Authors: Jessica Bell
At night I would ask Papou to play cards with me on the wobbly kitchen table covered in clay-brown, checkered laminate which matched the wrinkly brown-orange lino floor. We’d sit by the wood-fire oven to use it as a side-table for our flat orangeades.
The flicking neon light of the mosquito zapper would accentuate Yiayia’s oily fingerprints all over the once-white cupboards and plastic yellow-stained handles. The sink, which was used as a place to hold the bucket of water collected from the well to do the dishes, stunk like stale grease. Yiayia would use the same water several times before transferring the bucket to the outhouse to flush the toilet. As a result, all cutlery and glassware had a slight fatty glaze to them and would sustain the exact pattern of one’s fingerprint.
Papou would show me his clever shuffling tricks with his sun-spotted trembling hands—one of which had a thumb missing—and I would smile and nod at his mumbling despite hardly ever understanding what he said. My father later said he often told stories about the earthquake that initiated the mass migration to Melbourne in 1953.
However, I do recall
one
instant when I’d understood. It was one afternoon before going for siesta that Papou and I sat together in the lounge room for a while. I was flipping through old photo albums as he picked up the newspaper and sat in his faded maroon armchair facing the window. I glanced up for a second to see him looking from side to side and then patting his shirt pockets.
“They’re on your head,” I said.
His eyes lit up as he removed his reading glasses from his balding and scratched head (from consistently knocking it against the wine cellar entrance), put them on his nose, and said as if he had been touched by an angel, “How you know? How you know what I look for? My God, my God, you have
gift
!”
At six years old, of course, I believed him, until my mother explained I had just used common sense. At least she’d made me feel intelligent instead of crushing the novelty of possibly being psychic.
In the evenings, Yiayia would fix herself a plate of bread, feta cheese, tomato, olive oil, and oregano. She would eat it with her fingers without having much control over the oil dripping down her chin and wrists—then she’d pinch my cheeks.
“
Ella tho
Melody,
ella na fas
some bread tzeez ’n’ domata, is goud for yoo, ya knah! No
kreas
today,
eenai poli
tough today ya knah,” Yiayia would squeal in her high-pitched half Greek–half Australian accent.
She’d fumble around the kitchen with a ripped straw hat, that was maybe as old as I was at the time, greasy ’eighties-style sunglasses (even at night), a faded floral dress, and an overused apron for pre-cooking the following day’s meals. When the food was ready to “look a’er itself,” she would sit out on the rear balcony in the moonlight, drinking “mountain tea” and dipping in teddy bear biscuits she’d had sent over from Australia.
Yiayia was eccentric to say the least. I’ll never forget the day my father returned from spear-fishing one morning and had brought home a massive live sea creature as big as his head, thinking it was just an empty shell.
We all gathered on the verandah to take a closer look at the twenty-centimeter thick monster that slowly emerged from its shell like a slimy skinless muscular arm. It was bright red with purple veins and a slippery transparent membrane. But Yiayia suspected it was a local delicacy and promptly prepared it for the grill. She put it in the washing machine. To tenderize. The whole house stank of dead fish for weeks, and thank God the washing machine was never used for its intended purpose. Most of the time it just sat, unplugged, by the toilet as an “asset.”
The shell still sits on Mum’s mantelpiece—as rare and precious as ammolite. Although multicolored on the outside—brown, yellow, green, blue, and red—the inside is lined with what looks like jet black glass. Any local that visits and sees the shell asks about it in astonishment and with great interest. It turns out the creature was deadly. If its poison hadn’t been sucked out during its two-hour cycle in the washing machine, Papou and Yiayia would have been poisoned to death!
The first thing you see as you walk through my parents’ front door, except for the magnificent shell, is my mother’s grand piano.
It shines like a freshly glazed tart. And whispers haunting melodies to me as if it were once a living soul; the mother of musically-triggered melancholy.
Last weekend, the resonance of my entering sandaled feet had hardly bounced off the walls when Mum said, “Why don’t you sit down and see if you can remember to play it?” Her eyes blazed with a need to swank her own musical skills and show me up. I tamed an irrational urge to scratch its glossy dark chocolate body with my wedding ring by shaking my dusty cardigan too close to the keys instead. Mum whipped out a duster from inside the piano stool and brushed it away—seething clenched teeth hidden by a civil smile.
My father, James, took our bags and challenged Tessa to a race in the nearby field of goats. Their bells jingled like windchimes weighed down with anchors in muddy water. One second the house was full of shrieks of joy and the next Tessa disappeared behind a slammed front door.
“Don’t slam the door!” Mum banged on the window, creating an echo highlighted by an abundance of country air. Dad, immersed in oblivious child-imitation giggles, ran after Tessa, shriveling up his body as if trying to shrink to her size.
“Well?” Mum nudged me toward the stool and tapped her left foot. The sound wavered between an annoying dripping tap and approaching suspenseful footsteps.
“Um …” My voice dithered like vocal heat waves, reluctant to make a fool of myself. “Maybe a bit later? Have you got any warm water? I feel really dehydrated.” I nursed my head and limped to the couch, legs heavy with unbalanced fatigue.
You can’t drink the water on the island, so everybody stocks up on plastic bottled ‘consumerist crap’ (in my opinion) labeled with try-hard environmental campaigns that Greek society generally ignores. I don’t blame them. If they can think of a way to make recycled paper bottles, I’m all in to support their efforts.
Mum usually remembers that I don’t like my water cold and leaves a few bottles out of the fridge for me, but it seems Dad saw them lying around and put them back in, probably thinking he was doing the right thing, and hoping to avoid being blamed. So I forgive him. I understand.
“Jesus! Bloody James put them in the fridge. I can’t count on him to do
any
thing.” Mum felt every bottle of water, wrapping her long soft and petite piano-playing fingers around the crisp crackling plastic bottles of false environment-saving hope to see which one was the least cold.
“It’s okay, Mum, don’t worry, just run it under the hot tap a bit,” I said, lifting my feet up onto the hospital-white couch and puffing a crimson no-frills cushion behind my head.
“Got any good pirated movies from the black dudes lately?” I asked, grabbing the pile of movies from the edge of the locally made and too-high coffee table. I sifted through them on my stomach, the sharp plastic corners of the covers digging into my flabby pale skin.
“No, not really,” she said, throwing me the bottle of water, and then wiping away the splashes around the sink with her beloved orange microfiber cloth. “They’re not coming round this end of the island much anymore.”
Thank goodness for the remnants of high-school tennis reflexes, otherwise I’d have spent the entire weekend nursing a bruised forehead.
“They probably got sick of everybody turning them down. Everybody treats ’em like shit.” The microfiber cloth made a thud, like a bare foot stamping on flat soil, as Mum threw it into the sink on ‘shit.’ “Except for James—he spends at
least
an hour looking through bundles and bundles of the bloody things, and then gives ’em about
fifty
Euros for
twenty
Euros’ worth of movies.”
Mum shuffled a few things around on the kitchen counter, opened and closed a few cupboards, muttered “Jesus Christ” under her breath, opened and closed a few more cupboards, then finally pulled out a packet of cherry liquors. “I keep forgetting James is a saint—or so everybody keeps telling me. I wish I could
see
the
saint
,” she continued, shuffling to my side, then flicked her head left, right, over her shoulder and up at the ceiling. “Nope.
No
saint in my house—unless I’m mistaken, and a saint is someone who never puts things back where they belong, requires someone to pick up their shitty toilet papers off the bathroom floor because he always misses the bin, and who needs to be told to breathe in and out just in case they forget. Then yes, I
do
have a saint in my house.”
With an acerbic smile she ripped open the packet of chocolates like a scavenging monkey and offered me one with a sigh, holding the open packet toward me like a bag of potato chips.
“Mind if I have a sleep?” I asked, taking a chocolate from the bag.
“Already? You just got here.” Mum puffed up the cushions around me on the couch.
“I’m really tired, Mum. You know what it’s like traveling with Tessa. She wants me to tour her around the ferry until she’s seen every nook and cranny a kazillion times.”
“How about I make you a coffee?” she asked, lifting my legs and sitting on the couch to rub my feet.
“Agwgh,” I groaned, letting my head drop backwards like a wet towel. I closed my eyes and began to drift off, completely aware of Mum’s manipulation, yet totally ignoring it. We could talk about holiday packages and how the island is full of small-town patriarchal pompous hypocrites, or in other words, Man, after a refreshing nap.
I let my body sink into the couch like a hollow branch in quicksand.
But I was startled awake about half an hour later when Dad and Tessa came storming in from habituating with the goats.
“Last one to the music room loses!” Dad cried, almost bursting a blood vessel in his face. He ran on the spot, the way they do in cartoons when they’re trying to run but can’t seem to get anywhere. Tessa passed and made it to the music room first.
“You lostht! You lostht!” I glared at her for making fun of her grandpa’s lisp. But she just shrugged at me as if to say, “It was harmless.”
“Grandpa lost! Grandpa lost, Mummy!” Tessa pounced at me, and started to jump up and down on the couch as if it were a trampoline. I half expected Mum to bring out the ‘Betty Boo Hoo’ (Alex’s phrase), but to my surprise, instead of getting upset, she grabbed her camera and snapped a few shots.
“Okay, okay, come on, enough, someone’s going to break my ribs.” I coughed, bringing my knees to my chest to protect myself.
“Right! Who’s up for some mushroom and
spinahchi
lasagna?” Mum blurted out lieutenant-style, as if we had to fit a week’s worth of events into the time frame of a single evening. She put her camera into a small chest decorated with metallic elephants (more street-seller’s paraphernalia), by the TV.
“You cooked?” I asked, furrowing my brow; the taste of the unpredictable stung my tongue like the end of a magnet.
“Yeah. You know I
can
. I’m just usually
really
busy every time you come over. But this weekend I’m all yours. No tuna pasta this time. Ya hungry?” She rubbed Tessa’s belly with a wink.
We all cried out “yeah,” even Dad, who apparently had no idea Mum had cooked either by the look of his deracinated smile. Nor did I blame him. Something wasn’t quite right.
“James, set the table,” Mum ordered, her tone switching from bouncy biscuit baker to authoritarian chef.
“Okay,” he said, as if someone had shoved a whisk down his throat and got it caught in his vocal cords. He reached for a set of placemats in a drawer, eyebrows raised, lips pursed, and something like a fleck of tissue hanging from his nose hair.
“No! Not those ones, you
idiot
. We never use those! The
real
ones!” Mum barked as she cut up the lasagna and then burned her wrist on the edge of the tray. “Ouch! Shit! Fuck!”
Bang
went the spatula in the sink after it’s quick two-meter journey through the air.
Dad looked at me as if I should
know
where the “real” placemats were and could signal him in the right direction. But I had no idea and shook my head in silence. I stroked Tessa’s hair as she watched with amused intrigue.
Mum caught sight of the fleck of tissue hanging from Dad’s nose and squeezed her own nose with a “tsk” as cue for him to brush it off. Dad, seeming to take his uncoordinated tendencies into account, cupped his knobbly-knuckled hand, speckled with tiny tufts of wiry sprouting black hair, over his whole face, and loosened the fleck of tissue with one swift downward swipe.
“They’re in
there
! Next to the … the
things
!” Mum pointed in the general direction of the drawers with such a hard flick I was amazed she didn’t dislocate her elbow.
“Where? We have fifteen drawers.”
“Oh look, you’ve learned how to count,” Mum snapped putting her hands on her hips. “They’re in
this
drawer.” She pointed again, without actually indicating
the
drawer the
real
placemats were in or what things they were next to. Dad opened and closed all the drawers and inspected their contents, but to no avail. Tessa giggled. She loves her grandparents’ bickering. Especially the way Dad makes faces every time Mum talks. Tessa started imitating him one day, in reaction to one of Mum’s obsessive fits. Mum then scolded Dad for subjecting their granddaughter to bad habits. She’d hit him with a wooden spoon.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mum muttered and accidentally dropped her oven mitt on the floor. Dad picked it up and looked at her as if to say,
see I’m not the only one who drops things
, and Mum snapped back, “They’re in this drawer, you dipshit. They were staring you right in the bloody face. An’ I drop things by
accident
—you drop things because you can’t coordinate using two hands at once. For Christ’s sa—”