When they left, I changed into a pair of jeans—an old, soft pair, warm from the sun, and a sweatshirt. My skin was covered with goose bumps, and the touch of the soft fabric on my skin was so good I could have cried. Though the air was warm, I was deeply chilled, shivering from a primal place. I curled up on the blanket and let the air rush from my lungs. Below my heavy, closed eyelids I could feel my pulse, keeping time.
The beach was silent now, the sea quiet, and I lay still, not wanting to disturb any of it, not wanting to turn it to stone.
I gathered my things as the last light faded from the sky. I was light-headed with hunger. I could go to one of the tavernas with the gorgeous views, but the thought of eating alone suddenly felt unbearable. I’d get something at the port. To hold me over I stopped instead at a little bakery, about to close, and bought some sesame cookies and orange juice, like I’d just given blood. Then I got into my car and ate three of the cookies, crumbs falling all over my jeans, the seat. I drank the container of juice all at once, some of it dribbling on my chin, which I wiped with my sleeve. I drove away.
•
Although my parents had died in Chicago, an accident in the snow, in my mind it’s always here, on this stretch of road. I don’t know why. The day they died my father had been driving, though probably because my mother was drunk. He hated driving, and my desire to learn at sixteen baffled him. But once I’d learned, he loved when I’d drive him around. When we’d attend gatherings together he’d tell his friends I had driven, as though he were telling them I’d taken him there in my helicopter, or flown in on a magic carpet.
I was grateful for the dark drive, the ability to see only ten feet ahead. No more than I needed, a need-to-know basis. Still, I kept my eyes sharp for a woman walking as if she’d come from the sea. The darkness was a relief. I didn’t want to be reminded of that spectacular landscape, the twists and turns and gorgeous sea views. At that moment I needed the anonymity of night driving, the near terror of turning a sharp, steep corner and feeling I might fly off the cliff. I needed to feel the dropping heft inside me as I veered straight into the black night sky, only my headlights to remind me of the surrounding darkness.
Wasn’t facing loss the same? Breathe in, breathe out. To see the entire landscape was just too much, the green hills in the distance, the setting sun over the glass sea, the vibrant supermoon. Grief was oceanic; you could get lost in it, as if swimming in deep water while not knowing which end was up. For a moment I experienced the intense sensation of someone next to me, but the passenger seat held only my bag. I thought of the professional mourners, those women hired to lament at funerals, to perform grief, and I finally understood the point. Grief never appeared the way we expected, and it snuck up in terrifying, surprising waves. Others needed to see it translated into something visceral and simple, something that could be read, understood. Because when we’re in its midst it cannot be translated at all.
In the small rooftop shed, I found the furniture I had dragged there a few summers ago, my father protesting that I’d hurt myself hauling it up there but then being delighted by the rooftop sitting area. I pulled out one of the two divans and a small wooden table. Years ago, Aris and I had slept here, beneath thin cotton blankets and the bright night sky. I woke in the middle of the night and he was standing at the ledge, looking out at the view; from there you could see the dark sea. And then I realized he was pissing out onto the narrow alley. I didn’t want to startle him so I just watched, amusedly, and when he turned to come back to bed he saw me sitting up and he shrugged, laughed.
I poured the last two shots from a bottle of whiskey into a glass, took a sip, and set it aside. Before I could change my mind, I emptied out my parents’ closets and drawers—there were not many things—into a separate bag, saving a soft oxford and a gray T-shirt of my father’s, and an elegant trench coat and two silk scarves of my mother’s, all of which she’d had since before my birth. I pulled my wild beach hair back in a scarf and put the oxford on over my hot skin. I tried on the jacket, slipped on my mother’s slippers. In every hiding space, the chest of blankets and sweaters, the linen closet, the bathroom cabinet, there were near-empty liquor bottles. I gathered them into a bag.
Now, the whiskey burned and I enjoyed it. Drink still in hand, I walked back to the dumpster. First I tossed the empty bottles, again satisfied to hear the crash of more glass breaking. Then I was about to toss in the old clothes but instead left them in the shopping bag, on the ground. Perhaps someone would find them. I knew I was about to face another salty wave of grief, and at least I knew what to expect. Its familiarity soothed me. It belonged to me, just the way that living in two worlds, two lives, was my way of being. I approached each return as I did the seasons, the change of weather leaving me momentarily bewildered as to what to wear. Each time I arrived in Greece it was as if I had rediscovered it again. Who would I now be in this place? I had never answered the old woman: To whom do you belong?
Two young backpackers walked by, looking lost, but the sight of me hurling things into a dumpster, dressed like a lunatic and holding a glass of whiskey, probably didn’t make me seem a person to ask for directions. They hurried past me, in the shamed way we deal with the insane—the man murmuring to himself on the bus, the crazy lady in the central square feeding the pigeons.
Of course I couldn’t not think of Aris, the way we’d emptied the entire brownstone that way, in a frenzy. Garbage bag by garbage bag: underwear drawers, socks, papers, and old bills that perhaps should have been kept, but I heaved those into the dumpster, too.
It may seem that because I took Aris’s news with such nonchalance that I was not hurt by it. I was. But I don’t construct a narrative of myself as a loyal, faithful girlfriend, unraveled by Aris’s sexual infidelity. It was more complicated than that: our relationship had never been conventional. It was that he’d moved on, completely present in this new life with Eva, and we had not even had a proper breakup, a proper goodbye. We never assumed sexual fidelity but we, at least I, assumed some sort of loyalty. Maybe I was naïve to actually think there was a difference. What I had taken for devotion was simply complacency, the most dangerous state of all.
No, I wasn’t naïve. But I wasn’t not naïve either. I could say this about almost anything, my life of betweenness. I was not reeling. A pregnancy, a life with someone who was not me, one that had begun months before I knew. This is what doubled me over. Aris had been living two parallel lives and now they had met. I, too, had been living two lives: my life in the States and my life here, but somehow my rootlessness had become its own sort of trap.
Back in the house, I felt relieved by the absence of things that did not belong to me. Two of Nefeli’s paintings hung over the couch, several long-faced women seated around a table. I called her yet again but she didn’t pick up.
No, I was still reeling. Had I not still been reeling from the breakup I would have understood Nefeli’s behavior to be direr than I had. That her odd behavior was not artistic tempestuousness but something more bruised, desperate. Even self-destructive.
The couple on the beach had thought they’d seen two women out there swimming, and I wondered who had been out there with me and what had happened to her. Maybe I was both in the water and on land, all at once. Maybe I had somehow finally really split myself in two: the woman I was then and the woman I was becoming, both of us out there carving through the waves. I sipped my drink and wondered how long it would be before my mother emerged from inside me, how long I could keep her hidden deep inside before she broke through my skin, triumphant.