Aegina by Emma Hyche

Author's Note: First off, I know this is quite rough, so bear with me. I think this story is stronger than my first, but it definitely has some problems (some of them probably due to the fact that I wrote it in a flu-medicated haze.) As Carson and Carrie know, I’ve been reading a lot of Alice Munro recently, and I think some of her themes and technique influenced this story. Like Munro this story involves an older female narrator dealing with intergenerational conflict and reflecting on her perceptions of herself. The link between my first story and this one is fairly tenuous, but it links through art, specifically manifestations of the female body as depicted in various forms of art, like film, painting, etc. I know I need to add at least a scene or two, because it feels incomplete to me the way it is. I wanted this story to have an “episodic” feel, where the scenes aren’t directly chronologically linked, but that may be too confusing. I’m not sure if the conflict is too interior to be engaging.

Aegina

Madeline’s stomach gave an uncomfortable twinge as the runway of LaGuardia disappeared under her. The plane, whining fiercely, soared upwards off the slate gray ground and into the air as drops of rain slid across the window. Howard gave a moan beside her, and in a rare gesture of exigency, grabbed for her hand. She held it calmly, giving a little squeeze of his fingers when the plane tilted side to side as it cleared the lowest layer of clouds coating the city. Howard didn’t need things from her often, so it was nice to feel as if she was the one keeping him together. 

When the captain’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker and announced their cruising altitude, Howard immediately pulled his laptop from the black bag he had tucked under the seat in front of him, opened it, and began drafting an email. Madeline settled back in her seat and wondered how Amy would greet them when they arrived at the airport in Athens. Would it be a polite smile, a light hug (the kind in which the arms merely lay against the back, limp as fish?) Or would it be a grin, a bouquet of some nice flowers (tulips, Madeline’s favorite), and a warm kiss on the cheek? Madeline hoped for the latter, but expected the former. Amy had always treated her independence from the people who raised her as an established fact, one that everyone would be more comfortable if they just got used to. From the time she had left for Deerfield, and even before, she seemed more of a long-term guest in their house in Westchester than their daughter. Besides, Madeline didn’t know if tulips grew in Greece anyway, or if Amy would have remembered they were her favorite. 

Howard closed his laptop and reached to the side of the airplane chair to lower the incline of the chair a few inches. Settling back, he drew the paper-thin airport blanket over his chest.

“What are you going to do for the next nine and a half hours?” he asked, his eyes closed as he moved around to find the most comfortable position in the narrow seat. 

Madeline looked through the carry-on bag in her lap. “Oh I don’t know, probably look through some magazines, maybe read a little. I still have some exams to grade as well.”

He laughed softly at her. “Those magazines. I think the only time I ever see you read them is when you fly. Whenever you get back from a conference they’re stuffed in your suitcase like contraband.”

“It’s my travel indulgence,” she protested as the flight attendants began to make their way down the aisle of the plane, asking for drink orders and running over toes. “I know they’re tabloid trash, but they make the time go faster.”

He only shook his head, smiling, and settled in for a nap. Madeline, feeling ashamed of herself, drew out a book on Greek myths she had borrowed from the university library, and tried to read. So many rapes, so many transformations from human to animal to object, it was hard to keep track of names and fates. When Howard’s breathing grew slow and regular, she stowed the book away in her bag and drew out a glossy tabloid magazine instead. Splattered across the front cover was the tanned body of a blonde woman whose name Madeline didn’t even know. She was walking on a beach, her head turned back away from the camera as if someone was calling her name. her skin was a creamy shade of pink and brown that reminded Madeline of the color of coffee when ribbons of cream blossomed across the surface. Her hair was blowing in the frozen wind of the snapshot, but still looked perfectly arranged. According to the glaring typeface stamped next to her muscular thighs, her marriage was in shambles. Madeline felt the pressure of the airplane seat lap band across her waist, and the roll of stomach fat that drooped over the edge of it.

She flipped through a few pages. Another woman celebrity, this time a brunette, had gotten married in a bell shaped wedding gown all frothy with hand-stitched white lace in Big Sur. Madeline thought of her own wedding, in the White Plains City Hall, where she had worn a gown with dripping sleeves that was considered attractively bohemian at the time. She had no idea what Amy would be married in. Like her, it would most likely be unique and striking, uncompromising in its demand for attention.

When they had lived together, Amy and Howard nagged almost incessantly at each other, her New Left ruffling the feathers of his Old. Howard had once been radical, revolutionary even, before the influence of time mellowed him to a mere malcontent who grumbled at the influence of religion in public schools, or the hypocrisy of local politicians. He was the economist to her art historian, the tall and handsome to her features which sought first and foremost to please. Now he snored, and the tilt of his head downward pushed out a double chin. 

When they had lived in the same house, in every conversation at breakfast over coffee, toast, and eggs there was the shadow of past yelling matches over Amy’s decision to join the Young Socialists of America, or Howard’s urging Madeline not to join the teacher’s union at the community college where she taught, and Amy fighting equally passionately to change her mind. Amy was strong-willed, and if Madeline was honest with herself, she was both surprised and happy there was now a man who could stand up to her, though Madeline would be meeting him for the first time in nine hours. 

As the flight attendant passed, Madeline ordered herself a whiskey and Coke, grateful for Howard’s soft snores beside her. He would have said those drinks were crap, a waste of money for a few drops of watered-down liquor. She just wanted to ease her nerves, though the introductions were hours away. She had never been very good at first impressions. 

The plane soared over the waters of the North Atlantic, dark and cold thousands of feet below. Howard was sixty two, Madeline two years his junior. They had been married since they were twenty seven and twenty four, respectively, though they hadn’t had Amy until five years later. They had not slept together in three years. 

“There she is!” Madeline called back to Harold. She had spotted Amy waving to her behind the plastic barrier in the arrivals terminal of Athens International. Beside her stood a tall olive-skinned man, handsome, carrying a bottle of wine and also waving. 

“That must be Marcos,” she said to Harold as they crossed the final gate and walked to meet them.

“Of course, who else would it be?” he said. 

“Hello, hello!” Amy called, reaching for Madeline’s hand and kissing her cheek. “Was the flight okay? It feels so terribly long, doesn’t it? Much longer than it should. Whenever I have to go back and forth from Boston I always keep staring at that little plane icon thinking, ‘Move faster!’”. 

She was chatty and genial, probably the best mood they could have caught her mercurial mind in. She seized the handle of Madeline’s rolling luggage from her hand and was about to lead them out the door when she suddenly stopped and exclaimed, “Oh, I almost forgot! Madeline, Howard, this is my fiancé, well, soon to be husband, Marcos.” 

The tall man smiled at Amy and extends his hand to them, saying “It is a pleasure to meet both of you.” His voice was richly accented and deep. 

“Kalime’ra,” Madeline fumbled out. It was the one Greek phrase she’d been able to perfect on the plane ride. 

Marcos smiled kindly at her attempt. “Kalime’ra. Good morning to you.”

After the introductions, Amy took control, corralling them through the maze of tourists and luggage carts to the parking lot, where Marcos’s small car waited. Howard and Marcos stood by the open trunk, testing configurations that would fit both Howard and Madeline’s suitcases into the small space. Madeline and Amy sat in the car. What Madeline had thought was wine in Marcos’s hands had turned out to be olive oil from a local grove, and she cradled the bottle awkwardly with her elbow while putting on her seatbelt. Amy turned the radio on, and the ensuing stream of words, though indecipherable to Madeline, was melodic and beautiful. 

“Can you speak the language well yet?” she asked Amy, who was adjusting the volume dial. 

“Not perfectly, but enough to get around and order wine. You know, the necessities,” Amy laughed. A good mood. She was much tanner than when Madeline had last seen her, at the graduation ceremony for her masters program. The hair she’d once kept tightly wound into a knot at the top of her head hung loose and curly around her shoulders, where freckles appeared beside the sleeves of her blouse. Her limbs were long and golden; she had inherited Howard’s height and dieted the tendency to pudginess she’d inherited from Madeline down to thinness with all the concentration of an ascetic. 

Madeline was very conscious of the garishness of the outfit she had chosen, the lime green top glaring against the white capri pants she had thought would be distinct and stylish. She was sweating in the heat of the car, and her shirt was sticking to her. Sitting here in the car with her, Madeline felt like she was a friend or a mentor rather than a mother. The trajectory of her daughter’s future had long ago careened into left field where Madeline could not see it, and where she knew she wouldn’t be asked to follow. Amy hummed along to the music on the radio while the car shook from the dropping of suitcases and Howard cursed. 

Amy had met her fiancé at the University of Athens, where she was getting her doctorate in philosophy. Madeline and Howard hadn’t known about the relationship until the engagement, and hadn’t known the date of the wedding until Amy had emailed them a suggested itinerary. Reckless, determined Amy. Amy Schumer, her daughter, doctor of philosophy. Only Amy Schumer for a few more days, until she became Amy Efthimiades. Madeline tried the name out loud, and the syllables felt clunky against her teeth. Amy corrected her pronunciation, and they fell silent as Marcos stepped behind the wheel, and Howard settled heavily beside her. 

The little ship pitched and bobbed. Waves sloshed against the windows and Madeline felt like the cat’s eye inside of a marble dropped into the Mediterranean with a plunk. 

“Are you sure this isn’t a submarine?” Howard groaned beside her, his head in his hands. He had what he called “a sensitive disposition,” which Madeline privately called “being a baby about things.” The motion sickness medication he had taken before the ship had unmoored from the dock in Athens was apparently ineffective against the rock of the waves. The boat trip to the island of Aegina was very short, as Marcos’s home was less than thirty miles off the coast. Amy and Marcos sat a few rows behind them. In typical Amy fashion, they had arrived late, being the last people to step from the dock onto the rocking deck of the boat, so they had to sit wherever they could find empty seats. Madeline looked back at them: Amy had laid her head on Marcos’s shoulder, and he looked out the window. She turned back as Howard groaned and told her to stop moving around, it was making him sick. 

Madeline stared out the little pebble glass windows as the blue green water splashed the glass. She felt sweaty and wrung out, ready to be rid of the clothes in which she’d traveled from New York. Sometimes out the window she could sees schools of little silver fishes, hovering like a cloud of flies just under the surface of the water. They moved completely in unison, darting this way and that as if their tiny brains were connected, like they were different incarnations of the same mind. Then the water would splash up against the window and Madeline would lose sight of them. Howard vomited quietly into a paper bag beside her. 

“Do I look okay?” she asked him when he had stopped.

“What do you mean?” he asked with a groan.

She smoothed her hair, felt the little half-moon stains of sweat under the arms. “I don’t want to look sweaty when we meet Marcos’s parents.”

Howard tore his eyes from the rocking floor of the boat and looked at her. There was nothing in his eyes. “You look fine.”

Madeline knew she did not. She had never wanted to consider herself vain, but as the years had passed she had spent more and more time in front of the mirror in the mornings, pinching at the folds of skin which had seemingly miraculously appeared where once it had been taut and smooth. That’s just how it is, Miriam, the Women’s Studies Professor at White Plains Community College. Bodies change over time, there’s nothing we can do about it. Madeline suspected Miriam would not have cared anyway, with the way she kept her gray hair cropped short and the clunky sandals she wore year round. The women on the boat wore long loose skirts and shirts that hugged their frames, leaving their arms languid and bare. They wore their hair long, or braided in shining cords. Madeline felt the sheen of sweat on her upper lip and tugged at the hem of her shirt until Howard swatted her hand from her waist. 

“You look fine, I promise.”

When the little ferry boat finally landed at the Aegina dock, Madeline stepped onto the sudden solidity of dry land and knew immediately why the colors of the Greek flag were what they were. The water was a deep blue green, spotted with black from the barnacles clinging to the hulls of white sailboats, and silver with fishes that darted under the dock, that smelled of salt and wet wood. The sky was searingly blue, so saturated in color it seemed like the excess could be wrung by hand and drop like rain. By the docks there were carts with men selling toys to the few tourists who came to Aegina instead of to the bigger islands like Santorini.  They sold single roses, bracelets with the evil eye embedded on them, wide and unblinking. Stray dogs lounged on the warm wood of the dock, lifting their heads as people passed in hopes for scraps of food. 

Amy hurried them along to Marcos’s car, driven on a ramp from the depths of the ferry onto a narrow gangplank, and then onto the road by the dock. They crowded in and set off for Marcos’s childhood home which was to be the location of his wedding. Though Howard kept his head determinedly straight forward as the car mounted the circling hills, Madeline looked out and drank up every sight she could crane her neck to see: the purple-spined sea urchins sutured to the side of cliffs, the pistachio and olive groves for which the island was famous, and the locals whizzing around corners beside them at unsafe speeds on the back of small motorcycles. Men and women lounged on the beaches, some of the women with their bathing suit tops off, their skin browning in the sun. Madeline was too intrigued to be embarrassed. She imagined herself laying on the beach like those women, the indignity of it. She imagined her flesh bulging and rough like a Schiele painting, earnest and grotesque. She dabbed at her shiny nose in the compact from her purse. 

“You will stay at the home of my parents,” Marcos said, turning back to smile at them while driving in a way that made Madeline nervous.

She protested, “Oh no, we could never impose like that. We will find a hotel.”

“No sense,” he said, then paused. “Amy, is that right? No sense?”

“Nonsense,” she corrected gently, touching his hand on the steering wheel. “It’s nonsense.” 

After a few minutes, the car pulled up to a house set in the hills overlooking a small cove. Whitewashed stone, it looked as if it had sprung organically from the hillside, as if it had always existed since the time the island’s namesake nymph was kidnapped by Zeus in the form of an eagle and deposited her on an island in the Saronic Gulf. (Madeline had done her research dutifully.) A small flight of stairs led down to a small crescent moon of beach where the waves lapped like a heartbeat on the sand. 

“It’s so beautiful,” she said to Marcos.

“Many thanks,” he said, putting the car in park in the driveway. “It was a beautiful place to grow up.” 

Madeline thought with a pang of Amy’s childhood home, the duplex in the cul-de-sac Howard had put the down payment on with his first paycheck from the university where he got a job as a part-time lecturer. She was still in graduate school then, spending nights rocking the baby and studying textbooks at the same time, balancing books above the changing table, memorizing dates, techniques. Madonna and child. She the overworked Madonna, dark rings like blueberry stains under her eyes, clothed in blue for royalty. The queen of theses of Schiele and Byzantine mosaicism. She was skinny then, she remembered. She must have those clothes somewhere. 

A man and woman walked out of the house as they drove up. Marcos had inherited his good looks from his father, the broad shoulders and deep set eyes. His mother was small, her olive skin only faintly wrinkled like a drawstring at the corners of her eyes. Her clothes were simple and functional, and her rich dark hair was bound loosely at the nape of her neck. Her neck was long and graceful like a Classical bust. 

“Madeline, Howard, I would like for you to meet my parents,” Marcos guided her to the front door with the hand on the small of her back. “This is Agatha and Niko.” 

Agatha extended her hand to Madeline and it was soft and firm. “It is so nice to know you,” she said, hazel eyes looking into blue. 

Madeline felt the sweat sticking her shirt to her back, the stain on her Capri pants where she had spilled Diet Coke, and the moon dust of powder spread across on her nose. 

“It’s wonderful to meet you as well.”

Amy was kept busy putting up the decorations for the wedding for most of the next day, but managed to take a few hours for dinner with her parents and Marcos’s family. The kitchen table wasn’t meant to accommodate as many as they attempted to fit, but they managed. The table fairly groaned under the weight of all the dishes Agatha placed on it. Salads of cucumber, tomato, onion, and white cubes of feta, spanakopita, all the dishes Madeline had seen in the cookbook she’d bought from the Barnes and Noble when Amy had called her with the news of her engagement breathless in her voice. She had resolved to start eating this way when she returned to the States; in the magazine on the plane Gwyneth Paltrow had talked about the benefits of a Mediterranean diet, and she had taken down her recipe for moussaka.  

After they had finished eating, Howard talked with Agatha and Niko. He had always had a way that recommended himself to speaking to those he didn’t know well, some knack Madeline had always seemed to lack. That was the way it had been in the beginning too, at college, when he had approached her and she’d been surprised he even knew her name. They had fit together well that way, like a balancing act. But balances tend to shift over years, and scales tip. And she herself withdrew from the tipping point, reaching back into herself to where the fulness of her being still remained, living there, making it her home. 

She could hear Howard speaking to Niko with a lowering of his voice, “Might I ask, will the wedding be officiated by a priest?”

Niko said, “There will be a priest, yes, yes.”

Madeline turned her face from Howard’s rumble of discontent. She knew what would come next, the inevitable awkwardness of his blustering, the panic that would set in their eyes while they listened politely, the spiel that had gotten them politely not invited to so many gatherings of faculty at Howard’s university or neighborhood get togethers. There were a few moments in which she could cut him off, divert the flow of the conversation into less dangerous waters. Instead, she excused herself. 

After the wedding, the couple, Madeline, Marcos’s parents, and the few friends Amy and Marcos knew from school that had travelled from Athens for the wedding retired to the white tents Marcos and Niko had pitched near the house. The sun had set and the tent was lit softly with strands of little yellow lights. Amy and Marcos were dancing to Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Spring” and the light was playing across her face and she was smiling. Marcos was looking at her with a look Madeline had seen in Howard years ago, when her body was small and bony and her stomach and hands were empty of a baby. Amy’s dress was light and flowing, laying over the curves of her body like the trace of a hand. Madeline was drunk on wine from the vineyards on the other side of the island, almost drunk enough not to feel the pang in her chest when she watched her daughter dance. Didn’t Brigitte Bardot get married in Greece? Madeline saw her tiny waist, her cigarette pants and hair ribbons rise in front of her like a vision, then dissolve. Howard had gone back to the room Agatha and Marcos had given them to stay in, complaining that the wine gave him a headache. She had watched him go with no feeling, either of relief or regret.

The old things were coming back into style. Amy hadn’t taken the Nicks and Buckingham record she’d tried to send with her when she went off to college but now she was swaying and mouthing “I would be your only dream” to Marcos while Madeline drank a glass of wine whose number she had lost count of. She had sung that record when she was up in her elbows in soapy water washing dishes in that duplex, Amy twirling and singing words she didn’t know. 

She kicked off her shoes and winced her way down the stone stairs to the crescent moon beach with a crescent moon above. This is something like Kate Chopin, she thought. Or was it Chopin? Virginia Woolf? Howard would know. Something about walking into the waves, and a parrot. The wine was a pleasant warmth emanating from her head and limbs as they moved through the air. Somewhere along the road a Vespa hummed. 

As she waded into the first few inches of the sea, smalls shells and coral tore at the bottom of her feet, and the saltwater made the tiny cuts sting. The sea was as warm as blood. The waves were saying over and over again kalini’chta, kalini’chta, kalini’chta. The fullness of her skirt floated around her legs like a jellyfish, undulating in the tiny currents. She was weightless and untethered by any thing to the ground. Madeline floated on the surface of the waves and stared up at the stars, which were vast and cryptic and innumerable to the edge of the horizon.