Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  Soon, summer weekends bring driving trips to the scalloped coastline, to the ruins and treasures at Ephesus, Pamukkale, Pergamum, Bodrum. Nights are spent in cheap beachside hotels where snails cluster above the beds like textured wallpaper. She is folded into the clique of English-speaking women with the same ease with which Canada had joined the children on Olson Loop. There are long days at the pool; card games and shopping in the Old City with Bahar. Under her expert instruction, Grace learns to study the intricate knot-work to tell a good rug from a cheap one, to weigh gold appraisingly in her palm, to click with her mouth when she is outraged by a price. She becomes close with Paige Trotter as well. The Trotters live in a real house, not an apartment, and in the pretty garden out back, tattered Japanese lanterns are strung from fraying clothesline, weighing down the stunted trees that grow up through the patio. The furniture is rickety and weather stained and Grace ruins countless dresses with rust marks from leaning up against the tables and chairs. But she spends some of her loveliest hours there, in Paige’s garden and the untidy living room, with its low windows and sprung couches, among the dusty spill of books and artifacts and papers and general material confusion.

  Some days it feels as if she’s been swept up in a great, ongoing party, without consequences or repercussions, where drinks flow and food appears, where the women are lovely, the men bright and interested, and the children out of sight and productively occupied.

  July 1975

  3

  SIMONE. SIMONE OF THE FRENCH-BLUE BEDROOM SUITE, THE gardenia and vetiver, the atomizers and glass pots of face cream, the jewel-hued bath beads and lace-trimmed bed jackets. Simone Tremblay, Catherine’s mother: climbing, bloodless, her heart as frosty as her perfectly coiffed hair. Simone and her houseboy, John: her minion, her underling, her co-conspirator, and something else we couldn’t yet define.

  On Tuesdays, in the heat of the day, John folded laundry in the small, matching blue room off Simone’s bedroom suite. Tuesday was Simone’s day at the salon. Of course, it didn’t occur to Catherine to ask her mother to go along, and Simone would never think to offer.

  Sometimes, passing the doorway, bored and ill at ease, Catherine and I would linger, watching John fastidiously fold Simone’s panties and delicates, his hands moving quietly among the lace and silks, his mouth slightly curled. The iron hissed on the table and we heard the bright tinkling of oud strings from the small black radio, its antenna pointed toward the tiny square of window that looked over the alley and, we’d been told, toward Mecca. This was also the room in which John prayed in the afternoons, on a rug he kept rolled behind the washing machine.

  In a pile on the floor were Simone’s clothes—lavender silks and demi bras, camisoles, madras shirts and long, pleated skirts requiring meticulous ironing. As John aimed the iron into the darts and cuffs and creases, wet heat gathered in the air and seemed to us like some emanation from his body.

  “What do you want?” he said. “Go away. I do not wish to be watched by you.”

  Clean clothes, folded and stiff and fresh, grew in stacks around him. They piled up on the ironing board, the floor, the dryer. The radio crackled; he adjusted the antenna.

  Catherine pulled me away from the door. “Let’s go out,” she said.

  “I want to stay.” I turned to John: “Can we help?”

  “No.” He turned back to the laundry and his hands became more purposeful, his folding more vigorous and impatient.

  But I liked watching John; he was so different from Firdis, who slammed and slung and tossed things: John used such care touching Simone’s lingerie, folding the tap pants trimmed with lace, turning bra cups inside each other, his fingers tugging down silky straps. Simone favored silks and crepes—in dusky roses, lilacs, peach. I often thought: Who is this woman, Simone, to wear these fabrics and colors—so chaste, so innocent—next to her body? Who does she think she is? Perhaps John wondered the same thing.

  Later, as we were walking down the hall to the kitchen, Catherine suddenly said, “I don’t think he likes girls seeing him do the laundry.”

  I looked at her over my hand. “We watch him cook and clean and do the dishes.”

  “It’s different.” She shrugged. “Laundry is beneath him. It’s women’s work.”

  On afternoons when she was home, Simone and John huddled together in the kitchen and spoke in low tones, studying menus and seating charts, flower arrangements and butter clovers. The two of them were always scheming some upcoming social triumph.

  We pushed open the door—looking for a drink, an approved snack, some distraction or another—and they both looked up as if intruded upon during some private, occult rite. Foodstuffs were spread on the counter, silver was drying on soft towels, the refrigerator hummed. Simone huffed, straightened her skirt with her long, pale hands and launched an interrogation.

  “Have you done your homework, Catherine? Practiced at the barre? Why are your faces dirty? Your hands? You aren’t wearing shoes inside the house, are you? Surely I’m seeing things.”

  We backed away and tiptoed down the hall to Catherine’s room, settling for the candy we hoarded in her closet and water straight from the bathroom tap. The latter was ill-advised, but we had both, since arriving in Turkey, developed cast-iron stomachs.

  We kept our candy hidden in a shoebox behind Catherine’s neatly hung clothes—Peter Pan–collared shirts, pleated tartan skirts, navy blue trousers. Over the summer months a kind of bargain had blossomed silently between John and Catherine. And the candy was part of it; all of it came from him, delivered in secret, payment for some dark thing growing between them.

  She told me a little of it that same afternoon. She told me that when he came to her room to deliver laundry, to straighten her bed or dust her dresser, he stayed just a bit longer than the task required. He carried in her white cotton panties, pink leotards and clean tights, collared shirts and school skirts—and all the time, he whispered to her. The whole time, most of it, his hands slid shirts onto hangers, crisp cottons into her dresser. He never stayed more than a few minutes, she said. Perhaps he needed to compose himself for Simone’s return, to anticipate the instructions she would insist she’d given him earlier, which would most certainly have come to her under the hair dryer. And yet to Catherine, these moments alone with John had the breadth and substance of hours.

  “Your mother is a bitch,” he would whisper to her. “A filthy woman, an oppressor, a whore.”

  Though she was not inclined to disagree, the sound of his accented voice saying these words must have provoked in her some involuntary surge of loyalty, some small instinct to object. I imagine his words accompanied by the sound of fabrics, the shush of cotton, the crinkle of starchy shirts and the vaguely stiff leotards Catherine had by the dozen, which Simone had shipped from Montreal.

  John was slight, wiry and strong; he smelled of clean clothes and hair oil and he moved as Simone herself did, glidingly, and was not much for eye contact. If he touched Catherine, which he did not often do, being restrained by some odd chivalry, he left grease marks on the collar of her shirt, across its crisp alabaster front. When he left he would hold out his arms to take the stained garment away and she would slide it off and place it in his hands. She said he always turned his eyes from her body, as if it didn’t interest him.

  “Your mother,” he would murmur, “she is a bad person, she treats people poorly. Inşallah she will go to hell. Do you agree?”

  John’s English was exceptionally good, though the words came out with odd inflections: ah-gree, he said. Beesh.

  “She does not care for you. Orospu. Only for her perfect parties, her china, her position.”

  Certainly this was true. Simone was peremptory, imperious and snide, always jockeying for position. (What’s that thing stuck to the ambassador’s backside? went a common joke among my mother’s friends. Oh, that? Just Simone Tremblay.) Simone, almost always dressed for some affair: her clothes silky around her frame, her eyes glittering with pleasure—tak
ing in what John had done: the crystal and china, the sprays of orchids and individual ferns set spikily into vases, the polished silver that threw back her reflection, which she bared her teeth into, bending over the table, checking for stray lipstick.

  When Catherine was dispatched to the kitchen to assist John in some preparatory task—folding napkins into intricate designs, polishing water glasses or fruit knives—John mouthed things to her behind Simone’s straight back, the knobs of her spine visible under a tennis outfit or a thin cotton dress. She heard the words in her head as though he were placing them there, one by one, as carefully as he laid silver on a table. Whore. Slut. Dog. She could read his lips precisely, in the instant when their eyes met, when he compelled her to look at him. She watched him form those words, hearing his voice in her head, and it was as if he were painting Simone in brilliant, poisonous colors, while the woman herself was occupied with some triviality, clicking her pen over the evening’s menu, repositioning a blade of greenery.

  You could not help but notice the obsession in Ankara with domestic servants. These strangers in our homes—bending, washing, scrubbing, serving—seemed to have a value greater than any amount of actual currency. Among the ladies they were constantly discussed, traded, inherited, loaned, lauded and complained about. And Simone’s relationship with John was particularly interesting to the other women in my mother’s circle.

  Still, the young man they gossiped about, this swarthy, libidinous houseboy, sly-eyed and hostile, was strangely confined by perimeters known only to him. He never touched me, for example, though I certainly wanted him to. I settled for far less, treasuring even the slip of his cool hand against mine in the hallway. Passing me in the corridor leading to Catherine’s room, he would turn his body away from mine; he was taut, bladelike, and the suggestion of a mustache above his upper lip reinforced the implication of a sneer. But our hands would incongruously meet, so quickly and deftly it would be hard later to imagine how it had happened, and I would come away with some bit of cellophane or foil curled inside my palm, a thing to be unwrapped later, privately, savored and adorned with meaning—the flavor, the color of the paper, the comic hidden inside like a Chinese fortune.

  But John pressed these riches on us with his typical disinterest, with the manner of one paying a debt he is not quite convinced he owes. From time to time he brusquely deposited in Catherine’s room paper bags filled with candy or chewing gum, the sickeningly sweet sugared squares called lokum, which we disposed of down the toilet, for fear, of all things, of hurting his feelings.

  It’s a mystery why he included me. Perhaps he simply saw how easily my silence could be purchased, how eager I was to be included in what went on between them. Generally, if John spoke to me at all, it was by way of instruction or criticism, reminding me to take off my shoes, or wash my hands, not to touch Simone’s breakables or his beautifully laid dining table. He was often Simone’s intermediary, taking up her causes when she was absent. You would never have said they were united, of course, but I believe John liked the idea of giving us orders, and he sought out opportunities to do so.

  In her bedroom, Catherine and I divided up the candy and rationed it out. I tried to pry from her the details of their encounters—when had he come last, what had he said or done? I felt as entitled to his trespasses as I would if they’d been directed at me.

  “Do you think I should tell someone?” she asked me that afternoon. “Should I tell my mother?”

  The candy was spread between us on the bed, like treasure poured from an undersea chest. The little mound glittered and winked.

  I put my hands deep inside the pile: the cool of cellophane and the squish of caramel, hard sour candies colored like jewels and mysterious little bundles we would have to unwrap to identify. To lose all this booty, to give up the thrill of its secret provenance, seemed tragic to me, and stupid.

  “Tell Simone?” I said. “No. Why on earth would you?”

  Catherine stared at me. I unwrapped a green sour ball and fitted it inside my mouth. “She’d have to fire him,” I pointed out. “She’d hate you for it.” I sucked vigorously on the candy; artificial lime flavor burst bright stars in my mouth. “But then again,” I said slowly, “what if she didn’t? What if she didn’t do anything?”

  Catherine looked around the room. She smoothed the flowered bedspread under her fingers. “It’s nothing anyway,” she said then. “It isn’t anything.”

  Looking back, perhaps there was a time when Catherine wanted my advice, or even my approval: she was timid by nature, afraid to walk home from the bus stop alone, terrified of the dogs that roamed the streets and the construction workers who muttered at us incomprehensibly when we passed their work site in the mornings, in our tights and school uniforms, carrying our books.

  WHEN CATHERINE and I weren’t in the alleys, we spent summer afternoons at the pool at the Canadian Residence, lying side by side on the hot tile, our feet splashing gently in the deep end. The sun beat warm strokes along our bodies; surrounding the pool the lawns were emerald green, thick as carpet, bordered with bright flowering hedges. It was lush, almost suffocating, and the trees overhead seemed to close us in, to gather the sky in a perfect sphere above where we lay prone, lethargic and baking. Outside the tall iron gates the city was dirty and hot and bleak, but it seemed to me as distant as Olson Loop. At lunchtime, we pulled apricots from the trees; they came free still warm from the sun, blushing pink, skins soft and furred.

  The scritch of a lighter being flicked repeatedly. I had one arm thrown over my face, a sticky apricot stone clenched in the other hand. I widened my fingers and saw my mother—an alien in enormous sunglasses, a wide hat, a skirted bathing suit, on a lounge chair nearby. She was examining the lighter, looking concerned, the unlit cigarette a little white stick resting in the middle of her luridly pink chest. Simone lay beside her under an umbrella, stretching like a cat, scribbling something on a pad of paper.

  My mother disliked Simone, though they were friendly socially. Friendly, but by no means friends. There was something between those women, some sporting camaraderie, but it was limned with something distinctly ungenerous. Catherine and I suspected they were united only in the face of what they mutually disapproved of: slouching girls, back-talking girls, loud, silly, inconsiderate, thoughtless girls.

  Closing my fingers, I waited for the sunspots to recede and briefly considered the idea of my mother. She swam long, endless-seeming laps, always breaststroke, her chin never dipping below the surface. She wore a bathing cap studded with plastic flowers. Her white legs frog-kicked end to end, her mouth slightly open, sunglasses propped up on her head. Coming out of the water, she toweled herself vigorously all over, even between her legs; she dragged the cap from her head with a big snap. But aside from Simone, she was liked; you couldn’t have said she wasn’t. I found it surprising, less than pleasing, an ongoing mystery. And those bracelets she’d begun wearing, they drove me crazy. Maybe a dozen thin, scrolled bangles, they clinked and tinkled along her freckled arms. She went around jingling like our cat and seemed to enjoy it, hearing the sounds she made moving, dressing, brushing her hair, shouldering through the world. Catherine had asked for ones like them and Simone had called them common and sniffed—a sound like a kitten sneezing. Catherine could imitate it perfectly.

  The two of them were Canadian by birth, Simone and my mother, but my mother was an American now because she’d married one, which was the first thing Simone found objectionable. But my being named Canada—a bizarre patriotic gesture my father had strenuously opposed—this she called “the height of bad taste.” Simone never, ever called me by name. Even when I was not around she said: your friend, or that American girl, or simply her. It was a rudeness she wouldn’t have tolerated from Catherine but blithely allowed herself. Simone, I believe, put up with our friendship only because it was temporary, because, of course, everything among us was—posts and schools and apartments and houses, certainly friendships. And what Catherine really w
anted, I think, was permanence, a house in a place that stood still, and trees and plants that flowered seasonally, predictably, a school she might graduate from, friends who wouldn’t ever change or move or leave. She might have become the kind of woman who nurses a vague agoraphobia or one who earns a living from home, putting papers into envelopes. But then perhaps she would have become the prima ballerina Simone was grooming her to be. Even though I know the truth, I still sometimes picture her as a pin on a map, a little figure of a ballerina, like one on a music box she had, spinning gracefully, somewhere in Quebec.

  Under the edge of my blue towel—side by side with Catherine’s—I kept a little lump, a mound I rested my hand on periodically, palm flat, fingers wide. I edged the towel back and my fingers rustled in the assortment, culling what I wanted from the rest. I slid a fruit pastille—not a black-currant one, those I kept for myself—against the edge of Catherine’s hand. She pushed it back gently and I pushed again, insistently.

  “Too hot,” she hissed. “It’s too hot.”

  “Look what’s left.”

  “You have it.”

  There was silence, long and scorching; the sun throbbed against my eyelids.

  “Really? You don’t mind?”

  “I wish you would.”

  I sighed and wriggled on my towel, shifting my shoulders, greedy fingers busy again in the pile. Papers unfolding, quiet as could be—I submerged each crinkle, snap, or tear beneath a cough, a sigh—each sound allowed to dissipate before another was initiated.

  The afternoon wore on into early evening, when lights blinked on in the residence and down the hillside and insects began stirring in the trees. My mother and Simone rose from their chairs and began to gather their towels and lotions and hats. A party was being held at the pool that night and the two disappeared into the cabana to shower and paint their faces and change into dresses. Servants began moving up the path with bottles and folding tables and platters of food wrapped in plastic.