Burning the Map

by Laura Caldwell

  Sin shuts her mouth and makes a face as if to say, “Fine. I don’t care.”

  I let my shoulders relax a little. Kat just stood up for me, and minimal though that may have been, it’s like a warm blanket thrown over my shoulders. It gets me off the defensive enough to see that I need to be direct. With the deteriorating condition of my parents’ relationship and my questions about John, this friendship might be the one thing I can salvage.

  “We’ve got to get over this, you guys,” I say.

  Sin is expressionless. There’s a slight pause, but then Kat moves closer to the table.

  The bar is completely full now, and the Disney music seems jauntier and louder than before. I pull my feet off my pack and scoot my chair in toward the table. I take a deep breath and, before I can talk myself out of it, I say, “I need you guys right now. I think we all need each other.”

  “What do you mean?” Kat says.

  I think about how I should phrase this. “On one hand, I’ve lost some weight, I’ve met a couple of great guys and I’ve been in this tropical paradise, but at the same time, things are weird with you two.” I point at them with my spoon. “I don’t know what I feel about John, my parents are splitting up and I have to start work soon.” I start tapping the spoon on the side of my hand. “Nothing seems to make sense right now.”

  “Well, what do you want us to do?” Lindsey asks, sounding sarcastic as usual. Ah, the comfort of good friends.

  As if taking a drag of a cigarette, I suck in another deep breath, refusing to jump at her bait. “What I want is to have fun and relax, and I want to spend time with both of you, some serious girl time.”

  “We’ve already tried that,” Sin says, but her voice is neutral now, as if she’s waiting for me to continue, to tell her how it could be different this time.

  “We said we were going to try it, but it seemed like you two kept meeting a lot of guys, and then I met some guys, and there goes our time together.”

  “Exactly what are you suggesting?” Sin asks. “A prohibition on all males?”

  From the expression on her face, Kat is mortified at the thought.

  I try not to laugh. “I’m not saying we can’t meet people, whether they’re male or female, but I’d like the three of us to stick together for a few days.”

  No one says anything for a moment and the tinny Disney music becomes overpowering.

  “All I’m saying is that we should make an effort to spend some real time together,” I say, raising my voice to be heard over the damned music.

  Lindsey shrugs her shoulders.

  “I can do that,” Kat says, appearing to have calmed herself.

  I look back at Sin.

  A few seconds go by, then a few more.

  “Sin?” I say.

  “We can give it a whirl,” she calls over the music.

  Mykonos is the Greece that you see in movies. The cafés that sit in front of the bobbing boats of the port are much more charming than the more basic restaurants of the Ios docks. Here, huge flower boxes line the restaurants’ perimeters, and there are crisp linens and real silver on the tables. White speckled streets the size of sidewalks weave away from the port, past the blue-painted doors of the white buildings, past an abundance of jewelry stores. Blue-domed rooftops dot the sky, standing tall above the rounded white homes, which seem to sparkle in the sun.

  This time, there’re no hostel or hotel workers to greet us at the port. Mykonos is full, we’re told by the people at the information booth.

  “I’m so glad we waited in line for forty-five minutes to hear that,” Sin says.

  Just then the ferry pulls away, and I feel a creeping panic. We’re homeless! We’re here without shelter or a plan!

  “Fuck it,” Kat says, pulling her hair into a ponytail. “We’ll find someplace.”

  For two hours we pitch and stumble around the village with our packs, our faces shiny from the heat. We knock on countless doors and beg countless innkeepers to give us a room, a closet, anything. My panic rises again, and I’m seriously considering whether we should head back to the docks and wait for the next boat to anywhere when we come across a quaint inn called Hotel Carbonaki, which is situated at the outskirts of the village. The owners, an older couple, nod and tell us they have one room left. I nearly kiss them.

  White stone steps lead up to our small but bright room, which overlooks a tiny pool surrounded by blue cloth beach chairs. After a dip, we shower and go in search of a place to eat. It’s already nine o’clock, and the peaceful village we’d seen in the daylight has metamorphosed into an outdoor Studio 54.

  “This is like South Beach on steroids,” Kat says as we pass four model-type women. They’re gaunt in tropical micro dresses, smoking at a table outside a restaurant, no food in sight. We see at least a hundred more of their brethren, both male and female, strolling as if on a catwalk. Many of the men are obviously gay, shirtless with leather pants, walking arm in arm with other boys. There’s also a number of long-haired Guiseppe-type Italians dressed in their finest. I steal a glance at Kat and see that she’s doing her best to control the Pavlovian drooling.

  All the tavernas on the main drag are jammed, with at least an hour’s wait for a table, so we keep walking until we find a small restaurant tucked away on a dead-end street. Square tables painted sea-green are set up in front of the storefront café. We spot the only empty one resting near a brick wall under a circle of streetlight.

  “Welcome!” says an elderly woman with curly gray hair and a toothy grin. She gestures toward the open table. “Sit, sit! To drink?” she says.

  “Vod-ka ton-ic,” Kat answers, overenunciating and speaking loudly, as if the volume will help the woman to understand.

  A flicker of amusement lights the woman’s eyes as she nods, apparently understanding perfectly. She looks at Lindsey and me.

  “Some red wine?” I ask Sin in a tentative voice. Red wine used to be our shared drink of choice, enjoyed over many opposite-sex advisory meetings and dinners with the girls, but it’s been a long time since we’ve split a bottle.

  There’s a pause, but then she nods.

  “What you have for dinner?” the old woman asks after bringing Kat her drink and pouring our cabernet into short glasses, setting the bottle on the table.

  “Men-u?” Kat asks, confused.

  “No menu, no menu,” the woman says. “You come to kitchen.” She gestures for us to follow her, and walks away.

  In the kitchen are a few women wearing aprons, their black hair tied back, tending to two large stovetops. They give us shy nods when we enter, quickly returning to their stirring, chopping and cutting. The room is hot and smells of something spicy, something with tomatoes in it.

  Our waitress waves a wrinkled hand toward a large wooden island that commands the majority of space in the kitchen. “What you have for dinner?” she repeats.

  On the island they’ve arranged earthen platters filled with food. There are tomatoes as big as my head stuffed with rice and sausage, grape leaves encircling meat and vegetables, various cuts of tender white fish and huge portions of moussaka.

  I glance around as Kat and Sin ask about the preparation of different dishes, thinking that John would love this kitchen with its huge pots hanging overhead and the racks upon racks of spices. I remember how he cooked dinner for me on our third date. It was just spaghetti and meatballs, but he had set the table with cloth place mats and napkins. I could tell that he’d bought them that day, because they were still creased from being folded, and the price tags were on the back. I thought it was the sweetest thing in the world. When he brought me my plate, I saw that he’d carefully arranged the meatballs and the sauce, sprinkling freshly grated Parmesan on the top just so. He smiled when he placed it before me.

  “What do you think?” he said, and I knew that he meant more than the spaghetti.

  “It’s perfect,” I told him.

  The thought of this makes my heart sink. As much as this trip has made me wonder
about John, about our relationship, I simply can’t imagine what my life would be like without him.

  “Casey,” Kat calls, pulling me away from my thoughts. “What are you having?”

  I move toward the food, suppressing a powerful urge to request the entire inviting tray of moussaka. Instead, I select a piece of white fish with some rice on the side. Kat, of course, asks for two helpings of the moussaka.

  Sin and I have just begun to make our way through the mellow red wine when our dinners are delivered.

  The old woman hesitates by our table as we begin our meals. “Good?” she says. “You like?”

  “Mmm,” we all say through mouthfuls of food. The fish has completely surpassed my expectations. It’s so fresh, it tastes like it was caught thirty seconds ago.

  “You enjoy Mykonos,” she says, still standing by our table, nodding at each of us. “Mykonos good for you girls.”

  “Sure, thanks.” I’m not certain what she means or how else to respond.

  She stays there for a moment longer, before she finally heads back to the kitchen.

  “She reminds me of Belle,” Lindsey says when she’s gone, and we all crack up.

  Belle was our housemother at the sorority. Her real name was Marilyn, but she was so crazy that we called her Bellevue, Belle for short. Belle seemed to never sleep and was forever lurking around. On many a night we’d raid the kitchen about 4:00 a.m. after coming home from the bars. We’d stuff our faces with the mashed potatoes that always seemed to be left over in the fridge, yelling our conversation as only the drunk and the truly tone deaf can do, and suddenly Belle would appear out of the pantry. How long she’d been in there, we’d never know, since there was no other entrance.

  “Hello, girls,” she’d say in her dramatic, smoky voice, throwing one of her colored feather boas over her shoulder. She always wore them after 8:00 p.m., when it was too late for someone from the Panhellenic Council to stop by.

  “Did the boys molest you?” she’d ask with a lecherous grin. She wanted all the gory details, but only a few brave souls would actually confide in her. Yet even when you told her nothing, Belle was always around when you got home, always staring and nodding knowingly, as if she knew that you’d lost your underwear somewhere in that hovel your boyfriend called an apartment and that you’d neglected, again, to make him wear a condom.

  I had thought Belle nuts at the time, but now I’m struck by the fact that I could actually end up like her. I mean, if I can’t be satisfied with a nice guy like John, maybe I’ll never be happy with anyone. I pour myself a healthy refill of wine to drown the thoughts.

  The first bottle relaxes and mellows us, and when Kat decides to switch to vino, we order a second. The mention of Belle, in addition to terrifying me about the prospects of a lonely life, has brought on memories of college. We tell and retell all our stories, which are full-blown novellas by now as the exaggeration and fictitious details grow with each version.

  “Why, exactly, did I spend six months with that Jimmy Tate character?” Kat asks, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “What did I ever see in that guy?”

  Since Jimmy Tate represented Kat’s longest relationship to date, Sin and I remember it in detail.

  “A very large penis,” Sin reminds her. “That’s what you saw in him, or should I say, in you.”

  We talk of raucous football weekends and booze-filled road trips. We shriek with laughter as we remember the cruel joke we’d played on Troy Tellers, who after sleeping with Kat and secretly videotaping the encounter, was uncouth enough to show the video at a Monday night meeting with a hundred of his closest fraternity brothers. Three weeks later, when he’d forgotten about Kat and moved on to other victims, Troy received a phone call from the student health clinic informing him that he’d been listed as a sexual partner for one of their patients, who’d contracted a nasty case of the worst type of herpes.

  “Now listen, son,” Lindsey says, mimicking the matronly voice she’d used to call Troy. “You’ll have to tell everyone you come in physical contact with that you might have this.”

  We’d learned from Troy’s roommate that for three days after that call, Troy refused to attend class or even leave his room, choosing instead to spend his time inspecting his privates with a handheld mirror. Luckily for Troy, that nice woman from the health clinic called back to report that it was a mistake, and that she was terribly sorry for any inconvenience, but not before Troy had informed his roommate and at least one woman of this possible affliction. After that, rumors that Troy had numerous communicable diseases spread rapidly, and Troy rarely had any films to show his frat buddies anymore.

  As for Kat, she’d acted as if it wasn’t so bad that a videotape depicting her superior oral abilities was loose on campus. At the time, I believed her relative nonchalance, but now I wonder, and I almost bring it up. I find I can’t, though, because it feels so good to reminisce, to remind ourselves how close we were, how close we might be again. I can’t bring myself to break the happy spell that’s settled over the three of us.

  Unfortunately, someone else breaks it for me. Two someones to be exact—two tanned, well-dressed men who could be related to the Kennedys. They amble up to our table, both about six feet tall, wearing expensive-looking slacks and pastel golf shirts.

  Jesus, they’re dressed alike, I think, before I glance around our table and realize that Lindsey and Kat and I are all wearing various forms of the little flowered dress, Kat’s much littler, by the way.

  “You look like you’re enjoying yourselves,” says one of the Kennedys. He has straight brown hair and eyes so blue they must be colored contacts. His friend, who looks like a Ken doll with his blond hair and jutting, square jaw, nods at us.

  “My God—Americans!” Kat says, giving her highest voltage smile. “I’d begun to forget what my mother tongue sounded like!”

  The Ken doll beams back at her, matching her watt for watt. “We don’t want to interrupt your dinner,” he says, “but we’re heading to the Scandinavian Bar, and we thought you might want to join us.”

  I feel like saying, “What, exactly, made you think that?” but I keep quiet.

  “Scandinavian Bar?” Lindsey says in a wry tone. “I thought we were in Greece.”

  The Ken doll introduces himself as Trent and his friend as David, then explains that the Scandinavian Bar is the place to go until 2:00 a.m.

  Here we go again, I think. Just when we’re having fun, just us, we have to meet these two, and you know damned well they’ll be around for a while, buying drinks for Lindsey and Kat—and for me, too, of course, since it would be rude not to—but the whole time they’ll be secretly hoping that I’ll find my own man so they can be left alone.

  I wonder why I’m assuming that neither Trent nor David would be interested in me. I am, after all, the one who got Billy’s attention—not Lindsey. But the doubting part of myself feels that had been a fluke, a coincidence, or possibly a mistake on Billy’s part. Well then, was Francesco a mistake, too? This self-defeating circle jerk gets me nowhere, so I tune back in to the conversation.

  “It sounds like a blast. What do you think?” Kat says, and I can tell she’s excited. I want her to be happy, I really do, so I smile back.

  “Want to go?” she says when I don’t answer right away.

  “Sure,” I say, trying to sound game, and some part of me thinks it does sound like fun to check out the island nightlife. Mykonos is supposed to be one of the most happening places in Europe. But some other part of me, some large part, wishes that instead of Mykonos, we’d gone to some secluded slip of land where it was just the three of us.

  The Scandinavian Bar is the sole business occupant of a tiny plaza surrounded by whitewashed houses with arched doorways. The bar itself is a small, unimposing, oak-lined pub that could never accommodate the crowd it attracts. Instead, the patrons spill out of the place and fill every inch of the plaza, its doorsteps and stairways. Greece, apparently, doesn’t have any of those pesky, you-can’t-d
rink-in-a-public-thoroughfare laws.

  We stand at the entrance to the plaza looking for a waitress and talking. Kat and Lindsey both listen to the Kennedy boys, who explain that they’re traders in Manhattan, but neither of my friends appears to be overtly flirting or turning up the volume. I’m pleasantly surprised. It seems that they’re following through, in a way, with our little pact to spend more time with the girls and less with the boys.

  It’s clear that we’ll never find a waitress standing where we are, but luckily, Trent and David spot a pack of English people they know who’ve managed to corner a large chunk of real estate just outside the bar. It takes us at least fifteen minutes to travel there because the crowd is nearly impenetrable, and no one is particularly interested in making room for anyone else. Muttering “excuse me” and “sorry” about a thousand times, we slip and squeeze past women with movie-star good looks and a few drag queens who are even prettier, past the Italian stallions and the rest of the beautiful people. Finally, we all congregate with the English crew, packed tight like we’re in the front row of a concert, and the introductions are made.

  “This crowd is unbelievable,” Kat says, glancing around at the slim and ridiculously well dressed hordes of people.

  “It’s enough to make you feel like a fat arse, isn’t it?” responds Jenny, a stout English girl with mischievous green eyes and a sprinkling of freckles over her nose.

  I like her immediately. In fact, I like most of the group. The Kennedy boys are less preppie and predictable than I’d thought, and the Brits are loud and friendly.

  Sin uses her miniature frame to her advantage, sneaking to the bar and back, arriving with a tray of cold, dripping bottles of Tuborg. Our little gang cheers for her, and I see a genuine smile light up Sin’s face. I take one of the bottles and relax, letting myself enjoy the company and the people-watching from our prime vantage point. It’s hard not to compare myself to the stylish women with stick-straight hair and bodies, four-inch heels and perfect makeup, but I’m in a particularly good mood, and I’m able to wrench myself out of that mind rut easier than usual.