Honestly, We Meant Well Read online

  “I already have,” Sue Ellen says. “I’ll do it. I’ll go.”

  Eleni

  July 7

  Aegina, Greece

  “I’m trying it again!” Eleni shouts.

  She turns the knob and stares up at the showerhead. Holding her breath, she listens as the promise of water moans beneath her. Somewhere downstairs, Stavros—a weathered Corinthian who her father, Christos, hired once as a handyman thirty years ago and who has since refused to leave—tinkers with a maze of rusty pipes. The window’s open and there’s a breeze, but it’s too weak to drive away the bugs. A mosquito lands on the nape of Eleni’s neck, and before she has time to slap it away she feels the faint pique of a new bite.

  She closes her eyes and imagines herself somewhere else. A parallel world where lights turn on and ovens work and showers run; where existence extends beyond the four walls of this inn and the ragged coast of this island. A place where Eleni Papadakis lives the life she wants, instead of the one to which she’s been sentenced.

  “Anything?” she hears Stavros yell.

  Opening her eyes, she squints at the showerhead. Dust gathers along its curves.

  “Still nothing,” she shouts back, and steps out of the tub. “Stay there. I’m coming down.”

  She finds him in the kitchen, smoking next to a tin of coffee beans. She considers asking if she can bum a cigarette, but instead says, “I thought I asked you not to smoke in here.”

  “Plumbing makes me anxious,” he says.

  “Haven’t you been doing this for, like, thirty years?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  He pinches the cigarette between his fingers and brings it to his lips. Leaning against the counter, he inhales and she watches as smoke seeps out from the corners of his mouth. His face, Eleni thinks, looks as if it’s been roughly molded from wet, red clay; thick wrinkles crease his cheeks, and when he frowns his forehead collapses in half. She wonders if this is how her father would look, if he had been given the chance to age.

  “This happened once before,” Stavros says, ashing his cigarette in the sink behind him.

  “What, all of the upstairs showers stopped working at once? You’re kidding.”

  He shakes his head. “I’m not.”

  “When?”

  “Four years ago, maybe? Five? You were at school.”

  Eleni pulls her hair back and ties it up with one of the rubber bands she keeps around her wrist.

  She asks, “What’d Dad do?”

  “He had to call in a part from Athens. Took about a week and a half, if I’m remembering.”

  “Shit,” she says. “We don’t have a week and a half.”

  Rummaging through the refrigerator, she finds a beer and cracks it open.

  “Who are these guests again?” Stavros asks.

  “I don’t know.” She holds the bottle to her cheek and winces at the cold. “Just some family. The mother said she stayed here before. Like, forever ago. Or at least that’s what she wrote in her email.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Sue Ellen Wright. Claims she knew Dad.”

  Stavros shrugs.

  He says, “And they get here tomorrow?”

  “Today. They’re coming in on the five o’clock ferry.”

  “There are worse things in the world than sharing a shower.”

  Try telling that to a bunch of Americans, Eleni thinks.

  She swallows a sip of beer and runs her tongue along her teeth. “You’re sure you’re not able to fix it?”

  His cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, Stavros turns on the sink and begins to wash his hands. “I told you,” he says, “plumbing makes me anxious.”

  “Remind me why I pay you,” Eleni says, rubbing her eyes.

  “Because your father didn’t have the guts to fire me.”

  Eleni shakes her head. “This—this is why our country can’t pay its bills.”

  Clinking the beer bottle against her teeth, she wanders out of the kitchen and into the inn’s small dining room. Four square tables arranged haphazardly. All the surfaces, from walls to ceiling, painted in the same, noncommittal beige. Hanging above the bar, a chandelier that her grandfather appropriated from a condemned ship—a lamp made up of three smaller lamps, one of which lost its shade before Eleni was conceived. Three French doors that open to a row of tangled and overgrown hedges, beyond which lies a pool. On the west wall, the room’s sole piece of art: a framed poster of Santorini, even though Santorini’s more than two hundred kilometers away.

  She pushes open one of the French doors and steps over a tangle of weeds and a broken tile as she makes her way out onto the patio. Finding a spot of shade, she stares out past the pool to Aegina Harbor, where a mess of boats dodge one another, their bows nearly kissing as they pull in and out of port. To the south, there’s a spit of beach where, as a little girl, she would sit for hours on end, letting her shoulders and arms and spine darken to the color of ripe olives as she built sand castles. Her mother, Agatha, would call her from the rocks, tell her to come inside, eat something, keep cool in the relentless summer heat, and Eleni would ignore her. Would lie on her back and flex her feet as the tide sloshed around her ankles. Then, when Eleni was ten, Agatha died. Melanoma, of all things. She figures it was around then that she decided to hate the sun.

  She hears the click of a lighter as Stavros starts in on a second cigarette, and she watches as cars crawl up the red hills leading up and out of town. Forty-five kilometers north, Athens smolders behind a scrim of smog, its buildings blending together into borderless gray huddles.

  Her last morning in the city was over two and a half years ago. She sees herself waking up in her flat, a few blocks away from the physics laboratory in Zografou. To the left of her cot is her suitcase—her only one—and to the left of that are three boxes, packed heavy with her books. She remembers picking her way to the small refrigerator and reaching into it for the only thing that remained—a small peach. She cut it open and waited for the juices to run down her fingers, and when they didn’t—the peach was three days away from ripe—she bit into it anyway, puckering at its sour toughness. And then what? She must have showered, and brushed her teeth, and taken the metro down to the port, but all of that seems to have been wiped clean from her memory. It’s like the sea dragged it out of her, away from her; like the small channel between the mainland and the island ripped her clear of the life she had spent three and a half years building.

  It was two weeks before that when her father called her and told her to come home. She was sitting in the park near the Olof Palme playground, sort of reading a back issue of The Economist, but mostly watching a pair of girls fight over a swing, when her phone rang.

  Looking at the screen, she saw that it was him. Still, all she said was, “Naí?”

  “It’s time for you to come back.” His voice sounded gravelly, gruff. She checked the connection on her phone. She had full service.

  “Here we go again.”

  “The university’s closed. I read it today in the paper.”

  Actually, it had been closed for a while—a week, to be exact. Another round of austerity measures, along with the closing of the banks, had led to massive layoffs and walkouts. Two of Eleni’s professors had taken to holding class meetings in their apartments, which she had been attending with some regularity, and she was still engaged with the research on applied microeconomics she was doing for Maragos, her adviser. Ostensibly, though, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens was nonfunctional. The bathrooms at the University Club hadn’t been cleaned in three weeks, and most of her friends had started selling their textbooks on eBay. She conveyed none of these developments to her father.

  All she said was, “Look at that, you’re reading the paper.”

  “There’s a ferry at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. That gives you time to pack up.”

  “Dad, c’mon. The university has closed before. It’ll reopen.”<
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  “That’s not what they’re saying this time.”

  One of the little girls pushed her friend from the swing, and when she hit the ground her knees began bleeding. Eleni tucked her hair behind her ear and turned away.

  Her father added, “Besides, I need help around here. Alec quit yesterday. I’ve only got Stavros left.”

  “Whose problem is that? I didn’t get a degree in economics so I could sit around the front desk and wait for the phone to ring.”

  “What degree? Last time I checked you were still half a year away.”

  “Well, then I need to be here for when the university reopens.”

  “And what will you do in the meantime?” She imagined him sitting at his desk next to the kitchen, punching numbers into an old calculator, his gray hair curling around his ears.

  “I have a job,” she said. “I’m doing research for Maragos.”

  “Oh-ho, research. That’s what we’re calling it now.” The girl with the skinned knee began to cry, and her friend sat on the swing. Eleni turned back to watch as she pumped her legs, forcing herself higher and higher into the air. “The only reason old men pay young girls to hang around them is so they can look down their shirts.”

  She hated him sometimes, most of the time. She said, “You’re speaking from experience, I presume.”

  He didn’t react. He never did, which killed her. All he said was, “You’re coming home. Eight o’clock tomorrow morning, from Piraeus. Take a cab and I’ll pay you back.”

  He hung up before she could say no.

  She didn’t go. If anything, she went out of the way to give her life in Athens a new sense of permanence. She shopped for nonperishable groceries—cans of beans and legumes that could sit in the cupboard, untouched, for a year. When she made dinner, she left the dirty dishes in the sink. At the florist three blocks from her flat she bought a potted plant, a fragile African violet that required great care and wouldn’t bloom for another six months. On Tuesday of that week, she walked to the Economics Department at 10 A.M. and, just as she’d done for the past two years, poked her head into Professor Maragos’s office to tell him that she was there and to update him on her progress compiling the data from the research he’d given her the previous month. He thanked her, and before he dismissed her he let his eyes fall from her face to the contours of her breasts. Recalling her father’s words, Eleni felt a new, burning chagrin. She was torn between wanting to either stuff her body in a sleeping bag or rip off everything she was wearing; between either slapping Maragos to thank her father or sleeping with the old pervert to spite him.

  She did neither. She completed her work for the afternoon, then went home to order takeout and stare at the new cans of chickpeas lining her kitchen shelves. The following day consisted more or less of the same, as did the day after that, and the day after that. Christos phoned her regularly—four times a day, give or take—and each time she guiltlessly let the call roll over to voice mail, feeling a certain glorious thrill as she watched his number vanish from the screen. When the weekend came, she recounted these small victories to her friends Sophie and Mina. They were drinking wine in a café in Thissio, doing their best to ignore the heat that weighed down the Athenian air.

  “He’s a fuck-head,” Eleni said.

  “A fuck-head who’s insisting you come back to Aegina,” Sophie corrected.

  Eleni swallowed her last bit of wine. “Well, then that fuck-head will have to come to Athens and drag me home himself.”

  A week later, while she was getting ready to leave for campus, her landlady knocked on the door and told her that her rent check for that week had bounced.

  “That’s impossible,” Eleni had said. “I…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She loathed admitting that her father still transferred funds to her checking account each month. It robbed her of the right to be ungrateful.

  “Well, it did. It bounced.” The woman blinked her black eyes. “So, either pay or leave.”

  “Give me a week. Five days. I’ll figure something out.”

  The woman scoffed. “I’m not running a charity.”

  Eleni thought of her father. Of the smug look he must have made as he called the bank. “That son of a bitch.”

  Her landlady said: “You watch your language, miss.”

  And that had been that. The next morning, after having been more or less evicted, she boarded an Aegina-bound ferry at Piraeus; by two o’clock that afternoon she was back at the Alectrona, tripping over the same uneven tiles that had given her bloody toes as a child. Over the past three years at the university she had learned how to hustle; she’d developed a general air of nerve and certainty, because certainty seemed to be the only ethos to which the men in her department responded. Now, she had a new thing to be sure of: she deserved better than to be back on this island.

  She avoided Christos for the first three days she was home. Each night when he called her down to dinner, she pretended not to hear him and waited until he had gone to bed before venturing to the kitchen to pick at whatever leftovers languished in the fridge. She felt, more than anything, betrayed: it had been Christos who had encouraged Eleni to apply to the university, Christos who had prodded her to move to Athens once she was accepted. She could have screamed at him for this. You can’t send me away to be someone else, she imagined saying, and then act surprised by the person I’ve become.

  On the fourth day, when he asked her if she wanted to walk with him in the eleonas just south of Pachia Rachi and pick olives, she told him she was busy; she wasn’t interested in his false camaraderie, his forced attempts at friendship. The eleonas, she wanted to remind him, were where they used to go to lose each other after her mother died. Under the guise of father-daughter bonding, they would drive to the ancient groves and then scatter themselves among the trees, drifting far enough away from each other that, at least temporarily, they could forget the other one existed.

  * * *

  She would have acted differently if she could have known what was to come six months later. She remembers the doctors telling her there was nothing that could have been done; that it was the fastest-metastasizing pancreatic adenocarcinoma they’d seen in their cancer-pocked careers. Between sobs she told them to shut up; she didn’t care. She asked them why they were so insistent on explaining away an arbitrary cause for an effect that was so certain. They looked at each other and bit their lips; they said that was the job of medicine. Perhaps, they offered, she should talk to the priest that the hospital employed as a grief counselor. Her cheeks still wet, she found him—a young man cloaked in a black robe, busying himself in a small chapel adjacent to the maternity ward. She was angry and devastated, she told him. Angry that her father hadn’t had the courage to tell her that he was dying; devastated that she hadn’t had the compassion to sense it. The priest pointed to an icon of St. John Cassian, nailed to the chapel’s Sheetrock wall, and quoted something about forgiveness from The Philokalia. Outside, a nurse helped a young mother into a wheelchair. The newborn in her arms began to cry. “These feelings are normal,” the priest told her. “They’re normal, and they’ll pass.”

  Eleni stood up and gathered her things. She didn’t want her pain to be normal, she said. She wanted it to be extraordinary. It was the last time she ever went to church.

  It was winter, the slow season; the first guests wouldn’t arrive for another six months. Without the structure of a schedule—the preparing of breakfast, the cleaning of rooms—the days of the next week merged together. Each afternoon, she took slow walks down the road that led to the Alectrona, a stretch of dirt forking off from the larger road that snaked east out of Aegina’s central port. Overgrown pine trees sliced up the January sun and cast cool shadows over her. At night, she crawled into bed and folded her grown body into the dent her childhood form had made in her mattress. When she awoke, she spent the better part of her mornings staring at the same Sokratis Malamas poster hanging next to her door—the only thing that distinguished her own r
oom from the four others in the inn. When that became too much—when she had grown tired of studying the room’s wood floors, its rough, whitish walls—she’d pull herself to the window and watch birds land on the branches of the gnarled mastic tree that grew outside her father’s old office, counting its leaves as they fell to the ground.

  Then, on the fourth day, Stavros came to her. In his left hand, he held a black hat. Sweat matted his gray hair against his forehead.

  He said, “You have to leave this room, koritsi mou.”

  She was sitting at her desk, staring at an open book. She hadn’t bathed in four days, and she had taken on an increasingly yeasty scent, a mix of salt and filth and unbrushed teeth that made her think of regrettable mornings in Athens.

  She turned to him. “I don’t have to do anything,” she said. “And I’m not your little girl.”

  Stavros cleared his throat. “Actually, legally you do: they’re reading your father’s will today.”

  “So let them read it,” she said, fingering the pages of her book.

  “You have to be there.” He sat on the edge of her bed.

  She protested again, but eventually she gave in. She showered, put on a fresh pair of jeans, and went to the courthouse in town. There, she learned that Christos had bequeathed to her everything he had owned, including the Alectrona. There was, though, one notable provision: if she wanted to sell the inn and pocket the proceeds, she could be legally allowed to do so only after two years. In the interim, the property’s deed—and its operation—would fall under her name.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said to Stavros on the way back to the inn. They were riding in his old VW Golf, and as the car jostled over potholes Eleni felt her throat pulse; at any given moment, she worried she might break down in sobs. She said, “Even from the grave, my father manages to fucking ground me.”

  “Maybe he was trying to do you a favor,” Stavros said, shifting into third. “Maybe he thought that in two years you would come to love it.”