A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature)

by Lonely Planet

  Mother and Aunt Wheezie, glowing in pastels, hat, shoes and purse matching, took turns driving. If that person behind the wheel was Aunt Wheezie I held the side of the back seat. Wheezie believed in acceleration.

  When we finally arrived at the impressive stone mansion, I walked up the winding path between the two sisters who looked alike as twins.

  ‘Remember, no matter what is placed in front of you, give it a brave try. And smile,’ Aunt Wheezie counseled.

  ‘And don’t pick on Gallatin.’ Mother paused. ‘He’s not as forward as you are.’ She turned to her older sister. ‘How’s my lipstick?’

  ‘Joan Crawford divine.’ Aunt Wheezie’s gaze fell on me. ‘Hazel will look at you with the searching eye. Hear?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Aunt Wheezie lived in fear that I would reveal her relentless efforts to render me feminine a failure.

  We knocked on the door. Bixby, the portly butler, opened it.

  ‘Julia Ellen and Louise.’ He smiled, a genuine smile. ‘And your precious little girl.’

  ‘Semi-precious,’ mother shot back.

  Laughing, Bixby ushered us into a sitting room filled with eighteenth-century furniture. The only reason I knew that was Aunt Hazel (how she allowed me to address her) had been telling me since I was six.

  Hazel Bowater stood to greet her cousins. The three women, good-looking, trim, all with deep, wavy hair, were clearly related. Hazel wore a pale green spring day dress with a thin trim of feathers along the low neckline. Like everything she had it was beautiful.

  Gallatin smiled at me, offering his hand so we sat apart from the adults though we could hear them.

  ‘Juts, that child is too brown. You don’t want her looking like a field hand.’

  ‘She’s in the sun a lot.’ Mother slid away from an argument.

  ‘Do you still play baseball?’ Gallatin asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I play first base. We don’t allow girls to play.’ He breathed in. ‘It’s a boys school but we still wouldn’t allow girls to play if it wasn’t.’

  ‘If we go outside I’ll throw the ball further than you do,’ I bragged, but knew I could back it up.

  He leaned toward me. ‘Mother won’t allow it. She says competition is vulgar, unless it’s at school, of course.’

  Hazel rose and we moved into the dining room, flowers everywhere and the long table set with luncheon china. Every time of the day had a special set of china, and silver too.

  It seemed like hours between the cold soup and the next course.

  I crossed my eyes at Gallatin. He giggled loudly, which drew an icy stare from his mother, who then turned her full attention to my mother.

  ‘Julia, why are you wearing that overlarge aquamarine in the broad of day?’

  Mother grinned, wiggling her finger, ‘It always reminds me of your Aunt Mimi, my mother.’

  Telling Hazel my grandmother’s name irritated her but she pushed it back, forcing a smile.

  Ever adroit when she wanted to be, Aunt Wheezie glided into the conversation. ‘Hazel, which of your mother’s jewels do you like the best?’

  Beaming, she said, ‘The three strands of pearls that hang below my waist. Every time I wear them my handsome George says I look like the girl he married. He’s so busy, you know, on the train to New York at least once a week. You know, George gets calls daily at the brokerage house from Boston, Chicago, even San Francisco. Such a gift for finance that he has to work long hours just to satisfy others, guide them. Everyone wants to know what George Bowater thinks.’ She paused, then sighed. ‘He works much too hard. I try to tell him to slow down but you girls know how that goes. You can’t tell them anything.’

  ‘We know.’ Aunt Wheezie laughed.

  Mother, sensitive to children, asked Gallatin, ‘Have you thought about what you’d like to do when you grow up?’

  ‘Paint.’ His face lit up. ‘I want to be a painter.’

  Hazel gave a high, thin laugh. ‘Darling boy, the Bowater men leave that to the lower orders. You will follow in your father’s illustrious footsteps.’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  That was the only remark addressed to Gallatin.

  None to me.

  When the crème brûlée was cleared from the table, the ladies strolled in the symmetrical garden, lilacs in full bloom.

  Gallatin and I walked a distance behind them.

  ‘If you get your baseball, we can see who’s the best.’

  He shook his head, saying nothing.

  Driving the long way home, the sisters, having fulfilled their annual obligation, chattered with relief and glee.

  ‘She wants Momma’s ring.’

  ‘Juts, she always wanted that ring from the time we were kids. The woman could buy an entire jewelry store but she longs for that aquamarine.’ Aunt Wheezie added, ‘Hazel always wants what she can’t have.’

  ‘George never comes for lunch. At least not when we’re there.’

  ‘He goes to his club. And what do you think about that story of him going up to New York all the time?’ Aunt Wheezie said with a shrug.

  ‘Same as you, I think.’

  ‘And that feather trim on her dress. Egret?’

  ‘Vulture,’ mother replied.

  Aunt Wheezie, laughing hard, choked out, ‘Hazel believes her décolleté is a Philadelphia treasure.’

  ‘George no longer does.’

  This sent the two of them into peals of laughter. They delighted themselves while I thought about solemn Gallatin. He really wanted to chuck that baseball. He wanted to show me up. Course, I could snap him like a twig but I liked him anyway.

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘What, Semi?’

  ‘Oh, Mom.’ I rolled my eyes, which she could see as she was looking in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘What, shortcakes?’

  ‘Did you like the crème brûlée?’

  ‘Yes. Hazel has the best cook in three states. Tell you what, it’s worth a five-hour trip to boredom.’

  ‘Those raspberries, the raspberry sauce on the crème brûlée,’ Aunt Wheezie sighed with significance. ‘Heaven.’

  We rode a bit more and I asked, ‘Mother, why is Aunt Hazel like that?’

  A long pause followed this then finally my mother answered. ‘Because all she has is money.’

  MONIQUE TRUONG is the author of two novels, Bitter in the Mouth and The Book of Salt. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, but can often be found elsewhere in the world.

  ENCHANTED ISLE

  Monique Truong

  The emotional equivalence of jet lag is the end of a love affair and yet you, foolish and besotted lover, won’t let go. You’re still keeping time by his sun and moon, waking when he wakes, and sleeping only when he closes his eyes. Travel, when it was slow, used to provide a halfway house of sorts—a neither here nor there—for the recently expelled and broken-hearted. On the ship or the long locomotive journey back home, the traveler had time to consider the landscape of where she had been and to comprehend how her body, with every minute and hour, was now deliberately moving farther and farther away. By the time that she has reached home, the traveler has had days or weeks to understand the absence of that other body of land, to hold her heart steady, and her head high again. Air travel changed everything.

  We now allow ourselves to be propelled there and back with such great speed that when we return our bodies protest, rebel, seeking something, concrete or intangible, that we can no longer offer. No wonder our bodies punish us with unrequited sleeplessness and crushing fatigue.

  My worst and most prolonged bouts of jet lag haven’t always correlated with the distances traveled or the differences in time. Often, the intensity of my stupor has everything to do with how hard I had fallen. Like love for a man or a woman, love for a destination on a map cannot be planned. Sometimes, the affection is hard earned, even a result of a feat of courage or a trial by ordeal. Once in a while, if fate and luck travels with me, there’s a singula
r, indelible moment that feels like a first kiss.

  On Lefkada, one of the Ionian Islands off the western coast of Greece, the kiss took place on an open patio with a sweeping view of the foothills of Mt. Stavrota, interrupted only by the occasional columns of swaying cypress trees. The scent of Lefkada in the late spring was courtesy of the ginestra flowers, which bloomed bright yellow and covered the island in patches, like sunlight. They released a delicious fragrance: crushed fresh herbs—mint, thyme, fennel fronds, sage and oregano—with a dollop of clover honey on top, and laced with the improbable, mouthwatering scent of a butter cake that’s almost ready to be taken out of the oven.

  I had traveled to Lefkada to research the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, the subject of my novel-in-progress. From 1850 till his passing in 1904, Hearn made his home on three continents. Lefkada, also the name of the island’s main town, was Hearn’s birthplace and namesake, and for me a necessary portal into this man’s peripatetic life.

  You must believe me that the following is fact and not mere puffery: from its inception, a novel is an act of courage. It does not always require the author to travel, but it’s always a long journey into the pitch darkness for her. Only the brave or, perhaps, the foolish will dare it.

  I arrived on Lefkada in the early hours of the morning after a very long travel day. After our plane touched down in Athens, my husband and I inched across the city in a taxi—actually, it felt more like we inched around the city, as in an unbargained-for full circle of Athens—only to arrive at the bus station to find that our seat reservations had been given away by a taciturn bus dispatcher whose English language skills fluctuated between shoulder shrugs and monosyllabic grunts. This man had gifted our reservations away as though they were roses or a box of chocolates. Our faces, ashen and fallen, didn’t hide our grief. Some of the boarding passengers, probably the ones who had received our reservations, felt sorry for us and explained in fluent English that the next bus for Lefkada was in five hours. Resignation, dejection and exhaustion immediately set in. We headed to the bus station’s cafeteria, where those three stages of travel grief seemed to have afflicted everyone present. Small children with doleful eyes asked us again and again if we wanted to buy little packets of tissue paper from them. I think they knew that I wanted to cry.

  During the summer months, it’s possible to reach Lefkada from Athens via a short plane ride. In May, however, the Aktion National Airport was still closed. Lefkada is connected to the mainland of Greece by a bridge, so the options were a five-hour bus ride or a rental car. Driving in Greece seemed like an invitation to tragedy to me, so we opted for the bus, which was instead an invitation to prolonged boredom and acute moments of heart-in-the-throat terror because there was something even worse than driving in Greece (as our taxi ride had just shown us): being driven by a Greek driver in Greece. Somehow this simple fact had eluded me when we were making our plans.

  When we finally boarded the Lefkada-bound bus, a modern behemoth that was again woefully overbooked, I watched from my coveted seat as the dyspeptic dispatcher turned away would-be passengers. I felt sorry for them all, especially an old man with cheeks so sunken that they seemed like the basins of a dried-out sea, but I was also thrilled that I would soon be getting closer to Hearn’s island.

  The sun was already starting its descent as our bus, like a towering cruise ship, slowly navigated Athen’s rush hour traffic. Gilded and then rose-hued, gridlock had never looked so sublime. By the time the congestion spat our bus out onto the national highway, somber purples and blues cloaked the ribbons of asphalt ahead of us. Then began the cluster of hours when I could have been on any highway, almost anywhere in the world. The visual boredom that only modernity and its generic throughways can engender, I thought as the bus sped us southward.

  Soon though, I would long for those steady, dependable and nondescript arteries because during the latter half of the journey the bus, devolving into a lumbering giant, would cling onto roads so narrow and exuberantly pocked that I was certain that it was sharing them with goats. The headlights of the bus allowed for just enough illumination to show us passengers, who were unwise enough to look, how very near to a plunging death we were. A shoulder wasn’t to be seen for many kilometers. A slip of the hand, an involuntary twitch even, and the bus and the awaiting cliffs would meet in a matter of seconds. When Hearn left Lefkada for Dublin, he did so via ship and he never returned. It was becoming apparent to me why. To reach his island, you have to be brave or foolish, which is really differentiated only by a sliver of motivation in the face of utter ignorance.

  The scheduled five-hour bus trip was, in fact, seven hours. There were stops at every small village or suggestion of a village from the moment that the bus crossed onto the island till it reached Lefkada town. The discharge of passengers into the nightscape of single-story houses with carports draped in grapevines, lit by the occasional gray-white light of an outdoor bulb, was quick enough, but it was locating each passenger’s luggage that caused significant delay. These travelers—one per village was the apparent allotment—seemed to have all brought back with them a large chunk of Athens, wrapped in odd-shaped packages or stuffed into bulging woven plastic tote bags, which were difficult to distinguish and to extract from the bowels of the idling beast. We, onboard, could only stare haplessly as the passenger below shook his or her head, denying ownership of what had been pulled out before eventually grabbing onto something large and unwieldy with both hands and heading finally home.

  Our journey ended at an otherwise deserted parking lot in Lefkada town. My husband called the owners of the inn where we were booked, and they came to pick us up in a jeep. We loaded our luggage and squeezed in for the short ride to the inn, during which my husband was coherent enough to describe our travel woes while I wished that I had purchased a packet of tissues from one of those melancholic but enterprising children. They were silent little soothsayers: Oh, lady, you’ll need these tissues before the night’s end!

  Located on the second floor, our room was dominated by a white four-poster bed, which was much more inviting than the hospital beds that I thought we would be in. The room also had a set of French doors that opened onto a small balcony half hidden by the branches and waxy leaves of a rubber tree, whose roots were in the courtyard below. I opened the French doors, and we lay on the bed, speechless and exhausted. Then, as a welcoming salvo or a mean-spirited lullaby, we heard the sound that would become familiar to us in the nights to come: the insistent thump thump, thump thump of dance music leaking from the town’s nightclubs and bars.

  The bridge that so helpfully connects the mainland to this island also has cursed it and now us. Lefkada is the ‘easy’ island getaway for mainland Greeks as well as the Europeans and Brits who used it for bachelor parties and other modern rites of loud, obnoxious debaucheries. Hearn, an admirer of ancient cultures and the subtleties of the natural world, would have rolled over in his grave. I rolled over in our massive bed, exhausted to the bone, wondering why I had followed a dead writer to his desecrated, spoilt birthplace.

  I slept the rest of that day away, our bed a raft on a calm sea. I awoke to the sound of birds attacking something tasty among the glossy leaves of the rubber tree. The flapping of their wings and their high-pitched squawks were both gleeful and terrifying, the precise combination that made them such perfect vessels for the uncanny. I thought of Hearn, whose chosen totem was the raven because of his admiration for Edgar Allen Poe and for the heightened intelligence that these birds possess. In lieu of a signature, Hearn would often end his notes with a winsome doodle of a raven. My next thought was whether the flock of its cousins outside my window was a sign: that Hearn had decided to accompany me home or, perhaps, he was just in absentia mocking me.

  We spent the following day exploring Lefkada town’s historical center, which boasted a fishbone-shaped street plan, dating back to when the Venetians shortly ruled this island from 1502 to 1503. Now, the pedestrian-only streets along the central sq
uare were lined with shops that offered the universal tourist trappings: scarves and jewelry from India, subpar gelato stands, outdoor cafes where French fries and hamburgers could be ordered but shouldn’t be. I was surprised not to hear the ubiquitous strains of the Peruvian pan flutes being played by a trio with CDs for sale. Lefkada town’s saving graces, literally, were its diminutive churches, with their plain, stoic and timeworn facades, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They each looked like a sepia-toned photograph.

  Despite what we had previously and wisely agreed not to do, the next morning my husband and I rented a car from the inn. We needed to get out of Lefkada town, and the only way to do so was via car or bicycle. The island of Lefkada has a mountain range smack in the middle of it, so to get from Lefkada town down to the southern tip of the island meant a straight ascent and then descent. Of course, this perverse island would require us to go up in order to go down. My husband consulted the map, spoke with the owners of the inn, who told us about a little restaurant in the mountains that would be open for lunch, and we were off!

  Unfortunately, the map of Lefkada, town and island, was drawn by fabulists. We became our own Greek taxi driver, circumnavigating the town until we finally found the elusive road out of the fish bone. Within minutes we were in the countryside, and I rolled down the window and unwittingly took in my first lungful of ginestra-scented air. I immediately felt hopeful. I would later read that in aromatherapy ginestra is used for treating depression and co-dependency. Perhaps that’s why I also felt no guilt whatsoever about leaving all thoughts of Hearn and his birthplace behind me. I hadn’t even located the house where he was born yet, but Lefkada town, you were bringing me down.

  Our car, meanwhile, was desperately trying to get us up the two-lane mountain roads. The inn’s Smart Car had apparently never left the sea-level topography of Lefkada town. There was no power and no acceleration for the sharp inclines, and no shifting of the gears could remedy it. My husband was an excellent, resourceful driver, but the Smart Car had defeated him. We found ourselves stalled out and then rolling backward, as oncoming cars swerved and passed us without a reduction in their speed. I screamed each time. He told me that didn’t help. I screamed anyhow, and we were on our way to an all-out fight. No amount of ginestra was going to help us now. After two more near-death experiences—the passing drivers honking and displaying colorful hand gestures—we decided that the Smart Car was a profoundly dumb idea and headed back into town. The Smart Car performed excellently downhill. My husband and I did not. Our fight had spiraled, and I used it as a catchall for every one of my recent travel grievances, disappointments and despairs. He, of course, wasn’t the cause of any of them, just my unlucky companion.