The Clover House (5 page)

We come in above a series of little bays to the south of Athens and then fly over apartment buildings packed in tight, their gardens still lush despite the season. When the plane banks slightly, I catch a glimpse of the city, poured like milk in the basin between the mountains, and, down below, the glass-and-marble cube of the terminal. When the new airport opens next year on the other side of Mount Hymettos, this experience will pass into history, new aerial views altering the feel of arrival. This airport already looks old and almost foolish as
we descend. It seems far too small and vulnerable for its mission.

As the plane comes to a stop on the runway, several passengers applaud. The man in the seat beside me crosses himself.

“Excuse,” says a woman standing next to me in the aisle.

I make way for her as she twists and reaches up to pull her bag from the compartment. I help her bring the bag down. She has spoken to me in English, and I am bothered by this, though I know I have no right to be. A second later, the woman switches on her cellphone and begins to chatter in Greek to her husband. She tells him their new grandchild is a little pinched in the face now but is sure to fill out. As we passengers begin shuffling toward the exit, she turns to me again and says, in English, “Thank you.”

I emerge from the plane into the damp air of a cloudy afternoon and walk down the clanking steps of the mobile stairway. I follow the crowd as we walk across the roaring tarmac into the hubbub of the terminal. I smile, because nothing has changed in the five years since I was here last. There is no line, just a crowd massed before the window of the single passport-control officer; there is still the click and hiss of lighters as the newly freed smokers light up beneath the N
O
S
MOKING
signs, still the simmer of impatience as people jostle one another for the advantage of an elbow extended, a hip turned.

When I finally reach the window, the uniformed officer glances back and forth from me to my photograph. He must have an inkling that a petite woman named Calliope with dark, straight hair has Greek heritage. He gives me a little smile, and I return it and say my first words of Greek in Greece:
“Geia sas.”
To your health. It is the polite form of
geia sou
, the message I see on bumper stickers and menus across Boston. But there it shows up as
Yasou!
and it makes me wince. It conveys
no particular meaning, serving simply as a kitschy proclamation of Greekness.

I have no checked baggage, so I move quickly through the unmanned customs booth to the pay phones in a corner of the large main hall, where backpackers have rolled out their sleeping bags to rest. Stepping around the white-blond head of a young man with an Arab
kaffiyeh
wrapped around his neck, I find a working phone and make a call to Jonah’s cell.

“Hey. I’m here.”

“I checked online. I’m glad you called.”

The line hisses.

“I wasn’t sure you’d answer the phone,” I say.

“I wasn’t sure you’d call.”

Someone bumps my shoulder and the phone slips from my ear.

“Did you say something?” I ask.

“No.”

“Well, I should go. I have to catch the bus. I do love you, Jonah.”

There’s a pause.

“I love you too.”

I let out a long breath and head for a pair of frosted glass doors that lead out of the airport. The crowd is ten deep, all jockeying for position so they can spot their loved ones the instant they emerge. I start to push through, murmuring,
“Sygnomi,”
as I go. The word releases a flood of Greek all around me.

“
Pou pas, ré?
Where are you going?”

“Slow down.
Siga
. They won’t leave without you.”

They are including me in their joking—men, mostly—but they know I can’t possibly be from here. I am hurrying, refusing to be swallowed up in the happy chaos of the crowd. I belong
but not quite. It’s the belonging of the graduate student in the waiters’ break room—harder won but never complete.

“Geia sas,”
I say to the driver of the bright yellow Mercedes taxi by the sidewalk. I tell him I’m going to the bus station and then lean into the corner of the backseat and rest my head against the window. My head is beginning to feel heavy from lack of sleep.

I wake up when the taxi comes to a final stop. On the corner of two busy streets in a worn-out part of Athens is the station, little more than a large cement shed through which the buses pass in and out. I pay the driver from the stash of drachmas I changed in Boston and head over to a ticket booth. There is a three o’clock bus to Patras that will get me there at six, just as the siesta is ending. The station reeks of diesel fumes and oil, and there are dozens of people pushing toward the buses or the ticket booths in a mass of earth-toned coats and scarves. As in the airport, there is no line, just a crowd, so I nudge my way steadily forward.

“One for Patras,” I tell the man in the booth.

“Round trip or one-way?”

“Round trip,” I say, giving him the date of my return flight.

“Enjoy the
Karnavali
,” he says, as he bangs a stamp against some papers and hands me my ticket and some coins.

“I will.”

But I had no idea it was Carnival in Patras. Now I realize that we must be somewhere in that four-week period before the start of Lent. The Carnival in Patras is renowned through all of Greece and Europe; if my mother is to be believed, it rivals even Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I’ve never experienced it, knowing about it only from my mother’s stories. How as children, she, Nestor, Thalia, and Sophia threw candy and streamers from the balconies of their grand neoclassical home onto
the parading crowds below. How they lit firecrackers and tossed them into the groups of festivalgoers. How their parents worked for days helping to paint and build floats representing the tennis club or the symphony. It occurs to me that Jonah would love to see it. For his Cape Verdean clients, Carnival is how they remember home. It’s the one thing they fill with all their love for the place they are trying to leave behind.

I board the bus along with a group of roughly ten young men and women, smoking and joking with one another as they tussle for seats. As I take a seat toward the back, I notice that all of these people are dressed for the Carnival in some way. They wear flowing scarves, velvet, and ribbons, and the women’s makeup is dark and rich. One of the men, a little bit younger than me, has a stovepipe hat of purple velvet. His longish hair is dark, with trim sideburns framing his angled face.

He tumbles into the seat in front of me, pulling a henna-haired young woman in with him. They fall together, half standing, against the back of the seat, and the woman glances toward me, saying, “Sorry,” and then pressing her lips together into a tight smile. The man with the velvet hat leans over the seat, holding up a finger.

“Forgive us, for we are celebrating and we will not be silenced.”

“Shut up,
ré
,” the woman says. “She’s a foreigner.”

“Ah,” he says. Then, in accented English: “Sorry.”

I smile but don’t respond. I want to sleep, or at least to prepare myself for the coming encounter with my mother. I slouch down and try to prop my knees against the seat in front of me, but I am too short to make this work. I tuck my legs beneath me and curl in toward the window.

I close my eyes, but I can hear the couple in front of me talking with their friends in Greek across the aisle.

“Too bad she’s a foreigner,” Velvet Hat says.

“I told you. I’m meeting Daphne.”

“She’s better-looking than Daphne.”

“Fuck off,” says the friend, laughing.

“He’s right,” says the woman. “She is.”

“She’s got that sexy American thing going on,” says Velvet Hat. “All buttoned up, but you can tell she’s got a good body.”

“Probably wears a thong,” says the other friend approvingly.

At this point, I have to sit up.

“A black one,” I say. “Want to see?”

The four of them look at me in consternation.

“Shit!”

“You should have said something!”

“You’re not American?”

“I am.”

“But you speak Greek.”

“Yes.”

Velvet Hat is waiting, but I don’t want to explain. I imagine him without the hat and realize that he is impressively good-looking, in the straight-nosed, dark way that I never see among the round-featured Greek Americans of Boston.

“Glad we have that settled,” I say, and lean against the window.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to sleep.”

“You can’t sleep! It’s
Karnavali
.”

I turn to see Velvet Hat bobbing his head. The henna-haired woman and the others across the aisle laugh as the hat waves from side to side.

“You’re going, aren’t you?”

“Then xero,”
I say. I don’t know. I hear the American accent in my voice.

“What are you doing here, then?” he says. “You’ve come a long way to not go to
Karnavali
.”

Back home—and I catch myself at the thought of
back home
, as if I have been gone more than a handful of hours—Jonah and I would be laughing and joking like this group. On St. Patrick’s Day, the closest thing that Boston has to Carnival, we pull on silly hats and scarves and drift from bar to bar with Marcus, Ted, and all the others. I look at Velvet Hat and think of inventing something innocuous, then decide to tell him the truth.

I say evenly, “I am here to sort through the inheritance my uncle left me when he died.” I give him a little smile.

“Amán!”
he exclaims, then calls over his shoulder, “Shut up, you idiots. We have a mourner here! Or,” he says, looking at me again, “do you just need cheering up?”

Before I can answer, he starts to wave his head, and voices from the front rows shout and point at the hat.

“Wiggle it again, Stelios!”

“It’s drooping,” someone crows, and adds some new slang I can’t understand that sets the rest to renewed laughter.

“Stelios! Leave her alone,” says the woman. She smiles at me. “What’s your name?”

“Callie,” I say. “Calliope.”

“
Ela
, come, Callie.” The way she says the word, it sounds like its own Greek name:
Káli
. “You don’t have to listen to this moron who stole his girlfriend’s hat!” As she says this, she swipes the velvet hat from Stelios and puts it on. He grabs for her and they wrestle briefly, ending with a deep kiss. Stelios reaches under her sweater.

“Karnavali,”
he says to me, with an exaggerated leer.

“Stop that, you rude and crass boy,” the woman laughs. “You’re offending our American friend.”

Knock yourselves out
, I want to say, using Jonah’s phrase. But I don’t know the equivalent expression.

“It’s all right,” I say instead.
“Karnavali.”

I look out the window at the three pristine lanes of highway to the left of the bus and remember the pitted, narrow road that used to lead out of Athens when I was a child. We would drive it in a rented sedan, with my mother sailing around the turns on the edge of safety. I loved the feel of the hot sun on my arm and the wind beating my hair from my temples.

“Come on,” Stelios is saying to me, and I can’t understand why he won’t leave me alone when he has a willing and attractive girlfriend.

“Look,” he goes on, “we’re sorry we were rude before. Though, actually, it’s not really rude to call someone sexy.”

“Stelios, shut up,” the woman says, and smacks him on the chest. “Let us make it up to you,” she says to me. “You hungry?”

She turns back to her seat and I can hear her opening a packet of food. She peers around the side of the seat and holds out a cellophane-wrapped sleeve of rectangular biscuits to me. I recognize them instantly: Pti Ber biscuits by Papadopoulos, a staple of car rides with my aunts. Unlike everyone else in Greece, my aunts and my mother pronounced the name with the proper French accent,
“petit beurre,”
a tribute to their years of lessons.

“Want some?”

“Oh, I love these,” I say, taking the sleeve. And as I push three biscuits up with my thumb, I realize how familiar the action is to me—as familiar as the toasted-butter smell, the smooth, hard surface of the biscuits, then the moistened crumbs sticking to my palate. I smile up at her, and I can tell
she thinks I am just hungry. But it’s more than that. With surprise, I realize that I fit in here. No matter that I tried to cut Greece out of my life, along with my mother. The Greekness isn’t gone. Stelios and his girlfriend and their friends and I—we have a common bond, a shared culture.

I take two more biscuits and hand the sleeve back to the young woman, chiding myself for having stayed away from Greece for so long. Right, I catch myself: You think a relationship with your mother is as easy as a relationship with a biscuit.

I learn that Stelios’s girlfriend’s name is Anna and they are spending a long weekend in Patras, maybe longer if their friends have space. It is
Tsiknopempti
, Roasting Thursday, when, they tell me, everyone eats grilled meat and dances in the street. They are both graduate students on the dole, as is the rest of the group. Stelios studies history and Anna is a mathematician. They are both nearly thirty and have been dragging out their degrees for years, and neither one of them seems bothered by the fact that they are skipping some lectures. I watch them explain this to me, glancing at each other with laughing eyes, and I admire their irresponsibility.

I tell them what I do for work and where I live. And I tell them the simple facts of my reluctant trip.

“And …” Anna points at my left hand.

“No,” I say, blushing. “I’m not married.”

“But you wear them on the left in America, right?”

I always forget that Greeks wear their wedding rings on the right, as my parents would have done had they worn their rings at all. Whenever I asked my mother why they didn’t, she claimed the rings didn’t fit. I stopped asking once I understood the real reason.

“It’s an engagement ring,” I say. “I’m engaged.” My face goes immediately to full burning and I’m sure my distress is visible. But they don’t seem to notice.