My mother was the problem.
If she had George around to back her up, my mother could make an occasional show of command, over the olive oil, for instance. But she couldn’t maintain any authority. Her usual methods were seduction and charm. She wooed people and made them eager to please her by giving them the feeling that she appreciated them. Maybe she even did appreciate them. (It was hard for me to tell.) None of this was any use with Kula. Kula was not going to be enfolded into the family à la Frederika, coddled into behaving in a helpful way. Kula’s position was below, and she was sticking to it.
My mother’s feints at camaraderie in botched Greek got Kula upset. She would hide in the back kitchen. This was her inviolate space, off-limits to us, where she slept on a camp bed beside the crusty two-burner stove. Once, my mother had tried to go in there. Kula darted up in an unusual display of personality and flapped her arms as if shooing out vermin: Forbidden, forbidden, she’d said.
Two kitchens and she can’t make a decent dinner, was my mother’s complaint. But her real complaint was, I don’t understand her and therefore I can’t get her to do what I want.
George, naturally, was the source of Kula, who was the niece or the sister or the cousin of a woman who worked for his mother on the island of Aegina. During our first months, my mother had many consultations with George about Kula and what to do with her.
My mother was horrified by the back kitchen. “There’s no window, there’s no shower, her bed is jammed next to the stove. It’s terrible.”
“That kitchen is as big as the main floor of her house on Aegina where she lived with two other people,” George said. “This is the Grande Bretagne, for her. She can wash at the sink. She’s here in Athens with a secure job. You do not need to worry about it.”
“But she could have her own bedroom,” my mother said. “We have several extra.”
George shook his head. “You are being sentimental.”
This caused a rift between them.
“He’s a heartless bastard,” my mother reported to my father. “Like all communists.”
“You’re generalizing,” said my father.
“From experience,” my mother said.
“Why are communists heartless?” I asked.
“They look at the big picture,” my father told me.
“Their theories are more important than reality,” my mother said.
She forgave George within the week, because she was fond of him and because she needed him. We all did. Each time George showed up, with his thin black tie, his cuff links fashioned from antique drachmas shining in his perfectly ironed sleeves, and replete with his knowledge of where to find the most honey-saturated baklava, the darkest mavrodaphne, the least-bumpy road to Eleusis, the person to bribe in order to see the largest, loveliest Pantocrator mosaic in Athens (in a church under restoration that had been closed to the public for years), we all relaxed. George would help. George would explain it, or organize it, or get rid of it. My father, initially resistant, had turned into his biggest fan, even to the point of defending the communist outlook.
“You have to see it in context,” my father said. He was talking to me, but my mother made a face. “Nazis or communists. That was his choice. You can’t be surprised he picked the communists.”
“That was then,” my mother said. “Anyhow, you—” she added. She didn’t finish her sentence. It was a reference to the communist diamond-dealing grandfather, who’d sent my father to communist Hebrew after-school every day. My mother had been raised a socialist.
“I don’t understand why George said you were sentimental,” I said. In fact, I understood almost nothing about my mother’s quarrel with George, or about the communist-versus-socialist arguments that now and then took place between my parents.
“Concern for the individual is a bourgeois value,” my mother said. “One person’s situation isn’t important. They say.”
“I thought communism was about equality, that everybody is as important as everybody else,” I said.
“Right,” said my mother.
“Are we bourgeois?” I asked.
My father looked around at the chandeliers and the gilded mirrors and the matching beige silk sofas across the room from the dining table. “I’d say so,” he said. “We’re certainly doing a good imitation of it.”
“The bourgeoisie should be so lucky,” my mother said. “We’re living like tsars.” She put her head in her hands and pulled her hair. “Oh, god, this country. I really can’t take it.”
“Annette,” said my father in the tone he used when I was being especially balky.
My mother hated it here too, I saw. This surprising realization cheered me up.
But that, as my mother would say, was then. Now, several months later, two days before our journey to Mycenae, my mother was cheerily asking George what to pack and doing a good imitation of looking forward to the trip.
No imitations for me. I was buzzing with anticipation. I was sure that, like the Parthenon, Mycenae would still be what it had been—not a bunch of broken pieces like Knossos or a map of something it once was, like the Sacred Way at Eleusis. Up there on the citadel where Clytemnestra had unfurled the crimson carpet and Cassandra had said farewell to the sun, I was going to feel the pulse of the old, cursed bloodline. I knew it. All that family murder: I wanted to see its locus.
Wednesday night I was packing the little green suitcase my mother had got me before we left Cambridge for Greece when I felt a ripping sort of belly pain. I was used to bad belly feelings from constipation, and I kept on packing. Then there was another rip, somewhat worse. Also, everything in the excretory area felt peculiar, full and soggy. I went to the bathroom and looked into the toilet to check on the cockroach population: none. I sat down.
When I relaxed my knees, my underpants stretched out between them, and there I saw a little heap of dirt. It was dark and fragmented, chips of what I hoped was not poop. When I touched it, it crackled liked dried mud. I peed; the toilet paper (useless, glazed Greek toilet paper) came away with a red glob of jelly on it. Blood.
I was going to die without seeing Cambridge again.
I went back to packing. But I couldn’t resist going to sit on the toilet every few minutes to check for blood. First I had to check for cockroaches. Each time I checked, there were no roaches but there was blood. It wasn’t like nice, regular blood from a cut. It came in nasty jiggling blobs, as if it were carrying my insides along with it. That explained why I felt I was ripping. I was. Whatever was causing the blood was ripping me apart.
I didn’t want to sit on the bed in case I bled on the blanket. I didn’t want to sit on the toilet because I felt I’d used up my cockroach-free minutes. For quite a while after I finished packing I stood at the window watching the tangled Athenian streets revving up for their nightly explosion of activity. As I stood there I felt the blood oozing out of me, adding to the mess in my underwear.
Eventually I went looking for my mother.
She was rummaging in her bedroom closet. The big khaki suitcase with the leather edging was open on the bed.
“What?” she said, with her head still in the closet.
“I have blood,” I said. I’d come up with this phrase while standing at my window. I was pleased with it, because it was true, it wasn’t hysterical, and it seemed to strike the right tone. As soon as I’d said it, though, I started wailing. “There’s blood down there that just keeps coming and coming and it hurts.”
My mother emerged from the closet and sat down next to the suitcase. She patted the empty part of the bed beside her. “Come here,” she said. She patted again.
“But the blood!”
“Don’t be afraid of the blood,” she said. “The blood is fine.”
“I’m going to bleed on the bed! I don’t want to bleed on the bed!” I was getting wound up.
She reached into the suitcase and took out the black scarf my father wasn’t going to wear and put it on the bed. “Sit on that,
if you’re so worried about it.”
I sat down.
“This is a big day,” my mother said. “This is your first period, and it’s an important moment.”
I stared at her. “It is?”
“Yes. Now you’re a woman.”
I kept staring at her. “What does that mean?”
“Let’s see.” My mother was gathering some sort of speech, I could tell. “It means that you have become physically mature. Physically, you’re a grownup.”
“I am not a grownup,” I said.
“No,” she said. “But now you can have a baby.”
“I don’t want to have a baby,” I said.
“That’s good,” said my mother.
“So what’s the point? I don’t want all this blood.”
“It’s normal. It’s completely normal and fine and it’s not going to hurt you. It means you’re healthy and you’re growing the way you’re supposed to. It’s good.”
“What’s good about it,” I said. It wasn’t a question. “And it hurts.”
“It can be a bit painful in the beginning,” my mother said. “That doesn’t last, usually. It gets better as your body gets used to it.”
“You mean I’m just going to be having blood forever, just leaking out blood all the time! Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“I did,” my mother said. “But you weren’t listening.”
“When?” I had no memory of her telling me anything.
“Back in Cambridge,” she said. “When the—ah—chest development started.”
“Oh.” If she had told me, then she was right; I hadn’t listened. “But—but now always blood? All the time?”
“No. Just once a month for a few days.”
“Like two days?” I asked.
“A bit longer than that,” she said. “Maybe five days.”
“Five days!”
She nodded. “Could be six,” she said.
Even my low-grade arithmetic was good enough to show me that this meant nearly a quarter of my life was going to be devoted to bleeding. I put my head into my hands. “Why?” I said. “Why?”
“Every month your uterus gets nice and soft so that if you were having a baby, it would have a good place to grow. But then if there’s no baby, the uterus gets rid of all that and starts again the next month, making a fresh new spot in case of a baby. That’s why.”
That wasn’t really what I wanted to know.
“But I don’t want a baby,” I said. “What’s a uterus?”
“A place where the babies grow.”
“Can’t we tell it not to bother?” I asked.
“Nope,” my mother said. She got up and opened the top drawer of her bureau. “Now let’s get you fixed up,” she said. “I’ll give you a belt and some pads.” She poked around in the drawer for a minute. “I can’t find an extra belt, but here’s a pad.” She pulled a long, thick bandage-y thing out of the drawer and handed it to me. “Just put that in your underwear for the night. In the morning, before we go to Mycenae, we’ll get everything you need.”
“I don’t like belts,” I said. “Belts make me itchy.”
“You need this belt,” my mother said.
I held the pad away from me. “One pad a day?” I asked.
“No. You need several pads a day, at least three.”
I bowed my head. Belts and pads and hot, sore insides and nothing I could do about it. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it wouldn’t come back. Maybe it was just this one time. And what about my father! What would he think of me?
“Don’t tell Daddy,” I said. “Please, please, don’t tell him.”
“Okay,” said my mother.
But I knew she would tell him and they would talk about it and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop them, just as I couldn’t do anything to stop the blood.
George led the way in the rattly Fiat, down the coast to the Isthmus of Corinth and over onto the Peloponnese. The day was bright and still. Hawks were hanging above the fields. There was nothing anywhere: no towns, no ruins, no traffic except one dusty bus barreling toward us, going north.
“This is the plain of Argos,” my father said. “Right?” he asked my mother. She had the guidebook.
“Mmm,” she said.
“The Argives,” he told me. “Those who went to Troy.”
He was trying to be nice to me, probably because of what my mother had told him about my situation. I refused to answer.
“Are you awake?” he asked.
“Argus had a hundred eyes,” I said.
“That was somebody else,” my mother said.
“Are you sure?” my father asked. “Look in the guidebook.”
“He was guarding Io after she got turned into a cow,” I said. “Because he had a hundred eyes.”
“I don’t think that’s right,” my mother said.
“What does the guidebook say?” my father asked.
After a while, my mother said, “It’s confusing. There seem to be two of them. There was Argos, who built the Argo. And there was Argus, with a u, who had a hundred eyes. The plain is named after the first guy, so I’m right. But she’s right about the other guy and his hundred eyes.”
I knew I was right. It should have been an even more satisfying rightness because my mother had said I was wrong, but I couldn’t enjoy it. All I could think about was how uncomfortable I was. I was wedged onto a thick, damp pad with a scratchy elastic belt taut across my belly. Every time the car went over a bump, and it went over a lot of them, the clammy pad jammed up against me. My head hurt. My legs felt as if they were being poked by needles. I smelled funny too, like rusty metal. My entire body had become a foreign object that didn’t feel like me anymore. Probably I’d remembered Argus and Io not because we were crossing the plain where she’d been transformed but because my long-ago nightmare of being turned into a cow had come true. Like Io, I was stuck in this condition, which wasn’t my real self.
“Whoops,” said my father, putting the brakes on hard. “I see we have arrived.”
George had pulled off the road and parked the Fiat under an olive tree. We drove in beside him. It was the usual Greek arrangement: no sign, nothing to hint at a sight worth seeing nearby. Up ahead of us was a big hill, but there were big hills in every direction, and this one didn’t look especially promising.
“We walk up?” my father asked George. He tilted his head toward the hill in a Greek gesture; he was learning.
“The archaeologists have a road, but it’s very rocky and full of ruts—you call them ruts?”
“Yes,” said my father.
“That road is okay for a truck. I think the cars will be too banged around by it. We can walk up on it, though. And there are also donkey paths, which are steep but quicker.”
My mother was holding her big red-and-black Greek bag, which was filled with scarves and hats. “It’s so warm,” she said. “It’s a really nice day. Let’s walk on the road.”
“Did you bring the wine?” my father asked her.
She lifted the bag at him.
My father and George put my sister between them and started walking. My mother shouldered the bag, lit a cigarette, and turned toward me.
“Coming?” she said.
She made me so mad that I wanted to eat a rock. I imagined crushing a rock with my furious teeth or, just as satisfying, having my teeth crushed by a rock and spitting them out at her. Of course I was coming. What could I do but tag around after them? Anyhow, Mycenae was the one thing I wanted to see in Greece. I didn’t need a lecture from my father on its importance, and I didn’t need to hear my mother recite poetry about it, and I didn’t need to look in the guidebook. There was a Mycenae in my head already, full of people and stories. All I needed was the place itself.
I followed my mother up the twisty road, going slowly so as not to catch up with her, so as to fall, little by little, quite far behind her. Low, spicy plants—rosemary, thyme, myrtle—grew beside and sometimes on the road. If
I stepped on them, puffs of fragrant oil came up to me. Despite George’s warnings, it was windless. The pad shifted around between my legs as I walked. Now and then I felt a gush of blood, which came out hot and quickly cooled. It was hateful, almost like peeing in my pants, and it was worrisome because I didn’t know how much blood the pad could absorb.
I trudged up through the switchbacks. As I got higher, the wind started. I could hear my parents and George talking, but I couldn’t see them, and the wind tossed their voices around in a confusing way. One minute they seemed to be right above me, the next they seemed far off to one side or another. I was getting chilly. I’d worn only a sweater and hadn’t, of course, taken one of the scarves or hats my mother had stuffed into her bag. I kept my head down to blunt the wind and to watch my step on the road. Also, to show, though nobody was looking, how bad I felt and how hard it was for me to walk with my blood and my pad and my wrenched-up insides. Windy, windy, then suddenly, the wind was gone. I’d entered a passageway between two huge stone walls. I looked up and saw the lions, on their gate.
The entrance beneath them was an almost square opening that seemed small at first, but, looking around, I decided it was small only in comparison to the size of the walls. I walked into it and stopped on the granite threshold, which was scored as if it had been raked—with a rake of the gods, a rake that could carve lines in granite. The opening was bigger than it looked. It was at least twice my height, and the slab that went across the top to hold the lions’ stone triangle was so thick that I couldn’t imagine how anybody had gotten it up the hill and put it there.
At the Parthenon I’d felt that something had been peeled back to let me see beneath. Things were different here. There was nothing to peel. I was looking at it straight on. I was standing on a hill fortified before the start of history, before there were flourishes like fluted columns or stone acanthus toppings to pretty up the situation. Everything was a big square declaration of power: We are strong, we built these enormous walls, we can crush you, go away.