Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “The local officials here in Lesvos do not even come,” Eleni said bitterly. She glared at her husband as if he were somehow personally responsible.

  “Come.” Kostas led us to a stack of crates. “The farmers today, they bring more spinach. We have onions, garlic. Andreas, he brings feta. But not enough. We will be needing protein.”

  “Is there any fish?” I nodded toward the port.

  An uneasy silence came over the group.

  “The refugees won’t eat it,” said Inga.

  “Nor will the Greeks,” Selena said quietly. She leaned in, whispering. “Everyone here thinks the fish are poisoned.”

  I frowned. “From the motor oil in the water?”

  “No.” She shot a pained look at Amir. “From the bodies.”

  My coffee cup went heavy in my hand.

  Kostas and Eleni began arguing about what to make with the ingredients they had. “We are not making spanakopita today, Kostas. It is crazy,” his wife said. “It is too much work. Too much time.”

  “But soup and rice, soup and rice. Every day. The same thing. This is making me crazy.” Kostas tapped the side of his head. “It is bad for everybody. Bad for morale.”

  “I think we’re all just happy to eat,” Inga said quietly.

  Amir added, “As long as there is no pork. Food is food. We are all grateful.”

  “Everyone who comes to Skala Sikamineas should eat Greek traditional cooking!” Kostas said vehemently. He turned to us like a jury. “You do not know our language, but you can eat our food. Greek food is best in the world.”

  Spanakopita. Good God: Did anyone have, say, six or seven hours to kill in a kitchen obsessively rolling filo dough and de-stemming spinach and watching a clock? Back in Michigan, I’d attempted to make spanakopita myself a few times to demonstrate the Privileged Kitchen’s Silicone All-Purpose Pastry Brush ($8.95 in either lime green, mocha, or paprika!) and its best-selling patented No-Stick Bakery Pans ($15.99–$32.99, depending on the size; dishwasher-friendly!). The filo dough alone required an insane amount of rolling and kneading over and over—really, it was like an aerobics class—and once it was done, you had to carefully layer together eight sheets of it, buttering each one. And then the filling itself was a whole other enterprise. I’d used the Privileged Kitchen Choppity-Chop Chopper ($49.99) on enormous bags of prewashed, prebagged spinach. But even with these shortcuts, in the end, spanakopita proved way too elaborate and labor-intensive for demonstrations. I’d had to come up with a much faster alternative.

  “I have an easy pita bread recipe. It doesn’t even use yeast, so it takes no time. We could just make pita and stuff it with the spanakopita filling instead,” I suggested.

  Kostas frowned. “You mean we make sandwiches?”

  “Well, pita pies.”

  “Ha,” said Selena. “Spanako-pita.”

  “That is not the traditional Greek way.”

  “True,” Cathy interjected. “But Kostas, they eat pita in the Middle East. So for the refugees, it would be a little bit of home, but with a Greek twist. That might be a nice way to welcome everybody.”

  “Okay. Lady Chop-Chop,” Kostas said as he pointed at me. “You’re in charge of pita pies then. I show you flour.”

  “Hang on.” I’d only planned to be in the kitchen an hour or so. I needed to get back to Ashley.

  “Can you do three, four hundred by noon? We need as many as you can make. Now,” Kostas said, turning to the others, “Amir and I, we need three strong people to help carry boxes.”

  I looked at the ovens warming, then at the lumps of sleeping bodies beyond the kitchen. Kostas had let the refugees with children sleep inside on the floor of his tavern. The days were sunny, but the nights cold.

  Fuck it. Yeast-free pita wouldn’t take very long to teach. “Okay, folks,” I said in my shiny, Privileged Kitchen demo voice, “who wants to make pita bread with me?”

  Inga and a half dozen others assembled.

  I’d like to say that I simply showed them how to make the bread, set the kitchen in motion, and voilà. But has anyone in the history of the universe ever cooked like that? Hell, the first time I ever did a demo at the Bloomfield Hills Mall, I’d set my hair on fire. And I wasn’t even drunk.

  All the measurement utensils in Kostas’s kitchen were metric. And the oven was in Celsius. Plus, for all my experience in America, I had no idea how to communicate to people who were not native English speakers. Apparently, I talked way too fast. Apparently, I was also a little exhausting.

  It didn’t help that I kept glancing at my watch, then up toward Dina’s, either.

  And so, I fucked up the first test batch. The second batch was not something you’d want to serve to people who’d just barely survived drowning at sea, either. Finally, though, with input from the whole group, we got it right. Eleni and I set up a prep team for the pita, while Kostas and his team hauled in crates of spinach, onions and garlic, and buckets of feta.

  “Lady Chop-Chop, can we get you over here now, love?” Cathy called from the prep counter. “Would you show these kind people here how you cut up all those onions yesterday?”

  A line of volunteers stood at the ready with cutting boards and knives of various sizes and quality. Ten minutes, tops: I’d just have to do enough to get a rhythm going. As I began to demonstrate the French way to cut onions, a man appeared; he’d slept in the tavern. He had light brown skin and a thick black mustache and a woeful, insistent gaze. What held my attention most, however, were his long, slender hands, covered with tiny burns and scars—and the fact that he was dressed, incongruously, in a suit jacket but plastic flip-flops. Seeing me, he motioned, first to himself, then to the cutting boards.

  “You want to help?” I made room for him beside me. We were running low on knives; I gave him our last one.

  Smiling, bowing his head slightly, he picked up the knife and went thwup-thwup-thwup-thwup, then scraped the chopped onion into the collection bowl with a single, graceful motion. One, then another, then another. The others stopped to watch.

  “Wow. You’re really good. What’s your name?” But he just smiled at me uncomprehendingly.

  “Do you speak Arabic?” I said. “Merhaba?”

  He shrugged apologetically, then held up his hand implying I should wait. Disappearing into the restaurant area, he returned with a boy who looked to be ten or eleven, wearing muddy jeans and a bright athletic shirt reading ARSENAL. “Hello,” the boy said in a singsongy voice. “My father says you speak English. He does not. He only speaks Pashto, Farsi, and Dari.”

  I laughed. “Oh, only three languages.” The boy, however, did not seem to understand I was joking.

  “We are from Afghanistan,” he said. “Where are you from? Are you Greek?”

  “No. I am American. My name is Donna.”

  “She’s ‘Lady Chop-Chop,’” Cathy called out, plunking down another crate of onions, then heading back down to the pantry.

  “Oh, because my father,” said the boy, “he would like to thank all Greek people. He would like to tell all Greek people that he is so happy that we are safe here in Greece.”

  “When did you arrive?”

  He looked confused.

  “Oh. My family. We walk.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We walk from Kabul,” he said very matter-of-factly.

  I stopped chopping and looked at him. “You walked from Kabul to here?”

  “We walk from Kabul to airport,” he said.

  “Oh, I see,” I said with a smile.

  “We fly to Tehran. Then from Tehran, we walk to Turkey.”

  Tehran was in Iran, wasn’t it? How far was that from Turkey? It had to be hundreds of miles. I stared at him dumbly.

  “It take three months because we walk over mountains but can only go at night. Or they shoot at us. And my sister, she get sick. We walk across Turkey. Then, from Turkey, we take boat here.”

  I put down an onion. “I’m so sorry,” was all I could think to
say.

  “Why are you sorry, my friend? We are here. We are safe now. My mother. Last night, she sleep on floor here. This morning, she wake up. She say, Massoud, for first time in two years, I sleep well. For first time in two years, I dream.”

  The whole time Massoud and I were speaking, his father was chopping onions single-mindedly. Tears were streaking down his cheeks and catching in his mustache. Wiping his eyes on his sleeve, he said something to Massoud to translate.

  Massoud said to me, “My father, he is so happy to be cooking again. Back in Kabul, he have restaurant.”

  Massoud’s father’s name was Safi. Between the two of us, we got the volunteers prepping like a well-oiled machine of sous-chefs. As it turned out, we didn’t need any words to communicate at all.

  As soon as I could, though, I wrapped up two pita pies and hurried back up the hill to Dina’s. I could imagine how distraught Ashley would be if she’d already woken up. As I climbed the steps to the porch, I saw, guiltily, that our landlady had left breakfast for us on a paint-smudged tray on the rickety little table outside. Beneath a netted dome to ward off the flies were slices of bread, fruit salad jeweled with pomegranate seeds, containers of Greek yogurt, two soft-boiled eggs. Well, at least someone here won’t starve, I thought grimly.

  The door, to my surprise, was open. Inside, the utility room had the stale, yeasty smell of a sick room, mixed with the mildew from the walls and a frenzy of flies already swirling overhead. Yet Ashley was awake, newly showered and animated, lying with her feet propped up on the rails of the daybed, talking happily into a bright little screen. My useless American smartphone had somehow come back to life.

  “Hang on,” she said to it. “Hey Mom, I’m Skyping Mia. Wanna say hi?” She flashed the phone in my direction. I caught a glimpse of black hair and eyes, a hand waving halfheartedly in a rectangle. Mia was Ashley’s best friend back at the University of Michigan.

  “You got my phone to work?” I sat down heavily on the edge of the trundle bed and pulled off my boots.

  “Yuh-uh. When Dina came with our breakfast, I asked if she had an adapter for your charger. And there’s Wi-Fi here. The password’s taped to the outlet. You can’t make calls on this. But if there’s Wi-Fi, we can get internet.” She turned back to the screen, where Mia’s voice was saying, “Yeah, so now, we’re all signing this petition, and the department chair is totally freaking out.”

  “Oh my God. Shut up. I can’t believe Blake said that in the first place. That is so totally sick.”

  “Ashley,” I said.

  She must have sensed my annoyance, because she said quickly, “Hey, sorry, Mi. I think I have to go.”

  When she hung up, she tossed the phone on the bed and stretched and yawned extravagantly.

  “Well, you seem better,” I said.

  “Oh, totally. Oh my God. I am like a whole new person.” Standing on one foot, she reached behind her and grabbed her ankle, then extended her other arm until she stood poised before me like an exotic bird. “I hope you don’t mind, I ate some fruit salad already and the fresh orange juice.”

  “No, no, that’s good. Can you manage an egg or some of the yogurt, too, maybe? You need protein, Ash.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Vegan, remember?”

  I looked at her and sighed. “I brought a spinach pita-pie for you. I can vouch that the bread doesn’t have any dairy in it.”

  She took the pie off the counter and wandered out onto the porch behind me. I sat down at the little table and reached for the soft-boiled egg in its cup and began to tap it hard—too hard—with the side of the spoon.

  I looked down toward the marina. All the little fishing boats did, in fact, remain moored. What were the locals going to eat if all the fish was, in fact, poisoned?

  Ashley tore open the pita and poked at it suspiciously.

  “Sorry, Mom, but this whole thing is, like, tainted with feta.”

  Making a face, she scraped out the spinach filling disdainfully, then raked the tines of her fork through it to ferret out the little cheese cubes and quarantine them to one side.

  I had the overwhelming impulse to grab her plate suddenly and break it over her head—wasn’t breaking plates a Greek tradition, in fact? Well, maybe this was how it really started—not with a wedding celebration or Zorba the Greek—but with some indolent teenage vegan picking feta cheese out of her spinach pie. The last time I’d smashed a dish had been the morning I’d caught Joey with his mistress. The ceramic pineapple utensil holder: It had been so satisfying to hurl it against the wall. Then I saw myself again, beating Joey with the fish spatula. During not one of these times had I been drunk. Even sober, I could be dangerous around kitchenware.

  I was a woman capable of great violence, I realized. It was hot within me, part of my intrinsic genetic fabric, lurking just below the surface. I had never really thought of myself this way before. But there it was. Was it the loss of my mother—or my crazy, aggressive father—or just part of me, my being alive? Who the hell knew. But how could I not have recognized it before? All that punk rock, with its belligerence, the slam-dancing and spitting, the screaming into a microphone. I sure as hell wasn’t a folksinger. I sure as hell wasn’t Barbara Mandrell. Even that night in the Tennessee jail, threatening those meth-heads. I was a perimenopausal woman performing yoga on the floor, but they’d seen something in my eyes that they recognized and drew back from.

  I sat back in my chair. “Wow,” I whistled.

  “What?”

  That night at Zack’s, too. When Janine had punched me in the face, I’d stumbled back and doubled over. But then, I recalled suddenly, I hadn’t simply stepped away. Instinctively, I’d straightened up and lunged back at her, smacking her on the shoulder, feebly pulling her hair. How had I forgotten this? There was a reason I hadn’t pressed assault charges. There was a reason I had been speeding away from Murfreesboro.

  “Hey. Mom?” Ashley was, in fact, eating the cleaned-off pita bread now, tearing it off and shoving bits in her mouth. “I checked online, and there are flights back to Athens from Lesvos five times a day. I’m not sure we can get one this afternoon. But do you think maybe tomorrow?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I was thinking. Maybe, after getting a new passport, instead of going back to London, I could return to Michigan with you instead? I don’t know if U-M would take me back mid-semester, but we could see. I could room with Mia, she says.”

  I set my spoon down. I gazed at my daughter. “We’re not going back to Athens, Ashley.” I reached for a piece of bread, broke it.

  “What?”

  “I had to pay three nights up front for this room. And you seem to be a lot better now. So we’re going to stay put for a little while.”

  “Are you serious?” Ashley set down her swatch of pita. “But Mom. I was just, like, really, really sick. I’m still totally weak.”

  “Well, you certainly seem well enough now. Well enough to eat, and to figure out how to get internet service. And to make plans to protest back in Michigan.”

  “But?” She stared at me. “I don’t even have a passport or ID here! Mom, trust me. That is not okay in this environment.”

  I picked up another piece of bread, tore it off, dipped it into the egg yolk. “I emailed Dad and Austin asking them to scan a copy of your birth certificate. So that should help.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “You’re hardly the first person to have her passport stolen, Ash. Kostas told me that if we file a report with the police nearby, they’ll give you a document you can use as ID here until we make it back to Athens.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Dealing with the police isn’t my first choice either. But we’ll be able to stay here at least and keep volunteering. I don’t have a lot of money, but this seems a worthy cause, doesn’t it? We’ll finish what you started. Together.”

  “But I don’t even have shoes, or hardly any clothes. I’ve had only one pair of underwear for six days.”


  I looked at her oddly. “I’d thought you’d want to stay.”

  She glared at me, her face going red. “Yeah, but I haven’t eaten in like, days, and I don’t have my meds—”

  “Well then,” I said flatly. “I guess we’ll both just be in recovery.”

  “Mom! That’s not funny.”

  I picked up my spoon and set it down with a clatter. “No, it’s not funny, Ashley,” I said. “It’s not funny at all. But you were the one who wanted to come here. You were the one tweeting about this for, like, months—and you were the one who snuck off to Greece without telling anyone. So guess what, sweetie? You’ve talked the talk? Well, now you’re going to walk the walk, as they say.”

  She looked at me with open hatred. “Oh my God. You’re forcing me to stay here, now, like a hostage? You’re punishing me?”

  “Wow.” I stopped. “I’m punishing you?” My hands were shaking. “You scare the living daylights out of us—your father and I have to borrow thousands of dollars from Arjul—so I can fly halfway around the world at a moment’s notice to get you out of quarantine? In a refugee camp? Oh, and make sure you have medicine? And clothes?”

  “Okay, what I meant—”

  “And the whole time, we are worried sick about you? Your dad and I are wondering, ‘How high is her fever? Could she go into a coma? Who robbed her? Was she beaten up? Or worse?’ But I guess you’re right. I guess I’m just ‘totally punishing’ you. I’m an absolute monster.”

  Now it really did take all the self-discipline I possessed not to throw something—and there was so much junk, so many willing objects in that damn utility room.

  “But Mom. It’s just…” Ashley began weakly. Yet she knew she didn’t have a case and she stopped.

  “It’s just nothing.” I snatched up the phone and my bag and the card Thodoris had given me with his number and email scrawled on the back. “Take something out of my suitcase and get yourself dressed. Now.”