SUMMER 20
In summer 1980, the French newspaper Libération asked acclaimed writer Marguerite Duras to write a daily column — one ‘that wouldn’t discuss current events, of a political or other nature, but a sort of news report parallel to that, on events that interested [Duras] and that had not necessarily been captured in the mainstream news.’ Duras — famously protective of her own time — agreed to a weekly column in the end, to be published over the course of one summer.
The result was a tour-de-force of nonfiction writing: a collection of observations written from the beach town of Trouville that nonetheless transcends its humble setting, twining together memoir, nature writing, literary criticism, and — against Liberation’s request — political analysis. ‘Summer 80’, as the collection was titled when it was published as a stand-alone text by Les Éditions de Minuit later that year, offers a singular, dynamic look at a summer characterized by much turmoil: a number of severe summer storms; the beginning of the Solidarity movement in Gdansk, Poland; a terrorist bombing in Bologna, Italy. ‘Look at how our spirits shatter when confronted with widespread death’, writes Duras: ‘how close death is to us, how close it has always been to us, as close as life itself.’
With this extraordinary summer as a backdrop, Duras explores her own loneliness, her relationship to writing, and her thoughts on history, death, desire, and — perhaps most importantly — hope in the face of catastrophe. ‘There are heralds of a new happiness’, Duras claims, ‘a new optimism, it’s already circulating within the disaster each day sadly reported by those in power.’
In the spirit of Duras’s innovative work, we at Moxy are proud to present ‘Summer 20,’ our riff on ‘Summer 80.’ Forty years later, as another extraordinary summer takes shape, we’ve asked some of our contributors to step into Duras’s shoes. Each week, one writer will write on events that interest them, exploring the personal and political, the particular and the abstract, observing themselves and the strange new world around them. Like Duras in 1980, we are presently confronted with the closeness of death. But as we begin to imagine a changed world, one shaped by disaster but not irretrievably damaged by it, we have also planted the seeds of a ‘new optimism.’ Our writers will capture this fledgling optimism, examining the myriad ways in which it might be expressed, and the different — and perhaps unusual — places from which it might spring. ∎
I
It’s June, but England is still cold. My counsellor is a middle-aged woman with short curly hair and kind blue eyes. She tells me over Zoom about styles of attachment. My notes look like this:
‘The capacity to be alone; What gives us peace when we are alone is a strong sense that we can come and go as we please.’
The first time I ever felt free was on the plane to London in September 2017. I was in a window seat, and the man next to me fell asleep the moment he sat down. I desperately needed to pee.
Now it is the summer of 2020, and I am in England. In September I will fly home to Singapore.
II
Sometime at the beginning of the twentieth century, an unknown, unnamed man brought a young boy from Fujian, China, to a tiny port city at the end of mainland Southeast Asia. A few years later, this man would be dead, killed by a Japanese soldier during the occupation of Singapore. He might have had my lips, or my nose. The child he brought would grow into an old man with snow white hair, an old man who would have a grandchild with dark black hair and dark black eyes. Me.
Somewhere else on the Malayan Peninsula during the turn of the twentieth century, a Chinese man married a Malay woman, and they had a baby girl. It was probably an arranged marriage. Crossing the ocean to make his money in the 南洋, or the South Sea, as so many young Chinese men from the Southern provinces did during the decline and fall of the Qing dynasty, he probably already had a wife and children back home in Shantou. I wonder how they spoke to each other, and what language they used if and when they did. Or what they ate, if they ever ate together.
This baby girl would grow into a beautiful woman with curly hair who chain-smoked Marlboro Reds and cooked heavy curries. A woman who would come to share a grandchild with dark black hair and dark black eyes. Me. She would call herself Chinese despite never learning Mandarin, despite never wearing Chinese clothes or cooking Chinese food, despite her wavy hair and caramel skin. Like so many murky things from this half-remembered history, her statement was not inaccurate. But it is also not entirely true.
III
I write down my fears while my counsellor struggles with her internet connection. They look like this:
Fears
Work
Singapore
Mother
Retaining a sense of freedom
Retaining a sense of self
My counsellor says that to survive transition, it’s important to retain a sense of continuity with the present. I tell her I have been doing yoga and running, to build a routine I can take with me. She says these things are good, but it’s important to have a form of self-expression. She tells me to imagine myself as Ariadne, who laid a thread for Theseus to help him find his way out of the Minotaur’s maze. She says that I should find a way to hold on to nuance, and to the person I have found and built in these rooms of my own.
IV
How to hold on to what there is no language for? To hold nuance in a land where there is no time for language is to grasp at your own slippery puppet strings. Strings of language and race, of empire and spice, of love and the absence of it. This is my mother’s genetic makeup, according to a company in America called 23andMe:
Chinese – 77.8%
Indonesian, Thai, Khmer, and Myanmar – 9.9%
Vietnamese – 2.6%
Filipino and Austronesian – 0.6%
Broadly Southeast Asian – 8.4%
South Asian – 0.5%
To hold nuance in a land with an unspoken past is to tether yourself to a murky, half-remembered dream. A dream that is not necessarily yours.
V
Sometime at the turn of the nineteenth century, during the decline and fall of the Qing dynasty, several nearly Chinese people who could not read or write, or choose whom to marry, or what their lives would become or come to mean, stood at the edge of the South China Sea and threw their lots in with the cold water. I know nearly nothing about them except that they did not sink. ∎
My street door has no post-box, so I drilled holes in the hundred-year-old brick and fitted a mailbox. I didn’t tell my landlord. I don’t know who my landlord is.
I value this letterbox-less iron door between my staircase and the street. I’m wary of it, too. I live alone above a pharmacy, and by day hear the faint murmur of business. It’s a patriarchal affair – the pharmacist is a gruff man, solitary in his maleness. His eyes are half-closed. He’s pockmarked. He looks ill. His head sits upon thick-set shoulders like a boulder wedged in a gully. He’s seen things, I feel (and not just drugs).
Parcels won’t fit through the aperture to my mailbox on the wall. Plus, around here, interesting-looking post gets nicked; I think the Royal Mail might be crooks. A year ago I asked a girl at the pharmacy counter whether they would take in my parcels, books mostly. She deferred to the pharmacist. He kept me waiting, didn’t acknowledge me. Come to think of it, he didn’t acknowledge the girl either. At leisure, huffing and puffing, he approached, sighed, and told me no, they would not. That was that.
My living room window faces the rear and looks over a patch of scrub enclosed by rotten fences and out-of-control bushes: the pharmacy’s back yard. I hear the women chatting and laughing over cigarettes. I wonder if they have tablets for nicotine addiction. Sometimes there is a more private conversation; I deduce it from the sounds, not the words themselves, which I can’t quite hear. Maybe I require listening equipment. If I could hear, I’d write the words down, for my own pleasure. For posterity. To study the way people frame their truths. To eavesdrop on the way people fool themselves. I imagine these conversations regard matters of the world: husbands, children, parents, affairs, illnesses. Had I the chance, I don’t know what I’d like to talk to someone about. I might listen first, and see what they want to hear.
There’s a cat, a ginger moggy. One of the women feeds it. The cat lies in the sun, and either ignores or eyes me lazily as I stand like a statue at my window. It has no expression. Of course, no cat does. But this one seems especially expressionless. I am hemmed in by life, and quite alone. It suits me, to a point, but I worry about the future. I see decrepit men on the street, wheezing, hollow-cheeked, leaning on what they can. I am you, but younger, I think. Rather, you are me, but transformed. In no time at all, we are each other. In no time at all, we are nothing.
I think about the iron door between my home and the street. There is no other way in or out. In health, locked, it keeps me from crime. In illness, it might be my prison. Even a strong man couldn’t kick it down. I know not a soul in my town. Sartre would say I’ve outlived myself. I wonder what he’d say about the old men. I study my pulse.
Life is everywhere. The young couple above never stop arguing, stamping, throwing things at the walls. Their post finds its way into my mailbox (more Royal Mail antics). A stream of red-edged letters from the letting agent, bailiffs, solicitors. No wonder they’re stressed. Their street door is next to mine, but it’s not iron. I forward the letters through it (it has a letterbox). They have a daughter; maybe she’s ten. I glimpse her on the street. She’s withdrawn. I never hear sounds above I could link her to. There’s something about her which is too knowing for a ten year old. She looks intelligent. I wonder about the private hell her childhood might be. I sit on my couch and wish her safe.
Her mother is obese, and, whenever I see her, heavily made up; she’s pretty. I see young men come and go. They either look furtive or victorious. The father is a permanently smirking man – the way Fats Waller smirked. He’s built like Fats too, but I doubt he plays the piano. Evenings I see him with the street-walkers out front – prematurely-aged ratty women with sallow skin, scraped-back hair, pram-pushing mums by day. He’s always on the edge of hilarity, this man, always has a line. I guess he might be a pimp, but it’s too much of a cliché, and I try to disregard the thought. I wonder, from behind my locked metal door, what prejudices I place upon this street, where I know no one, and of which I’m naturally wary. I see the best in people, I tell myself. I think again of the pharmacist’s narrow eyes, the way he volunteers nothing. He knows. I fear that without my metal door I’d be fair game, with my classical music, my books, the personal valency tattooed across my forehead. I check my pulse. I drink people in. But I have to barricade myself against them. ∎
She’s only coughed once or twice, I think, it’s hardly as if she definitely has COVID-19 and is definitely going to die, nor that I’ve infected and therefore killed her through my flying visit though, from this angle, one could very feasibly paint Grandma as a Dalí piece, perhaps named COVID-19, perhaps one of the so-called ‘paintings’ that hang in that self-aggrandized basement, the so-called Dalí ‘museum’ near the summit of Montmartre, not that she’s ever been, although in any case Montmartre is nowadays not Montmartre but ‘Montmartre,’ just how Paris is no longer Paris but ‘Paris,’ and thus fittingly, deservedly, studded with so-called ‘museums’ like so many herpes warts on the face of the infected while her body dribbles into the evening chair, flubbers itself into the fibres of an unvacuumed sofa in the most caricatured image of the passage of time imaginable, her eyes plugholes ceaselessly filled with Sisyphean streams of what we nowadays deign syphilisation I mean Frasier, Becker, Mash, ‘Allo ‘Allo, Dad’s Army, Cheers, Only Fools and Horses, My Family, Porridge, Going Straight, The Good Life, The Vicar of Dibley, Last of the Summer Wine, George and Mildred, One Foot in the Grave, Two’s Company, Fawlty Towers, Yes Minister, Yes Prime Minister, Open All Hours, Are you being served? all of which she has already seen many times over and will see many times moreover more, forever and ever amen, that’s the best can be expected, I think, the very best possibility available to her is I’m afraid your Nan’s got 324723.4 more seasons of Frasier left to live I think Each time an elder dies, a library of obsolete sitcom trivia burns, ‘never to be retrieved or repeated,’ I think, absurd, like the faces of children and other innocents who burned in the opening credits of the WWII documentary that my father watched and occasionally showed me as a kid, magnificently entitled THE WORLD AT WAR and thus the very antithesis, or so I thought, of The World at One, these two antipodes of present/past ying/yang etc. cleaved into two series for the benefit of the taxpayer (nay, the licence-fee payer !) I think, thinking as she coughs again, bone-rattlingly, that my grandmother is going to die, is dying I think and that that’s the thought to which I must adhere most firmly, must keep my gaze upon, fix my gaze most sternly upon as someone says in some book somewhere I thought think! to be as sure of it as the wind turbines existing behind her, through unopenable French windows, in the Chagallian blue August of South Wales. ∎
28 August 2020
REBECCA STEBBINS
Carpinteria, California
The dust is everywhere these days: the floor, the TV, the blades of the ceiling fan. It is in our nostrils and on our hair, taking the sheen off the green leaves of the plants left in the garden. Much of the garden has been reduced to dry, silty dirt following the installation of one hundred and twenty-five linear feet of septic leach lines, which are buried six feet beneath the soil now and run in triplicate under the old potager next to the house.
Everything has been reduced to nothing, and now we start anew. The piles of dirt and mounds of gravel were overwhelming for a time, but since we have been living here around the clock, day after day much the same in our pandemic isolation, we have been forced to see it as a new beginning, an opportunity to create something lush, beautiful, and drought-tolerant again – appropriate to our Mediterranean climate with its long, dry summers and occasionally wet winters.
The dirt is so expansive that it’s difficult to know where to start, so we begin where we ended. As we reinstall new fence posts around the potager and rake new gravel across the old boules court, we see some formal structure beginning to reappear, and it calms my mind. It allows me to envision a possible endpoint.
We can at least dream of an endpoint to the dirt and dust, but with a landscape, there is never an endpoint. To manage a garden is to live in circular time, following the revolutions of the seasons to plant, water, weed, harvest, and plant again.
Marking time through a garden is a forced slowing down, and maybe that’s what we need the most right now, to allay the anxiety of awaking every day to the same day: the pandemic; the dark doom of climate change; the helplessness of living through an era in which our president is more a menace than a leader, more a fool than a figurehead.
We are well into our fourth month of so-called lockdown, and we are the fortunate ones, able to live inside and outside, wander the gardens, sit quietly in a cool breeze or a hot, sundowner Santa Ana wind – one that gusts across the dirt, tossing the dust up in clouds.
We are marking time through the new vegetable garden, planted on the far side of our acre. We are also drowning in large and small zucchinis, now endlessly erupting from two plants that just recently, I thought, were in tiny pots. It feels like a lifetime ago that I would go out in the fog every morning and look for signs that the seeds were sprouting, nurturing the seedlings until they were big enough to plant out.
Now I grab a handful of haricot vert Maxibel green beans each day, steaming them until they are bright green, then plunging them into cool water and tossing them in a salad. The lettuces right next to the house were the only row that survived a visit from two bulldozers; they ripped up plants, rocks, and dirt as we looked on, like Harold and Maude having a picnic at the wrecking yard. While a few have bolted, we are still picking from the leftover romaine, curly leaf, oak leaf, and a few other random varieties, enough leaves for a salad every day.
Our neighbors bring avocados and squash, and we send off zucchinis, lemons, and eggs from our new flock of chickens, raised for the County Fair, which was cancelled, and then sold to us in May. Every day we are watching the tomatoes and trying to guess which ones will flame into color first: the yellow pears, the Jaune Flamme, the Cora Rich, the Amana orange, or the giant St. Marzano vines that are now taller than me.
A friend brought us rejected Mountain Princess tomatoes from the school where he works. The school gardens drifted into silence when the classrooms closed up and the students reappeared online, looking like the Brady Bunch, each in his or her little window. The plants arrived as single droopy stalks standing sadly in tiny pots; now, a month later, roots reaching into rich soil, they are lush with foliage and tiny fruits.
My school’s little garden was also left to dry out when school closed up mid-March. When I went in with mask and sanitizer to clean up my art classroom, sort and photograph all the art for an online art show, and shutter my classroom for the summer, I walked past a dozen artichokes nearly past their prime. I grabbed some scissors and picked them all. I saw a few straggly potato plants, too, and after digging into the dry earth, harvested pounds of beautiful purple potatoes. Then I pulled a few lemons off a tree and went home. All of it was delicious, a free harvest that would have been wasted.
Even my daughter, now socially distanced from the world here with me for so many weeks, has found her own green thumb. Ten out of ten ‘purple ohuru’ marijuana seeds acquired from a friend have sprouted under her capable and vigilant watch. We’ll see if they all survive, but so far, it’s looking good for most of them as they reach skyward on tiny stems, unfurling their cotyledons and then their first true leaves, acid green and wrinkly.
As we design patios and plant new garden beds, rip out the old lawn, move plants around and sow seeds, we begin to take back the future from this enormous patch of dirt we inhabit. In the meantime, the dogs continue to play, roll, and sleep in the dust on warm sunny days. Little clouds lift off their backs when patted. In the meantime, we are amazed at the juiciness of the apricots that are just becoming ripe, and the full flavor of strawberries and raspberries that taste like candy. ∎
One afternoon in early June, I walked from my apartment in Manhattan’s East Village to Washington Square Park, a close-knit collection of lawns and hedges set behind a triumphal arch dedicated to its namesake, George Washington. A crowd was gathered near a fountain in the park’s center, which is dry this year. It’s usually turned on in April, and throughout the summer, children in bathing suits leap up and down its steps toward the arcing jets in the middle. This year, though, no public space looks the same as it has in years past. Historically, Washington Square Park’s fountain has been a cooling site for its visitors, who aren’t technically barred from wading in. It might have been doubly useful this summer, bound to be the city’s hottest on record. Though the fountain is dormant, the park itself – a space with historic ties to protest, dating back to the city’s first labor march in 1834 – is rife with activity: there have been rallies in the park almost every day since demonstrations against racially motivated police brutality began in late May. Some of these have extended all the way to the northwest corner of the park, where the darkest chapter of its past unfolded. There, in 1819, a slave woman named Rose Butler was executed in front of a crowd of ten thousand people. There is no plaque or memorial for Butler, only a tall, spindly tree nicknamed the ‘Hangman’s Elm,’ planted close to the site where the park’s gallows once stood.
The rally I joined that day was primarily a vigil, not a protest, though many of the people – all masked and spaced six feet apart, these strange rules already concretized as second nature – held cardboard signs written in Sharpie: ABOLISH THE POLICE; BLACK LIVES MATTER; JUSTICE FOR OLUWATOYIN. Oluwatoyin Salau was a Black activist who died on June 15, two months shy of her twentieth birthday. She’d maintained a vibrant presence on social media, though before her death, her posts had become somber, outraged: she’d been stalked and assaulted by a man, she wrote, who would kill her a few days later. She was extraordinarily well-spoken and composed, a natural leader; she was going to study law at Florida A&M University. An array of flowers and candles had been laid out on the ground by the fountain. Oluwatoyin’s portrait formed the center of this shrine, lit up by flickering tapers. Behind it, a collection of speakers, all Black women, were perched on the fountain’s edge, taking turns using a megaphone. As I walked up, the first speaker, a small woman in high-waisted jeans, was talking quietly into the megaphone. The crowd pressed together slightly, straining to listen. The effect was beatific, church-like; she held her gaze steady, and we returned it. ‘This is what it means to be a Black woman in America,’ she said. ‘It means I could be killed at any moment.’ The crowd shifted. People looked down at their feet or nodded affirmatively. The sun was glaring. I was beginning to sweat. The woman regarded us seriously for a moment, her face drawn, and continued speaking. I thought of Butler, accused of arson, at that time a capital offense. Posthumously, her case was taken to New York’s Supreme Court, though justice was never served, and her name has faded from the city’s collective memory. She was executed less than ten years before the Emancipation Proclamation would have freed her.
In July 1968, three months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. – another summer of explosive protests and riots – Esquire interviewed James Baldwin ‘about the state of race relations in the country.’ ‘How can we get the Black people to cool it?’ the (all-white) editors asked him, referring to the civil disorder that followed King’s death. One can imagine Baldwin’s response: an incline of his head, a sharp look, an inhale. ‘It is not the Black people who have to cool it, because they won’t,’ he replied. ‘What causes the eruptions, the riots, the revolts…is the despair of being in a static position, absolutely static, of watching your father, your brother, your uncle, or your cousin – no matter how old the black cat is or how young – who has no future.’ America was burning, Baldwin said, but it always has been. This is a nation built through human exploitation and weaned on a steady diet of chauvinist rhetoric – a Band-Aid on a gaping lesion. How, he asked, could you expect Black people not to be enraged, to remain ‘cool,’ when only incremental reform had been achieved? The material conditions of their lives had not improved, even as politicians trumpeted a new era of equality.
Summer often feels like the Sisyphean pause of the seasons, a period of indolence: staggering out of the frantic spring, we come to rest in a stupor. This summer, though, as in 1968, there’s no ‘cooling it,’ no sense of deserved quiescence. Temperatures are soaring; New York’s climate has been relabeled ‘sub-tropical.’ As other countries begin to recover, America falls further behind. It’s impossible, now, to overlook the chasm that separates poor and non-white Americans from their wealthier, white counterparts, and the absence of basic provisions – universal health care, sufficient welfare for the many unemployed – rankles, like a deep, untreated wound. Now the heat is an opportunity, not a soporific; it’s allowed us to gather outside, where our proximity to others is less likely to worsen the virus’s spread, and where we are best poised to voice our demands.
This seems to frighten some people. ‘You’re very brave for staying in the city,’ says a coworker on a video call, comfortably ensconced in Connecticut. Her tone is disapproving, not admiring. It can’t be safe, can it? is the subtext. It’s hard to know exactly what worries people about New York right now – the virus or the riots? The rich have fled their residences in the city, as if, by abandoning one outpost, they could cauterize themselves; but is it fear of disease that’s motivated them, or fear of violence, of confronting an enraged underclass?
Moving trucks checker my block most days, commandeered mostly by people I recognize as my own age. They load up boxes and furniture, looking grimly focused, leaving behind the city for greener, more homogeneous pastures – Southampton, parents’ homes in suburban New Jersey. What’s left to do here? they seem to be thinking. Clubs and bars are closed, and some will never reopen. Friends can congregate, but only in certain ways. Everyday life is full of thorns: standing in long, spaced-out lines to get into grocery stores; picking your way past others at a six-foot distance. But what of the city itself? Who’s left to care for it? The mechanical, self-segregating ruling class has departed: Marguerite Duras describes it as a caste ‘endowed [not] with thought but with irrepressible logic, excluding from its ever narrower trajectory everything that does not concern its own causality.’ Most of us who stayed, I think, feel some sense of responsibility for our community – people and things that do not concern us, or our own causality, directly. The city is not your playground, goes the common refrain; it’s something that requires investment, reciprocity.
Of course, it’s not brave to have merely stayed in New York. Not when there were protesters who faced off against police during the June riots, who were shoved, shouted at, flogged, teargassed, arrested, held for days in cramped cells. We know now that this has been the most successful, sustained national uprising of the last two centuries. In Portland, Seattle, Chicago, the protests have continued unbidden, even as a good portion of the country, including our political leaders, pretends that they’ve passed, or questions their validity.
Standing in Washington Square Park, under the shade of a monument dedicated to our first president, I wondered why we still needed to honor man whose vision for our country – forged centuries ago, in wholly different circumstances – is no longer eminently applicable. Here, in front of Washington’s arch, were Black women whom the country had failed, in no small part because of enslavers like Washington. And yet they – perhaps only they – could articulate a clear path forward, out of the disorder of history and toward a more perfect future. Perhaps they were too young to be memorialized, with years of good work in front of them. But the way they held forth before the crowd was magnificent; I wanted to see their silhouettes projected in place of Washington’s on the arch; I didn’t want to forget them. Neither, it seemed, did anyone else in the crowd. The faces around me were rapt and alert, as if suddenly switched-on. We’d spent three months indoors, waiting for warmer weather, surrounded by the mounting wreckage of one of the greatest disasters in American history. We’d come outside now, blinking in the sun. Rose Butler had drawn her last breath only a few hundred feet away from where we stood. The city around us was quieter, but vital still, charged with a new kind of collective fervor – less frantic, more purposeful. We were together, all sweating, minds roiling, ready for something to change. ∎
There’s a myth I can swim to. It’s an island – a rock, really – off Agios Dimitrios, the next village over from my home in Greece. There, on a barren outcrop along the Peloponnesian coast, a woman named Leda gave birth in an exceptional way.
Leda and the Swan is the genteel title of paintings and poems that tell the story, brutal and strange, of a woman raped by a god disguised as a swan. Zeus, besotted by Leda, the queen of Sparta, ‘seduces’ her. So says discreet Wikipedia. W.B. Yeats pulls no such punch. ‘A sudden blow: the great wings beating still’: these words open his poem. Afterwards, Leda has relations with her husband. Then she comes to the island near me and lays two eggs. One egg held the Dioscuri – διοσκούρι – Castor and Pollux, astrology’s Gemini.
Helen was in the other – casus belli of the Trojan war. That Helen.
The island itself measures perhaps ten meters long by five across. To swim there and back is about a kilometer by sea. This myth keeps me company as I move, stroke by stroke, through the water.
Seduced by a swan? Unlikely. If they’re anything like the geese that waddle the roads here, hissing, swans are silly, not sexy. Then there’s the woman laying eggs like a bird. Did she roost on them, keeping them warm as winter storms lashed her? How lonely she must have been, with ample time to count her grievances against a priapic god. Yeats asks at the end of his poem: ‘Did she put on his knowledge with his power?’ Good question. Does consorting with the gods make you privy to their omniscience? I hope not. What a burden to know how things turn out.
∆
I love to swim, especially in the sea, and in the Mediterranean best of all. My first experience of it is among my most sensual memories, up there with my first café mocha and first orgasm (in that order). During the summer of 1984, I was in Europe with a gaggle of girlfriends. They were on the post-collegiate tour that young people assumed was our birthright back then. I had taken detours from my education, hitchhiking through Alaska and bumming around Venice, California, so I was a year behind, but came along anyway.
There, in Nice, I met the sea that stole my heart. While topless women sunbathed and men photographed them from the promenade, while Ferraris prowled the streets, I entered that water. And something happened.
Its silken texture, its mermaid hues, its warmth. Instantly, I was home.
∆
Here I was, home again, swimming towards Leda in May. Locals told me I was τρελός, trelos – crazy.
‘Too cold,’ Aggie said.
She and her brother Socrates run the Nereid café, holding court among its devoted habitués. Because of Covid, we can’t go inside, so in May, they set up a bar outdoors, cordoned off with caution tape. Men – always men – come to smoke and sip coffee. The sister sometimes dyes her cropped hair with leopard spots. The brother, who recently became a father, keeps his long hair in a samurai knot. Circles under his eyes attest to the baby’s fussiness.
No Greek swims until late June, she promised. But I forged on.
Greece responded to Covid decisively – cancelling Carnival, closing schools, requiring ‘Extraordinary Movement’ forms to step outside. Now, in late summer, they hope to reap the reward. One in five people here work in tourism, so August and September have been the focus of intense prayer. Empty hotels will swell with guests. Tavernas will serve heaping platters of μπαρμπούνι, barbouni, red mullet, and χόρτα, horta, wild greens. May they come, but may we stay healthy, too.
And now, in August, they arrive. Mostly Greeks, so far. Daily, they take to the sea.
Men paddle about in straw fedoras. Women bob in groups, clad in black bikinis from teenagers on up to yiayias. The water embraces us all. With mask and snorkel, I study the life beneath the shining surface. Flying Gurnard fish scuttle along the bottom with their fin feet and bat wings. Sardines shimmer, turning as one. A squid pulses off into deeper blue.
Arriving at Leda’s island, the rock glows gold at the waterline.
Yeats posited that history requires cycles of birth and death, punctuated by divine interventions. Leda and Zeus collaborated to end the Hellenic age, ushering in Roman hegemony. This came undone when a woman named Mary cooperated with another god in bird form, the dove of the Holy Spirit, to birth the Christian era. Now we stand on the brink of an epoch whose portents – fires, fascists, mass extinctions, and keening cries for justice – augur painful change. Meanwhile, the plague surges on.
Birth is notoriously hard.
Just recently, though, something new has appeared on the island. I swim its circumference to investigate. An artist is making a sculpture. On a pedestal, a simple egg.
What will it hatch, I wonder? ∎
Even on the sun-shiniest, butterfly fluttering-est, everybody into the water, most beautiful of beautiful days — even then, very few people ever want to play Whiffle ball with me. And now, with the world on lockdown, no one at all wants to play, and people think I am a lunatic for even mentioning anything so frivolous.
Except: NOT NO ONE! My nephew Frank played online Whiffle ball with me recently, and he won handily, 3-0. I feel really good about this, truly happy, unlike how I feel much of these plague-ridden times; which, if my true hidden feelings were a photograph of a famous writer, they would be Alexander Solzhenitsyn, on an especially dour of this, even this, humans are capable day.
I’m happy because my eighteen-year-old nephew Frank was unlike all of the eleven strangers who had actually signed up for my online Whiffle ball league, including a self-described skydiving mom from Hermosa Beach, who had in fact RSVP’d. The rest all said no thanks genteelly, or — demonstrating that although much has changed in Los Angeles, not everything has changed — flaked.
Frank said, ‘I’m in,’ and just like that, two roads diverged in a wood. He needed a minute to get ready, get the password, log in, all that. Online Whiffle ball is the exact same thing as regular real life Whiffle ball — same white plastic ball, same yellow plastic bat’ — except you do it like you do everything nowadays, on Zoom, taking turns throwing the ball up and hitting it yourself — why is this so hard for people to understand? I’d been fuming, but not anymore; now I was like the kid with a birthday party where no one came, except suddenly: a guest! An actual guest to ride the pony with me!
Frank has always been a genial yet taciturn fellow, and it’s not like we did a lot of bantering during the game. Not a word passed between us about his mom, my younger sister Audrey, at that moment short of breath with a dry cough in her second week of self-isolation. I had called to check on her, which is how the notion of asking Frank if he wanted to play came up.
And here he was, six foot four and rising—his senior year of high school cancelled, his going-off-to-college in limbo — with a lurching, elbow-intensive swing. Frank had three words to describe his efforts: ‘oof’ for a strike, and either ‘clean’ or ‘solid’ for a hit. He struck out in his first at-bat — lots of ‘oofs’ — then smacked two ‘clean’ singles, followed by a ‘solid’ home run for a three-run lead.
I came up — sporting the regulation polyblend baseball pants and knee socks that are my preferred daily lockdown uniform — and promptly lofted a soft pop-up straight back to the imaginary pitcher on each of my first four swings. I get one out per inning; that’s my handicap. Four swings, four outs, and just like that we were into the fifth and final inning, Frank still up by three.
I could make plausible excuses for my poor performance, but nobody wants to hear them. I did load the bases in the final frame, only to loft an easy pop fly to the imaginary left fielder, and just like that, Frank, who appeared not to have swung a bat or thought for a moment about baseball since he was nine years old, had me trounced.
This, I realized in a rare moment of knowing exactly how I felt, was absolutely fine. I immediately switched into sportswriter mode and asked Frank how he felt.
‘I actually have that King of the Hill feeling right now,’ Frank said, and he let go an unabashed smile, followed by an unprecedented outpouring of feeling. ‘That’s the most fun thing I’ve done in a month. The season’s looking good for me.’
Exactly one week later, his mom, my sister, Audrey, felt up to sitting outside on their porch to watch our rematch, which ended in a tie when Frank’s imaginary center fielder made a miraculous catch, certain to become legend. ∎
12 August 2020
RUSKIN SMITH
Lancaster, england
I take the girls out to the woods most days, through bushes where a section of the high steel fence is wrenched away. We step over its spikes. The ground is full of vinyl; brittle ends of it stick up between the roots. For a century this was a gravel pit and dumping ground for a huge lino factory, and recreation fields for workers there. It is in different hands now, private hands, but the idea of it as public space lives on. People keep ripping down the fence; over decades, woods outside the boundary have spread in all directions, thickening, one species in particular protected by the law. Despite the lockdown rule — no gatherings allowed — a group of teenagers are somewhere in the trees, a dozen voices laughing, conversations overlapping with the scent of woodsmoke drifting out across the path.
Under the canopy you step on manhole covers almost buried, shattered roofs of buildings softening, their rubble full of moss and yellow poppies, bluebells, other flowers that I cannot name. Esther’s face relaxes in a kind of waking dream, gazing up between the branches full of light. I like drawing butterflies, she says eventually, and quietly, to no-one but herself.
In a clearing is a length of cement pipe. Rosie gets onto her hands and knees to crawl inside, and when I bend to meet her with my face she screams and giggles at the echo of it. Esther decorates the side with chalks — hedgehogs and flowers, one small butterfly. It might be birdsong, how the layers of it flicker side-to-side at different depths, the wildness perhaps, but sometimes here I feel fresh memory, a shift, a sense of something I had hidden from myself becoming bearable. I turn away and shut my eyes.
∆
I find it hard to do much school-related stuff. Rosie keeps grabbing at the screen and clambering into the way. I make sure they have pens and paper, things like that. There is a kind of paint that’s easy to wipe off the kitchen floor tiles. I let them put their bare feet into trays of it and run around. They scream with laughter at their footprints — reds and yellows to begin with, orange. It becomes slippery too soon; Rosie fell back the other day and bumped her head against a cupboard door. I bent to pick her up; she kicked my hand and laughed and stood and slipped again, onto her side. I carried her into the yard. Her footprints on the landlord’s paving stones will fade, I guess, with rain and sunlight, over time.
∆
I leave the girls in front of the telly. I watch the kitchen clock for Eleanor to get back, finally, via the garage, where she has chalked out a corner as a decontamination zone. She stands inside the lines and disinfects her keys and phone and NHS badge, and she gets undressed — not from her uniform, which she was told to leave at work, but from the clothes which she has worn between the hospital and here. She hangs them in a designated bag high on the wall, and in her bra and knickers, tiptoeing in case her feet have picked up any virus from the garage floor, she walks in through the back. I am meant to leave the doors wide open, from the garage to the bathroom, but I keep forgetting, and today she had to use her elbow and her shoulder to get in, although she wants to keep her hands in front of her, avoiding surfaces, her fingers curved as if she’s holding something, like a precious vase. She went immediately upstairs for a shower, past the girls, who hardly blinked up at her as she tiptoed through. Am hugging you inside, she called out from the stairs. ∎