“Look!” my father called. He was pressing his finger onto a column. “My God! Annette, come here! It’s Byron’s signature.”
My mother ambled over to him. “Did he come here with a chisel?”
“You mean Byron the poet?” I thought this made things even worse. This made the arcade of time even longer and more cavernous—to think this had been a ruin when Byron came, which was so long ago that it was already history in itself. It made me both dizzy and mad.
“Yes, the poet Byron,” said George. “I forgot to mention that, the famous signature. I wonder if he did indeed bring a chisel.”
“Maybe someone came after him and improved it. A post-Byronic chiseler.” My father laughed.
“It’s the Romantic-era equivalent of a souvenir stand,” my mother said. Then she too put her finger in the marble to trace the letters. “ ‘The isles of Greece!’ ” she said.
“ ‘Where burning Sappho loved and sung,’ ” my father responded. “It’s really just Kilroy Was Here, though, isn’t it?”
“It was the opportunism of the post-Byronic chiseler I was thinking about,” my mother said. “If Byron didn’t do it himself. Or even if he did, somebody must have gone over it afterward. It’s quite deeply incised.”
“You know, this is where Theseus’s father jumped off,” my father said to me. “I can’t remember his name. What was his name, George?”
“King Aegeus. Hence, this sea. The Aegean.”
“That was when Theseus forgot to change the sail from black to white? After he killed the Minotaur?” I was pleased to have remembered this.
“Right,” said my father. He shook his head and muttered, “How could I forget that, Aegeus. It’s ridiculous.”
“George,” I said, “was this temple here when King Aegeus jumped off the cliff?”
George made a torso-heaving Mediterranean shrug that expressed doubt about many more things than whether there’d been a temple here when Aegeus killed himself.
“Was there actually a King Aegeus?” He kicked the base of one of the columns, gently, so as not to hurt his foot. “There was a temple,” he said. “We can see that. There was probably some sort of a king. The rest?”
My mother had sat down on a chunk of stone, with my sister curled up in the grass beside her. My sister was asleep, my mother nearly so. The owl lay in the dust with his cotton face turned up to the sky. The cicadas were still screaming on the hill, and the sun was beginning to lower itself toward the Aegean.
“Coffee?” said George. “And a little galaktoboureko? I know just the place.”
“Do they have baklava?” I asked. Galaktoboureko was too creamy, a kind of wiggly junket jammed between phyllo sheets.
“There is always baklava,” George assured me.
My mother decided that George should ride in the front on the return trip. “I’ll just nap in the back with the girls,” she said.
“No, no, no,” said George.
“Really,” my mother said. “Please, I beg you, George.” She clambered into the back with my drowsing sister and leaned against the door, then stretched her legs out on the seat. “Look, I’m so comfy,” she said.
George obeyed.
I didn’t intend to nap. Besides, my mother hadn’t left me much room. I wanted to make sure that the dusty roads and goats were as boring on the way home as they’d been on the way there, and I wanted to feel disconnected and misunderstood. At least, I hoped I was misunderstood. I needed to figure out how to thwart my mother’s trick of knowing what I was thinking. I had to learn to think things she couldn’t detect. I could practice while she napped.
“George,” my mother said.
“Yes?” He turned halfway back.
“You hadn’t really ‘forgotten’ about Byron’s signature, had you?”
“I wanted it to be a surprise,” he said.
“It was,” said my father.
I scrunched up against my window and pretended to sleep. We’d left the headland and begun to ride along the scrubby plain that lay below Sounion when my mother poked her foot into my leg and said, “You think this is just a waste of time and it doesn’t interest you and why are we dragging you all over the place, don’t you?”
I could have killed her.
“I don’t think that,” I said. My voice was squeaky and artificial.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
The summer went on and on that way. To Epidaurus, to sit in the top tier of the raked stone banks and hear a pebble ping on the stage hundreds of feet below. To Delphi, to drink the sacred mountain water in the marble basin from a wooden cup that had hung there on a chain for millennia. “They must have to get a new cup every twenty years or so,” my father observed. “Maybe it’s a magic cup,” said my mother. “Maybe it’s a four-thousand-year-old cup.” My father didn’t think so. “Annette,” he said, “don’t be ridiculous.” To Eleusis, to walk the Sacred Way and get hotter than I’d ever been anywhere, including the Acropolis at noon, and to go into a low, wide, rubbly cave that was the entrance to the underworld. “That’s why it’s so hot here,” my mother told me. She was in a good mood, and so was my father. The trip to Sounion had done something to remove her resistance to traveling: thus, our constant goings-around.
Was there really an underworld? Had that crisscrossed stub of stone in the Delphi Museum called the Omphalos really marked the navel of the universe? In Cambridge it would have been easy to answer these questions. The answer would be, No, but that’s what the Greeks thought. In Greece, at the entrance to the underworld, the answer wasn’t so clear.
The air around these spots was zingy, like a pre-thunderstorm, crackly atmosphere. Things felt thick and thin at the same time. I could understand the thick part: thousands of people walking here and looking at these things and thinking they were important for thousands of years would make a place feel heavy and full. The thin was what worried me. It frightened me. In these places the veil or screen—whatever kept us in the everyday, regular world—had shredded or fallen away so that I could see through to another place, almost. I could know that there was another place. I could feel the underworld in the rubbly cave. It was a dank, vibrating something that was there in the back, implacable and big. You could pretend it wasn’t there but it was there anyhow. It reminded me of first seeing the Parthenon, except the opposite. At the Parthenon, the world had unfolded enough for me to see a balance and quiet that was inside everything. At the entrance to the underworld, I got a whiff of a huge, shapeless violence, like an ocean, that lay beneath the surface of the day-to-day.
The worst part was that neither the balance nor the violence had anything to do with me. I was a speck. All these things I felt, I didn’t really feel them in myself. I was only passing through them. They were a kind of weather. They were the essential weather of the world. If I got close to them then I got wet or hot or frightened or whatever they had to offer.
Greece was a long lesson in my insignificance.
The dolphins with their taut shiny grins followed us as we sailed down to Crete, hotter and hotter. The deck was white with quick-dried salt, and the brass tarnished overnight. My mother wore her shrug in the evenings, though it wasn’t chilly. Islands left and right, then a day of open water. At the museum at Heraklion, my mother said, “It’s Egypt.”
“It’s a kind of confluence point,” my father said.
I could see what she meant about Egypt. To begin with, amazingly hot, even inside the dark museum. Then, everyone in the paintings was sideways, like Egyptians. And the feeling that there was no depth to things was also Egyptian. The paintings were basically bas-reliefs, and I didn’t like that. Bas-relief had a strange attitude toward people, as if people weren’t quite real. In Crete, it occurred to me that it might be an incapacity, not an attitude. Those Cretans couldn’t see things any other way. The kouros in the Acropolis Museum who’d stepped out of his stone—in order to kick me in the ear—was beyond them. The Cretans were still stuck in the s
tone. Like the Egyptians, they were living in a two-dimensional, symbolic sort of universe.
It was a colorful universe, though. The women wore red and yellow clothes and terrific, messy updos that reminded me of some of Frederika’s hair experiments from long ago. Their eyes were lined with black makeup that swirled out at the corners. The only bad thing was the shape of their dresses. Their dresses were cut down below the chest so that their breasts stuck out. In fact, their dresses were a kind of reverse bra. They made the breasts push out and forward, but they exposed them, rather than covering them. I couldn’t bear seeing the things on my own chest that I was still hoping wouldn’t turn out to be breasts, so the idea that anyone else could see them, and that a person would want to stick them out like that, was a nightmare. Just being in the same room with pictures of these dresses embarrassed me.
Then a hot bus came along to take us to Knossos.
The palace—which wasn’t anything like what I thought of as a palace—was enormous: a vast, weedy expanse with traces of things. It was more of a floor plan than a structure. Fallen-down walls and bits of doorways made the outlines of what had once been rooms. One long-ago room was filled with vases taller than I was. “They’re for storing oil,” my father said. Some parts, though, looked as good as new. There was a porch with thick red-and-black columns, and there were intact walls covered with bright paintings of fish jumping around in the ocean and curly-haired Cretan women with their breasts pointing out.
No Labyrinth. No Minotaur. I stood at the periphery of the wrecked buildings and looked out over the cliffs where Icarus had tried to fly. Everything was quiet and still.
“Those are reconstructions,” my father told me when we were in the bus going back to Heraklion. “That porch, and the throne room. Who knows if it really looked like that.”
“It looked convincing to me,” my mother said.
“Cement,” my father muttered.
On to Rhodes, on to Patmos, on to Naxos and Mykonos. The air was hot and the sea was dark. Every evening at dusk, when the ship sailed on to the next island, we were escorted for the first mile or so by the local fishing fleet with their lanterns lit in the prows of their wooden boats. In every village the glaring whitewashed box-shaped houses crowded the hills like a raggedy staircase. The church was always at the top, its stucco dome the only curve in a maze of right angles. We went into one of these churches: nothing inside except a blunt stucco altar above which was painted a big, heavy-lidded eye.
“The Eye of God,” my father said.
The last stop was Delos. Not everyone got off the boat. But we did.
Delos seemed empty except for a bunch of stone lions in a row. They were crouched above a beach, leaning toward the sea with their mouths open in a stony roar. Because they were so old, they’d been weathered to a nice, nearly soft finish that was smooth and inviting. I climbed up on one and sat on its back. It was peaceful there and breezy, a cool, fresh breeze very different from the hot winds that had pursued us through the Cyclades all the way from Crete.
A green lizard walked onto my lion’s foot. As it was zipping off the stone platform where my lion squatted, it turned yellow.
My parents suddenly popped up.
“You’re here!” my mother said. “We were looking for you up at the temple.”
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know there was anything else here.”
“This is Apollo’s birthplace,” my mother said. “There’s tons of stuff here. Well, never mind—it’s time to go back to the boat.”
“You shouldn’t be sitting on that sculpture,” my father said.
I scooted down off the lion.
“We were getting worried about you,” my mother said.
“I was just here,” I said. “I like it here. I think I saw a chameleon. It was green, then it went all yellow.”
“You’re a chameleon,” my mother said.
My sister was the only one of us who could speak any Greek, the kitchen chatter she’d learned from Kula. Because she was a four-year-old, she spoke at a basic level. The rest of us couldn’t manage even that. My mother’s classical bits didn’t go very far, I was too shy and self-conscious to risk more than Hello, Thank you, and Good-bye, and my father didn’t bother. He believed that loud, slow, Greek-accented English would do the job. It did, but only with people who spoke English, and they thought he was making fun of them with his supposedly helpful Greek intonations.
Every morning Kula walked my sister to the Montessori kindergarten two blocks from our apartment and I got on a bus to the American school near the army base half an hour outside of town. I was in sixth grade now, and my parents said that school was too important for me to waste a year or even part of a year trying to learn Greek. So my first encounter with real Americans took place nearly four thousand miles from home. I’d never met people like this before. Cambridge might have had them, but I didn’t go to school with them.
They chewed gum—totally taboo in our house. They ate sandwiches on soft white bread, another household no-no: whole wheat, please, or rye. The boys were tall and many were chunky. Most of the girls had breasts, and if they didn’t, they were pretending to by wearing bras they didn’t need. They had jingly charm bracelets with poodles and Eiffel Towers dangling off. Everyone wore bright-white sneakers, which they kept clean by painting them with white shoe polish during Friday recess. I missed my red Keds, but they would have been out of place.
Red Keds, however, would have been better than what I was wearing.
With her infallible style sense, my mother had sniffed out a dressmaker who had a weaver at her disposal. You could invent a fabric—I’d like a fine gray wool with a red pinstripe—and two weeks later the weaver had woven it and the dressmaker had run up a skirt, tailor-made to your design. I had a blue dress of heavy cotton with a Peter Pan collar and a white embroidered frieze around the hemline. I had a skirt of the gray wool with the red pinstripe. I had another skirt, multicolored stripes like Jacob’s coat, that fell in big box pleats, and I had my leftover-from-the-summer sundresses from Filene’s Basement warmed up by a green cardigan. The dressmaker had also created four white middy blouses, one with a collar embroidered in red for special occasions, to go with the skirts. To complete my outfit I had sandals from the outdoor market in the Plaka, where they sold scary brassieres shaped like torpedoes that made me worry about the eventual size of the breasts I was still pretending I didn’t have. These sandals, though not as good as the gladiator ones from Florence, were of the same genre and, like them, had soles made of old tires. I didn’t fit in, and my clothes were the badge of how different I was from my classmates.
They weren’t afraid of school. They thought school was a kind of joke or a kind of game. They didn’t listen when the teacher talked, they didn’t sit still when she said to sit still, they didn’t care if they couldn’t follow the lesson because they weren’t trying to follow the lesson. They passed notes and doodled and looked out the window and interrupted. Mrs. Mezitis, I need to go to the bathroom, Mrs. Mezitis, I broke my pencil, I want another, Mrs. Mezitis, my tummy hurts, I have to go to the nurse. I’d done plenty of doodling and looking out the window at school in Cambridge, but I’d been furtive about it. I knew how important it was to pay attention. Nobody had ever told my classmates in Greece to pay attention. For them, going to school was a sport like dodgeball: The point was to avoid learning anything.
And to see what they could get away with. A boy named Craig sat behind me and kicked my chair all day. Sometimes he kicked so hard that I turned around, which was what he wanted. Then he’d stick his tongue out or jam his finger up his nose and wiggle it or make a mean scrunchy face. I tried not to react. Then after a few days, he did something so disgusting that I yelped. He turned his eyelids inside out, so his eyes were rimmed with ridges of wet, red, inside-the-eyelid skin. It made my own eyes hurt just to look at them.
“Mrs. Mezitis,” I said, the first words I addressed to her, “Craig has done something horrib
le to his eyeballs.”
But of course his eyeballs were back to normal and I was a snitch.
“I don’t see what you’re complaining about,” she said.
Mrs. Mezitis was pale and dry. She had wrinkly hair that she tried to tame into a pageboy, but it frizzed in resistance. She was an American married to a Greek and she was a patriot. The one moment of the day she displayed anything like enthusiasm was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in the mornings. With her bony hand clutched to her chest, she stood erect, facing the flag that drooped from the pole beside the blackboard.
I didn’t know the Pledge of Allegiance. It wasn’t part of the Cambridge catechism. But it was short, and I learned it in a day or two. Mrs. Mezitis always emphasized the words under God.
At dinnertime my parents demanded tidbits about school. It was the rule: Everyone had to tell about his or her day. The army school didn’t offer me much. Craig stuck his finger up his nose wasn’t a good tidbit. But at Wednesday dinner the first week, I could recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
“Reactionaries,” my mother said. She snorted. “That under God thing is a McCarthyite addition. Typical. You don’t have to say that.”
“Everybody says it,” I said. I didn’t want yet another thing to make me stick out.
“I mean the God stuff,” my mother said.
“I’m not supposed to say that?”
“You do what you want,” my father put in. He gave my mother a look—one of those looks I didn’t understand.
God wasn’t a member of our household. I’d met him in the cafeteria in first grade, at my school with the cement playground across the street from home in Cambridge, when everyone folded hands and said, Thank you, God, for our food, before we ate lunch.
When I got home, I’d asked my mother, “Who’s God?”
She was stumped, for once.
“Well,” she said. “Well, some people believe in God.”