Cambridge

  I liked it. I went through the gate.

  It was a brutal place, and it was unapologetic about that. It wasn’t trying to beguile anyone with its perfection the way the temples did. It was a good spot to plan and carry out murders. The terrible wind was rushing across the hilltop, bending the grass that had infiltrated the ring of gravestones and the foundations of the palace buildings and some of the crevices in the tight stone courses of the walls.

  My parents and George had got themselves nicely set, sitting on the ground against a broken wall, out of the wind. They were drinking their wine and eating bread and hunks of salami sawn off with my father’s pocketknife. My sister was cozied up next to my mother reading her animal-alphabet book, her perpetual owl beside her.

  I hated them for getting comfortable, which seemed a kind of desecration of this cursed place. I didn’t want to eat salami and bread, so I was mad about that. But the really bad thing was that they looked complete without me.

  I could see they’d be happy if I stayed by the Lion Gate, kicking at stones and bleeding, instead of coming over to be with them. They were enjoying their lunch and looking forward to their post-lunch pleasures. My father was going to drink another glass of wine while my mother blew her smoke at the mountains. George and my sister were going to take little naps. If I went over there, I would disrupt everything. I didn’t fit into their schedule. I would complain about lunch. I would complain about sitting on the ground (because I didn’t want to sit on my soggy horrid pad). Even if I resolved not to complain no matter what, not to say what I didn’t want to eat or didn’t want to do, my presence would be sulky in a way I couldn’t control, and my mother would say, “You’re in a mood.” When she said, “You’re in a mood,” she meant, You’re in a bad mood. She made me feel that having any sort of mood at all was forbidden. And though she hadn’t said anything yet, she was right.

  My bad mood was the sum of several contradictory moods. I was wistful and sorry for myself, because I wanted to sit with them and be comfy and warm, but they didn’t want me. Why didn’t they want me? They never did. I also felt the opposite. I couldn’t believe I was related to them. I didn’t even want to look at them. I wouldn’t sit with them if they were the last people in the world or the only people up on the citadel of Mycenae—which they were. Also, how could they be so cavalier about being here, chewing their salami as if this were a normal spot for a picnic? Cannibalism, human sacrifice, matricide, murder: Just about every bad thing there was had happened up here, and they didn’t care. What was the matter with them? They always had to look in the guidebook to know what was going on.

  But I could smell it and taste it: blood everywhere. Buoyed by how perceptive I was, I headed over to them.

  “Hah!” my mother said when she saw me. “ ‘These roofs. Look up!’ ”

  There weren’t any roofs. It was all in ruins.

  “There.” My mother pointed. “ ‘There is a dancing troupe that never leaves.’ ”

  I looked up but they weren’t there. It had been a long time since they’d been there.

  George opened his eyes. “Don’t provoke the Furies,” he said, half asleep.

  My mother laughed.

  George sat upright. “I am serious,” he said.

  What if time didn’t always move forward? What if there were places where time got stuck or became circular, where it was now but it was also all the times before now and everything was happening all at the same moment? That could explain why, though I didn’t see the dancing troupe, I knew they were there on the roof that wasn’t there now but had been there, once. George also seemed to think they were up on the roof. Maybe he was just being extremely careful in a George-like manner, covering all the bases. Or maybe he knew things we didn’t know.

  I knew something too, even if I wasn’t sure what it was. The difference between this place and a regular place was like the difference between knowing the melody and then hearing it played by an orchestra. Everyday life was just one line of song that ran from yesterday through today and into tomorrow, going along a narrow path. And then—these crazy places in Greece! Suddenly, huge symphonic chords whose bottom notes boomed so far down there was no knowing where they came from. The noise of time was enormous, but the places themselves were quiet. Like the underworld—nothing there except the click of crickets. That made it easier to hear the thrum of the menacing, subterranean ocean. And here at Mycenae the only sound was the intermittent hiss of wind, a whispered accompaniment to the screeching on the roof, clanging metal wheels on granite thresholds, the thump as the ax meets bone.

  Perhaps my mother was quoting Cassandra in the same way she’d quoted Byron at Sounion, as a citation of a line that applied to this spot. I hoped so. I hoped she couldn’t actually see the Furies dancing.

  I didn’t want to think she could do that. I wanted to be the only one sensitive enough to feel all the horrors of Mycenae. It was okay if George felt them—he was a Greek. But if my mother felt that sort of thing, we would have too much in common. I didn’t like that idea at all.

  I’d always known I wouldn’t be like her when I grew up, because we were totally different. Clothes: She loved them, I hated them. Furniture: I didn’t care one whit about furniture or paint colors or how the living room was arranged, and she spent hours on that. The piano was her special thing, but I was no good at it and that was fine with me. All her twisty, twirly ways of getting people to do what she wanted: Those were nasty methods I was never going to use. I wasn’t like her. I was like my father.

  Except my father had to look in the guidebook. He had to look it up in the encyclopedia. He had to check on it in the dictionary or the concordance or the collected works of. Whereas my mother knew. She just knew.

  They were packing up, brushing off crumbs and dust. My father jammed the cork back into the wine bottle. I wasn’t going to get even a bite of the salami and bread I didn’t want.

  “You did not eat,” George said.

  He was the only one who cared about me.

  “At the café beside La Belle Hélène they have very good sweets of the spoon,” he told me. “I will get you a beautiful fig. It’s the best one.”

  “Oh, she doesn’t like them,” my mother said.

  I didn’t like figs and I didn’t like sweets of the spoon, which were candied fruits served dripping with honey, but I wanted one anyhow, because George was being nice.

  “Apricot,” he said. “Orange. Whatever you like.”

  “If you think the fig is the best one, then I would like to have that,” I said.

  My mother raised her eyebrows. My jab had hit. I was pleased.

  And now it was time to go. She checked in the bag: sunglasses, wine bottle, scarves, owl, all set. We headed back toward the terrible gate.

  I’d wanted to walk with George, but he’d teamed up with my father so they could discuss whether to go to Nemea or Tiryns the next day. George was for Nemea. “Tiryns is just a shadow of Mycenae,” he said. “At Nemea is the nice piece of the temple for Zeus.”

  I was in my usual position behind everyone. “Any lions?” I called to them.

  My father granted me an appreciative snort. “Were there ever any lions?” he asked George.

  First I was happy that he thought my question worth repeating, then I was mad because he thought it hadn’t really been asked until he had asked it.

  “Jackals, probably,” said George.

  My insides were beginning to feel very bad. Something in there was opening and closing like a fist, squeezing out blood with each movement. My back hurt. The pad seemed to be used up. It was leaking at the sides, making tickly dribbles down my thighs that chafed my skin against my blue jeans. Soon, blood was going to reach my ankles and emerge into public. Then what?

  I had to get another pad. I hustled up to my mother, who was close to the gate, holding my sister’s hand.

  “Do you have another pad thing in there?” I asked her.

  “Oh,” she said. It was down at
the bottom. She lifted my sweater a little and popped the pad under it. “Go behind the wall over there,” she told me. “I’ll wait.”

  I wanted her to wait. I was surprised she’d offered to. “You don’t have to wait,” I said.

  She didn’t bother to respond. She waved her fingers at the wall and then at me. My father and George were approaching. She waved her fingers at them too.

  “Go on,” she said. “We’ll be along soon.”

  My sister said, “I’m going with Daddy.”

  My mother handed her off to my father, and I trudged over to my wall and went behind it.

  I pulled down my blue jeans and squatted. It was wonderful to feel the air on my dank bottom parts. When I got my pad unhooked from the little prongs of the belt, I had a good look at it. It was a combination of hard and gooey, black and stiff around the edges and bright with fresh pink blooms in the center. My upper legs were streaked with thin rivulets that itched. I decided to pee. I looked down to see if I had peed blood, but the earth was so parched that my pee had gone straight into it like a needle. I stayed squatting for a minute to let things dry out before strapping myself onto a new pad.

  When I stood up I felt better. The clean pad was soft and nice. Peeing had helped too; my sensations were so mixed up I hadn’t even known I needed to pee.

  The old pad lay at my feet. It looked like a thick red worm. I poked it with my sneaker. All that blood had come from inside me: strange. Could I just leave it there? I decided I could. It was going to dry up and fall apart soon, probably, I hoped.

  I liked leaving my blood on the ground. Mycenae was the right place for it.

  Home

  We were home, after many more things.

  A white horse in a field in Thessaly on the day of the earthquake, when the ground rippled like water. The wicker baskets that hauled us to the top of Meteora to eat bread and feta with musty-smelling monks. The bees frantic in the bowl of honey at Sunday brunch in Kifissia with the professors from Tübingen who had first disapproved and then helped when I fainted on the Acropolis. They were a couple; I hadn’t known that was possible. My parents went to Istanbul for ten days and Frederika came from Sweden to babysit once more. My mother thought Freddy and George? But he was too busy to come over that week, so they never met. Besides, Frederika had a nice Swedish boyfriend, Anders, who was a civil engineer. My mother said that wouldn’t last. “You’re too romantic to be married to an engineer,” she told Frederika.

  The years of wandering were over. We were home and we were staying home.

  “Frederika will come back to live with us again, won’t she?” I asked my mother.

  “You’re both so grown up now, we don’t need her,” my mother said. “But she’s always welcome. She might. I don’t think she’s planning to, though.”

  I wanted her back so I could reconstruct life as it had been. It was just barely possible—I felt that. There was enough of the old me, the one who knew nothing about bleeding and eternity, to have one last round of childhood. If Frederika came back, we could try on makeup and laugh about how silly we looked. She could tell me what to do and I could not do it and she would love me anyhow, and the world would be safe for a little while longer.

  But she wasn’t coming back. She was going to stay in Sweden and marry Anders and have two daughters and then divorce him. My mother was always right.

  We came home in August. After the dry glitter of Greece, Cambridge felt thicker and stickier than I remembered it. When I pressed my finger into the tar of our street, it left a hole. My attic bedroom smelled of heavy, unused air. The backyard was a tangle, the closets were stuffed with clothes that didn’t fit us, the cupboards were full of boxes of spaghetti turning to dust and cans of tomato soup that my mother said looked “dubious.” The inside of the unplugged refrigerator made me think of an empty swimming pool, sad without its contents and with a whiff of chlorine. It was a haunted house, and our old selves were the ghosts.

  Pinch was another ghost. The Bigelows had taken her for the year, as they’d done when we went to England. But this time, she died. My mother didn’t tell me until we were on the second leg of our journey home, the twelve-hour flight from Rome to Boston.

  “She was an old cat,” my mother said. “She was more than ten.”

  “When did she die?” I asked. I couldn’t believe my mother hadn’t told me. “Did she die last week or something?”

  “Oh, no,” said my mother. “Sometime in the spring, April, I think.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me then?”

  “I felt the news could wait,” she said. “There wasn’t any point in upsetting you.”

  “But all this time I thought she was alive. I thought when we got home, she’d be there.”

  “That’s kind of nice, isn’t it?” said my mother. “She lived another four months, for you.”

  • • •

  I didn’t know what to do with my days. I made bicycle pilgrimages to the important places: the candy store across the street from the Bigelows’ (who were on the beach in Wellfleet with the other psychoanalysts), where Roger and I had bought bull’s-eye caramels and Squirrel Nut bars with our pennies; the gloom of Gray Gardens East, where I’d enjoyed feeling sorry for myself; even the boggy riverside fields of my detestable school, where soon enough I’d be back in the classroom, bored to death. At each place I was surprised by how small, how faded, how insignificant it was.

  I couldn’t locate the problem—I couldn’t tell if the problem was “real” or just something the matter with me. Maybe while I was away Cambridge had gotten worn out and dirty and unappealing. A worse thought was that it had always been like this, but I hadn’t known it. Or maybe it was both. Maybe I’d changed and Cambridge had also changed.

  In Harvard Square bits of scrap paper were scooting around the empty streets and everything was asleep, waiting for September. Veritas mugs and spiral notebooks lazed on the shelves of the Harvard Coop. The Out of Town News was deserted. There weren’t any French graduate students looking for Le Monde or homesick midwestern kids buying the Chicago Tribune, just a few locals grabbing packs of Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes. I walked my bike into the Yard: nobody and nothing. The enormous colonial trees rustled their dusty hot leaves above me.

  I stood beside my bicycle, looking at Memorial Church, where in the spring a platform would be built to hold the faculty and the Latin orator and the sheriff of Middlesex County and everyone else needed to enact commencement. My mother and I always sat in the audience and tried to find my father, in his black robe, among the rest of the professors in their black robes. The choir sang a hymn, “Domine Salvum Fac,” that made me shiver every year.

  I wondered if I would shiver this coming spring. I didn’t think so. What had thrilled me was the idea of how many years—hundreds!—this scene had taken place in this spot, and of how old the rituals and costumes were. I had felt that I was part of a big, old thing.

  But I wasn’t really part of it. And it wasn’t very old. It was a nice ceremony on a pretty June morning in a small town in America, and I was a bystander.

  If I shut my eyes I could see the dark, turbulent Aegean, sacred to Poseidon, thrashing at the headlands of Sounion. I could see the almost-smiling girls of the Acropolis. Those things were old. I wasn’t part of them either.

  I got back on my bike and went home. I was home now.

  But it was no good pretending. I had become a stateless person.

  My mother was purging the house. Everything chipped, broken, lidless, outgrown, or disliked had to go. Out, out, onto the curb for the trashmen.

  “What about the Goodwill?” my father asked. “Someone could use this stuff.”

  “I haven’t got time to go there,” my mother said.

  “I’ll do it,” said my father. “We’ll do it.” He turned to me and nodded my agreement for me.

  I didn’t care. I had nothing else to do. I felt chipped, lidless, and broken. Maybe I would go stand at the curb on Monday morning
and wait for the maw of the garbage truck to eat me up.

  Every afternoon for most of a week my father and I gathered the boxes and old shopping bags full of the detritus of the past and shoved them into the Chevrolet. Then we went all the way across town, past the building where Alexander Graham Bell had received the first telephone call, and the NECCO factory, breathing out clouds of sugar and chocolate, beyond the railroad tracks to the half-empty stretch between Central Square and MIT.

  A few guys were always lounging against the Goodwill building, smoking, when we pulled up. They didn’t look at us as we made our several trips from the car to the back of the store, where a squinty lady ruled over stacks of stuff. She pointed: “Kitchen left, clothes right,” she said. She said that every day, refusing to remember us from the day before.

  “Those people don’t like us,” I said on the way home.

  “Why should they?” said my father. “The way they see it, we’ve got everything and they’ve got nothing, or not much.”

  “Is that true?” I asked him.

  “It’s not untrue,” he said.

  “But we’re giving them our extra stuff, so they can have some things they need.”

  “Charity underscores disparity,” said my father.

  “You were the one who wanted to give them things,” I objected. “Mummy wanted to throw it all out. If you don’t believe in charity—”

  “I didn’t say I don’t believe in it,” my father interrupted. “I said it shows up the difference between the ones who have and the ones who don’t have. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.”

  “And it doesn’t matter if they don’t like us?”

  “You don’t help people because you want them to like you,” my father said. “You do it because they need help, and because you can help. They don’t have to like you for it. In fact, they will probably dislike you. That isn’t important.”

  “Daddy,” I said. “Are you a communist?”