“But who is it?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Do we believe in God?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Can I believe in God?” A daring bid for independence.
“If that’s what you want,” she said.
I got the feeling it wouldn’t be a good idea. God embarrassed my mother, and if I believed in him, that would be embarrassing too.
Five years later, God had popped up again. And just like last time, he provoked an unusual diffidence in my parents. You do what you want was not their general position on my behavior. You do what we say was more like it. I was puzzled and I was suspicious: Maybe the question of whether to believe in God was a test of my character. I didn’t want to fail it.
The next morning when we stood to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, I omitted the words under God, though I did move my lips as if I were saying something. Not saying the pledge would be asking for trouble, but saying the God thing would be betraying my parents in a way that I hadn’t figured out.
At home in Cambridge, we had a teacher for English and a teacher for history and a teacher for science and so forth. The history teacher thought history was the greatest. The math teacher couldn’t wait to explain algebra. Mrs. Mezitis was responsible for teaching all of our subjects, and she was equally uninspiring about every one of them.
The exchange about Craig’s eyeballs was a preview of how Mrs. Mezitis and I were not going to get along.
Science class: “Matter comes in three forms,” she told us. “Solid, liquid, and gas. Can anyone name three substances with these three different forms?”
Nobody did.
“Anyone?”
“Turds are solid,” Craig offered. “Sometimes.”
Mrs. Mezitis ignored him. She picked up her coffee cup and banged it—a little harder than necessary—on her desk. “A desk,” she said. “A desk is solid.”
“Water is a liquid, right?” said a girl named Lindsey, who had lived in Japan for four years.
“Right,” said Mrs. Mezitis. “And how about a gas?”
“Gas,” said Craig.
“Give someone else a chance, Craig,” said Mrs. Mezitis. “Anyhow, gasoline is a liquid.”
Craig kicked my chair. “I didn’t mean gasoline,” he said.
Nobody could think of a gas.
“Air,” she said. “Air is a gas. Okay. The desk is a solid, water is a liquid, and air is a gas. Do you understand?”
I raised my hand. “What about mayonnaise? What’s that?” I asked.
Mrs. Mezitis stiffened. “Don’t ask foolish questions that waste our time.”
“Or Silly Putty?” I went on. “What about that?”
“That will be enough out of you,” she said.
At dinner I reported the mayonnaise interchange.
“That is not a foolish question,” my father said. “That is a good question. And the answer is, it’s a colloidal suspension. The solid molecules are suspended in liquid in such a way that it forms something between solid and liquid.”
“Why didn’t she say that?” I asked him.
“Maybe she didn’t know it,” he said. “That’s my bet. Shocking, really.”
This made me very happy. She was a dope, Mrs. Mezitis. I’d thought she might be, and now I knew it. My father had as much as said so.
“What about Silly Putty?” I asked my father.
“I don’t really understand Silly Putty,” he said. “It must be some kind of suspension, but it’s a different kind from mayonnaise. Mayonnaise tends toward the liquid and Silly Putty tends toward the solid end of the spectrum. George might know. He had some training as an engineer.”
“It drips,” I said. “Like if you leave it on the edge of a table, it drips down to the floor.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t come apart,” said my father. “It oozes in one mass. It’s very strange.”
“You can make copies with it,” I said.
My father cocked his head. “Copies?”
“If you press it on a newspaper, it makes a copy.”
“Oh.” He waved his hand. “That’s not interesting.”
There was always a point at which what I thought was interesting or important bored the person I was talking to. With my father, that point was farther away than it was with Mrs. Mezitis, but I had now arrived at it. I decided to think about my father’s dismissal of Mrs. Mezitis rather than his dismissal of me. If he thought she didn’t know what she was talking about (and that seemed to be what he thought) then I could be like the other kids and not pay attention to her without worrying.
As usual, my parents were having a lot more fun than I was. They had a knack for it. They loved to meet new people and try unfamiliar foods and dash from place to place seeing sights. They were avid for life; they wanted to eat experience. I wanted to stay home and read, and if I had to go out, I wanted to do something I’d already done, something predictable. It was as if they were the children, excited by all the new things, and I was the adult, anxious and stuck in my ways.
In the afternoons when I returned from school, my mother was often taking a nap. She needed one because many nights a week she and my father were out until two or three in the morning at tavernas where dinner was served at eleven. Then there was a floor show, with a band and a singer. “The songs are all about misery,” she said. “Their favorite is ‘Cloudy Sunday.’ ”
“Can you sing it?”
My mother could play the piano but she wasn’t much of a singer. She gave it a whirl, though. “Sinefiasmeni Kiriaki,” she sang. “You make my life black,” was the next line.
“It’s so yowly and wailing,” I said.
“It’s a lament,” said my mother. “I thought it was a love song the first time I heard it, but it’s about the Sunday the Nazis invaded Greece.”
After singing, there was dancing. “But only for the men,” she told me. “First they drink ouzo, then they throw the glasses on the floor, then they dance. Two guys hold on to one handkerchief, I guess so they can pretend that they aren’t exactly holding hands.” She laughed. “And they aren’t, exactly.”
“I want to come,” I said. It was odd, but I did want to go. It seemed to be something I could watch rather than something I would have to do.
“You could never stay up that late,” my mother said. “I can barely stay up that late.”
“On a weekend?”
“Maybe.” She yawned. “Oh, why not,” she said. “You can come with us this Friday.”
I hadn’t expected her to say yes. Sometimes I felt her standards were slipping when it came to my behavior.
“Can we go to the one with the dancing?” I asked.
“They’re all like that,” my mother said. “Anyhow, we go where Andy takes us.”
My father and Andy had been assistant professors together at Harvard after the war, back when Andy was an American. Now he was Greek again. He was part of a revered left-wing family. “Andy will be premier of Greece someday,” my father had said at dinner one night. “First the old man, then Andy.” As always, he was right. He didn’t foresee that they were both going to be political prisoners as well, but nobody knows everything.
Andy had a huge, friendly face and a nice American wife named Maggie. “You look so sophisticated,” she said to me when they arrived on Friday. “I can’t believe you’re only ten.”
“I’m almost eleven,” I said.
My mother had dressed me up: my gray skirt with a white blouse and a red wool shawl she’d loaned me for the evening. She’d also let me wear her Victorian bracelet, the one that snapped open and had a chain as fine as a thread so that even when you undid it, it wouldn’t fall off. It was a gold oval enameled black on the outer face, with five pearls embedded in it and a gold filigree incised in the enamel. My father’s father, the communist diamond dealer, had received it in payment for a debt during the Depression. There wasn’t much he could do with it—it wasn’t a diamond—so he gave it
to my mother when my parents got married. It was a bit tight on her. I was hoping this loan would become permanent.
Andy and Maggie and my parents sat around on the sofas drinking Scotch and eating fish roe on crackers until it was late enough to go to the taverna. My mother insisted that I have cucumber soup and cold potatoes in the kitchen with Kula and my sister. “Otherwise, you’ll fall asleep because you’re hungry,” she said.
“But I want to eat with you, there,” I said.
“You can do both,” she said.
Finally, around ten, it was time to go.
Everybody got into Andy’s little French car that hissed when you sat down. My father was in the front with Andy, and I was in the back between my mother and Maggie and their competing perfumes.
My mother smelled the way she always did: dry, sandalwood-y, tobacco-y, as if her cigarettes had been sweetened and bottled. Maggie smelled of lily of the valley. Her perfume made me feel sad. It was delicious, but at the precise moment I got a full taste of it, it would vanish. That was why it was sad. It was like an essence of nostalgia. Part of the smell was its quality of slipping away just when you thought you’d got hold of it.
“Diorissimo?” my mother asked.
Maggie nodded.
“You can only wear that if you don’t smoke,” my mother said.
My mother and her assertions. I’d often hated her for them. They seemed arbitrary or maybe designed to thwart whatever I wanted to do. Now I just wondered how she knew these things. What made her so sure that the shawl I had wanted to borrow, the red-and-green-striped silk, was “too grownup” for me? Where did she get the information that charm bracelets were vulgar—which she couldn’t wait to tell me when I described my classmates. Why did she know who could wear a perfume she never used? My mother knew these things the way my father knew the succession of the kings of England. The difference was, if I wanted to check on my father, I could look up the succession of the kings of England in an encyclopedia. If I wanted to check on my mother, there wasn’t any book to consult. She was the encyclopedia. I didn’t think this was fair. That night, though, as we prowled the dark backstreets of Athens, with Andy leaning out the window to look for a lively dinner spot, I didn’t care about the unfairness. My mother had a body of knowledge, and I wanted to find out where she’d got it and maybe get some too.
“Does it say on the bottle that you can’t use Maggie’s perfume if you smoke?” I asked my mother.
“I doubt it,” she said.
“So how come you know that?” I asked.
“It says so on my nose,” my mother answered.
That didn’t help.
“Eureka!” said Andy. He turned backward toward me. “That means, I have found it. And I have.”
I knew that eureka meant I have found it. Did Andy think I didn’t know anything?
Andy drove the car up onto the sidewalk at an angle, and we all got out.
“Is it okay to leave the car like that?” I asked.
“You’re such a worrywart,” my mother said. “Relax.”
I couldn’t see why Andy thought this was a good place to have dinner. To begin with, it was closed. But that was just the outer part, a café with the chairs turned upside down on their tables. Inside there was a bar with a row of empty stools and a long, shiny shelf of bottles. The bar was also closed. At the back of the room was a doorway hung with a plastic-bead curtain of a sort favored by Athenian restaurants. They came in many garish color combinations, purple and yellow, red and green like a Christmas ornament. They always gave a touch of mystery to what lay beyond, and they chinked and muttered when you passed through them. This was an elegant one, blue and white, like the Greek flag. We passed through it, and the curtain whispered in my ear.
“Time to grow up,” it said.
By twelve-thirty I was so tired that the skin of my face hurt. I’d eaten shish kebab (Ask for souvlaki, my mother told me, because shish kebab is Turkish and they don’t like that) and baklava, and for a while that had kept me awake. The singer had wailed her songs; a lot of people sang along. Now the waiters were delivering short, smoky glasses of ouzo, and the singer was moving from table to table with her assistant the cameraman. She draped her arm around my father’s neck and put her cheek against his head. I was horrified. How could she do that? He would get mad. But he looked quite happy. A blast of light from the flashbulb, and then she moved on to Andy and kissed his cheek. I looked at my mother and Maggie to see what they thought. They were laughing.
“One more! One more with Andreas!” said the singer, leaning in closer.
The cameraman backed up so he could fit the entire table in the frame.
The empty bottle of retsina, the napkins in little heaps, the overflowing ashtray, the tablecloth limp and littered with broken bread. My mother in a low-cut silk blouse. Maggie in profile, smiling above her pearls. The singer holding Andy’s chin in her outstretched palm, his head on display like a trophy. My father with drooping, tipsy eyes and his bow tie askew. My shoulder, hunched and exhausted, wrapped in the borrowed red shawl. The name and address of the restaurant or of the photographer are stamped on the back of the photograph in purple ink now so faded it’s almost illegible. One of the words seems to be Endymion. And we’re all preserved there, like him, in our beautiful youth.
After that the dancing started and I fell asleep in my chair.
My November birthday was behind me by the time my mother decided we should go to Mycenae. The white summer light had subsided, and though the edges of things were still dazzly, the world was less tiring to look at. Now and then there were days of rain when our marble apartment became as cold and dank as the coffin-house in London.
This rain had caused a family of cockroaches to germinate in the depths of my toilet. They usually scampered around near the outlet at the bottom, but they sometimes walked up to the rim below the seat, where they lurked, waving their black antennae and, as in London, making me completely constipated. I could pee, because I could arch my back and shoot my pee into the bowl. Sitting was the problem. If I sat, I felt their crackly many legs skittering about on my behind. I felt that even though it wasn’t happening and had never happened. It might happen, and the idea of it was ghastly.
We were planning a real, four-day trip. I was going to miss Thursday and Friday at school. George was coming with us; he and my father were taking two days off from their so-called work. We had two nights reserved at La Belle Hélène, the archaeologists’ hotel in Mycenae. Then we were going on to Nauplion to see the remnants of Venetian rule. I couldn’t wait. I was finally going to meet my second family, the House of Atreus.
“I don’t think it will be too cold,” George said at dinner the Tuesday before we left.
Kula had made one of her trademark terrible dinners. She had three or four of them. This was the tough lamb stewed with tomatoes and accompanied by a bowl of boiled potatoes, which she dotted with limp parsley, drowned in second-rate olive oil (“Why? Why?” my mother said. “In the land where olive oil was born!”), and placed with averted eyes before my father: an offering to the godhead. Kula was in awe of my father. When he got home in the afternoons from doing nothing at Doxiadis, she scuttled up behind him as he sat on the sofa, bringing a dish of glistening black olives or three peeled figs on a plate. Every morning the lotus-orange awaited him at the breakfast table, some days adorned with a jasmine blossom. “She’s in love with you,” my mother said. “No, no,” said my father. “To her, I am Zeus.” “That’s just what I mean,” my mother said. “It’s not the same,” said my father. “Anyhow, I enjoy being Zeus.” “Who wouldn’t?” said my mother.
“At least during the day,” George went on. “The nights could be quite chilly. And it might be cold in the day if it’s windy. And since it’s high up, it might be—”
“In short,” my mother cut in, “prepare for everything.”
“That would be wise,” said George. “It’s often very windy, even in the summer. Have you got sc
arves, for instance?”
“I have a lot of scarves,” my mother said, “and I will bring them all.”
My father shook his head. He didn’t like scarves. He didn’t like hats or gloves either. He liked to stride out the front door with his overcoat unbuttoned and flapping around him. In Cambridge this often was not possible. But we were here, in Greece, where he could do as he wanted.
“I’ll bring that black one for you, just in case,” my mother told him.
“I don’t need it,” he said.
“Do we have to Look Nice?” I asked. Looking Nice meant uncomfortable clothes for visiting people we didn’t really know or going to fussy restaurants where there was nothing I wanted to eat.
“Maybe once, in Nauplion,” my mother said. “Bring the new middy blouse with the red embroidery on the collar.”
Kula was back with a plate of melon slices.
My mother put a hand on George’s starched bright-white cuff. “George, can you explain to Kula that we want to use the good olive oil? I can’t seem to get that across.”
George lifted his head toward the ceiling and moved his chin in Kula’s direction. She skated over to his side on her noiseless felt slippers and stood at attention. Sharp, curt instructions from George; whispery protests from Kula.
“She says it’s very expensive,” he told my mother.
“I am paying for it. And it’s what I want.” My mother lit a cigarette for emphasis.
George explained that. Kula bowed her head. As she scooted back to the kitchen, she glanced at my mother, the smoke-goddess of extravagance, and looked away quickly, before my mother saw.
My mother saw. It was impossible not to see how much Kula hated us. We didn’t know how to have a servant. Kula knew how to be a servant and that was all she knew. But she couldn’t do it alone, and none of us could play our parts.
My father came the closest. That was probably why she worshipped him. He was naturally imperious, so the expressions on his face and his way of flicking his hand at something he wanted or something he wanted taken away were familiar and correct in Kula’s eyes. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t speak Greek. Maybe it was better: no words to dilute his desires. They had come to an arrangement. Kula deposited sculpted fruit in front of him, and he ignored her existence unless he wanted her to remove a dirty plate, and that suited them both.