Like water, language flows with its own convention. Words shift and change shape depending on the container, on the cultural barometer, the source of light, bend of ear. An utterance might be rigid as ice, impenetrable and bafflingly cold. A phrase equally inscrutable for its ephemeralness, mysterious as steam, foggy and evanescent. No sharp-edged land can hold back the wrath of a storm, no rock the insistence of a river’s polish.
 
So, too, words flung in biting inflection or soothing tone can wear down, win over, spark wonder, worry, want, well-being, wrath.
 
And like water, like words: women.
 
Chicks, dolls, broads. The fairer sex, the weaker vessel, a damsel in distress. Cleaning ladies, housewives, gentlewomen, maids. The chairwoman, the actress, the prostitute. The sister, a daughter, niece, mother. A maiden, the virgin, mistress, whore. The spinster, the crone. The bitch, the ditz, the bombshell, the jail bait, the shrew. She’s a wild child, tomboy, spitfire, butch, battle-ax, ball and chain, ball buster, cock tease. Smile, you young thing, old hag, waif, wench, witch. Tell us your stories, cougar, hell cat, minx.
 
“Water is something you cannot hold,” writes Anne Carson in her collection Plainwater. Still, we try: filling trays for ice cubes, glasses for guests, tubs to bathe our families.
 
Corsets, girdles, Spanx, cabbage soup, SlimFast, Master Cleanse. We can be held, but not contained. We are the egg and the nest and the flock flown south. As lakes flow into rivers, rivers into seas, we morph, move, dance, leak. We flow.
 
Welcome to Tidal Journal. We are a journal ruled by the words of womxn, whose bodies of water are ruled by the moon, whose muscles flex with strength and softness.
 
Welcome to Tidal Journal. We are a journal whose very title is the tidal pull and push of pleasure and pain, of stillness and flow, of process and becoming.
 
Let the tide pull you in.
 

Arielle Silver is founding editor of Tidal, former editor of Lunch Ticket, and contributor to Matador Review, Brevity, Under the Gum Tree, Gulf Stream, Jet Fuel Review, Lilith Magazine, among others. She teaches at Antioch University Los Angeles, where she also writes for the alumni magazine. In addition, she is a performing singer/songwriter and composer, whose music has been licensed internationally for film and TV. With her partner, she leads retreats and workshops on yoga, creativity, and writing in California and beyond. www.ariellesilver.com

by Judith Huge

June 7, 2019
Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Welcome to Tidal, the new literary journal of the International Women’s Writing Guild, an organization that has for 44 years empowered women writers through workshops, community, and now publication. Here you will find work that has won honors in our annual writers’ contests, work by members, perhaps even work of your own.

Out here where I live on Cape Cod, the tides become part of your own pulse. For centuries the tides have brought in inspiration to writers and carried out messages in bottles. Today, Tidal is here to recognize the incoming work of outstanding women writers, and to provide the potential to carry the work beyond those writers' own desks and safe harbors out into a world that needs these voices amid the storms.
See Tidal as your own tide: Read it in your quiet hours, contribute to it as it inspires and shapes words from your own hands, share it with others who love words and stories as you do.

As Board Chair of the International Women’s Writing Guild, I invite you to embrace Tidal and the Guild’s mission to bring the words of women into ever-more-distant seas.

Anna St. Sylvan lives on an organic farm with a herd of cows, a flock of sheep, four horses, and one red mule. She holds an MFA in writing from the University of Montana. When weeding, she thinks about courage, power, the effects of trauma, and ending oppression. When not weeding, she is at work on a book-length memoir. 
 

My neighbor says, “It’s a shame my wife doesn’t like you.”

A small shadow passes over the morning; fleeting, like a bird that glides overhead and momentarily blocks out the sun.

I wonder why he said that?

The last time I had seen his wife, she had offered me muffins and had shown me pictures of their grandchildren. The polite distance between us had seemed natural, given the significant difference in our ages.

I had wondered, when my neighbor had appeared at the front door of the house this morning, why his wife had not come with him. Now, it seems, I have my answer.  

When I come up to our summerhouse, I usually bring my family. My children roam the yard like tigers while my husband watches nervously from the hill with his stick in hand; alert for the coyotes he is certain live just beyond the grass.

This time I came up to the house alone, and so did my neighbor.

I recall the way his hand had lingered when he had hugged me hello. Just a little too long. Just a little too low.

I make us tea and turn my eyes from the kettle to look at him sideways. My neighbor sits at the table with his hands folded politely atop its Formica surface, and observes me. His face is open and friendly; it is as if we are sharing a happy childhood memory.

I smile pleasantly and select two mismatched teacups from my stack. I admonish myself for my suspicious thoughts. He is a nice old man, my neighbor; the one who came to our rescue when the shingles blew off the roof and there were not enough pots to catch the leaks. .
I pour the tea and ask him what he means about his wife.

He raises his eyebrows in that way I have always found endearing, and speaks to me in the lyrical accent of the old-timers. He tells me it’s nothing specific. Just a few comments she made after I left last summer, and the fact that my email address went missing from their fridge. He tells me ‘his girl’ has always been like that: jealous of the other women.

This shadow is more like a cloud. The interruption of light is less temporary and sends a subtle chill over everything. Still, I tell my insides to stay quiet. We don’t need any trouble. We can just enjoy the tea.

He slides his hand across the table, pats my arm in a soothing gesture, and tells me what he thinks I need to hear.

He is not going to tell his wife he is here.

I take a sip of my tea and force a little laugh. His eyes catch mine and he laughs too.

I tell him an amusing anecdote about my husband’s recent battle with a lapdog, and then catch myself in the act. My husband is back in the city, probably knee deep in the cacophony of our children’s breakfast, but I have intentionally introduced his presence in to the room with my story.

I feel like a paper bag drifting across a meadow; caught up in a battle between wind and gravity.

My neighbor helps himself to another biscuit.

The room is crowded with all of the unexpected guests who have entered; my neighbor, his wife, my husband, my children, my churning insides. I long to be transported back to the moment just before my neighbor arrived, when I was still alone in my house; before everything got complicated.

I rise from the table under the guise of retrieving a napkin and increase the physical distance between myself and my neighbor.

From behind the cover of my kitchen counter, I advise my neighbor to tell his wife about the visit. If he does not tell her, it will make me feel strange. I pretend not understand the full extent of his implication and give him an easy path out.

He looks at me like a proud parent and thanks me for my forthright nature. I decide to stand in the kitchen for the rest of his visit, just to be sure.

When he leaves I come out to the porch, like I always do, to see him off. He approaches me, like he always does, for a goodbye hug.

There are usually five of us, including my husband, lined up for this hug when my neighbor departs. I keenly fell the absence of the other four. I realize, although she is always there, we never hug my neighbor’s wife.

I think back to what passed, and didn’t, in the kitchen. I congratulate myself for the way I handled things. I did not upset the fine balance of the morning. I assure myself that my neighbor now understands our respective positions. We can resume our easy friendship. I can give him a goodbye hug. To fail to do so would be to make it ‘a thing.’ I do not like ‘things.’

He wraps his arms round my waist and tells me he always enjoys seeing me. His gnarled hands slide up and down down my spine as he says it. His fingers rest low, long, and firm. There is now no mistaking his intent. The sun becomes trapped behind a solid wall of grey. I stand frozen on the porch as he invites me to drop by next week, when the rest of my family arrives.

I try to smile as his truck drives away. I try to make light of the situation for the benefit of my dark, complicated insides. I tell them to get a grip on things. He is an old coot, harmless, close to a hundred. When he grew up, it was probably fair game to take one’s chances with women who were left unattended.

Those sound like excuses.

I was never in any danger. If things had gotten out of hand I could easily have overpowered him. He is frail, elderly, and half dead.

Yes. But is physical harm all that bothers you?

It is not worth it. Who wants to blow this whole thing of proportion? Some old fart gets a little handsy and you are going to start a holy war with the neighbors?

So you are afraid of what he will say about you?

He is a neighborhood treasure. Everybody likes him. They will take his side over ours. He is their golden grandfather and we are that uptight family ‘from away.’

So you realize he has power over you.

Power? Come on. What can he really do to me?

He can make you stand there, on your own porch, and let him grab your ass.

Really, girl? Is this it? The badger next door and his saucy tea party? Is that going to be your ‘Me Too’ moment?

Were you hoping for something better? More glamourous? More sinister? More violent?

Is this what that I am supposed to confess to my girlfriends over coffee after they bravely reveal their legitimate past traumas?

Is it a competition now?

I think nothing really happened here.

Are you planning to tell our husband?

Now that you mention it: no.

So the visit will be a secret?

I think of our husband, up on the hill, slashing his stick at the slightest rustle in the grass. It is too much to deal with his cave-man antics on top of everything else.

Yet you conjured him to defend you when you told that cute little story about the lapdog, cave-girl.

I will think about it later.

Yes. You will.


     *     *     * 

Three weeks later, I pull the car into the little coffee shop by the highway. My husband is back at the house, preparing to build a fence around the yard. All three children are in the back seat. We are on our way, without him, to the sea.

My oldest son presses his finger to the window. He sees my neighbor’s truck in the parking lot.

I grip the steering wheel, stunned with indecision. The children become quickly restless for their ham sandwiches and ice cream. They demand to know why we are not going inside.

I do not want to go in. I tell my insides it is not because I am scared. It is simply that I don’t want to have to deal with a ‘thing’ in front of the children. It will not be a big bother to drive a little further. There is another coffee shop.

I look in the rearview mirror at my three children. Each one buzzes with impatience. I tell them that maybe we will try the place up the road, for a change.
My second, angriest son demands answers. He was promised ice cream.

Will you lie to him too?

My second son kicks the back of the seat.

I suddenly feel all of the energy that swirls in the car.

I see my daughter, standing on a porch, telling herself not to make a big deal of it.

I see my oldest son sliding his slippery hand across a Formica table.

I see my second son lashing out because he doesn’t know, or care, about what lives inside that person’s head.

That is when it all unravels.

I tell them about my neighbor, and the way I felt when his rough hand scratched the side of my ass. I tell them how I didn’t say anything, I just stood there and let it happen. I was afraid I was overthinking it, that it wasn’t a big enough deal. I tell the children that’s how they get you. They make you think the problem is your reaction and not the crap situation that they know damn right they have created. I tell the children we are going into the goddamn coffee shop to order our lunch and no hundred-year-old asshole with fast hands and a slippery tongue is going to stop us.

When I come up for air, my second son escapes the back seat and runs in the grass beyond the parking lot. My sorry ‘Me Too Moment’ was insufficient to hold his attention. I tell myself he is eight. It is too much to expect him to grasp the complexity of this boring, adult situation; but I am still stung by his indifference.

I walk toward the restaurant with the two other children. My daughter reaches up to take my hand and gives me a shy smile. I have become something foreign to her. She is not sure how to tread.

My oldest son stares reluctantly at the door of the coffee shop. He has lost the appetite for his ham sandwich.

We pass through the door and find my neighbor in front of us, paying his bill. He turns to greet us with his usual friendly affection. He tells the children they are growing like weeds and asks them if they will come soon to visit.

My oldest son’s response is beautiful in its simplicity.

“No.”

My neighbor looks at my daughter, who stands with her eyes narrowed and seems not to notice when she steps slightly in front of me.

His milky, old eyes meet mine for a brief instant but his face does not acknowledge what we all know is happening. He is serene, jovial, and in his element.

Our movements are fluid; our tones are calm. None of us make any real fuss. The other people in the coffee shop, if they notice us at all, just see a group of friends having a polite conversation. It is all very civilized as I tell my neighbor that no one in our family will come to visit him anymore and he is no longer welcome to stop by our house.

My neighbor doesn’t blink when I say it. He just gathers his take-out container, wishes us a good summer, and slides out the door as smooth as rain. The slickness of his exit tells me this is not the first time he has navigated this conversation. I realize that tomorrow, when I talk to the woman down the street, she will have a similar, whispered confession. I think of my neighbor’s wife, slipping my email address into her kitchen garbage, and how her motivation might have been more than simple jealousy.

I realize that secrets hold power, but only if you don’t tell them.


     *     *     * 

When our order is ready, we take our food outside.

My neighbor stands in the parking lot, giving directions to a group of tourists. His hearty laugh dances in my ears and I feel a brief regret that we cannot just keep the best pieces of people; that we must consider them, always, as wholes.

We pass my neighbor’s truck on our way to the outdoor picnic tables. I notice something fluttering under the truck’s front wiper. It is a napkin, marked in red crayon by the jagged script of my second son. There, pressed against my neighbor’s windshield is his eight year old’s message:

‘YOU SUK.”

Indeed.

The sun reflects off the sea of grass beyond the parking lot. I raise my hand to my forehead and squint to see what has happened to my second son. He sits atop a picnic table, watches me intently, and waits for his ice cream.

The hematologist’s Stanford diplomas on the wall reflect the Transamerica pyramid and part of the Bay Bridge. Tan, with tennis wrinkles around his eyes, he says in an assured voice, “A year, maybe less.”

And you, looking like Ulysses in the storm, ask, “Ess der anyting to do about it?” This third opinion is the same as the others.

“No. Nothing. Myelofibrosis. Scarring in the marrow that produces the deformed blasts that can’t turn into regular cells, can’t make blood.” A year to oblivion. A time bomb in your bones. He continues, “Were you ever exposed to radiation growing up? We’re going to see a lot of people with this when the Chernobyl people get old. X-rays, asbestos, or…?”

You interrupt, regaining your authority. The man who owned restaurants, financed housing developments, employed Americans. “That’s not it!” you say. You stare ahead. Growing up, there was only the island, Andros in the Cyclades. Only sea and earth and air.

The doctor says, “Toxins? When I was in high school, shop class, they gave us this old paint and then solvents to wash our hands. Very bad stuff.”
But you don’t want to talk about the cause. It’s your appointment. “I have these headaches, and my hands are cold and numb. Sometimes my ears ring and ring.”

On the way home, even now, you think of food. Your business for years, your mother’s skill and love, your constant hunger during the German occupation. “I’ve got a freezer full of roasts and chickens and lamb chops. I’ll never eat all that food.” All the years in California, you never thought or talked much about the island. Even when your American daughters asked, you’d stir the air with your palm and say, “I forget. Leave it back there.”

Now, you can’t stop remembering as if the past, those memories of life, will keep your companion, Death, away. “My father made me go every morning to sell fruits and vegetables from our garden. Before I could go home, I had to sell the whole box. There was a lot of competition from grown men and women needing money like us. I’d call out and knock on doors and I went early, a curly-haired little boy, so the women liked me. Before I left the house, he’d weigh and count the tomatoes or the pomegranates or the eggplants, whatever was in season. When I returned home, he’d make me give him the exact money for each item. I couldn’t take anything for my own pocket.”

“Chocolate. I was crazy for chocolate, so even when I was small, I figured out how to get money for it. At night, when my father was sitting at the side of the house with his friends and his wine, I would go to the garden and take extra tomatoes or potatoes from the cellar and hide them by the road. In the morning, I’d pick them up and sell them too. At the store, I’d buy long thick chunks of chocolate and I’d sit out by myself and eat it all. Make myself sick. Sometimes I’d steal eggs from my mother’s hens and go sell them to buy chocolate!”

The plane moves electronically across the flight monitor over Germany toward Athens. Your hair has thinned and has a green cast from the chemotherapy, your eyes are lost deep in the sockets. You sleep head in hand, the heavy gold-link bracelet hangs loosely from your wrist. When breakfast arrives, you are like a hungry child, taking off lids, sniffing, unwrapping, sampling the yogurt, tasting the omelet. You force yourself to chew, to swallow.

“Next year, I’ll feel better, have more energy,” you say in a hoarse voice. Your blue eyes are faded, dull like weathered marbles left out in the sun and rain. You know there won’t be more energy, another year. You lean back, breathing heavily. A large sharp nose, cleft chin, high forehead, and I see how your profile will look in the coffin.

“I don’t want to,” you say.

I nod. I know you don’t want to die.

“Back then, New Year’s was the great opportunity. I was the priest’s assistant on his visits to bless the homes. He was fat and his hat was too small for his head. Women made honey cakes and walnut cookies, almond paste kaltsounia. They put out dishes of loukoumi and rose water delight and baklava and sugar korabeides. The mistress of the house offers us sweets and Greek coffee, and we eat, but the priest has many houses ahead, so swiftly we get to work. He motions me to stay behind, and he and the mistress disappear into the rooms. While he drones prayers and sprinkles holy water, I take as many sweets from the plates as I can and rearrange the gaps. I drop them into the sack I carry over my shoulder. The priest likes these special sweets even more than I do, and he doesn’t share them with anyone but me. There are many houses left to visit, so we hurry on. The priest and I are a good team. We raid the houses.”

From the ferryboat, Andros stretches in front of us; two rounded mountains come closer like soft breasts. Reversing into Gavrio port, the Penelope churns the water like an earthquake under the deck. You sling the black bag over your shoulder. Feet angled out, sailor-style, you take the metal steps fast down to the lowest deck. Shifting from foot to foot, you look around, waiting for someone to recognize. You are disappointed and say, “Once the islanders going to and from Athens all knew each other.”

“When I left Andros the first time, my mother was like a wilted leaf left to dry up in sorrow. Boys had to leave the island, there were too many children, not enough land or food. No jobs. My grandmother had four sons born in the 1880s. They all left for America, left when they were twelve or fourteen years old, and no one ever heard from them again. Were they dead or alive? No one ever knew. They went on the ships, they went to big places—New York, Chicago, New Orleans—and got swallowed. She was bitter, old, and sorrowed. Sometimes people would bring news. ‘I saw Petros four years ago,’ or ‘I heard Nick was in Chicago,’ and so on. But in those times, so far away, who knew what happened to those lost children who had to leave to survive? No one wants to go to sea. Who wants to live on a boat and be a slave? The bad weather, the same sea and sky for months, the same faces, the same work. Three boys in our family went. My mother lit candles every night for my older brothers. They were just kids. Stamatis was thirteen when he went on the Liberty ships that crossed the Atlantic to America during World War II, during the German blockade. The mines, the U-boats, so many Greeks waiting to die. Those were all Greek crews blown up, sank, and never heard from again. Do you think they wanted to go to sea?”

Thistles grow from hills of slate, and through the layers of rock caper, bushes cling to the soil. From the bus window, you look down the cliff to the Aegean and the old harbor now too shallow for boats where the breakwater, three and a half thousand years old, hooks a sheltering arm around the bay. You are home. Delicate against the harsh rocky hillside, back from the road, there is a tall whitewashed tower. Around the top, fancy filigree stonework forms angles and latticed openings. The dovecote entices doves to lay their eggs and raise their fledglings there. When you were a boy, you’d crawl inside the tiny opening at the base and climb up inside the narrow ledges to get eggs from the nests. It takes a lot to make an omelet, but doves will lay more when they see an empty nest. You sometimes went for the unfledged birds; your mother needed ten or fifteen to make dove stew, pitsunia. She would take off the feathers and heads and clean the insides of the tiny creatures. Then she’d wash, flour, and sauté them in hot olive oil. After adding a cup of red wine, she’d grind up several fresh tomatoes and put them in with the rest to simmer. Tender, sweet, the bones tasting like walnuts, you claim there is nothing more delicious.

“The war came when I was fourteen, left when I was eighteen. By then I was tall, over six feet, and I don’t ever remember my stomach being full. Our bellies ached all the time. My mother did all she could, but there wasn’t any food. The Italians had orders to take the food to send away, but they left us enough to survive. But in the middle of the war, a German commander arrived and sent soldiers to each house and took all the supplies, robbed each kitchen and cellar. They took the hams, the sausages, honey, all the oil, onions, potatoes, flour, and beans. Everything. They loaded it onto boats to send to their troops in the Balkans or Russia. Then they counted every chicken, how many eggs it laid, every pig, goat, and lamb each family owned, and wrote it in a book. They saw the crops and fruit and terraces and came back later to take the harvest and count again. We were forbidden to eat our own food, and if they found out we did, or we hid food, they would shoot us. If a goat or pig died, we couldn’t eat it. We had to tell the Germans so they could inspect it, verify it died naturally and nothing used. Sometimes it took a week until they came, and that food would rot in front of our eyes, but we were afraid. One neighbor buried a pig that died, and when the Germans came back and found it missing, they shot the father. A lesson. They were ruthless. What they didn’t send away, they took for themselves and the collaborators. It got worse, so that by the end, the island was bare, just lemons left. My mother made soup chopping and boiling lemons, mashing them up to fill our bellies so we could sleep at night. The Germans didn’t count the lemons.”

Lying on the couch at your nephew’s house in Korthion, you tap your fingers on the wooden frame and begin to sing an old song, “I was going to come last night but it started raining / She said, you should have come. I have dry clothes and a big blanket / And my body to keep you warm. / Even if it was sloppy wet, I had everything for you.”

You laugh and slap your thigh, remembering. “Last night I saw Treffonis and Michaelis in my dream. They were all dressed up, and I said, ‘I’ll go put on my good suit and join you.’ My old friends, dead now. We had iron knees in those days. We’d dance the missirlou, the zembekiko. All night we’d spin and turn and leap. In Ethonia village, up the winding steps between the walls, almost at the top they had good dances. Their plaka was the size of a dance floor with a huge tree in the center with branches spread out over the top like a roof and a big kerosene lamp. They played bouzouki and guitar and maybe accordion. All the girls wore soft dresses with high heels. One time our friend Barbonia, a huge fellow like three men, got into it. Some little guy got jealous and wanted to show off so while we were dancing, this guy attacks him with a knife, and Barbounia picks him up by the throat and holds him in the air, but the guy keeps swinging and stabbing at him. A girl jumps on and starts pounding but we pull her off. Barbounia holds him down on the rocks and pulls out the hairs of his mustache and stuffs them in his mouth. He was like a bulldog. We got into all kinds of fights at dances, but nobody got killed. We’d come home the next morning with our shirts in rags, arms out of the sockets, bloody. I will never forget those nights with the big lamps and the music and the dancing.”

“In the 1950s there was no work, and work on the ships wouldn’t go to me. My brother had been an organizer for the unions, arrested once. They knew our name and they didn’t want unions on the ships. I was desperate, and every day I went to the hiring but there was nothing. She saw me on the street in Piraeus port, I don’t know how she recognized me. I was skinny and hungry. All I could afford was a twenty-five-cent plate of spaghetti once a day. She was a big woman, each arm like a leg of lamb, and when she tucked my arm under hers, I was like a child. She took me to her house, a nice one up on the hill where you could see the bay. She cooked a big roast with potatoes and a moussaka. And she had skordalia creamed garlic sauce and stuffed green peppers. She loved to eat, and we took that roast and ate until just the bones remained, not even enough left over to feed the pigs! Then she took me down to the harbor to her husband’s office. He was a big shot in charge of loading and unloading the ships. Right there in front of everyone, she told him to find me a job. She told all the men sitting around to be ashamed that a strong young man, a son of Andros, couldn’t find work on a ship. I’ll never forget her, those arms, that roast. She made them give me a job, the job that took me to America.”

Roped to the deck or hanging over the side, you have to control the rust and corrosion on the converted WWII destroyer. You chip the deck and sides with a hammer and chisel to flake off the old layers of paint. Then you sweep up the tailings and try to avoid the powder and residue that blows into your face and mouth and eyes. With a strong-smelling solvent that burns your hands, you scrub the area day after day. You say the boredom cracks your brain, and you understand how animals in a cage feel. In the hold is British Columbian timber bound for Japan, and ceramics and furniture for California. “Jump ship,” you repeat to yourself, the only English you know.

When no one is around, the sailors say it aloud. “Jump ship. When the ship owes you money, so they don’t expect it.”

At the port of Los Angeles, you check the creased brown paper in your wallet with the phone number of a third cousin in America, and you walk away from the pier. Fresno is 120 degrees in the summer, and the cheap room upstairs in the old couple’s house smells of tar paper. On Sunday, when you are not working in the restaurant, they call upstairs: “George, Gunsmoke’s on.”

You think the heat is why you can’t sleep, why you are very very tired, and you can’t eat. All the food you could want, and you have no appetite. There’s a strange metallic taste in your mouth, and your ears ring. Your clothes hang on you. You punch new holes in your belt with a nail to hold them up. When you carry the trays from the dishwasher, your arms tremble. The waitresses say, “George, you’re young. You need to go out and have some fun.”

You told me your only real love was the girl in Greece, a true and innocent love, like it was back then. She loved you too, but how could a poor boy on a poor island get enough money to marry? How could her parents let her marry you? In California, you worked two jobs, you sent money back home, you saved. But you need more than dishwashing in greasy restaurants. You need to become legal, to get papers so you could have your own business and own property in order to go home the right way: rich. She came to the malt shop on Fourth Street every day and smiled at you. They told you she was a good Greek-American girl, Orthodox. They said you would learn to love her.

In seven years, you made a lot of money. You went to Greece in your Roos-Atkins suit, Bally shoes, and Bulova watch, and met your first love in a restaurant in Athens. She had a husband and son by then, and you had a wife and two daughters. You told her that in order to get what you loved, you had to do things that made you lose that love.

Today the sun is warm, and in the hillside cemetery above the bay, there is no wind. Your nephew Anthonis has to open the grave, dig up the body and wash the bones, his father’s bones. And it’s your brother’s corpse, so it’s your duty to go too. You’ve never done the ektafi disinterment before, you were always in America when the three years after your parents’ deaths was up. You think it’s a barbaric custom, but in Greece, where soil is so scarce and needed and so rocky, to dig a grave is to hew a tomb. You can’t make graves everywhere. The space has to be reused.

The priest watches Anthonis and the grave digger remove the grave-top picture and oil lamp and go to work lifting the heavy marble slab, then the thick cement slabs with the iron handles. Using a shovel, they crack open the wooden coffin and Anthonis kneels at the rock-hewn pit to pry off the waterlogged and disintegrating lid with a crowbar. The corpse is exposed, a skeleton dressed in a suit. Except for the tie you remember, it could be anyone.

The grave digger removes the skull, which separates easily with a twist, and hands it to Anthonis, who washes the brown matter left on it with Coca-Cola from a tall bottle. When they lift the disintegrating suit, the rest of the bones come out easily. An arm bone, the chest cavity, a hand, a thigh, and each bone are washed. The priest reminds them not to leave a single one, that every part must go into the small reliquary chest. You can’t help but think these bones were once your brother Dimitri, with the thick black hair and round stocky body who drank ouzo and danced the zembetiko at his eightieth name-day celebration. It brings back what you know: life is brief. Disease, old age, and death. This is not Dimitri any more, and in a year, it will not be you any more either. After the prayers and incense, the box with your brother’s name on it takes its place on the ossuary’s shelves alongside friends and neighbors and family.
​
People have to eat, and back at the house where you grew up, they serve ouzo and meze platters of stuffed grape leaves, fried cheese, and olives. The women and your brother’s widow bustle in and out of the kitchen preparing the food. You sit in the warm December sun and watch the mountain turn gold beyond the tall bamboo windbreak. The lapis waters of Korthion Bay are checkered with whitecaps. Restless, you take the familiar steps down to the yard. A goat is being roasted, and you baste it with olive oil and turn the spit, savoring the smell of meat over the grapewood charcoal. Several large pomegranates remain on the tree, and you pick them and sit at your father’s weathered slate table. You smile. You could still sell them for a few drachmas in town. You crack open the fruit; red seeds and juice spill onto the table like blood, and you begin to eat.

Steam reaches me through the perforated squares in the screen door as I stand in a narrow alley of tables and chairs, surveying the dining area. I’m already sweating. I take note of the lone grains of white rice huddling at the corners of faux wood tables, among other things. Half-tucked plastic chairs still brim with the heat of human contact, dropped plastic forks are left kicked into corners instead of thrown into the trash, and dots of brown gooey sauce stick, somehow, to the walls I’ll neglect scrubbing for fear of working too hard.

Heavy-lidded customers rest their chins in the nests of their upturned palms. One patron sips a soft drink while mindlessly chewing the exposed end of a translucent plastic straw. The other slurps burnt coffee mixed with powdered creamer and granulated sugar packaged in neon-pink paper wrappers. A baby carrier positioned between them is nudged gently with a pointer finger, lulling their newborn into acquiescence for the minutes between Saturday morning doctor appointments. Their pediatrician’s office is located two floors above the restaurant. Their pediatrician is in high demand, old, with soot-grey hair that sprinkles dandruff onto newborn cheeks. His wife will place their order by the end of the day.

The noodles are boiling. That’s what the steam tells me. When I open the door, sawed-off sides of cardboard boxes lie across a puddle of noodle bathwater no one wants to slip in. I give my general hello, a sing-songy rendition of the two-syllable word I’ve grown used to performing for them. At 7:55 a.m., I’m the fifth one on shift. I shuffle quickly to the back table, gather the money for my register, and walk up front.

Marilynn is taking an order. Next to her is a paper plate with an egg over easy, toast blackened to her specifications, and a circle of corned beef hash. A straw bobs in a Diet Coke, the Styrofoam cup the kind the workers are prohibited from using. She calls the order to the cooks in back: “Bacon one time, eggs scrambled, make it crispy!” then jots it on the back of an old receipt, taping it to the tip of her pointer finger, and palming it like a good luck charm, a luxury she’ll indulge in as long as the line remains shallow. I’m turning on my register as she pierces her yolk with one of her chopsticks. She waits until her toast is soppy with runny, golden goo, then takes a bite, her compact body turned toward me. Sipping her chilled drink, swaying gently side to side in order to relieve her calloused feet from decades of standing moored to a register, smiling at customers, reciting prices, and counting penny tips. I ask her how she’s doing. She smiles. Thick prescription glasses obscure her irises, curled hair droops across her forehead, crumbs like snowflakes dot her upper lip as a word manages to slip through the tiny gaps in her yellowed teeth—“I’m”--and then the head cook, Ben, sends out her plate.

She’s busy, so I take the opportunity to slip to the back. I pass Ben pre-cooking marinated chicken. He asks if I’m hungry.

“I’m all right, but thanks.”

I pass Fely chopping onions on a table leveled with scraps of cardboard. The wooden top is slashed with knife marks and stained with watered chicken blood. It’s the perfect size for Fely. The short base offers just enough leverage for her to grate buckets of carrots and pound bread crumbs into butterflied chicken thighs. I offer to peel her potatoes for tomorrow. She says my name like a thank-you.

I find Rayden by the walk-in, the mother hen of a roost of freezers holding frostbitten loafs of Ziplocked beef, plastic bins of boiled macaroni, and withered vegetables. My friend opens boxes of noodles with a knife left carelessly on a shelf laden with frying oil. Her thin red hair has been looped through the back of a baseball cap; her apron is wrapped around her exposed midriff; her cellphone, a couple of cheap cigarettes, and a lighter rest in her cleavage.

“Did you work yesterday?” I ask.

“Yeah.” She pulls noodle boxes from the top shelf of the walk-in, dropping them a few inches from my feet.

“With who?” I ask.

“Who do you think?”

Knowing glances are exchanged.

“When did you guys get out?”

“Not till seven, shit, and guess who had to do everything herself.” We both hear the phone ringing; we stop talking to watch it trill again, nestled in the receiver. I resolve to answer it if it goes a third time. Halfway through the high-pitched ring, body poised, foot lifted and gathering momentum for a hurried departure, I see Fely wipe her hands on the front of her apron and lift the cordless from its base. I look at Rayden.

“I’m fucking tired, you know,” she tells me.

“Me too.”

Fely notices the hushed conversation in the back of the restaurant.

“Rayden! The noodles!” she yells.

“Fuck, the fucking noodles, gotta fucking boil the fucking ten million pounds of fucking noodles—and telling me all that like she’s my fucking boss. Bullshit.”

I smile sympathetically and she waits as I fill a bowl with yukons, then we both head to our stations: me next to Fely, who’s de-boning chicken thighs with a knife she sharpens on a steel rectangle every minute or so, and Rayden next to Ben, who’s sweating from the heat of the flat tops and the four-burner. She notices and gets him his favorite from the front, a Barq’s root beer.

At 9:16 a.m., Renee walks in. Late.

“Aye, you!” Fely shouts, hoisting a large metal pot into the sink for soaking, which makes all of us stare at Renee, who’s walking to the back, eyes closed it seems, to punch in.

“Hi to you, too, Nina,” she says, body leaning against a basket of washed towels and aprons, eyes still closed, ears perked and listening to the tiny screech of her time card being sucked in and stamped. She lets her hand hover above the mouth of the old machine. When the card is finally released, she snatches it and puts it back on the metal holding rack. Nothing more to see here.

“You stay out all night drinking, or what?” Fely asks.

“No, Nina,” Renee says, tired.

Fely lets the conversation end. I watch Renee pull a compact mirror from her purse and nestle it in among a basket of knives kept on the middle shelf of the back counter. Then she grabs a red-handled broom from a greasy back corner of the restaurant and heads for the walk-in. I follow. I need a couple more potatoes for peeling. I want to ask how she is.

The door of the walk-in is propped open with a jug of water we keep close by for a counterweight. I watch Renee crawling on her hands and knees, pulling at the layered scraps of cardboard she replaces each week in order to hide the old disgusting floor of the freezer. She’s muttering to herself, the tight curls she pulled up with her rhinestone-encrusted hairclip are falling in strands across her face. One of the short wedged heels she’s wearing falls off, rolling down the lip of the cold threshold until it lands on its side next to my toes.

“Aunty,” I say, smiling even though her back is turned toward me.

“Honey girl, is that you?” she asks, stopping to kneel and turn her head, hand flinging hair out of her face. Flecks of red lipstick stain the front of her teeth.

“Hi, Aunty,” I say and I smile again so she can see it. “How are you?”

“Honey girl, you hear what happened yesterday night?”

“No,” I lie. “What?”

“Fuck, honey girl, didn’t get out till seven,” she says, blowing an exasperated sigh in my direction.

“Why?” I ask, faking surprise.

“I’ll give you one guess,” she tells me, lips tense, eyes wide, head flicked back toward the grill where I can hear Rayden yelling, “Order’s up.”

I nod, though I know it wasn’t Rayden’s fault. I still don’t know how Renee is, but when I reach past her head to the cardboard box holding potatoes, she makes a smooching sound in my direction. I send my love back. Then we get back to work.

I keep a watchful eye on the growing line. It’s 9:30 a.m. Regulars order their usuals. It’s steady. Marilynn is making the usual mistakes—eggs over easy when they should’ve been sunny, Diet Coke when they asked for a Coke Zero. I don’t have to step in yet. I move on to peeling carrots. Ribbons of crisp orange stain my fingertips. The phone rings and I answer it.

“Heights Drive Inn.”

Static crumbles the male voice slipping through the radio waves. I assume he says, “Takeout order, please.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” I say.

The uncapped Sharpie marker I fish out of the makeshift penholder that used to hold twelve ounces of spreadable butter isn’t working. Feathered lines of permanent black make ghostly impressions of numbers and abbreviations for menu items. I repeat the order and commit it to memory: four specials, two with chicken, two with beef; one fried noodles, five large Cokes. I go up front to find a pen. Marilynn asks if I’ll check the dining area. I rewrite the order and hand it to Rayden. She needs a fucking cigarette.

“We’ll take the trash out soon, you can smoke then,” I tell her.

The air conditioning in the dining area evaporates the sweat I only just noticed beading at my temples. The radio isn’t working. A low static creates an inhospitable ambiance, and I wonder how bad Boss’s lecture will be if I keep it like this. Clusters of bodies occupy booths. Paper plates are left with abandoned remnants of a greasy breakfast that’ll double as lunch. I wipe tables with a damp cloth and notice crumpled bits of straw wrappers dusting the floor like leaves. I won’t bother sweeping yet. Parents rocking crying babies ask if there’s a bathroom.

“Sorry,” I say.

When I head back inside, the phone is ringing. I answer it. “Fifteen minutes,” I say.

When I make it back to my station, I find a grilled cheese wrapped in parchment paper, next to my carrot ribbons.

“We thought you might like that,” Ben says, shrugging his shoulders up to his ears.

I take a bite. Melted cheese forms a tightrope from my mouth to the bread until I pinch it with my fingers. “It’s great,” I tell them.

We all laugh. The phone rings. Marilynn calls another order.

At 9:55, Boss walks in. We hear the screen door rattle open and watch her squeeze through, her large midsection almost grazing the splintered door frame. A chorus of hellos reaches her, and she reciprocates each one individually without making direct eye contact. She moves slowly, shuffling her swollen feet along the smooth red floor and letting Rayden know she must be over-boiling the noodles because there’s too much water on the floor.

“Put some more cardboard, Rayden.”

“Yes, Boss,” Rayden says. She rushes to the back, poking me in the ribs along the way so we can exchange exhausted glances and silent complaints. I can tell she needs a smoke. I try to let her know I understand, but then Boss tells me to wipe the tables clean outside, so I wring out the same towel I wrung out ten minutes ago before heading back to the dining area to make halfhearted circular motions across the plastic wood grain of the tabletops.

The lunch rush sets in at around 12:30. I’m up front with Marilyn, who keeps calling.

“Next!” to patrons swaying side to side to get a look at the specials. I’m writing down an order until I’m interrupted by a woman holding out an empty cup with a long smile who tells me her daughter had a spill at their table. I go to the back to grab the mop, hoping I’ll go unnoticed by Boss, who’s assembling plates next to Ben and Rayden.

She catches me and tells me the ice needs refilling.

“Got it,” I tell her. I look at Rayden who rolls her eyes at the back of Boss’ head before turning in my direction and mouthing, “I’m dying for a cigarette.” She holds an imaginary one in front of her and puffs it down before reaching her hands toward the ceiling in a plea.

“I’m sorry,” I mouth back. Then I lock myself in the employee bathroom and let the water run until smoke leaks out from the faucet. I fill a bucket and plunge the mop head up and down, up and down before suspending it in mid-air to watch the water drip.

I meet Renee coming out of the pantry. It doesn’t look like she was crying, but the thought crosses my mind. She takes her place against the edge of the sink and starts scrubbing dishes. The phone rings. Renee answers it. Her voice betrays her, tender aggravation slips through customer service niceties, the automatic dribble of “yes sir” and “thank you” and “my pleasure.” She writes the order down but doesn’t press the “off” button on the cordless, meaning no new calls can come in. I pretend not to notice. I walk with her to the grill. I rest my free hand on her arm because I feel like she needs it. She smiles.

“Thank you, honey girl,” she tells me. She leans her head in my direction, and I reciprocate, our version of a hug.

Outside I mop up the puddle of spilled juice. The floor is still slick, so I grab a handful of coarse salt and sprinkle it over the still-damp area, because I don’t care enough to really finish the job. Customers move past me, dumping plates in the trash and telling me thank you.

“No, thank you,” I say, then I smile.

At 1:30, Boss wonders why there haven’t been any phone orders. Renee is by the back counter, holding her mirror up to her face, running a finger along the edge of her lips so she can smear the faded red onto the face of her thumb before wiping it on a napkin. I remember that morning a couple of months ago when she came in late. Her hair wasn’t twisted into her usual bun. She wasn’t wearing any lipstick. Fely asked if she had spent the night drinking.

“No, Nina,” she said. She kept her eyes closed as she punched in but kept talking. “You know Pauly, Nina, he came home this morning drunk and whatever and was hungry for me, Nina, hungry.”

Fely shook her head. “Aye,” she said.

“He won’t let me say no, Nina,” she said in a whisper, almost desperate. I saw two veins poking out on the side of her neck. “You know how he is.”
Fely mumbled something in Filipino I couldn’t understand. Then Renee grabbed the broom from the corner of the restaurant and went to the back, opened the heavy metal door of the walk-in, and dropped to her knees to pull at the cardboard. I had wanted to ask her how she was, but I didn’t.

Now I reach for the phone and press the “off” button before holding it up to my ear, pretending to investigate.

“It seems to be working fine, Boss,” I tell her. She knows I’m lying, she sees Renee staring at herself in the mirror, wiping her lips, but before she can say anything, the phone rings. I answer it.

At 2:33, Boss makes a plate of food from the leftovers cooling in metal bowls on the counter and heads to her office. We hear the door close, and Rayden calls for me. Trash time.
I wheel the hand truck into the dining area and set it down with a metallic clang against the worn tiled floor. I brace my hand against one of the open rims of the two large garbage cans tucked into the corner near the kitchen and pull at the shiny black bag, wiggling it free and placing it on top of the other one that’s already tied and waiting for transport.

I place a sticky hand on my hip and notice how greasy my over-sized T-shirt has become.

“You ready?” I ask Rayden.

She feels up her breasts to check that her lighter is still there in her cleavage before throwing me a thumbs-up sign.

“Let’s go.”

We take turns wheeling the hand truck, Rayden handing me the reins as she lights up, me giving it back to her halfway across the parking lot. We throw open the top of the large metal trash containers with a decapitated broom stick and count to three as we hoist over bags filled with discarded food still warm from the stove top and half-filled sodas that drip down our arms, leaving snail tracks.

Now we smell like garbage. I pick a cluster of rice off my shirt and flick it onto the ground for the birds as Rayden and I settle down on a nearby bench.

She takes a deep drag and blows the smoke above us.

“It’s been a long day,” she tells me.

“Yeah.” We become complacent in our silence, except for the occasional “fuck” we let drop from our mouths that the other meets with a nod. In this moment, I’ve never felt closer to anyone. I think about how much I hate this job. I think about how many years I’ve spent here, how I thought I would leave but didn’t. I look at Rayden, who’s been here so much longer, who’s stubbing her cigarette out on the food-encrusted sole of her work shoe. She sees me out of the corner of her eye and laughs. I laugh. Then we get up and go back to work.

There’s an unexpected rush. I’m at the back counter peeling garlic, and Ben is talking about his daughter. The phone rings. The phone has been ringing incessantly. Marilynn is forgetting customers, leaving them stranded in a sea of hungry patrons who are all crossing their arms and shaking their heads. In a minute or so I’ll have to go up front. I’m collecting the skins of garlic that have scattered across the counter, and Ben mentions his ex-son-in-law to the kitchen.

“Used to hit her, you know.”

The metal shelves holding the stacked pans and the running water filling the sink for dish washing and the steam floating from the pot of boiling noodles are fellow witnesses to a confession we almost miss, because Rayden is trying to stop the water from boiling over, Fely is packing away her knives, and I’m wondering, with garlic skins clenched in my fist, if Marilynn is ever going to get the woman wearing glasses her large coffee. Ben’s small frame, all the more inconsequential from the way his stomach curves inward as though he doesn’t want to take in more air than necessary, begins to shake with residual anger. I see Marilynn grab the ice bucket, an excuse to leave the front. I notice Fely wiping her knives dry on a towel, mouth agape. I wonder what to do.

“That little fucker,” Rayden tells Ben. The phone starts ringing. “You know Ben, you know, this old man neighbor of mine used to always tell me these stories, and he’d always give me candy, and then he’d show me his bedroom and he’d and he’d and—” Her voice starts breaking. The phone is still ringing. If it rings two more times, I’ll have to answer it. I watch Rayden wipe her eyes with the edge of her apron. I watch her adjust her baseball cap. I press the “talk” button on the cordless.

“Heights Drive Inn.”

A familiar voice, female, drones in clear and crisp. “I’d like to place a takeout order.”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

“Two specials.”

“Two specials,” I repeat, committing it to memory. I’ve misplaced my working pen.

“Yes, my husband—the doctor upstairs—will pick it up in twenty minutes.”

I place the phone in its cradle. And when I’ve managed to scribble down the order, I hand it to Rayden, who’s watching the noodles soak in the water. I can see sweat drip down her face, obscuring her tears. I place the slip in the palm of her hand. She looks at me, eyes small and puffy.
The woman wearing glasses bangs the counter and demands her large coffee. I go up front and pour it for her. I apologize, even though it wasn’t my fault.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, offering her some sugar.