L'America

by Martha McPhee

  "Never received word?" Sylvia said, laughing at Beth's stilted sentence construction, which seemed the result of too much time abroad.

  "New new new," Bea said. "Brand-new."

  "Have you kissed?"

  "Almost," she said, and told them how she had been introduced to him in town one night. They did not share the same group of friends and she only knew him vaguely by face but that night he rode her home on his motorcycle and would have kissed her had the married man (his name was Giorgio) not been waiting for her in his car outside the gate. "I have never more not wanted to see Giorgio."

  Beth had never met the married man, but she had this image of him as tall and dark and cloaked in a black cape so that he never emerged from the shadows, a sort of hooded Darth Vader (Bea had described his black hair, deep-set eyes, strong jaw pocked with shallow dimples, and his hands—hands that could hold a lot, all of her).

  At this particular moment the girls were in their hotel room in Florence, Bea on the bed in her underwear with tweezers, leaning over her left leg, from which she plucked newly emerging hairs. She could do this for hours and she would try to get Beth and Sylvia to do it, too, but neither one had the patience. In fact, they had given up on waxing and gone back to shaving. Their beauty treatments involved gentle tasks like facials and deep conditioning of the hair.

  "Are you in love with Miki?" Bea asked Beth, still with her eyes hard on the project of her left leg. She did not like to talk much about Cesare and didn't mention him very often as it made her feel too vulnerable. Indeed, by the time they arrived in Páros, when Beth would see him for the first time on those steps, Bea's romance, lived vividly in her own mind, was only a faint memory to Beth and Sylvia.

  "He's too tall," Sylvia said. "And those feet."

  "He is tall," Beth admitted, and remembered him leaning down, way down, to kiss her. "Plus I don't think he knows what he's doing. He cupped my breast and just sort of held on to it as if it were a knob. I was afraid he might turn it to see if he could open something." Then she told them about his penis and how big it was and how he had put it in her hand, but that she realized once she was touching it that she didn't want to be. She didn't mention that she hadn't known what to do with it.

  "Yick," Sylvia said, but they loved talking about sex. They wanted to talk about the really juicy stuff, and of the three of them Bea had had the most experience because of the married man. Beth would get Bea to describe her escapades for Sylvia, how she and the married man (they liked to call Giorgio that because it sounded so sordid and adult) snuck around late at night, making out in dark parks and in the back of his Mercedes. "His wife is always there," Bea would say. "And I like that." His wife looming over them like some sort of aphrodisiac made the encounters one hundred percent satisfactory.

  "What about Cesare?" Beth asked now.

  "I love my married man," Bea said, turning the attention away from Cesare. She did not want them to know how much she thought about him. Beth and Sylvia had no idea yet that he, too, was one of the friends coming to Greece.

  Their suitcases were heavy but Bea always found some kind stranger to carry them, and when she didn't, they dragged them, destroying the rich green leather. From Brindisi to Patras they took the ferry, sleeping on the deck beneath a shower of soot from the ship's smokestack, feeling like real travelers. They danced Greek reels in the discotheque and played slot machines, getting rich on worthless drachmas. They were well dressed in Bea's adorable clothes, miniskirts, cropped pants, cropped tops, delicate strappy shoes in gold. The clothes featured last year's color, mandarin. "Orange," Sylvia would say in that direct way of hers. Poor and in Athens, however, they slept in Zappeio Park in order to save a few more of those easily won drachmas and because Sylvia read in the guidebook that it was safe as long as you secured your luggage to your body so that thieves couldn't snitch it in the night. Beth and Bea were skeptical and this excursion was truly slumming it for Bea. After all, her money problems were not the same as Sylvia's and Beth's. Bea's parents paid for her entire trip. The idea of an Italian child waiting tables to earn spending money of any sort was anathema in their world. In Italy waiters were waiters and had always been waiters and would always be waiters. But Bea enjoyed the adventure of traveling on a budget and knew that with Italian friends she would never have slept in a park. With Beth the world was always just a bit bigger for Bea, and for that she loved Beth all the more. "Can you imagine sleeping in Central Park?" Beth asked. "Or the Cascine?" Bea said of Florence's big park, thick with transvestites and transsexuals who had had operations in Casa Blanca—a detail the girls had found unbelievably curious, so they had taken a midnight tour of the Cascine (in a taxi) to observe these "ladies" strutting about in their high heels and sleazy skirts, thinking of them all the while on an operating table in the depths of Africa with doctors magically transforming them from men to women, chopping here, adding there. "Gross," one of the girls had said.

  Zappeio Park was in the center of Athens and part of the National Garden, which was once part of the royal family's palace grounds. Signs at the entrance said (in English, quite clearly) that the park was open from dawn to dusk. "But this isn't Central Park, or the Cascine, and the guidebook says it's fine," Sylvia insisted, pointing to the passage. They indulged her, allowing her to thread a long cord (they had no idea where it came from, but Sylvia somehow produced it) through all the handles to all the suitcases and then through all their clothes so that they were neatly bound together like some bulky, but precious, package. "If anyone tries to snitch a suitcase they'll get all of us and that will be too heavy to carry away. We're anchored here," Sylvia said. Beth and Bea rolled their eyes, but Beth was happy to save the price of a night's room. They also noticed other travelers, with backpacks, beginning to emerge from the shadows to find a spot for the night beneath the orange and the lemon trees. The new company made Sylvia more confident, and she gave Beth and Bea a "see" look—squinting, pursing her lips. It was dusk and the city was hot and dry and smoggy (smog was the detail the girls noted first and foremost upon their arrival), but the park was green and fragrant. A breeze rippled the air.

  Beth felt guilty about her suitcase as she watched the backpackers, as if somehow the suitcase made her a less serious traveler, and she wished she had brought her backpack. It was also much easier to carry. One of the long-distance travelers camped nearby approached (long beard, bare feet, tie-dyed undershirt, cute in a Jesus hippie sort of way, definitely an American) to ask them if they had any spare rope, and this request made Sylvia's afternoon. "I just don't understand the attraction of American men," Bea said, as the young man walked away. Secretly, though, she did: they seemed to belong to a world of no cares. And when the birdsongs died down and the late sun finally disappeared and when there was no more conjecture about the other friends Miki and Dario might be bringing along to Páros (a subject that occupied a good portion of their conversation), the girls drifted easily into sleep.

  In the middle of the night, to Sylvia's great delight, a thief tried to steal their bags. Instead of the suitcase, the thief got the whole bundle and was scared away by the three screaming girls. (For the rest of her life, Sylvia would love to tell that story.) Then at 5 A.M. when the orange light of dawn began creeping into the lemon trees, the girls were awakened again, this time by a shower of water as all the park's sprinklers turned on.

  Ambitious, feeling confident, if a little tired, that morning they planned a tour of the Acropolis, the Agora, and the Plaka. They left the heavy suitcases on the sidewalk near a busy outdoor café, agreeing that no one would steal them, because any thief would believe the owners were sitting nearby sipping coffee. "Who would be so stupid as to leave their bags on a street in Athens?" Bea asked. "No one." "Precisely," Sylvia said. And after a hot morning of drifting through the Temple of Athena Nike and the Parthenon and of imagining them as they must have been two thousand years ago, painted brightly and active with life (everyone in white togas as in the movies), the girls went shop
ping at the Plaka and returned to find their bags almost exactly where they had left them (though moved a few feet farther toward the street by a waitress because they were in her way).

  Funny about that age, you're invincible. Death is a long way off, something that happens to others. Risk is less risky. That summer a boy Beth and Sylvia knew from high school in Pennsylvania died. Likely, he was dying at the moment they left their bags on that crowded Athenian street; the night before while they slept in the park, he was doing the damage that would later kill him. He had driven too fast in his car with too many drugs and too much alcohol in his system, believing, like everyone his age, that he was invincible. (Do you remember all those high school nights when you rode fast in your Camaros, your Mustangs, your cute VW Bugs, when you got home without even knowing how, how you would laugh about it later, boasting to friends?) Beth and Sylvia's friend was Paul. He had been the guitarist in the Random Joe band, the band whose drummer both Beth and Sylvia had kissed. When Beth later heard that Paul had wrapped his beat-up old LeSabre around a sycamore tree, she imagined the accident literally—his car curling around the tree like a snake, Paul inside, the metal slicing into him. Paul had actually been thrown into a blackberry thicket, where he was found by a fireman, who took snapshots of the scene to warn his kids about the dangers of speeding and drunk driving. This was one of the worst accidents the fireman had ever seen. Rescue workers had to pick parts of Paul from the blackberry thicket. Even so, he somehow lived for half a day more.

  Paul and Beth had kissed once at a party. He had put the gum he had been chewing on the back of his wrist and they had kissed, a sloppy wet kiss that left her lips and her chin sore and chaffed. He had driven too fast a month after graduation with the Grateful Dead blasting away on the cassette player. Somehow it was still playing "Sugar Magnolia," so the rumor went, when the fireman found him. The girls slept in an Athenian park, thinking themselves just as invincible. Beth would picture their luggage at the edge of the café while the three of them marched up the hot hill to the remains of ancient Greece.

  "Do you think you'll sleep with Miki?" Bea asked as they rose to the Parthenon, history and its ruins all around them. Paul had asked Beth to go steady that night when he put the gum on his wrist. She had said yes, and they had walked around the party hand in hand, trying on love, trying on the grown-up world with all its formulations and rules—a dear boy with long black hair that he let cover one eye in a way he believed made him look dangerous. He did not want to be a nice boy, a good boy, but he was. For years Beth would see those kids from her Pennsylvania high school, her New York high school (more sophisticated though they were with their cocaine in the bathrooms of clubs), and she would see Bea and Sylvia and herself, all of them invincible, all of them waiting impatiently for the real (definitely emphatic here) to begin. What was it? Where was it? Won't someone show us the way? Take us there now? Guide us. Lead us. No wonder Beth and Sylvia surrendered so easily to Bea.

  Going steady had felt awkward and uncomfortable, a shirt that didn't fit right. At the end of the party, Beth broke off the affair, explaining the news to her friends who were only just beginning to celebrate. The drama of their reaction was as far as she wanted to push adulthood. The relationship had lasted four hours. Paul hit the sycamore tree at ninety miles per hour. Despite his mangled body, it took him a good twelve hours to die. "How are they going to fix him?" his mother kept crying, repeating the words into the enormous chest of her sad-eyed husband, wondering how the doctors would make her son whole again. When Beth learned about the accident, she would think of the Maserati speeding along on the Italian highway. She would think of her own mother, so deeply dead she was as much a part of history as George Washington. Beth would think of Paul's gum stuck to his wrist, his sloppy wet lips kissing hers, his black hair falling in the way of their mouths. By the time she learned of his death she would be well initiated into adult pain and deeply ensconced in the early days of her life's most central myth.

  It slipped out, on the tiny island of Antiparos, that Bea's Cesare was a friend of Miki's and that he was a big windsurfer and that he, too, might be coming to Páros. The detail was just one of many details that occupied the girls as they passed the hot days beneath the fierce Greek sun on their own small nude beach. They camped on this beach for three days, which felt more like an eternity, dreaming of when they would get to Páros and wondering if they would still be keen on their men, inventing instead some new men they would meet—Frans, Hans, and Reinhold, rich Germans (heaven knows why they were German) who drove a Mercedes. And, as they starved on their beach, waiting for the days to pass, they told each other ridiculous stories about the things they would do with these men. The girls had only brought some melons (which turned out to be round cucumbers) for food and Antiparos's main town was a good ten miles by mule away from their beach. They had wanted to eat melon for three days in order to lose weight. On the third day of starvation, as if an apparition, an ice-cream truck appeared on a rocky dirt road above the beach, a road they had thought was intended only for mules. But it was no apparition.

  It was the real thing and all the weight the girls had lost eating cucumbers they gained back eating ice cream. The ice-cream truck gave them (and their green leather suitcases) a lift to the ferry and from there they sailed across a small gulf to Páros, adorable in Bea's clothes, carefully manicured, and deeply tanned (even their boobs and butts).

  Miki and Dario and Miki's car, a Land Rover this time, waited for them at the Páros dock in Parikia. Awkwardly, but possessively, the boys kissed their girls and then whisked them and Bea and their luggage off to the small fishing village of Naoussa, the road winding through eerie magnificent rock formations and gentle terraced hills, some laced with vineyards. In the front Miki and Dario spoke nervously and fast to Bea, and in the back Beth and Sylvia were suddenly exhausted. Beth couldn't keep up with the Italian and didn't bother trying. Though it was late afternoon, the sun was still high, shining red and magnificent against the aquamarine sky. It felt as though the ten days since Forte dei Marmi had passed as fast as a breeze, blowing them all to this moment.

  And then there was Cesare, standing halfway up the steps of one of those traditional Cycladic homes—whitewashed with a deep sea-blue trim. Above the stairs wisteria draped a latticed balcony and here and there stood pots of brilliant red geraniums. Cesare was struggling to communicate with the landlady, attempting to negotiate the price of a room for the girls—his friends' friends—using his best ancient Greek learned several years before at the Liceo Classico. The landlady, her bulk draped in a black housedress, that revealed only her thick ankles and bare feet, did not understand a word but seemed to understand the topic was money and was thus keen for the conversation. The light of the afternoon sun caught in Cesare's hair, illuminating him, while his figure cast a shadow over the landlady. He gestured with his hands and smiled, clearly flirting. On the small road upon which the car was parked, a mule led by a hunched-over old man clomped by. Beth stood at the car door, green leather suitcase near her feet. She wore a mandarin-colored sundress and her Jesus sandals and she looked up at Cesare, thinking that he wasn't as attractive as Bea had suggested. His features were too sharp—angular jaw, Roman nose, even chiseled temples, making the lines of his face seem harsh. And there was something funny to his look, something strange, perhaps only the result of being animated by his conversation. Just then, as if he had heard her thoughts and wished to prove them wrong, he looked at her. She looked away, but felt the shock, the stab, a sensation she had not felt before and that struck her just as swiftly as something randomly falling from the sky. It was utterly intoxicating and seemed to have nothing to do with anything that made any sense, and she wanted to look at him again. Indeed, she could feel her face flush, a very hot and brilliant red. He's not that attractive, she thought again, as if to excise something uncomfortable—a thorn from a toe.

  I will never go back to Páros. White houses trimmed with blue, small towns at the
edge of the water with outside cafés serving fried squid and other fresh seafood—the smell of it, grilled fish and salt air and corn—the corn on the cob dressed still in its silk was grilled, too. On that island Beth and Cesare are perpetually falling in love—over and over and over again. It's a level in Dante's Paradiso out there in the blue sea where this blessed young couple are forever able to reenact their first moment of love, when everything is absolutely possible and you're blissfully unaware of the destruction that lies in your wake, of the cruelty and pain you'll inflict on each other in the name of love at some unforeseen and distant time. You trust. You trust your body, your future, the mysterious laws that say everyone will receive love. You trust, you have no experience yet to teach you otherwise. I will never go back to Páros.

  A fragment of Valeria's mother's life. Dated 1992, written by her mother in her mother's diary, in her mother's neat, careful, swirling script, her mother trying to tell a story, her mother, perhaps, trying to be indelible, poetic even, her mother speaking. It was all she ever said about Páros in her journals because she didn't start writing them until well after the Páros trips were over. (She and Cesare went to the island several times because they loved to windsurf and because the nature of their vacations were decidedly Italian rather than American.) And that was also the last passage Beth wrote about Cesare. She had just been to Italy to see him for the last time, Valeria knew from the letters. They started breaking up in 1987, but the drama endured until 1992, for five years—telephone calls, letters, fast and secret trips to somewhere. Years later, after Beth's death—fifteen, sixteen years later—Valeria, a twenty-year-old woman living in New York, wished her mother had written more. Beth had written plenty in Valeria's baby book, written not just about her first smile and bite of food but also about the politics of the time—some sex scandal, an impeachment, a stolen election. Valeria wouldn't care so much about her mother's views of her baby years (sweet, yes) as she would about her mother's life. You see, Valeria, unlike Beth, would have memories of her mother. Simple things, her mother cooking with her, her mother helping her to brush her teeth, her mother dressing up like magic for an evening out with Valeria's father, the wonderful scratching. Thus for Valeria her mother would not always be dead (like George Washington). But because of the way in which Beth died, the memory of her would not be about her life but rather about her death. She would become for Valeria someone who was always dying. Perpetually she died. For eternity Valeria would be able to watch her mother's death. For years and years and more years still she would be able to see it on television. Thus she would love digging into Beth's life, retracing it, finding in this passage, written in her mother's hand, a moment where her mother is doing something fabulous and dangerous just as perpetually, just as permanently, just as indelibly. In this passage she breathed, alive, a person feeling, immortal. On that island Beth and Cesare are perpetually falling in love—over and over and over and over again.