Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  I shook my head. “You know, Ash,” I said quietly, “I can’t imagine being in the middle of what you saw when I was nineteen. And totally alone in a strange land.”

  She wiped her nose, “Well, I was with Poz. And Pernille sort of.”

  “No. You were alone. And you were really brave, Ashley. Correction. You are brave. Brave and compassionate.”

  She blinked up at the ceiling. “I don’t feel brave.”

  “Look. You saw a gross injustice in this world. And unlike 99.9 percent of the population, you crossed a sea to do something about it. That is a big fucking deal.”

  She snorted. “Yeah. But then, I get played by this guy. I get robbed and sick and I’m totally useless. That night on the beach? Even before the people were drowning. Mom, I was, like, totally paralyzed. I just froze up. I didn’t do anything. I was just this pathetic volun-tourist standing there—” She made a bug-eyed zombie face. “Now, everybody knows what a baby I am. Nobody else here needed their mommy to rescue them. Nobody else here needed to have their mommy take them to the police station and buy them clothes like they were seven years old.”

  I tried not to laugh. I gave her a comic, incredulous look. “Nobody else here needs to be rescued, Ashley? Seriously? We’re in the middle of a refugee crisis.”

  She couldn’t help it; she looked down and smiled a little.

  “I just feel so stupid and helpless,” she said after a moment.

  “Oh, Ash.” Reaching over, I brushed a single strand of hair out of her eyes. “Everyone here feels stupid and helpless. The lifeguards. The volunteers, the Greeks, the refugees. All of us. It’s a shit-show. Everyone’s overwhelmed. Nobody here is a savior. Nobody’s a hero. Fuck. Look at me. I’m just picking up trash and chopping onions. We’re all just managing to do whatever we can.” Grinning, I threw up my hands. “Welcome to anarchy.”

  Slowly, Ashley looked at me. She started to laugh. You owe me $20, Joey.

  “Of course, if you ever pull a stunt like this again, I will likely kill you myself,” I said. “But I am incredibly proud of you.”

  “You are?”

  “Of course! Hell, when I was your age?”

  “C’mon. You were a total punk badass, Mom.”

  I shook my head. “Ashley, this is the first time in my life I’ve ever been overseas.”

  We stood facing each other. A current of electricity seemed to crackle between us.

  “Hey look,” I said suddenly, rolling my shoulders. “Sort of off topic here, but this needs to be said. It’s long overdue.” I touched her cheek. “I am so sorry for ruining your thirteenth birthday party, Ashley. To this day, I cringe thinking about how I humiliated you. Mocking that gift from your friends. If I had a time machine and could go back and redo only one of the many horrible mistakes in my life, that would be it.”

  Ashley looked at me, then down at her feet. She let out a long, slow breath. “Thanks.” She tilted her head slyly. “But you know, you were right, actually. Not what you did. But a $300 tracksuit? With ‘Juicy’ written across your ass like you’re some sort of corporate billboard? How totally degrading and sexist is that? I can’t believe I ever wanted that. It was, like, kiddie porn.”

  “Oh, sweetie. You wanted to be glamorous. And fit in.”

  She shook her head violently.

  Wiping her nose again, she pushed herself off from the edge of the sink. Suddenly, she hugged me. Fiercely. A tight, full-body grip, completely surrendered, burying her head in the crook of my neck, her arms squeezing my waist like vines, our limbs fusing. It was the most enveloping hug I’d felt from her since she’d started puberty, in fact. It was a hug, I realized, I had dreamed of for years. Grasping her, I hugged back.

  After a moment of snuffling, she murmured into my neck, “I can’t believe they’re calling you ‘Lady Chop-Chop.’ though. That is so lame.”

  But as she said it, I could tell she was smiling.

  Still, more boats came. Like my daughter, however, I found I couldn’t bear to go out to the beach. I didn’t know how people like Amir could do it. Just one drowned child, and I’d shatter. I knew my limits by now. Or, maybe, at forty-five, well, I just didn’t need to prove so much anymore. Or maybe, I was just too fucking tired.

  At night, I found myself dreaming: Austin and Ashley and Eli and Lexie and Thodoris’s baby, Dimitri, were washing up on the beach—one by one—like water bottles at my feet. The man in Las Vegas lay prone and purple-blue on Kostas’s kitchen counter amid the onions waiting to be chopped. Ayisha and her brother Bashir were screaming, being forced back into a punctured raft and cast adrift back to Turkey.

  The next evening, after Ashley and I finished chopping vegetables, we soaked our aching hands and wrists in ice water, then helped Selena and her crew pack up hundreds of meals in IKEA bags. These were too heavy to carry even the short distance, so a man named Stratis drove us to the camp.

  The grounds were lit with only a few strings of outdoor bulbs powered by a noisy portable generator. The stench was much stronger now than it had been two days before. People were camped everywhere.

  The anarchists had established a harsh but necessary system. Only one meal per person, and everyone who received food had to have a little checkmark put on their wrist with a Sharpie. Food lines were set up. The anarchists, oh, they were big on order. They were positively OCD. I fucking loved them! As Ashley and I distributed the meals in the dark, though, it was still a struggle. We had to take turns holding the flashlight. We learned how to say “hello” in Farsi from an Iranian family, only to find ourselves then serving groups of Syrians, who spoke only Arabic—then Pakistanis, who spoke only—who knew?—Urdu. Women grasped our wrists and pointed desperately to their children, pantomiming hunger. How did we say no to a pregnant woman? A man with a broken arm? The little children thought getting a checkmark was a game, but the adults were humiliated. I didn’t blame them. If anyone had tried to put a mark on me back at the homeless shelter in Memphis? I might’ve opted to go hungry. Or slugged them.

  One elderly man grabbed my hand. “You are mother and daughter?” He bowed. “I am sixty-six years old. I was doctor in Syria. I lose everybody. All my children. Everyone I love. Thank you for feeding me. Allah smiles on you. Praise Allah.” I found this even harder to take than the people who cursed us.

  When we finished, Ashley and I walked out of the camp robotically, our faces slack, the IKEA bags like spent parachutes in our hands. Following the pale beam of my flashlight, we staggered down the road back to Skala Sikamineas and climbed the hill in silence back to the little weedy path that led up to our room at Dina’s. A single weak bulb lit the porch outside, a few flies gyroscoping crazily around it.

  I unlocked the front door and switched on the light. The studio was ablaze in eye-searing, blue-white brightness. Dina had mopped the floor that morning (and very pointedly removed the bedsheet draped over her masterpieces). The scuffed tiles smelled of lemon and vinegar. Ashley and I stood in the doorway and took in our room, the daybed and cot with their pilling aquamarine covers, the riotously colorful kittens and sailors and harlequins dancing above them. We looked at the glassed-in fuse box near the utility sink—the big ugly sink, with its own running water!—and the red tab for the hot water heater sticking out like a tongue. Beside it was the bathroom—the bathroom!—its toilet truly a throne—perched beside the newly renovated shower with its hopeful, unfinished tile work.

  A porch. A bathroom. A room with two separate beds—one for each of us—just for us. So much goddamn luxury and space.

  Ashley dropped onto her mattress, her head in her hands. “I can’t even,” she said.

  I murmured something that came out sounding like, “Mwuuhuhh.” My arms and back were so sore, I could barely pull off my hoodie once I unzipped it. It was chalky with filth; it looked twenty years old. So did Ashley’s brand-new pants and tennis shoes. I shuffled over to the hot water switch and flicked it on. “Do you mind?” I said hoarsely.

  She shook
her head. “I just feel like all of the food I’ve ever refused to eat in my entire life is going to come back to haunt me, Mom.” She tilted to one side like a tree being felled and just lay on her bed.

  I stepped stiffly into the shower—relentlessly hot. As I squeezed a dollop of shampoo into my palm, I was overwhelmed by all the mothers and children I’d seen huddled on the ground outside, not far from where I now stood in a little protective stall, soaping myself up. I began to shiver. I turned up the water, but I couldn’t stop shaking. I began to heave.

  What if you’re the only ones on the airplane who even have oxygen masks?

  When I was finally washed and recomposed and swaddled in a towel, I emerged from the bathroom. Ashley was still sprawled in the exact same position that I’d left her in on the daybed, like a statue, a catatonic. But her head cocked the way a cat’s might suddenly, listening to something.

  “Shhhh.” She motioned toward the balcony.

  Outside, faintly but very distinctly, coming from the town square, we could hear a chorus of voices rising and falling in waves like water. Clapping. The haunting beat of drums.

  “What is that?” she whispered.

  “They’re playing music in the square. Selena told me they do that sometimes.”

  “Who?”

  “Everyone.” I looked at Ashley, then at Aggie, propped up in the corner. “Let me get dressed,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 21

  An American woman, whose own grandparents fled the Holocaust, finds herself in Greece helping the refugees of her own era. I supposed there was some symmetry to this—some of the “balance” Thodoris talked about. If my journey were, say, an epic poem or a picaresque novel, perhaps this was how it should end: With me playing guitar at night with the refugees around the oil-drum campfires on the shimmering beach. With Ashley and I spending our sun-bright days together chopping farm-fresh vegetables, baking heart-shaped loaves of pita bread, and grilling fragrant lamb in the big kitchen with a motley team of other volunteers. We’d be working alongside each other not just as mother and daughter—but as two women at different stages of life who nonetheless have a new, abiding respect for each other. We’d be laughing and sharing little in-jokes as we minced pearly cloves of garlic, and our hands grew redolent of lemon and thyme, and we managed to make our own, small contribution toward nourishing a battered, brutal world.

  But of course not. On our third day of cooking, Ashley sliced her left finger dicing an eggplant—there was blood everywhere—you’d have thought we’d have slaughtered an entire lamb on that kitchen floor—and she began freaking out—and okay, I, as Lady Chop-Chop, was not as coolheaded as I should’ve been, either—yes, it was my kid—and I was exhausted and stressed—but also, she wasn’t fucking listening to me in the first place when I told her not once, but three times, thank you, to halve the eggplant first—you don’t just set the whole thing on the cutting board and begin hacking away at it with a cleaver—that’s like trying to sever a giant purple lightbulb, for fuck’s sake. Eleni bandaged up Ashley’s finger with the first-aid kit and a freshly boiled dishrag—good luck getting a doctor in Skala Sikamineas—even before the refugee crisis, a medic came around to the village maybe once a week (a wheezing geriatric with a leather medical kit circa 1958, according to Eleni). So while Ashley was being tended to—and gulping a glass of orange juice to keep from passing out—I ended up yelling something like, “Just how fucking hard is it to follow a basic recipe, Ash?” while she hollered, “Jesus Christ, Mom. You are such a total kitchen fascist. Thanks a lot for all your kindness and sympathy. I could’ve bled to death right here and all you care about is your fucking eggplant”—after which, the argument quickly devolved into a general cataloging of every single niggling grievance we’d been stockpiling over the course of almost a week of living together: If you paid as much attention to cooking as you do to your hair?—Well, Mom, I wouldn’t take such long showers if you didn’t fucking snore all night—Oh! Don’t blame me for the fact that you’re not sleeping, Ash. It’s because you’re up all night Skyping Mia and Instagramming. Why not take a little responsibility for your life for a change, will you?—Oh my God. Why did you even have kids in the first place, Mom, if you didn’t want the responsibility of us?—Oh, now you want me to take responsibility for you? A moment ago, you wouldn’t even listen to me tell you how to cut a fucking vegetable—

  Blah, blah.

  As ridiculous as our fight was, oddly, it seemed to defuse the tension for the people around us. There is nothing quite like watching a parent argue with a teenager—a no-win situation if ever there was one—to make everyone else feel relief that this, at least, is not them. Although few of them could understand our words, the refugees, in particular, seemed to welcome our bickering as a form of delightful entertainment. After months of living in sheer terror and being treated as either criminals or victims, they seemed reassured—even tickled—by the idiocy of a mother and her teenage daughter shrieking at each other over a butchered eggplant. It suggested that they were, in fact, someplace safe for the moment, that life might, in fact, become mundane and insipid once again. A middle-aged woman in a hijab even winked at me across the restaurant, tilting her chin knowingly at her own petulant, teenage daughter.

  Afterward, however, Ashley stomped off with Pernille, Dagmar, and Philippe to pick up trash, a black plastic bag slung over her shoulder. In the kitchen, Kostas and Eleni had gotten frozen ground beef in bulk, and the challenge was to get it all thawed for the massive amounts of moussaka we were cooking. After the eggplants, I was in charge of the béchamel sauce. I never thought that “béchamel sauce” would play even a minute part in a refugee crisis—at first glance, it of course seemed obscene—yet Kostas stuck to his vision.

  At the end of the day, my daughter found me still in the kitchen, rinsing off the last of the utensils. The ovens were cooling. Selena’s crew had started slicing up the great pans of moussaka into little rectangles, transferring them into takeaway containers for the camp and eating some themselves.

  “Hey,” Ashley said quietly. Her face was flushed with heat, her oaky hair bleached to copper. She squeezed and unsqueezed her left hand, checking to see how her finger felt beneath its balloon of gauze. The first-aid tape was filthy.

  I dried off my knives, set them aside. “How is it, sweetie? Do you need to change the dressing?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe just the tape. It doesn’t hurt, though.” She chewed her lip, kicked at a floor tile with the toe of her tennis shoes. “Sorry about this morning. I was seriously PMSing.”

  “Yeah. Well,” I sighed. “I’m perimensing. So.”

  “Is that a thing?”

  “It is now.”

  Wearily, we helped pack up all the food. Again. Then distributed meals with the team inside the camp. Again. Then returned to our studio feeling heartbroken and guilty and drained. Again. Yet when I came out of the shower this time, I found Ashley sitting alertly cross-legged on the couch.

  “Mom?” She rotated her wrists. Gingerly, she peeled back the bandage to examine her finger. The cut had been longer than it was deep; already, the skin appeared to be shiny and puckering. “How long were you planning on having us stay here? I’m just asking because originally, in London, I figured I’d come for two weeks. If I miss class more than that, I might have to retake the whole semester.”

  I sat down beside her on the edge of the couch. I looked at the dark sky beyond the balcony.

  Ashley sighed. “I mean, I wish I could stay longer.” She knitted her fingers together coyly. “It’s just that, I’m thinking that maybe it wouldn’t hurt, you know, to actually get my degree. Seeing as I can’t even cut up an eggplant.”

  “Oh, Ash, that stuff happens in cooking all the time. Good God. Look at my hands.” I held them out.

  “Yeah, it’s just, I’m thinking I might want to change my course of study to include a foreign language? I mean, everyone here—the volunteers and the refugees—they all s
peak at least three. All I’ve got is two lame semesters of high school Spanish.” Picking at a blister on her palm, she frowned. “How am I going to help the world if I can’t even talk to it?”

  I smiled. “Well, there are different ways of communicating.”

  “Yeah, sure. I mean, you’re a chef, so you can communicate through food, which is universal. And Dad is a dentist. Everyone on the planet has teeth. And Austin has his park, which is construction, which can be done anywhere. But what skill do I have, exactly? Tweeting?”

  “Austin has a park?”

  Ashley clamped her hands over her mouth. “Oh shit.” She sighed. “Well. Now you know, I guess. Austin and a bunch of his skater friends? They’ve been sneaking downtown to one of those burned-out lots in Detroit. They’ve been converting it into this skateboard park. With a half-pipe, and graffiti art. They’re supposedly building all these ramps and things. I think they may be working with a local church. And doing a Kickstarter crowdfunding thing.”

  “Austin?” The kid who, until about a week ago, was essentially a deaf-mute?

  “Yeah.” Her lashes fluttered. “He didn’t want you guys to know, because he was sure you’d totally freak out about him going into the city all the time. But Detroit’s having this renaissance, and Rodrigo and him, they’re, like, building this playground from scratch. It was their own idea. They started it.”

  “I thought he and Rodrigo were doing a hip-hop version of The Odyssey.”

  “I dunno. Maybe that, too?”

  “Does your dad know?”

  “Nuh-uh. Otherwise, he wouldn’t let Austin borrow his car. Also, you know how Dad gets with projects and stuff. He’d probably just get totally obsessed and try to make it some sort of weird father-son thing. Austin just really wanted to do it himself, I think.”

  Well, that explained the aerosol and turpentine stench in my son’s room, his soiled clothes, his caginess. But good God: Every single person in our family had a secret fucking life now.