Authors: Susanna Kaysen
The men conferred. Then one said an earnest long something.
“They say,” said George, “that we will have a drink together. There.” He pointed up the dock toward town.
My father shook his head.
“Yes,” said George. To the men he said something more complicated than yes. “We will have a drink with them and we will go to my mechanic.”
“It’s eleven in the morning,” said my father. “It’s too early to have a drink.” It was a stab at an objection.
We walked up the long shimmering jetty. “It is not satisfactory,” my father said. I trailed behind the phalanx of men.
The bar was the size of a closet. A man who looked exactly like the two guys in caps uncorked a grubby bottle and poured four glasses of a clear spirit, then added several drops of water from a clay jug on the counter. The glasses clouded over, as though they’d been filled with smoke.
In chorus the sailors raised their glasses, said,
“Eeseeyeyensas,”
and drank them off in one gulp. My father and George drank too.
“America,” one of them told my father.
He nodded.
“My brother, he Chicago,” he said. “Many years.” He began to sing. “Chicago, Chicago, That’s my home town.” He sang quite well. “You Chicago?” He pointed his glass at my father.
“Boston,” my father said. To George, he said, “Let’s get going.”
But Chicago’s brother had signaled another round. Now they both lifted their glasses toward my father.
“You Ess of Ahh, You Ess of Ahh,” they said. “Very magnificent country,” Chicago’s brother added.
George poked my father in the side. My father raised his glass.
“Hellas,” he said. “To Hellas, also a magnificent country.”
The non-Chicagoan said something to George, who nodded.
“They’re going to bring your car down here, to you,” he told my father.
Without the two guys, the bar was almost big enough for the three of us. I’d been leaning in the doorway; now I came in and sat on a stool at the counter. The proprietor lifted the bottle toward my father, who shook his head.
We waited for the powerful familiar grumble of the Chevrolet. George picked his teeth. I sniffed one of the empty glasses: licorice. A strange country! The barman began to whistle and clear his throat. Eventually, he tapped George on the arm and whispered to him.
“He wants to be paid,” George said to my father.
“I am paying?” My father was astounded. “They invited us. It was my refund. They invited us!”
“They’re getting the car,” George explained.
“That’s a refund? Driving the car four hundred yards? That’s not a refund.”
“He needs to be paid,” George said.
“But
they
invited us!” My father could not accept this injustice.
“It’s only a few drachmas.”
“Liars,” said my father. “Thieves and liars.” He paid.
We followed George’s Fiat back to Athens on the terrible twisting road. My father had calmed down by the time we arrived at our apartment building. To my mother he said only: “The side mirror broke off in transit. George’s mechanic will fix it.” No duplicitous seamen, no bar, no rage on the docks.
My mother was stretched out in a rattan deck chair on the balcony, drinking fresh orange juice and smoking her new favorite
cigarettes, Papastratos Ena, with the Bauhaus packaging: white background, green circle inset with a red numeral, very chic. From our wraparound terrace you could see—almost—the Parthenon. You could see the Acropolis, at any rate. You had to go up three floors to the roof, where the maids hung the washing in the midday sun, and part the sheets and the double-D brassieres and the vast fluttering undershorts to get a real view of the temple: white and silent, self-contained, framed by laundry and unconcerned about it.
My mother was as chic as her cigarettes. This had happened in Italy too. She was a chameleon. She took on the prevailing look. In much of Greece, the prevailing look for women was a black shawl and premature age, but not in our neighborhood. Our seven-story apartment building on Kolonaki Square probably contained half the wealth in Athens. We constituted a large part of it. Our dollars made us millionaires. We had five bathrooms and six bedrooms and two kitchens, and crackled gilded mirrors built into the living room walls, and chandeliers that jingled in the breeze that blew in through the French doors open to the balcony in the mornings when Kula, the maid with a feathery touch of mustache, brought my father an orange carved into a lotus at the dining table that could seat twelve. On the street floor a café with a black-and-white-striped awning sold coffee and a sugared apricot dipped in honey and balanced on a spoon for ten times what it cost a few blocks away. Next door was a boutique so special you had to ring a bell to get in. Our first week in Greece, my mother rang the bell, went in, and bought a green suede jacket the color of an olive and a geometric-patterned, full-skirted linen dress in black and brown and a short, midriff-hugging sweater she called a shrug made of loosely knitted undyed silk yarn that she said would be perfect for an evening on a boat.
My mother at forty looked ten years younger than the other women her age who patronized that shop and whiled away their afternoons at the expensive café. Their hairdos were stiff and poufy, and their ankles were thick. They wore suits with tight, straight skirts and boxy jackets in horrid pastels, and extraordinary amounts of perfume and jewelry that clanked when they picked up their tiny cups of coffee. Here and there, though, strode her sole competition, or perhaps the look she was aiming for: a few slant-eyed beauties, Amazon-tall in their stiletto heels, often draped in a stifling, unnecessary fur wrap, wearing real pearls.
“You can tell,” my mother said, “when they’re real.”
I couldn’t. I couldn’t figure out anything that had to do with clothing and adorning. I didn’t think beyond loving my red sneakers or hating that middy blouse, and picking a T-shirt for my overalls-and-T-shirt ensemble. But the overalls didn’t fit well anymore.
This probably was because disconcerting lumps were growing on my chest. They seemed like breasts, but I pretended they weren’t anything. They were mushy and sometimes sore. Some days I had to admit that they might be breasts. Other days I’d wake and think: They’re gone! They were never gone. I couldn’t believe they were so persistent. I didn’t need them. They complicated clothing. I wanted to wear things that squashed them down and made them invisible, but anything tight enough to squash them did the opposite of making them invisible.
Before we left Cambridge my mother had got me five cotton sundresses with flower prints in Filene’s Basement. They were the kind of thing I hated. One of them was pink! There was a green one that was tolerable, but they all pulled under the arms, chafing, too tight for my new, mushy additions. To protect and disguise my breast-things, I hunched over, which made
the underarm pulling and chafing worse. Also, then my mother would say, “Stand up straight.”
I sacrificed one of my two pairs of blue jeans to the scissors and created a more grownup version of my traditional costume: blue-jean Bermuda shorts. Then all I had to do was find a few shirts that weren’t too tight.
“You should tuck that in,” my mother said.
“It’s too hot,” I said. I hoped this excuse would work.
“It’s sloppy,” she said. “Tuck it in. You’ll look so much nicer.”
That was typical of her. She’d tell me I would look nicer, but what she meant was, I like it better when you tuck it in. She thought she could make me do what she wanted by appealing to my vanity. She didn’t understand that my vanity had been destroyed. It had been vanquished by what was happening to my body. If this was how I was going to look, I reasoned, I didn’t want anyone to look at me. Sloppy shirttails and frayed denim edges were perfect for deflecting interest.
In the old days, at the few moments when I thought about it, I’d liked the way I looked. I was small and could fit nicely into little spaces. I was bony and quick, and my skin was a nice brownish color, though in winter it was a rather yellowish color. But on the whole I was fine. Now I was turning into a kind of monster who had to be disguised. My mother was forever giving me tips. “If you wear a belt, it will distract from the top.” “The top” was her name for the eruptions on my chest. “Patterns are good,” she’d tell me. I knew this was part of her plot to get me to wear the sundresses. “You have such a tiny waist,” she’d say. “I wish my waist were still so small.” She could have my damned waist. All it did was accentuate the breast-things. I would have given her my waist in a second if I could have got my old self back in return.
But I couldn’t get that. I was on an inexorable march toward
a new, unrecognizable me. Some nights I’d lie in bed and press them—the breasts—into my chest, hoping to push them back to wherever they’d come from. If I could get them to retreat, I’d wake up the way I’d been only a few months before, skinny and straight from top to bottom. But they had a will of their own. They wouldn’t back down.
My father was my refuge. He didn’t notice what was going on with me and my top because he was in a perpetual welter of enthusiasm. To the Agora! To lunch at the little taverna five blocks away to have kokoretsi! (I didn’t want any: livers and hearts of unknown animals on a spit.) Let’s go into this pottery store and see if there are any nice coffee cups. Then, turning to me: Is this a nice coffee cup? That meant, Would your mother like it? Neither of us was confident enough to risk her aesthetic disapproval, so we left the shop. Let’s explore the Plaka (mostly prostitutes in 1959). Let’s go to the top of Mount Lycabettus.
My mother declined all these explorations. Too hot, too much to do getting the apartment into a livable condition. The apartment was crowded with stuff in a Bigelovian manner, but the stuff wasn’t interesting or nice to look at. Every gilded side table had its bronze shepherdess, every marble mantelpiece its curly tinkly clock, every corner its half-size plaster replica of a statue whose eternal original lived ten minutes away at the National Archaeological Museum. Lurid little rugs were scattered throughout, waiting to trip you. As in Italy, there was a superfluity of furniture, but in Italy that had been cozy (and the furniture had been beautiful) and here it was bothersome. And, as my mother said every day when my father proposed a trip—Let’s go to Epidaurus—we were here for a year and she just couldn’t live with it the way it was.
She wanted my father and me out of the house so that she could enlist Kula the maid with her peasant strength to help
move at least half the furniture into one of the several unused bedrooms. My sister trotted around with them, chattering in Greek, which she’d learned in two weeks from sitting in the kitchen while Kula made lotuses out of oranges and soup out of lemons and seven-egg omelettes and all the other peculiar things she had to offer us, about which my mother said, “I’ve got to get a handle on Kula’s menus, but that’s the project after this one.” In the mornings my father and I stood in the doorway, flanked by a miniature discus thrower on one side and a dwarfish Poseidon hurling an invisible spear on the other, and waited for our good-bye kisses, while the maddened female trio planned their attack for that day.
Our attacks on Athens were not so carefully planned. In an uncharacteristically relaxed decision, my father had declared the entire city—the entire country—to be a museum. Therefore, as long as he had his
Guide Bleu
to document our activities with, it didn’t matter if we were meandering, dead-ending, or, often, totally lost. Wherever we were there was Something. That’s the Church of the Haghii Assomati, not just a brown brick heap. Oh look! This confusing pile of rocks is the Pnyx. Usually we weren’t looking for the thing we ended up standing in front of. It didn’t matter. He would flutter the pages of the guide as I shifted from one hot foot to another, waiting to be instructed. His endurance was astonishing. He never needed to pee, he never needed to eat, he never got tired of the brick heaps or the toppled columns strewn among the cafés and the fruit markets and the cheesy souvenir stands. If we headed out to the Panathenaic Stadium and instead ended up watching the evzones lift their red slippers toward their noses in Syntagma Square, he didn’t care.
Only one thing was stronger than my father: the heat.
We were both foolish. We thought we were tough because we
were used to the intemperate Cambridge climate, which ranged from arctic to a swampy Floridian humidity, and we’d weathered a summer in Italy. Athens in July at midday was intolerable. All the metaphors people used about summer—my brains are fried, it’s an oven, it’s an inferno—turned out to be plain description. Our brains fried. It was an oven. It was an inferno. There wasn’t a Greek on the street between one and four. It was the kind of heat that could kill you. I could see why it had been personified as a golden chariot drawn by golden horses whipped on by a golden, molten god.
But like the sun itself my father pursued his daily rounds, dragging me, his satellite, along. He consented to an hour’s break for lunch, but then it was back to the blaring pavement, the glittering ruins, the relief when we turned in to a shady street. The shade was as palpable as the sun, a musty, dry, stuccoed shade where I could almost manage a shiver.
And so passed our first several weeks, carless in Athens.
My father had postponed until some auspicious moment the conquest of the Acropolis.
One morning my mother said, “I’ve got to conclude the so-called redecoration by the end of tomorrow or I will go nuts.”
“So will I,” said my father.
The next day, the last day of my mother’s frenzy, was the day he chose to go to the Parthenon. It was like all the other days. The delicate, rosy sun came up above the yellow city and by mid-morning had built heights of heat that you thought could not be surpassed, and which were surpassed every twenty minutes. We ate our oranges and toast with honey and were on our way by nine-thirty. In consideration of our adventure’s scope, my father stopped in a café at the foot of the Acropolis, where he ordered me a fortifying baklava and lemonade. He had coffee—the tiny
super-sweet Greek coffee that is half dregs and that leaves a thick residue in the cup and on the throat. Then we started up the long, already hot footpath.