians. I’ll have to explain where both Turkey and Ukraine are to everyone, including the teachers. I lived with an old woman above a cemetery, and I ate a lot of olives, I’ll say. And I kissed no one. I fell in love with no one. I told Greek myths to people who spent the whole time joking about yanking off my beard. Evidently I have traveled eleven thousand miles and still found a way to fail at my escape.

  * * *

  —

  “MOM,” I say into my phone. It is evening and I can hear Grams outside thwacking wet laundry against a pole. I want to convince her to come visit by telling her that we can hop a quick flight to Egypt and see the pyramids. “Honey pie,” my mother says. Her voice on the other end sounds falsely close. Right in my ear. “I’ve been calling all week,” I tell her.

  “I know you have. I ended up going on a silent retreat at the last minute. I just needed it. It felt so good, it was just, it was wonderful. One of the dharma talks really reminded me of you.”

  I do not wonder aloud why it didn’t remind her enough of me to call back. To remember that I was real, not just the ide
a of a son but a fleshy body. “Yeah?” I say instead.

  “It was about forgiveness. About forgiving yourself. It was beautiful.” She has forgiven herself. It doesn’t matter whether I join her or not. I do not mention Egypt.

  It rains for three days in a row. There is almost nothing to do indoors at Club Zeus. I am swamped with restless kids and asked to schedule three extra sessions. I’m talking six hours a day in a scratchy old man voice and running out of myths. “Tell one about love,” a drunk man says and I tell the one about Hades trapping Persephone in the underworld with a single pomegranate seed. “Tell a better one about love,” says the drunk man’s wife and I tell her about how Achilles met Queen Penthesilea in battle, how he saw her courage and fell instantly and deeply in love with her at the same moment he delivered the fatal stab to her neck. The couple leaves without tipping.

  At my break the rain has quieted for a moment, so I walk out to the water. An older blond woman is lying in the rain in a tiny pink bikini. She is tanning. This, I think, this is commitment.

  Zeus’s Kebab Shack has been turned into a playpen with constant belly-dancing contests, indoor bocce ball and trivia. The British tabloids have sold out completely from the newsstand, even at the three-times markup. There are chubby ladies huddled around the hookah bar looking cold in shorts and tank tops, their faces in the papers. “Everybody Thought I Was Pregnant but It Wasn’t a Baby—It Was a 22-Pound Cyst!” Emir is making the rounds, as if a little flirtation can distract the women from their ruined holiday. Sudoku grids are being filled in at incredible speed, and the booze is pouring.