by Lynn Freed
* * *
BESS, GLADDY, AND I ALL went down to Dionysos’s aunt’s house to give it our approval. It was freshly whitewashed, the doors and shutters painted in island blue. And each of the three floors was fronted by a large veranda, facing down toward the Aegean.
“Greek,” said Gladdy, bending to inspect a corner, “they know how to clean.”
And, indeed, it was spotless—spare, but spotless.
“Wilfie he’s coming?” she asked Bess.
Bess jumped as if she’d been shot. “Oh, God, I hope not! Have you been phoning him again? Behind my back?”
Gladdy pressed her lips together.
“Because if you have, I’m warning you, I’ll leave for another island.”
“What about Aggie?” Gladdy said.
“What about her? She can practice her mindfulness on you. Or her mindlessness. Same thing.”
“Hai!” said Gladdy, moving off to examine the kitchen.
“But seriously, Ruth,” Bess said. “Why don’t we just escape? I mean, I don’t know how I’m going to cope with the invasion as it is, and if Wilfred does come, I’m truly lost. Santorini is over and, anyway, Dania’s there. But what about somewhere like Hydra? I read about it in that Colossus book.”
“What Colossus book?” There she was again, springing surprises. “The Colossus of Maroussi?”
“That’s it! Rex sent it to me when I told him we were coming here.” She settled onto one of the built-in couches. “God, these are uncomfortable!” she said. “But listen, I’m serious, Ruth. How are we going to stand them? Even down here? I mean, it’s bad enough already without them, no?”
“It’s certainly not heaven.”
“And it’s going to get worse. What the hell were we thinking?”
I let out a long sigh. “It wasn’t so bad in the beginning.”
“Before Wilfred came. And Finn and Rex. And now it’s going to be Agnes and Hester and, oh, God, those children of Agnes’s. Can’t we just leave them all to Gladdy?”
I laughed. “You really are divine, Bessie! You have no conscience at all.”
“None, none. But listen, Dania’s got something up her sleeve, I’m totally sure of it. I bet she doesn’t even come back from Santorini.”
I hadn’t thought of that. But now that I did, I thought Bess could be right. “I have a strong idea that Wendy is dead,” I said. “How else could Dania be so unconcerned?” I knew I was committing a final betrayal but over the past few days I’d been feeling the sort of creeping dread of catastrophe I’d described in Gripp after Gripp.
Bess sat forward. “You’re right!”
“What’s more, I don’t think it happened where Dania said it did.”
“E-hê!”
We both jumped. We hadn’t noticed Gladdy standing like a pillar in the doorway.
“They will look all around,” she pronounced from there, “and they will find her body. Then we know what we have here on this island, and the children they coming.”
“What do you mean ‘what we have here on this island’?” I said. But, of course, I did know. She meant we had a murderess and, worse than this, had her in the house. And if she thought it was all my fault, I wouldn’t have been surprised at that either.
She lowered herself onto the end of the other couch, something I’d never seen her do before. “Bessie,” she said, “you must lock your door now. And Dinny he must get his auntie to put locks here, too.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Bess. “She’s not a psychopath!”
But Gladdy just leaned closer. “That woman she doesn’t have a heart for other people.”
I looked at her. From the moment she’d arrived—from before that, really, from when Bess first brought up the idea of her coming to Greece—I’d considered Gladdy—if, in fact, I considered her at all—as a sort of straight man in a situation comedy. And now here she was, insisting on a truth about Dania I’d never even considered. And she was right. Dania didn’t have a heart for other people. Perhaps none of us did. Perhaps what we felt for other people was what we wanted them to feel for us. And if, indeed, we were like this, Dania was more so.
“Gladdy,” I said, “she’s my old friend, but you are right.”
She paid me no attention. For her, I could see, it was Bess who had all her heart. They were enclosed, the two of them, in a sort of loop of love and friendship that I could only marvel at from outside.
* * *
WE TOOK TWO CARS DOWN to the port to meet them—ours and Dinny’s. And then there we stood, Bess, Dionysos, and I, all watching the sea for signs of the ferry.
Gladdy had stayed up at the house to prepare a supper for everyone. For the past few days she’d been in a strangely nervous state, uncharacteristically tentative as she dithered between this or that kind of bread, and did Bess think the children would eat moussaka?
“They’ll eat what they’re given,” Bess said, “and you’re not to pay any attention to Agnes and her vegan nonsense either, you hear?”
Agnes had always disapproved of Gladdy, Bess explained. As far as she was concerned, Gladdy had been the “enabler” in the arrangement between them (“En-aa-bler!” Bess sang. “Can’t you just hear it?”), whereas, if Gladdy had just stayed home with her own child like any normal mother, maybe Bess herself would have had to do likewise (“Fat chance of that!” said Bess).
The fact was, she said, Gladdy was scared of Agnes. She’d never admit it, but it was true. She’d been scared of her as a child, and she was scared of her now. And, really, when you considered what a self-righteous bully Agnes was, no wonder Gladdy was so off-balance when she was around.
“Poor Gladdy,” she said now. “Two weeks of it to get through, and then more when we return to California.”
“It arrives!” Dionysos announced, trying to tame his hair in the wind.
And, yes, there was the ferry steaming around the bluff toward us. Watching it approach, I couldn’t help the flutter of excitement with which I seem to greet all arrivals, even those I’ve anticipated with dread.
It turned around, backed up in a churn of water, and then came to a stop against the dock as the gangway descended.
Throngs of people began to spill out, dodging cars and trucks and buses. It was always like this—chaotic, dangerous, Greek—and I thought suddenly that I should have warned Hester about the cars and buses, although, of course, she’d only have scoffed with delight.
“There’s Hester,” said Bess.
And, yes, there she came, near the front of the current. “Whew!” she said, coming to wrap me in a hug. “I was convinced you’d go to the wrong dock if there is such a thing here.”
“Wrong dock?” said Bess. She and Hester had never much liked each other and probably never would.
Hester gave her a mocking laugh. “She’s always going in the wrong direction,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“Where’s Agnes?” Bess said.
“Her luggage was right at the back. Here comes Lily with the children now.”
Lily. Luggage. Children. The flutter of excitement vanished completely.
“Dinny!” said Bess. “You find my daughter? In there? Tall—” She held up an arm. “No, wait! Here she comes!”
Agnes was struggling toward us under the weight of an enormous backpack. “Hello, Ma,” she said, wiping sweat out of her eyes. “Hello, everyone!”
“Plaits now?” said Bess. “You look like Minnehaha.”
“Oh, Ma!” Agnes flung her long arms around Bess.
“Agh, agh, you’re sweaty!”
I watched them with a frisson of envy. If I leveled something like “Minnehaha” at Hester I’d have to prepare for a blast, or at least for the sort of bridling that would leave her curt and rude for days. And yet here were Bess and Agnes, both laughing at the sweatiness as Bess pulled her new linen scarf from her neck and used it to mop them both.
“Let’s go!” said Hester. “We’ve been traveling for days, and I could do
with a nice hot bath.”
* * *
Hester #7
I’ve been thinking of the time I went to visit her in New York, and she was going to a party and had promised to take me along. “But I’m kaput, darling,” I’d said. “You go without me.” But, no, she wanted me to go. She was counting on me to go, she said.
What she really wanted, I knew, was to show me off. A Gripp had just made it onto the bestseller list at last, and she herself had lost ten pounds and was looking as good as I’d ever seen her.
Okay, I said, okay. So what do I wear?
No one dresses up here, she said, just go as you are.
Jeans? Sandals?
Fine!
As it happened, I was tanned and happy. The next Gripp was finished ahead of schedule, money would be coming in for the last, and Finn would be there to meet me when I returned. While I waited for her to dress, I phoned him. “Come back to me immediately, you old cow,” he growled. “I can’t stand it here without you.”
Half an hour passed, forty-five minutes, and my mood began to darken.
“Hester!” I called out. “What the hell’s going on in there?”
“COMING!” she yelled back, her old pugilistic self.
When finally she emerged, I was in high irritation and she was in a dress I’d never seen. It was tight and short and shiny and black, and she’d painted her eyelids black to match. She wore the gold hoop earrings I’d given her for her birthday, and her hair was fashionably wild. She stopped before me, smiling.
I knew what she expected me to say: “I thought we weren’t dressing up?” But instead I said, “Don’t lose any more weight. You’re not vomiting it up, are you?”
So we arrived at the party in our usual mode—irritated with each other. Like all student parties, it was loud and jammed and boozy, and the girls were all madly dressed up. But Motown was blaring, and when someone pulled me onto the dance floor, I danced wildly, Gripp and Finn and the gypsy earrings I’d just bought fueling my joy. One after the other, young men came to dance with me. I was barefoot, sweating, swirling, panting with happiness. Then I saw Hester. She was in the crowd around the edge of the dance floor, unsmiling. And I thought, She lacks joy herself, that’s exactly the problem.
When we met for lunch the next day, she was quick to tell me it had been a bust of a party. And, by the way, she said, what perfume were you wearing? Still Opium? Or have you moved on to something a bit less obvious?
* * *
Ruth, dear, sorry to hear you’re unhappy with “old age blurting,” but it really was too late to consult you—it would have been the middle of the night for you—and there was no way Amy was going to have the Tourette’s people coming down on our heads. Perhaps it will help to know we’ve been deluged by comments from old age blurters:) Why not take a look? Most of them sound just as unregenerate as you. Sxx
* * *
“UNREGENERATE”? I looked up from my laptop. “Who would have thought she’d even know the meaning of the word?”
“Who?” said Hester. “What word? You have this way of landing in the middle of something as if everyone knows what you’re talking about.”
I shrugged. “Actually,” I said, “I was talking to myself.”
It had been going on like this for three days—Hester trudging up to the house each morning and waiting around there for me to go with them to the beach, or to the port, or to the port on the other side of the island.
“I thought you were going to give up that ridiculous column,” she said.
“So you did know what I was talking about.”
She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Can we please just go, Mum?”
“Listen,” I said. “I rented you a car for this very purpose. Why don’t you take it and I’ll meet you later?”
“So Aggie and I came all this way to spend time with each other?” She flicked at something invisible on her jeans. “And what about your granddaughter?”
“I thought perhaps I’d take her one of these afternoons to that friend of Eleftheria—the one with the horses.” In fact, the idea had just occurred to me but, now that it had, an afternoon with Lily, horses or no horses, seemed like a holiday compared to a day on the beach with the group.
“And the rest of us? Are we supposed to just sit around and wait for you?”
Bess was still asleep, which was a shame because, when she was with me, Hester adjusted her tone from aggrieved to ironic. Despite their dislike for each other, Hester was always trying to inveigle Bess into an alliance against me, as if in jest. She tried this with all my friends, and often she succeeded. But Bess was not to be inveigled, not even after Finn and Rex. In fact, she became quite uncharacteristically grannyish around Hester. “Hester, my dear,” she’d say, “your mother is awfully tired. I think we should call it a day, don’t you?”
“And what about the birthday?” Hester said now. “Dania’s not going to be there, I gather. Which I think is very weird. Well, that’s your business, not mine.”
“Indeed.”
She looked up sharply.
But Bess was coming up the stairs just then. “Hello!” she said, yawning. “You’re here bright and early, Hester!”
“How are we going to bear it?” she’d said to me the night before. She’d poured us each a glass of the Cognac Agnes had brought from duty-free, and we’d collapsed onto opposite sides of the window seat. “I knew it was going to be tedious,” she’d said, “but already it feels like a life sentence.”
“Lily’s taken the children to the beach by bus,” Hester said to her. “I thought we’d all go and meet them there.”
“Not me,” said Bess. “I’m still chewing sand from the last beach experience. Glad!” she called out. “How’s my coffee?”
“Oh, I’d love a cup of coffee, if I may,” Hester said.
“Of course!” cried Bess. “Glad! Make that two cups, please!”
Gladdy came to the kitchen door then, her hands on her hips. “I am make coffee for Miss Bess!” she announced.
“Well, just make some more then,” said Bess. “And bring another cup right now, please!”
I saw the color high in Hester’s cheeks, and felt rage rising in my own. Gladdy had been peculiar since they’d all arrived, but this was more than peculiar—it was revolution.
“It’s like having a bloody lover,” Bess said. “She used to try this on with Agnes, too, you know. You just have to stamp it out.”
“Oh, hell!” cried Hester, pulling her phone from a pocket. “I meant to text Aggie.”
“What’s she doing down there?” said Bess. “Her morning devotions?”
Hester laughed. And when Gladdy came in with a cup, she sat back with her coffee as if there were nothing she’d rather be doing than chatting with her mother and her mother’s newfound half sister, all of them laughing at “old age blurters,” and agreeing that her mother was, indeed, unregenerate, a word Bess did not happen to know, although now that she did know it, she was going to claim it for herself, she said.
* * *
à gg, Greece
With children present in our lives, I find myself suffering nostalgia for a time when adults weren’t called upon to applaud them for accomplishing life’s most minor tricks and tasks. Underwater swimming, for instance. Last night, Bess’s daughter silenced the entire table by tapping a knife on a glass and announcing that her nine-year-old had that day learned to swim underwater.
I glanced down to Bess’s end of the table, where she was rolling her eyes. She’s been rolling her eyes a lot since they arrived, particularly when it comes to this granddaughter, an awkward girl, who, whenever she can, entwines herself around her mother, staring defiantly out at Bess.
Watching the performance, I long to say that, eight or nine years down the line, the girl is going to find out how little the world cares for her swimming underwater or for anything else, and how ill-equipped she’ll find herself to make her way without the false encouragement she’s come to cou
nt upon.
“Dysfunctional,” Hester whispers to me.
And I remind myself to tell her how stupid I consider the concept.
But not now. Now we are watching together as the underwater swimmer slips off her mother’s lap and returns to her place at the table for pudding. When she arrives, she finds that her younger brother has scooped the topknot of whipped cream from her crème caramel and, whining loudly, she rounds the table again for another session on her mother’s lap. At which point Bess pushes her chair back, picks up her crème caramel, and goes to enjoy it in the relative peace of the window seat.
* * *
“LISTEN,” BESS WHISPERED TO ME, “I spoke to Dinny. Hydra’s out of the question—it would take two days to get there. I also spoke to the agent at the port. She said, What about Naxos? Naxos is easy. We could slip away tomorrow.”
“And the party?” It was to take place in three days, in the square, and Gladdy had invited the whole village. When we’d objected to this, she’d simply said that she wasn’t going to be shamed in front of her new friends, and when Bess still balked, she called in Dionysos for help. “Ne,” said he, smiling. “Greek party for everyone, ne, ne!”
“I don’t give a damn about the party!” Bess said now. “Who asked for it? Who’s paying for it? We are! You and me!”
But I was getting a bit sick of playing the voice of reason. “Okay,” I said, “so let’s escape.”
She eyed me suspiciously. “You mean it?”
I shook my head. “Not really. I’d be worrying too much about shaming Gladdy and wounding Hester. But you could go on your own, why not?”
She pulled a face, picked up her magazine, riffled through it petulantly, then threw it to the floor. “It wouldn’t be any fun on my own.”
We hadn’t heard from Dania, and even though there was some relief in having her gone, it was as if we were now part of the pestilence she’d brought to the island. I saw it in the looks I was getting when I went off for my afternoon walk—the man in the jewelry shop, the restaurant owner, the baker and his helper. Gladdy said that her friends were asking, too. Where had Dania gone? they wanted to know. And why had she gone?