by Lynn Freed
“You know, Ruthi,” Dania said as we drove away, “children and grandchildren they don’t sound so bad all of a sudden.”
I had known that sooner or later it would come to this, and that, when it did, it would be Dania who’d say it. “Then we’d have children and Wendy,” I said. “It’s not either/or, you know.”
“And Gleddy,” she added. “And wife of Dionysos.”
“Those, too.”
“Tell me truthfully now, Ruthi,” she said. “Do I boast? You think I boast?”
I concentrated on the road. Driving down the hill required all my attention in order to miss the cars parked wherever the drivers felt like leaving them. There wasn’t a car on the island that wasn’t dented or scraped or worse, including ours. “I should have cleaned the windscreen,” I said. “I can hardly see at this time of the afternoon.”
But she was looking at me. “I’m asking seriously, Ruthi. I know you will tell to me the truth.”
I held up one hand to shield my eyes. “Okay,” I said. “You do boast, Daniushka, you can’t seem to help it. I’ve tried to tell you. But not straight. Until now.”
She was silent. From time to time, we’d had sessions like this, but usually the questions came the other way, especially when she was suffering an attack of despair. She felt like a failure, she’d say. Just look it—this one had won this, that one had won that, and what had she won? Nothing! Nothing! So then I’d have to remind her about the sixteen books and ninety-two articles, no mention of translations. You’re a wonder, I’d say. Just look what you did! The books! The practice! The children!
And then she’d laugh. “Oy, Ruthi,” she’d say, “what would I do without you?”
But this time it was different. She’d gone straight to the dark heart of our friendship, a place we’d approached only once before, when, in a moment of ill-considered candor, she’d told me that, as far as she was concerned, I had only one flaw: I talked too much about things I should keep to myself. And even though I’d recognized at the time that she’d told me the truth, I could never, through all the subsequent years of our friendship, forget that she’d scolded me for something that, until then, I’d thought of, if I’d thought of it at all, as a reckless response to intimacy.
“Sometimes I just like to remind myself,” she said now in a small voice, so unlike herself that I glanced at her to see if she was crying.
“It isn’t important, Daniushka. Really, it’s a small thing.”
But it wasn’t. And she didn’t answer.
After some moments, I glanced again. She was staring ahead, her mouth twisted to the side.
“Maybe,” she said at last, “for Gled we can buy in town an apron like the Greek women wear? Pull over the head? She looks in that outfit she wears with the cap truly like a slave. What do you think, Ruthi?”
* * *
Ruth, dear, all is well so far. What about if you try to wind in a few of the challenges you’re faced with over there? Nothing too heavy, of course, just a hint or two so our readers can relate? Sxx
* * *
à gg, Greece, SHOWER #1
If we’d thought that, by leaving our lives behind us, we were leaving, in the mix, the sort of conflicts that arise in families, we were learning to think again. The bathroom, for instance. Bess likes to shower in the mornings, and every time she does, she leaves a flood behind her. Never mind the lessons that both Dania and I have given her in Greek Shower, she can’t seem to cope.
As for the cleanup, she doesn’t much care about that either. It is one of the things that makes her both delightful and exasperating, particularly if, like me, you are wed to order. And even for me the shower took a week to get under control.
The best way to approach antique Greek Shower, I’ve found, is carefully. First, just to be safe, you should undress completely, leaving your clothes and all but two towels outside the bathroom. Then, you should close the bathroom door firmly and place one of the towels along the bottom of it, at least for the first few showers. If there is a shower curtain at all, chances are it’s cracked, too short, and/or will pull the rod down when you try to draw it across.
Next comes turning on the water. For this, one must take firm hold of the showerhead, unhook it from its noose, and point the nozzle into the back corner of the shower stall. If you don’t do this—if you leave it on its cradle while you wait for the water to warm up—the whole thing is likely to leap up, uncoil itself like a snake, and spray everything in the bathroom, including the towels.
Once the water is hot, turn it off, position yourself with your back to the corner, and then gently turn it back on, holding the nozzle toward the wall until you have the temperature right. Only then is it safe to spray yourself, remembering never to let go of the showerhead.
à gg, Greece, SHOWER #2
Some people like to place the stool, which usually comes with the bathroom, in the shower stall itself so that they can sit through most of the soaping and showering-down stage. If you do this, bear in mind that, depending on its age, the stool itself might collapse. So, do test it out before sitting on it. And be warned: even if all goes well through the soaping stage—even if you’re vigilant, taking care of curtain, water, stool, and soap—the chances are that, somehow, the bathroom will land up awash anyway, and you’ll have to use all your towels to mop up the water.
To none of this is Bess equal. She prefers baths, says she. Well, so do I. Both of us grew up with baths—long, luxurious baths, and sometimes, after a heavy storm, dark and muddy ones. And always there was someone to clean up after us. But, as far as I can see, the nearest bathtub seems to be in a Turkish bathhouse several islands and a sea in the direction of Turkey. And so, I have pointed out to her, we’re simply stuck with Greek Shower, at least in this house.
We have four bathrooms, one for each bedroom. This is because the house started out, about forty years ago, as a small hotel. And for forty years not much has been done to improve the plumbing.
None of this seems to bother Dania. She’s an old hand at Middle Eastern Shower, says she, and is also quite easy with the hole-in-the-floor toilets one still finds in some of the old public buildings, and which neither Bess nor I will consider, never mind Dania’s assurances that they are easier, cleaner, and better for the constitution. If Dania would simply use the things and not emerge to deliver another boast, we might even find it all quite funny.
* * *
BY THE TIME GLADDY WAS in the aprons Dania and I had bought her, the unpleasantness had subsided among us. No one brought up the boasting again, Dania stopped using the word “slave,” and even Wendy seemed miraculously to have disappeared. Her phone calls and e-mails stopped. She was gone.
But Dania was wary. “I have had before psychotics in my practice,” she said. “I refer them to a psychiatrist. But this one wouldn’t go. She is fixated on me.”
“Oh, don’t worry!” said Bess. “Dinny probably fixed things, although he pretends he knows nothing about it.” She was always promoting the benefits of Dionysos’s presence in our lives. And now that he’d put up the railing and gate to keep his wife out, she said, would I consider swapping my suite downstairs for hers up here? That way she wouldn’t have to come through the house and disturb us when she came in at night.
I leapt gladly at the suggestion. The upstairs rooms were lighter, with better views. I’d only volunteered to take the downstairs one as I’d thought it would be quieter. But, with Gladdy clattering around there, and Bess calling down to her every five minutes, or shrieking for help when the bathroom flooded again—well, both Dania and I were rattled to the bone.
Gladdy and Bess had an arrangement between them that was like nothing I’d ever experienced, not even in childhood. To anyone looking in on them, it would have seemed quite clear that Gladdy was the one giving the orders. “You already got a stain on that dress, Bessie,” she would say, clicking her tongue. “You need an apron like mine.” Or, “Go away now, Bessie. You making more work for me here.”
And so up Bess would come, rolling her eyes happily at us.
The fact was, though, that we’d all come quite quickly to rely on Gladdy, even Dania. Every morning Gladdy caught the bus down to the port to buy produce and cheese from the farmers lined up along the marina. She also bought fish from the fish man, and meat from one particular market that had the freshest supply—much cheaper than London, she said. And she’d made a friend of the woman who weighed and priced the produce, the same one who ran the juice machine. Before she’d arrived, I’d been buying bottles of freshly squeezed orange juice every time I went to the market. But once Gladdy found out how much I paid, she put a stop to that and took over the squeezing herself.
Wherever she went, Bess said, Gladdy made friends. What’s more, she was shrewd about it. Just look how she’d taken to wearing that cross around her neck. People here didn’t know one black from another, Gladdy had pointed out, and she didn’t want them mixing her up with those rubbish North Africans selling drugs on the pavements in Athens. So, every Sunday she dressed up and made her way with the village widows to the local church. The service itself she considered a sorry tuneless affair and the priests terrifying with their beards and ponytails. She passed the time reading her Bible on her lap, she said, and singing hymns to herself—“All People That on Earth Do Dwell,” “O Jesus, I Have Promised,” and so forth.
Until her grandson phoned one morning, I’d completely forgotten that Gladdy even had a family of her own. But now there she was, the phone clapped to her ear and her voice rising into an eruption of Zulu outrage.
I looked at Bess. We were sitting together on the window seat, listening like children to the tirade neither of us could understand. “They only phone when they want something,” Bess whispered. “Drives Gladdy mad.”
“Ai, suka!” said Gladdy at last, snapping the phone shut. “Rubbish boy! Rubbish country!” She thrust the phone into the pocket of her apron and slammed off into the kitchen.
As it turned out, he’d phoned to say that the pills weren’t working anymore for his HIV, and would Gladdy please send money for a private doctor?
“He probably sold them,” said Bess, “and you know what’s going to happen? Just watch! She’s already paid the bond for him twice—petty theft, breaking and entering—never mind that Patience has a job and drives a Mercedes, the selfish cunt!”
Suddenly it occurred to me how much of our freedom depended on the health of our children and grandchildren. Unhappiness? We could cope with unhappiness. We could also cope with resentment, and even hatred. It was illness that was the terror—accidents, assaults, all those unforeseen things that could come along and cut down a life in a moment.
“And if he dies,” Bess went on, “there’ll be the funeral to pay for, just you wait and see!”
I closed my eyes against the tumble of horrors taking possession of my thinking. Rogue drivers, suicide bombers, vicious rapists, madmen with guns, head-on collisions. I got up and went to my room. Tell Lily to be careful! I e-mailed Hester. Remind her to look both ways before crossing the street regardless of a green light. When teenagers move in a feral pack, they lose all common sense. Even Lily.
But my concern only delighted Hester. Oh, Mum! she wrote back. You’re the one who should be looking both ways, for God’s sake! What’s going on there? Want me to come and rescue you?
* * *
Hester #2
I knew, of course, that the week at Club Med was going to be awful—I just hadn’t imagined how awful. Already on the bus from the airport, Hester was slapping on makeup I didn’t even know she possessed. By the time we arrived, three hours later, she’d transformed herself into a plump tart—her skirt rolled short at the waist, her hair loose and wild, and her eyelids blackened into wings. She made a point of elbowing forward to clamber off the bus ahead of me, and would have disappeared into the crowd for the entire week had we not been forced to share the same room.
As it was, she slept through breakfast and was gone by the time I returned. For all I knew, she was sleeping with a new boy every hour, and ahead would lie venereal disease, abortions, God knows what.
I would sit on the beach, trying to ignore the incessant thump of the music and wondering at the strangeness of this new turn in my life. Sitting there, with the smell of tanning oil and the salt air, the sound of the surf, and the warm sand under my feet, I was crippled by a hopeless longing for Africa and the life I’d left behind all those years before.
Returning to America with Hester after the cold, gray damp of London—leaving behind all the small arrangements of our lives there—had seemed, somehow, a move closer to the ease and familiarity of that life. It would be a way, I’d thought, of blunting the longing I still suffered for those few months I’d had in Hugh’s bungalow before she was born—of reviving, perhaps, the defiant good fortune of finding myself at home there, even briefly, even after he was murdered.
But if he’d lived to see her born? Would that not have brought down the romance regardless? How many romances could I think of that had survived their children intact?
* * *
AND THEN, ONE DAY, JUST as Dania had expected, Wendy showed up again. “Ruthi!” Dania whispered urgently. “Come in here! Close the door! Look! Read that!” She pointed to the screen of her laptop.
“But it’s in Hebrew.”
“Yael writes in Hebrew because there came for her an e-mail from that vapor in the grass. About Amos and those women.”
“Listen,” I said, dropping my voice, “never mind the women. Amos is dead. You’re just going to have to call Wendy’s bluff.”
“How? How?”
“Tell the truth! Yael’s your daughter, for God’s sake and, really, what can happen to you? You accepted presents from a patient, you accepted money—it was extremely stupid, but surely not worth all this? Why don’t you just tell all the people you’re so worried might find out? Wouldn’t that be better than having the woman stalking you? Because, really, that’s what this is, you know—stalking. Hacking into your bank account and e-mail? Daniushka! For God’s sake! It’s illegal!”
She shrugged. “I knew it was impossible such a woman should disappear,” she said. “Now she goes after Yael again. She wanted already her son to marry her, can you imagine? He is also psychotic.”
“Dania!” I said, raising my voice. Really, this transgression of hers, this lapse of judgment, or cowardice, or weakness—whatever name one gave it was nothing to this blank refusal to face up to the situation she’d put everyone in—it was widening into a crack, a moral chasm. “Blame Amos! He might be dead, but he is equally to blame!”
“And Yael? She likes too all those fancy things.”
Bess popped her head around the door. “What’s going on in here, you two?” she said. She had an uncanny way of hearing voices dropped to a whisper.
“Wendy the stalker is in Paris now,” I said. “She tracked Yael down there.”
Bess came in and settled onto the bed. “What’s Yael doing in Paris?”
“She can in one day be here,” said Dania. “It’s easy for her. She can go anywhere she likes. She’s got from her parents a fortune.”
“Who?” said Bess. “Yael?”
“Not Yael. That woman who torments me.”
“Oh, her!” Bess lay back on the pillows. “What’s Yael doing in Paris?”
“She likes to brush on her French.”
Bess snorted.
“Maybe you should go and see Yael in Paris,” I said quickly. But really I was thinking, What was to stop Yael if she decided to come and see Dania here? Never mind our rules? And then the others found out and decided to hop over themselves? What then? I’d already heard the question in Hester’s voice when she’d announced that Lily might go to Spain for a summer abroad. In the pause that followed I’d seen myself on the ferry to Athens, in the taxi to the airport, and then traipsing around the Acropolis with Lily in the heat, trying to drum up some interest in the girl’s passion for horse
s.
Somehow, things had been easier while the children were still resentful. Now that they were beginning to thaw—now that Wendy had thrown herself back into the mix—there was no knowing who would turn up next.
“What’s the woman got on you?” Bess said, staring hard at Dania.
Dania shrugged. “There are things I can’t talk about.”
“So, why worry then?”
I looked at Dania. I wasn’t going to help her with this. “I’m going for a walk,” I said, wanting some time away from both of them.
“Oh, I’ll come, too!” Bess said. “I just have to put on some shoes.”
There were days like this in normal life, I told myself as I waited for Bess outside—days in which nothing came right, not even a solitary walk. And yet, free of the life I’d left behind, and of Hester and her headlong quest for a way to bring me to my maternal knees, why couldn’t I feel free? Why, in the middle of the night, did I still wake as if in terror, with my heart thudding in my chest?
“Won’t be a sec!” Bess shouted up the stairs. Even readying herself for a walk, it was as if she were undertaking a hike up Kilimanjaro.
While I waited, I gave another try at Emptying the Mind, something in which Bess and I had both been instructed by Agnes, her daughter, and at which we’d both failed hopelessly. There we’d sat, cross-legged on the carpet, with Agnes issuing instructions in a dulcet voice. They were nothing alike, Bess and Agnes. Agnes was pale and long-boned, with an antic, mirthless smile. “Eyes closed,” she’d said, and obediently Bess and I had closed our eyes. “Now empty the mind.”
But it had been impossible to empty my mind, and it still was. The minute I emptied it of Dania and Wendy, I found myself considering dinner tonight, and that Dania and Bess would, as usual, be happy with gyros, whereas I wanted grilled calamari at Halaris—although what I really longed for was a gorgeously roasted chicken, much more expensive in Europe than in America. So maybe I’d ask Gladdy to pick one up at the market tomorrow, which would be too late for the bananas we needed for breakfast. I’d tell Bess we had to make a stop at the little food stand on the square, however irritating it was to be the only one of us who ever seemed to think ahead.