by Vendela Vida
She splashed the water away and watched the ripples. It seemed it had been months, years, since she had left a trace of herself in this world. A grief counselor Matthew had sent to her home (in lieu of coming himself, it seemed) had accused her of trying to be invisible. “You seem to want to cease to exist too,” the woman said, just before Yvonne asked her to leave.
Yvonne plunged in deeper and swam for as long as her breath would hold. When she emerged, she saw she had traveled closer to one of the boats with a Turkish flag. She could hear voices calling to each other from one end of the boat to the other, and then in her direction.
A woman with a bright white scarf tied around her head was clipping laundry to a line on the side of the boat. She addressed Yvonne, first in Turkish, then in English.
“How feels the water?”
“Refreshing,” Yvonne shouted back.
“What do you say?” said the woman.
“It’s nice,” Yvonne said, and the woman nodded, as though this was something she already knew.
“Where are you from?” said the woman. She was wearing a white blouse tucked into long white shorts, her waist circled by a dark blue belt.
“United States,” Yvonne said as she swam closer to the boat. Swimming and shouting at the same time was exhausting. She switched to the breaststroke so she could speak more easily.
“Where in the U.S.?” said the woman. She pronounced the letters U and S carefully, as though spelling a word for a child.
“Near New York,” Yvonne said. She was tired of explaining Vermont.
“Oh,” said the woman. “I was near to there. My daughter, she lives in Vermont.”
“That’s where I’m from!” said Yvonne. It was strangely welcoming to find a woman hanging laundry on the other side of the world who knew something about where Yvonne lived. She felt as though the woman could picture the mismatched greens of Yvonne’s living room couch and chairs, the coatrack that stood in her entryway like a leafless tree.
“Please,” said the woman, “you must come on the boat. Please, I invite you to have a glass of tea with ice.”
Yvonne had no choice but to accept. What would be her excuse not to? That someone was waiting for her on the beach? Once she returned to her towel, she would be alone, as the woman in white would be able to see.
Yvonne swam to the boat. The aluminum ladder was warm on her hands, and Yvonne could hear the water dripping from her swimsuit onto the rungs as she lifted herself up. The woman was waiting for her, a plush white towel in her hands, and she wrapped it around Yvonne as if she were a champion swimmer finishing a record-breaking heat. From afar the woman’s trim figure had lent her the air of someone much younger, but up close Yvonne saw that she could be sixty-five, maybe seventy.
“Thank you,” Yvonne said. Now that she was out of the water, she tasted the salt on her lips.
“I am Deniz,” said the woman. Her teeth were the texture of wood, but her eyes were wet and bright.
“Deniz, I am Yvonne.”
They smiled at each other. Yvonne liked her immediately.
“Please, I introduce you to my husband,” Deniz said. “Galip.” Galip was standing by a table at the stern of the boat, pouring iced tea from a pitcher into a glass. He had a thick gray beard and wore a black bandanna around his bushy hair. His wrinkled white linen shirt was unbuttoned halfway down his chest, and his white shorts reached his knees. He was a stout man with powerful legs, and seemed aware of his fitness, his roguish appeal. A pair of Oakley sunglasses hung around his neck.
“Nice to meet you,” said Yvonne.
Galip nodded and handed her the glass of iced tea. It was clear he did not understand English.
“Please, sit down,” Deniz said.
“I don’t want to interrupt your lunch.”
“You don’t. Captain Galip eats in one hour. I don’t eat after twelve,” said Deniz. She paused, waiting for Yvonne to comment. She clarified: “We do boat charter all year and I cook very good food. So I don’t like to get fat, I stop eat at twelve.”
Two crewmen, no more than eighteen years old and also dressed in white, appeared behind Deniz. She turned to them and barked something in Turkish. Her voice was suddenly unpleasant, the consonants of her words scraping against each other like a zipper. The boys scampered toward the front of the boat.
Deniz turned back to Yvonne and smiled sweetly but without apology. “Where you live in Vermont?”
“Burlington,” Yvonne said.
“I see,” Deniz said. “My daughter, she live in the capital.”
“Montpelier.”
Deniz nodded. “She marries a doctor for the back.”
“A chiropractor?”
“Yes. He is a nice man. He needs to give me a grandson or granddaughter—I don’t care what it is. He just needs to give me one. Do you have a family?” She had a habit of smiling at the end of each question.
“I have two children,” Yvonne said. “Yes. Twins.”
Deniz made an exclamation, the Turkish version, it seemed, of wow. She translated for Captain Galip and he made the same exclamation. For her entire life as a mother, Yvonne had been getting credit for something over which she had no control. Twins ran in her family.
“What do they do, your childrens?” Deniz asked.
“My son is…he’s about to get a job at a restaurant. He’s a good cook, but he wants to manage restaurants. He’s getting married next year.”
“Next year is a giant year for him,” Deniz said. Yvonne nodded. She didn’t offer that every year for Matthew was a big one, full of accomplishments and celebrations. Peter had often listed them: National Merit Scholarship, early acceptance to Penn, second place in the regional lacrosse tournament, a pretty fiancée who had proposed to him, an offer—at age twenty-four—to be assistant manager of a restaurant that was booked two weeks in advance. If Matthew hadn’t been her son, she would have thought life was too easy for him. Actually, she still believed that. Sometimes she feared he had received so many accolades, so much external affirmation, that he had been depleted and dulled on the inside. He rarely said anything that one wouldn’t expect him to say.
“And your daughter?” Deniz asked. “Is she beautiful like her mother?”
It was, Yvonne knew, the kind of compliment you received when you weren’t in fact beautiful. “Thank you,” she said, smiling. “We look similar, but she’s much prettier.”
Yvonne had spent a great deal of time assuring her daughter of her beauty. She had started when Aurelia was young, and people smiled briefly at her before their gazes landed on her twin brother, whose perpetually distracted eyes and slightly smug mouth lent him the air of someone who possessed a secret you wanted to know. The twins had the same nose, and on Matthew it appeared tough and authoritative while on Aurelia it looked indelicate, broken. Throughout their lives, Yvonne had made sure there were more pictures of Aurelia than Matthew on display on the fireplace mantel, in photo albums, and on holiday cards. Aurelia never commented on the disparity, but Yvonne was sure she noticed. Aurelia noticed everything.
“What does she do, your daughter?” Deniz asked.
“Well…” Yvonne started. She had long avoided questions about Aurelia—she and Peter both had. It had almost become a reflex. Galip interrupted then with a question, and, thankfully, Deniz turned her attention to him.
The first time Aurelia went to rehab, everyone asked, “What’s your daughter up to?” because they didn’t know. By her third stay in rehab, though, word had gotten around, and when people asked how Aurelia was, they were asking because they wanted to have the update for the next dinner party, the sort of parties that Yvonne and Peter had stopped going to. At a certain point Peter had found ways to avoid saying Aurelia’s name.
When Deniz turned back to Yvonne, she had forgotten the topic of their conversation. “Your husband is on the beach?” She looked to shore, as though she might be able to spot him herself.
“I’m a widow,” Yvonne said. She was
n’t sure she had ever phrased it this way. Usually she just said her husband had passed away.
“What does that mean?”
“He’s dead,” Yvonne said, surprising herself. The words came too easily.
“I am sorry,” Deniz said. She lifted her hand to her head, as though trying to imagine the pain, and fingered her head scarf. “I don’t know I am still wearing this,” she said, and removed it and folded it into a small rectangle. “I wear it when I cook. Some people on boat thinks it is for religion.”
“Oh,” said Yvonne. She’d assumed this too. “So you’re not Muslim?”
“I am, but I pray in own way. I don’t need to show my religion. You know how wife of Turkish president wears a head scarf?”
Yvonne shook her head.
“It’s terrible. In this country Ataturk worked so hard for no religion in government, and now wife of Turkish president wears head scarf. Big problem. More iced tea?”
Deniz refilled her glass, and they sat in silence looking out at the water. “I think it is responsibility of spouse to watch what husband or wife does,” Deniz said. “President should not let his wife wear a scarf. I learn long time ago to watch the Captain. Many year ago, I stay at home raising my children, and the Captain worked for Club Med. But I make him stop. I go one time on the boat and see many women, from Greece, from Danish, they all take off their shirts and sunbathe and eat without shirts and I tell the Captain, enough. I am going with you to keep eyes on you.”
Yvonne said nothing. She knew this was how women spoke among each other, but she was out of practice. Since Peter’s death, her friends had avoided any mention of their own marriages. At group lunches with five or six fellow teachers, all women, the word husband was not spoken. They conjured, by omission, an imaginary world without men.
“It is important for marriage, you know, to do this.”
Yvonne nodded halfheartedly. Lately she had come to second-guess what she once thought important for a marriage.
Someone on a neighboring boat blasted an ABBA song for a moment, then turned it down. Yvonne and Deniz both stared in the direction of the music, as though daring it to assert itself again.
“This is a beautiful boat,” Yvonne said.
“It’s called a gulet. Is special to Turkey. More deck space for eating and sunbath.”
“Does it have a name?”
“Deniz II,” Deniz said. “It is named after me.”
“So there was another Deniz before?”
“Yes, come, I show you.” She stood and said something to Captain Galip, who had reappeared, and they all descended the steep stairs to the narrow passage in the galley, where framed black-and-white photos of the original Deniz, a smaller vessel, were on crowded display. Deniz and Galip pointed to pictures and announced proper names of people and companies, and it soon became apparent to Yvonne that they expected her to recognize their previous passengers. None of the names was familiar to Yvonne, but she nodded nonetheless to show approval of the caliber of Deniz I’s guests.
“I should go,” Yvonne said to Deniz when they returned to the deck. She had already had two glasses of iced tea, and speaking English was becoming a burden to them both.
“If you please, come back and visit us,” Deniz said as she walked Yvonne to the ladder.
“How long are you here?” Yvonne asked.
“Two days,” Deniz said. “We do chartered boat trips each day, yes? Tomorrow we take German group to Rhodos, next day we go to Cleopatra’s Island. Very pretty sand there. That day we have two Americans coming. Only two. Please, you are welcome.”
“Okay,” Yvonne said, “that would be nice. I’ll join you the day after tomorrow—Friday—for Cleopatra’s Island.”
“We leave Knidos at ten, yes?”
“Okay.” Yvonne was suddenly excited. She felt Deniz had something to teach her about being an older woman. Also, Yvonne had once been the kind of person who sought adventures, and she wanted to be that person again.
“Good,” Deniz said. “I am very happy now.”
“Me too,” Yvonne said.
As Yvonne descended the ladder, the rungs sharp on her feet, she saw the laundry Deniz had been draping by the boat’s railing when they had first started talking. Among the socks and shirts and towels hung a pair of Captain Galip’s boxer shorts, which had once been white but were now the dull, grainy color of a cheap paperback. There was nothing sadder, Yvonne thought, than seeing an old man’s underwear.
She dove off the bottom rung, and felt the stretch in her calves. The water was colder this time in, this far out. After swimming for a minute, she adjusted, and then took her time getting to shore.
Throughout much of her life Yvonne had made friends easily, and she attributed this to the fact that given any range of possibilities, she fell just to the right of middle: In terms of appearance, her features were neither beautiful nor harsh. Her dimples—she still had her dimples—tilted her to the attractive side of plain. She contributed to conversations without saying too much or too little, and she was smart without being intimidating. She walked into rooms never expecting anything but kindness, and in doing so, found she was greeted with open faces and quick intimacies.
In the past two years she had been different. She had welcomed nothing, had even assumed a pose in which she held one arm across her body as though to impede a potential embrace or attack. Her face too had changed; it appeared disapproving, even when Yvonne was not. She had worried for a time that the starchlike scent of death clung to her wherever she went, and she had taken to applying honeysuckle lotion to her arms, her neck.
But Deniz’s kindness, her eagerness to share Yvonne’s company, was reassuring to her. It felt like proof that this trip had been a good idea, and that Yvonne needed only to shed her cloak of mourning in order to be who she once was.
The water was murkier close to the beach, and Yvonne put her feet down to feel if it was shallow enough to stand. She almost scraped her knee on the rocks below. She staggered out of the water, trying to navigate the uneven surface between the weeds and, inexplicably, pieces of floating wood. Her body was cold as she emerged, but the warm air quickly blanketed her.
On the beach, a boy of about ten was laying something out on the sand. Boys the world over had the same body, she thought—narrow chests with protruding ribs and tiny paunches. He resembled Matthew at that age.
Yvonne walked past the boy, and saw he was organizing a collection of shells. He was setting them out with great care, the way a society hostess might arrange saucers and cups for a tea.
“What beautiful shells,” she said, pausing in front of them. For a moment, she had forgotten she was in Turkey. The boy turned to her. He had wide pink lips and a straight nose and eyes that were moist and dark, as though they had recently teared.
Yvonne pointed to the shells and smiled, and he surprised her by not smiling back. She had had students like this boy, students who didn’t immediately respond to her. It was the reluctant ones whose respect or attention she most pointedly sought.
She picked up a shell before noticing it was chipped on its side.
“Nice,” she said, and smiled.
The boy said something and shook his head. He stood and pointed to the chip.
“Oh, I see,” she said, holding it in her hand and pretending she hadn’t already noticed it.
The boy said something else.
She was ashamed she hadn’t learned any Turkish before arriving here. She and Peter used to study the basics before visiting any country—hello, thank you, excuse me, where is the…?
“Pardon?” Yvonne said.
The boy held up his fingers. Two.
Of course—he was selling the shells. The elaborate layout on the beach was his shore-front display.
Yvonne tapped the sides of her hips, her hands grazing the edges of her swimsuit, as though to show she didn’t have money on her.
The boy stared. I am an idiot, she thought. She felt the boy with his dark eyes mus
t think so too.
She pointed to her towel on the beach, her small bag, and started walking toward them. She realized she had left her belongings—her car keys, her money—on the beach while she had been on the boat. She sprinted toward her possessions as though hustling now could prevent any theft from having taken place in the past hour.
Everything was where she had left it. She turned to the boy and smiled at him, for she felt he was somehow responsible. He had not taken any of her possessions, nor had he let anyone else take them. She removed a five-lira note from her bag and handed it to him.
Now it was his turn to pat his hips—was he mocking her? He signaled to her to follow him back to the display of shells and began to speak Turkish again, as though if he continued speaking she might absorb his language during the very time he was talking to her.
Yvonne understood she was his first customer of the day, and because he had no change he wanted her to take more shells for her money. She pointed to one that more clearly resembled a sand dollar, and he nodded in approval. He knelt and, using a checkered cloth napkin, cleaned the sand from the shell before handing it to her.
“Thank you,” she said. “Tea and sugar.”
Yvonne returned to her beach towel, and as she sat down she again noticed the roughness of its texture. She closed her eyes to the sun, and her mind wandered to a fight she had had with Aurelia when Aurelia was a teenager. Aurelia had claimed that Yvonne loved her like any of her students, that she would have loved her if she had been bubbly or even dumb.
“Exactly,” Yvonne said. “That’s what being a parent is.”
“But I want you to love me specifically for who I am,” Aurelia said.
“Well, who are you, specifically?” Yvonne asked.
“See! You don’t even know!”
Tears were forming in the corners of Yvonne’s eyes. She wiped them away with her damp and sandy hands.
She heard laughter, and opened her eyes. The boy. He was standing in front of her, his shells wrapped in his towel and tossed over his shoulder. It appeared he had been walking past Yvonne and then stopped when something she had done amused him.
