•
The next morning I drove to my favorite beach, one you could reach only on foot from the road or by walking over the rocks and through the water from the adjacent cove. It was on the north end of the island, about fifteen kilometers from the mountain village. The road was so bumpy I thought the Fiat would just snap undone, all sides clattering to the ground.
I hiked down the familiar goat path and noticed something new at the end of the beach: a four-post bed in the small area of shade. The absurdity soothed me. Otherwise I was alone and was filled by the rush of this, no one knowing where I was.
I stripped down to my bikini bottoms, took a few steps into the water, and could feel myself opening up. What was the source of this near-spiritual ecstasy? The sense of being on the border of earth and sea? Or something primordial, the way fish crawled out of the ocean to live on land, the way we might wish for gills or almost feel the sprouting of wings from our shoulder blades?
The water was freezing, and I wasn’t quite ready for it, so I lay down atop the blanket. The sun was warm on my back. I fell into a heavy nap and dreamt of Nefeli, waking unsettled. I sent her a text but I had no service and it didn’t go through.
After noon, the day grew warm. From my bag I retrieved the apricots and cherries I’d purchased from the vendor at the side of the road, the cheese pie. I drank half the bottle of water and flipped to my front. I drifted in and out of sleep, and when I stood up I noticed an older woman on the bed, dressed in a black housedress, also asleep, her body curled up beneath a blanket, her back to me. I hadn’t heard or seen her arrive. When I walked closer I could hear her snoring.
I swam and swam, back and forth, back and forth, a quick, measured freestyle going nowhere, between the two capes that enclosed the cove. Then I decided to swim farther, to see how far I could go, to see if I could reach the rock out in the distance. In high school I had been a swimmer, and it felt good to channel all the power of my body into measured, strong strokes: one two three four five breathe, one two three four five breathe.
I grew tired soon enough, wondering what had gotten into me. Finally, I flipped onto my back and whipped my goggles off my face, letting them dangle in my hand. I floated, trying not to move, and let the salty sea gently prop me up. No one knows where I am. I looked up and could still, though barely, see the bed on the shore, smaller now in the distance, rising and falling with the gentle undulations of the waves. I had the strange feeling of seeing my strokes from above, as if I were both myself and some woman I was watching from the separate point of that bed, ashore.
I was much farther out than I had realized. I was so far into the sea that I was a part of it. Up above, a helicopter hovered. Not far from me was a yacht, though probably not as close as it seemed. I lay still atop the waves awhile. When I became cold I replaced my goggles, making sure they were tight and sealed, and began the swim back, which took all the strength I had, my small lunch long ago burned off. One two three four five. Breathe. The rhythm of my strokes, the fullness in my lungs, all those jumbled fragments racing through my mind. Last summer. My mother and the scorpion fish. Her failing liver. The doctor’s alarm: The sting is very dangerous. Particularly in her state. We must be very careful. We will keep her for a few days.
What state, I asked the doctor. What state, I asked my father. It’s her liver, the doctor told me. How much does she drink a day. My father’s defensiveness. She doesn’t drink more than anybody else. How much.
How much?
I’m getting married, Aris said.
One two three four five. Breathe breathe. Breathe.
She’s having a baby, he said.
Nefeli’s not well, the novelist said.
I began to swim as though I had just shot off the block in a race, my sixteen-year-old body emerging from within me, lean and strong and trained and understanding how to use the water, to work with it, not against it. The pounding of my heart propelled me forward, a hot little engine. I sliced the water with my hands with a rage that seemed to have no end. My mother on the dread of another Chicago winter: It will kill me, Myroula. Your father won’t leave. He wants to stay here forever. Until we die.
I’m getting married. I’m going to be a father.
She wants to imagine herself as a woman who is not sick.
I was certain I heard music but that was impossible, some sort of minor-keyed singing, but still I slowed my pace to trace it, to listen more closely. It vanished. I began to kick harder and the voices came back. This was not the place to unravel. I kept this pace until finally the seafloor looked as though I could touch it, so many sea urchins. If I was careful I could avoid them. A scorpion fish. The sting is venomous. Her health is not good. How could you not have realized this?
I felt something touch my ankle and I lurched up, flinging off my goggles and flipping my hair out of my face. I flung myself onto my back, tried to keep my mouth above the waterline, tasted salt, spit. My lungs burning.
I finally dragged myself out of the water, slouched over, exhausted, a waterlogged shell of the woman I was. A young couple stood on the shore with their hands on their hips, watching me slog through the water. The man called out to ask if I was okay. I couldn’t speak but I nodded, waved my goggles in the air, to answer them. I felt exposed and naked and was glad my wet hair hung over my breasts. What did the others see? An exhausted, topless figure coming out of the water like some drunken, graceless sea nymph? The inverse of a fully clothed woman walking into the sea with stones in her pockets to drown herself?
When I reached the shore, the woman approached me with a large thick towel and wrapped it around my shoulders. The gesture was so tender I felt a knot form in my throat. My legs buckled. I was shivering.
The yiayia who’d been sleeping on the bed trudged over, pointing up at the helicopter and saying that I was lucky the coast guard was watching. What was I doing swimming so far, and didn’t I know there were dangerous currents? She waved her hand in the air and then crossed herself. As if she had commanded it, the helicopter rose up and away, back toward some other place in the sky.
The old woman studied my face, my towel-wrapped body, my feet, then looked straight into my eyes. “Tinos eisai?” she asked. It was a phrase I had not heard since I was a child, from my grandparents. She pushed a lock of hair off of my face. Whose are you? She was asking. To whom do you belong?
Silence can be terrifying, and the longer I was quiet, the more rattled she became. She asked if I was foreign. I couldn’t form words. The younger woman tried to help: “Italian? Bulgarian? Arabic?” Something in my eyes must have alarmed the older one, because she exclaimed, “Girl! Do we need to call a doctor?”
Did we? The angle of the setting sun felt noisy, her voice was painful on my shivering skin, and the smell of the younger woman’s body lotion stung my eyes. My senses fired and merged and failed, everything jumbled up.
I finally spoke, in Greek, and assured everyone I was okay. I did not want them to see the way I was trembling. I did not want them to think I was mad. I sat down on my blanket and the old woman watched me, her hands on her hips. Across the small beach my mother stood by the bed, pressing down on the mattress. She sat down and lay back, as if embarrassed by my antics. Too much attention.
With the towel still around me I removed my swimsuit and pulled on my underwear. I handed the towel back to the woman and pulled on my T-shirt. Then she hugged me, as if we were sisters in our bedroom and I had told her something horrible. Me in my white cotton underwear, she in her boyfriend’s shirt. She said she’d thought she’d seen two women out there—had I gone in alone? I told her I had, which seemed to distress her. Her boyfriend watched, patiently, as if he had witnessed something he wasn’t supposed to but had no other choice. Then he came over to say goodbye. What sort of wretchedness they saw in me I didn’t want to consider. My hair was already beginning to dry in crazy, salty waves; a waterlogged Medusa in underwear, heavy indents from the goggles on my face.