Honestly, We Meant Well Read online

  “Knock it off.” He awards her a small laugh and stands. “I’m going to find Dad. Watch my backpack while I’m gone?”

  “Sure, kiddo.” She shields her eyes and looks up at him. “Where is he, anyway?”

  “He went downstairs. He said the smell of the fumes was making him sick.”

  “It’s worse down there.” She can’t help herself—instead of returning the lighter to Will, she slips it into her pocket. Once he’s gone she’ll go for the cigarettes. “There’s no fresh air. No circulation.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  She looks at him for a moment longer. He purses his lips and blows lightly across the bottle’s mouth, creating a low, sad whistle.

  “I’m glad you came,” she says.

  “Yeah?” He stops blowing.

  “Yeah.”

  He smiles. “I’ll be downstairs.”

  She watches him disappear belowdecks and, after retrieving her own beer from beneath the bench, she turns her attention forward, to the ferry’s bow as it cuts a broad wake through the water. She doesn’t want to meddle. Her own parents were meddlers, and she knows how exhausting it can be, having that pressure looming, the weight of balancing a mother’s interference with your own private anxieties. Still, it’s hard work, biting her tongue, resisting the urge to fix a set of problems that aren’t hers to fix. She wants to tell him not to worry, to accept that—at least for a while—things won’t work out as he imagined. She wants to remind him of all the awful jobs she had before deciding to go back to school; of how, for ten abysmal months, she went door to door to dentists’ offices, hawking bad art to display in their waiting rooms. More than anything, she wants to tell him how Purpose, that awful thing that greeting cards tell him he was born with and that he just has to find, is actually something he’ll need to create; that it’s not until he feels the monotony of life that he’ll come to decide why he’s living it.

  She can’t see Aegina yet, but she imagines it there, rising up from the waves. Holding the cool bottle against her cheek, she closes her eyes for a moment and lets the breeze whip through her hair. She thinks back to the first time she made this trip. She was twenty-five—she’d just completed her second year of graduate work at Berkeley—and she was like her son: terrified and clueless. She remembers queuing up at Piraeus to board this same ferry, her spine drenched with sweat beneath her backpack; she remembers looking out over the hundreds of heads in front of her, at the clouds of cigarette smoke as they mixed with the dank humidity of the port. She remembers thinking: What the hell am I doing?

  The ostensible goal had been to get to Delos, in the Cyclades, where a former colleague of her adviser was studying the Stoibadeion alongside the French School of Archaeology. She was still struggling to find a direction for her dissertation, and her adviser had suggested that spending the summer doing fieldwork might jolt her creativity and give her a sense of focus.

  “Dig around in the dirt for a while,” she remembers him saying to her early that spring. She was sitting in his office, and in front of her on his desk stood a miniature statue of the Sounion kouros. The boy’s left leg was rigidly fixed forward, as if he were caught in midstep, and his hands hung in half-fists at his sides. She remembers, very vividly, wanting to reach out and take hold of the thing. To grab the boy by his bare, flat ass and, without warning or motivation, shatter it on the office’s cold tile floor.

  Instead, she said, “Dig around in the dirt?”

  “Why not?” Her adviser shrugged. “Dig around. See what comes up. I mean, that’s all we really do anyway, isn’t it?” He lit a cigarette. “Besides, from what I hear, they could use the help. The École Française isn’t exactly what it used to be.”

  Sue Ellen looked at the kouros again. She thought of his leg split from his smooth pelvis. Of his head split from his stone neck.

  She said, “Sure.”

  She never made it, though. To Delos, that is. Because in Aegina she met Christos, and what was meant to be a two-day layover turned into three months of something else entirely.

  But now Christos is gone. And while she knows this, she nonetheless finds herself believing that she’ll stumble upon him; that, upon entering the Alectrona’s lobby, she’ll discover that he’s standing there, smoking a cigarette behind the inn’s front desk. Thinking of him now, as she floats halfway between Athens and Aegina, she worries she might start to cry, might break down in sobs here, in front of these squabbling French tourists, with her husband and son nursing cheap Greek beer downstairs. She presses her sunglasses farther up the bridge of her nose and remembers when she first learned of his death. It was a month after discovering her husband’s affair. As she worked to repair her marriage, she found herself googling Christos more and more often, scouring the internet for glimpses of a place where life might have turned out differently. It was an obituary she stumbled across—three sentences announcing he had died and was survived by his daughter, Eleni—sandwiched between bicycle ads on the Aegina News website.

  At first, she refused to believe it. Instead, she chose to focus her attention on the fact that his daughter—the little girl she’d seen in the last picture he ever sent her—was now a grown woman. Although she had never met her, Sue Ellen always held Eleni in the same place she held Christos: a season of perpetual youth. Moments later, though, the reality seeped in, and her breath seemed to get caught in her throat. Dean was sitting across the table from her—she had brought her laptop into their kitchen in Berkeley—and he must have noticed her face turning ashen, because he set down his crossword puzzle and asked if she was feeling all right.

  “The Classics Club was having a bake sale,” she said. She had never told him about Christos, and she couldn’t see the point of getting into it now. “I had too many cookies.”

  “Since when do you eat cookies?”

  “I don’t know.” She stood. “Since today. Since I decided I wanted something sweet.”

  Dean looked at her for a moment, then rose to put an arm around her. He pulled her close and kissed her forehead.

  She pressed her nose to his chest, breathing in a mix of laundry detergent and coffee fumes.

  Pulling away, she said: “I’m going upstairs to lie down.”

  In her bathroom, she sat on the toilet and wept. She was there for at least an hour—maybe even two; she remembers watching the shadows shift across the awful beige carpet at her feet. She cried for Christos, but also for the thirty years that separated them, years during which they spoke occasionally, and then rarely and, finally, not at all. Once she was exhausted with being sad, she became angry. She hated Christos for dying and herself for being so affected by his death. She hated that she could be so devastated by someone who, in the terrible scheme of things, had occupied only a fragment of her life. Mostly, she hated that, in the years since she and Dean had bought the house, she had been too lazy to change the fucking carpet here, in the bathroom where she sat. She hated how the coarse tufts of nylon and polyester seemed to blink back at her, how they reminded her of how slowly and suddenly time passes.

  * * *

  Rubbing the bridge of her nose, she looks up. The French tourists are still fighting, and she tries her best to pick out a few words. It’s useless, though. She hasn’t spoken French since high school, and even then she hated the language, all those swallowed r’s and tight, puckered u’s. Instead, she wonders if she should go downstairs. See if Will wants another beer and check on Dean’s nausea. She decides against it; she stays where she is, holding the Mythos bottle with both hands, sinking into her annoyance of the French.

  It had been an impulsive decision to come. Gianna asked, and Sue Ellen said yes; she booked her ticket before she checked her calendar. In the weeks that followed, though, she worried that she’d made a mistake. Here she was, fleeing from her family at the moment it needed her the most. But then Dean had come to her. Had brought her a turkey sandwich and begged her to tag along. At first she was skeptical—he really did hate the heat—but
after a few minutes of listening to him, she was convinced it made sense. More than that: it was, perhaps, a perfect idea. Berkeley held too many memories. Every building, every street bore some association with the past year. Here’s where she was drinking coffee when Greta Weinstein called to say that she had seen Dean with another woman; here’s where she bought boxes to help him move back in. Greece would allow them to escape, to find solid footing away from the scene of the crime. Besides, what’s that thing that Connie had told her? That in light of her husband’s affair she had two options: cut and run, or work toward forgiveness. And for the latter to happen—for transgressions to be pardoned and trust to be regained—there had to be equal effort and a willingness to try.

  There’s also the matter of Will: chances are, she’ll lose him come fall. While she’s always taken pride in being a mother and something else—pride in being a woman who isn’t rattled by clichés like a child no longer needing her or the loneliness of an empty nest—Will’s graduation has shaken her more than she had ever anticipated. Since he had started at Berkeley (she had been selfishly thrilled when his first choice, Northwestern, turned him down), she had always had a sense of his schedule, of where he was. She never imposed this on him, but she used it to free her mind whenever teaching caused her to feel claustrophobic: I’m at Classics, she would tell herself, imagining a campus map, Will’s at History, and Dean’s at English. Triangulating in this way calmed her; it reminded her of an existence beyond the walls of her department, the covers of her books. It reminded her of the life she lived in real time.

  Half a mile in front of her, Aegina port begins to peek through the smog. Slowly, Sue Ellen starts to make out the Orthodox cross that sits atop the Ekklisia Isodia Theotokou, casting shadows along its red roof. Just to the church’s north, small crowds gather in the waterfront cafés that line Leoforos Dimokratias. Watching as the scene gains focus, she wonders how much has changed since she was last here; she wonders if Elia still makes the best pistachio pesto, or if you can still get a shot of ouzo for a hundred drachma at O Kostas. She wonders if the best beaches—Marathonas and Kolona and Vagia—are still empty, still the domain of rock partridges and sea anemones, or if they’ve been discovered by the same northern Europeans who have conquered the rest of the Aegean.

  Suddenly, the ferry groans to a stop, and deckhands scatter to tie the massive hull to one of the port’s piers. There’s a thud as the gangplank is lowered to the dock, and the French tourists jump, then start to laugh. Standing, Sue Ellen smooths out the wrinkles that line her khakis.

  She says, to anyone who will listen, “We’re here.”

  Eleni

  July 7

  Aegina

  She hears the taxi before she sees it: wheels crunching on gravel, an engine coughing once and then shutting down. Standing behind the Alectrona’s front desk, she tucks her hair behind her ears and applies a thin coat of lip gloss. Two hours ago, she went to town and bought some flowers—a bunch of white hyacinths and a single Roman orchid. She’s arranged them in one of her grandmother’s ceramic vases, which she’s set just to the left of her laptop. Why not add a little pizzazz to the place, she thought, a little life—this was, after all, the last time she would be checking someone in. Inspecting the flowers now, though, she worries they look weird and sparse; there are too few stems to fill the vase she selected. Instead of admiring the hyacinths’ blooms, all she can focus on is the empty space between them, the way the orchid droops beneath its weight. She should have bought more flowers, she thinks. Or she shouldn’t have bought any flowers at all.

  Outside, a car door opens and closes. Faint voices compete and form layers—prices being calculated and haggled over.

  When she was alive, Eleni’s mother was the one who checked people in to the Alectrona. She liked to tell her that welcoming guests—being hospitable—was an art. Getting people to feel comfortable in a place they had never been, anticipating their needs before they knew they had them: this all required a certain awareness, a domestic talent. As she grew older, Eleni thought of these lessons with a mix of sadness and regret. Before she got married, Agatha had wanted to be a journalist; a year before she died, she was lauding the aesthetics of throw pillows.

  Now, as Eleni hears the taxi pull away, she runs through the list of dos and don’ts her mother left her: Memorize your guests’ names before they arrive—you don’t want to make them feel like another cog in the wheel, a way to pay the mortgage. When you show them around the inn, make sure to point out that the building was constructed over 150 years ago and once was the summer home of a wealthy Athenian family. If they ask who, make something up—a long, unpronounceable name, something with too many vowels to remember. Reframe flaws as personality and charm: those aren’t cracks in the wall, that’s just the original crown molding. In the morning, if you’ve run out of eggs and can’t escape to the market, put out a bowl of muesli and some yogurt—call it a Greek breakfast.

  The door creaks open, and she hears three sets of feet echo off the foyer’s tile floor. Eleni looks up and smiles.

  “Yassas,” she says. And then, switching to English: “You must be the Wrights.”

  The next five minutes are a deliberate blur—all she can think of is how many times she’s done this, and how she’ll never have to do it again. She talks, asking them questions they don’t have time to answer, filling the space with the steady hum of her voice. Once she’s confirmed the details she already knows (Where are you traveling from? California. It looks like we will have the pleasure of your company for four weeks? That’s correct), she produces a paper map of Aegina and unfolds it on the desk in front of her.

  “Perhaps you would like to know a little bit about the island?” she says, uncapping a pen.

  Sue Ellen thanks her and glances at her husband, then her son.

  “That’s very sweet of you,” she says. “But they—we—have been up for almost thirty-six hours. Maybe we could—”

  “You’re exhausted, of course.” Eleni nods.

  She thinks of another one of her mother’s maxims: Ask them questions about their travel, even if it’s small talk—there’s nothing people love more than complaining about airlines.

  She says, “I hope your flight was pleasant?”

  The husband looks haggard, tired. His clothes are wrinkled and his eyes are bloodshot. Sue Ellen, on the other hand, looks more or less put together. Her hair, a mix of blond and gray, is pulled cleanly away from her face, and her cheeks are fleshy, pink. She’s wearing a blue T-shirt and khaki pants made from the sort of synthetic fabric that Eleni associates with hikers and rock climbers—no-fuss, fast-drying stuff that a person can wash by hand.

  The husband arches an eyebrow. “It was awful,” he says. “Torturous and interminable. Planes these days are criminal. We may as well have come over on the Amistad.”

  “Jesus, Dad,” the son says, and looks to her apologetically.

  Eleni doesn’t catch the reference, but she smiles nonetheless.

  “I am sorry to hear that,” she says. “I will check you in and then show you to your rooms so you can get some rest. All I need, I believe, are your passports.”

  “Is that a pool?”

  The son asks this. He’s wandered a few feet down the hall that leads from reception to the hotel’s dining room, which overlooks the rear patio. Looking at him, Eleni tries to get a sense of his age; she can’t be much older than he is, surely, but still he looks so much softer, so entirely inexperienced. She remembers when she was a little girl, how she used to accompany her mother to the grocery store. Regardless of the hour, they’d run into someone—another woman, typically—with whom Agatha had grown up; this was a small island, and chance encounters were a sort of normalized plague. As her mother spoke, making small talk next to the tomatoes, Eleni would hang back and marvel at how much younger she looked than her peers; how while their hair had grown ashy and coarse, her mother’s was still jet-black and smooth. What a wonder, she thought, that time
could be both so sparing and so cruel.

  “It is.”

  “Is it heated?”

  “Of course,” Eleni says. “By the sun.”

  Will looks at her for a moment, then smiles.

  “Good one,” he says.

  They rummage through their bags for their passports, which Sue Ellen collects and hands to Eleni.

  “I’ll be right back.” She begins to leave, ducking through the door that connects the foyer to the Alectrona’s office, but she pauses for a moment. She takes a single breath and turns back around.

  “Actually, there is just one more thing. We have … we have had a bit of a plumbing problem.”

  “What kind of a problem?” the father asks. He slings his bag over his shoulder, and the strap pulls at the collar of his shirt.

  “We currently have one working shower. It’s here”—she points—“in the downstairs bathroom.”

  “One shower.”

  “We’re hoping to have the rest of the showers repaired within the week.”

  “Literally just one shower.”

  Sue Ellen reaches down and takes hold of her husband’s wrist.

  “That hardly sounds like a problem.”

  Eleni smiles. “Please,” she says, pointing to a small table next to the front door, where she’s assembled a small spread of food. Fresh bread, cheese, two bowls of fruit. “Make yourself at home.”

  * * *

  In her office, Eleni holds their passports in her right hand, fingering the documents’ stiff corners as if she’s cradling a deck of cards. Her phone vibrates against her hip and, setting the passports down, she reaches into the pocket of her jeans and sees that she has a new message from her friend Sophie, in Athens. A GIF of a pug falling off a couch, paired with a note: Me after last night’s fifth tequila shot. Eleni watches the dog tumble to the ground a few times before typing: Back among the living?

  Sophie replies in an instant: Barely.