Aegean

She tried diligently to enjoy the cruise. Ten days on the Aegean—her first vacation in three years without the bitter flavor of field work. She had booked the trip six months before, and at the time the decision felt vital—life-giving, even. The previous week she had overheard a private conversation between two graduate assistants. They spoke of her fondly, as though she were a favored aunt grown eccentric with age. - She really hasn’t lost a step in terms of criticality. I admire that. - That’s true. Theoretically, though…I mean, I understand the dedication to formalism, I really do. But you have to grow with the field or you risk making yourself a relic. Greece was an obvious choice. Its sun had set thousands of years before, but it persisted, lined with craggy coastlines and pockmarked with rugged mountains, respected in its decline. The trip was a private joke, she told herself, a nod to her own waning prospects.

As it approached, she grew to feel differently. She was not a dusty relic to be cloistered in museum corridors, and neither, she suspected, was Greece. What had been conceived as an elegy began to take the shape of rebirth. She would return to the university taut and golden. In her more elaborate prophecies, there was a young man at her side, also taut and golden, still dripping with seawater. The pallid graduate assistants in their cableknit cardigans would whisper and shake their heads, but she would sail past them in triumph, her loyal Adonis at her heels. When she boarded the ship in Athens, she had visions of yanking the thread of her life from the gnarled, grasping hands of the Fates. The hags would protest, of course, but when she returned from the Aegean to present an exquisite tapestry, they would understand. It was her life-string, after all. Shorter and more thread-bare than it had once been, but still hers.

The cruise was nearing its end, though, and she felt a mild panic blooming in her chest. The long days at sea had been pleasant, the stops at various ports suitably lovely. Each day she would study herself in the mirror in her stateroom, eyes raking over her own form, searching for some small change in the architecture of her body. She told herself that these things take time, that often vast internal shifts leave no physical trace. All she could do was keep trying, unfold herself before the mystery of the Aegean, let it seep through her artifice and paint her life anew. Dutifully, she noted each fragmented pleasure. The sun, high and vibrant, whip-sharp against her scalp. The blue of the rocking sea and the angular look of the waves, like cut gems. The salt air that scraped against her red face. These were beautiful things, really. Bracing and true. She reassured herself continually, then grew impatient with her own reassurances. She did not wear gentleness well.

August would have phrased it differently. Not bluntly, exactly. Even as a little boy, he was intentional and artistic in his reprimands. You aren’t fooling anyone with the Mother Theresa act, Mom. Does your skin crack when you smile?

On the third morning, she sat in the dining hall and peeled oranges methodically. As an indulgence, she let herself remember the way August’s fat fingers used to smell like citrus rinds, sticky and rich. She wished she could remember when he had stopped being small enough for her to hold in her arms. There must have been a final time she lifted him into the air, felt his plump hands grasping at her shoulders. She could not recall. She had spoken to his father last month, and he had told her that August was traveling. Last I heard, he’s backpacking through Morocco or something like that. Listen, you need to stop quoting Anne Sexton on Facebook. It’s concerning, and honestly, it’s embarrassing.

Wandering from the dining hall to the upper deck, she fell in behind a couple, two Brits a bit younger than herself. The man spoke too loudly, and the woman not loudly enough. Both were wearing straw hats, like donkeys in a picture book. She felt a stinging disdain crawl into her throat, but she was not sure where it was directed. The pair were blandly innocuous, and she was merely judgemental. Neither was a crime. August would not be ashamed of such thoughts, she knew. He would claim them proudly, grinning with his teeth and saying the quiet thing aloud. It was a distasteful habit, but one that she envied.

On the upper deck, she imagined herself back at the university, furiously scribbling in red pen, knowing her critiques would be either dismissed as myopic or held to as gospel. Every year it was the same—the critical students lacked structure, the structured students lacked criticality. She wondered how she might have handled August if he had been a student rather than her own son. He would have tested her, she knew. His had always been an electric intellect, crackling like a livewire. She wondered if he would have respected her as a professor, if he would have realized she had something, anything, to teach him. August was older than most of her students now. She had not seen him since Christmas, when he had slung insults at her across the dinner table, the tree in the other room blinking pathetically, illuminating his face twisted with resentment. After he left, she had thrown the gifts she had bought for him in the trash along with the remains of Christmas dinner. She had watched the turkey gravy seep into the knitted cloth of a sweater and felt an ugly tug in her stomach, something like satisfaction. And then she had cried, thick wailing tears that carved red tunnels down her cheeks. But that was December, and this was June, and she was not crying anymore. August had blocked her cell number, and she wondered if that meant she was no longer a mother. No one here knew that she had ever been one. On this ship, she was worn down to the sparest image of herself: a woman in a terry cloth robe, nearing the age that inspired questions about retirement plans.

And yet, her mind would not stop churning, staticky with distraction. Standing by the guardrail, she glared at the sea and thought of titles for articles. A woman next to her was speaking loudly into her cell, describing the monastery on Mykonos, chewing on her words with satisfaction. “Island Hopping: The Poetics and Practice of Affluent Statelessness.” Across the deck, a boy of seven or eight slipped into the pool, his slim, brown body swallowed up by the liquid pale. She watched his shadow beneath the water and waited for him to emerge. “Youth Subsumed: A New Examination of the Monstrous Maternal.”

She was beginning to tire of herself. Her boorish dedication to minutiae. She should have been a playwright, she thought. Playwrights were foppish, experimental only in trivial ways. Brow furrowed against the caustic sun, she decided to think up names for plays. It sounded pleasanter than wallowing in academia, and perhaps it would scratch the same shameful itch, her need to package the visual in the glossy plastic of language. Telemachus Goes No-Contact, she thought. Clever, biting yet anodyne. Crowds of young people would stream into theaters across the world to witness her 21st Century Odyssey. It would be so engrossing that the little spectators would silence their cellphones when prompted and sit together in dark silence. She imagined the unhappy twist of August’s mouth when his friends sang her praises with the expressiveness of youth. They would not know, and he would not say. He would only frown, letting just a trace of acid seep into his retorts. It sounds banal. Derivative. But really, what do you expect from an aging professor? It’s almost funny the way they’re always desperately clutching that last shred of relevance.

He would not say anything too earnestly, would not deride her specifically. All he would do was dismiss her wholly, archetypically, without heat.

She could have been an indulgent mother, she knew. If he had asked for permission to do something, to do anything, she would have struggled to say no. But he never asked. August moved through life like a lion cub, slinking and proud. His smiles were quick, his laughter brash. It wasn’t that he didn’t consider her feelings. He considered them, weighed them unfavorably against his own whims, and discarded them like peach pits. Her emotions were an unfortunate byproduct, an obstacle that prevented him from devouring the world whole. And still, he let the sweet-slick juices of his pleasures drip down his chin garishly, as if taunting her. Nothing you do or say will spoil my appetite. You are inconsequential.

She didn’t want to deny him anything. She just wanted to be lenient on her own terms. All mothers felt that way, she suspected. It was only his wildness that had hardened her, a gradual petrification seeping through soft tissue. She had been replaced.

The idea startled and depressed her. She had taken to the water as though it would purify her. She wanted to be sun-bleached, gauzy. And yet, here she was, raw stone even now. The salt air could render her smooth and featureless, but it could not change what she was. All it could do was erode her. In Athens, at the Acropolis, she had paced the cool corridors of the museum, studying the ancient busts—jagged, noseless faces and empty eyes under heavy lids. That had been a week ago. At the time, she had felt a kinship with the sculptors, those long-dead artisans who had lovingly coaxed humanity out of dead marble. They must have imagined a legacy, she knew, but even their most grandiose hopes would have fallen short. For a mad instant, she had let herself slip into a future where her own work held up to two thousand years of scrutiny.

A week ago she knew such visions were ludicrous; now she saw that they were worse than lies. She had stared at those statues and let her eyes believe that they could uncover what was true and human and lasting, that she and those long-dead artists were engaged in the same furious dance of meaning-making. But she was not like them. She was like the busts themselves—cold and cloistered, a mystery long since solved. Like her, they could not breathe life in, could not line their hearts with downy warmth. Whatever humanity they still held was vestigial. They, like her, were obsolete.

The ship was coming into port. The city of Volos grew before her eyes, monstrous cranes and silver cars layered over stone edifices and ancient foothills. Three thousand years folded into itself. Jason stood on the shore, dwarfed by his trireme, dripping with promise. This was before Medea, that most hated of women, loathed by gods and men. Before the child-death that hung over his old age like a curse. Here was Jason in the time before—big-boned like a man, bright-eyed like a child. Like August, she thought. Like all sons. She looked for Jason’s mother, cunning Alcimede. She was not there. She had never been there.

She had the urge to vault the guardrail, let her body crash into the waves. They could dredge the Aegean in search of her bones. They would find nothing but a churning whirlpool, Charybdis writ small. An empty monstrosity, swallowing down shining sailors as though their pulp could give her human form. And at its center: a peach pit, the vague scent of citrus rinds. The kinds of things that rot.

The Mediterranean heat was sour. She was adrift truly now, and wondered how she had pretended for so long. She closed her eyes against Volos, against Jason, against the Aegean and its cruel blue shine. The blackness was stained with sun. Another brilliance she could not claim, a bright spot beyond her control. These things always seep in, she thought. The gangway had been lowered. The passengers filed off the ship sedately. She was not among them, and could not be.