I have a sixty–year–old half–sister on a small island in Greece. My half sister – her name is Christina– became a widow eighteen months ago. Her husband, Kostas, was essentially decapitated by some part of a fishing boat during a winter storm. I don’t know the names of parts of boats. I know very little about Greek culture because I came to New York with my father at age six, while my sister, five years older, stayed in Greece with our weepy, mustached mother. She is dead now and Christina still lives in her house, a whitewashed stone house on the windiest hill in a village reputed for its miasmic incest and its cheese rolls. My family, the Barlou family, is acknowledged to have a curse something about a great grandfather who inhaled too much mining dust and lost it and that, to the villagers, accounts for my sister’s somber fate. In Greek villages the number of cursed families is suspiciously congruent with the fecund number of widows. If there were an iPhone app that could locate every widow in our village by satellite, the image would look like a white maze, surrounded by blue water and generously acned with little black dots—like urchins in the sea.
Like all dehusbanded women in Greece, Christina’s favorite pastime is mourning, odiously and loudly. She sits every morning with the other black-shawled wailers on the hill, fingering her komboloi beads and moaning with self-pity: her last pleasure. But moaning has always been Christina’ s pleasure. She was born to be a widow. Therefore, when I first received the news of Kostas’ s death I did not jump on the first plane to Athens. I almost felt an urge to congratulate her, but refrained. The United States has stripped me of everything Greek, except for familial respect, which I predict will remain cellularly lodged in me for many years.
Two months after the funeral I didn’t attend, I received a letter in the mail from Lea Peraticos, Christina’ s next–door neighbor of two hundred years or so. The handwriting was neat and very small, all in Greek, but there was an urgency in it I spotted even before reading the words. It said:
“This is the seventh night I have seen Christina’ s face looking at me through my window. She is giving me the Evil Eye. I am quite unnerved. Please come.
–Lea”
Of all my half-sister’ s odd tendencies, trespassing on other’ s privacy has never been one. She was as God—fearing as an Orthodox Greek could be, and kept to herself except to gossip or lament. The letter unsettled me. And so one week later I arrived by ferry at the tiny port of the tiny island, which, if things were different, could have been the entirety of my world.
I greeted Christina with a bottle of Italian wine I’d picked up in Duty Free. Her face was a little swollen and she emitted an unpleasant, feline odor, but these things didn’t strike me as particularly abnormal. She kissed me dryly on both cheeks and called me ‘Chloe-Mu’, my ancient pet-name encrypted with visceral connotations: memories of lemony fish, pink-lit dusks, and a soft, dark upper-lip fuzz rose from the grave of my childhood. A million years ago this was my home, equally mildewed and equally apart from reality. Cats, as prolific as widows among the Dodecanese, mated while they screamed outside.
For three days I tried to maintain the pretense of an innocent family visit, of which I’d had only three since I left with my father. I walked between the house and the small plaka and the port cafè each day, sometimes sketching the church’s apse, smoking too much, admiring the young dockworkers as they lugged cargo on and off the boats. I kept a peripheral eye on Christina but mentioned nothing of Lea’s concerned letter. It was June and the island was in a carefree state.
On the fourth night of my visit, Christina and I sat in the house’s stone alcove that overlooks the bay. I was watched the lights of a gigantic, sluggish ferry coming into port. The wind was violent, especially so up on the hill. Its alleyway yowling bled into that of the cats. “You’ve been spying on Lea Peraticos.” I said, suddenly.
The expression on Christina’s face when she looked up from her needlepoint was devastating. And then, with tremors that came from somewhere different than her masturbatory mourning, she told me a thing I never bothered to know.
“Ten years ago I was pregnant,” she said, crossing herself.
“But I was too old. He was born dead. Kostas told everyone we sent him to Athens for adoption.” She was rocking a little.
“I only wanted to hold him for a few minutes. I wanted to feel what it felt like with a baby’s head on my chest. Haven’t you wanted that? And he was right there, but he was a shell, Chloe, do you understand? Just an empty shell, and the doctor took him away.”
Now we were like little girls again, crying wretchedly, holding each other’s hair as if on the precipice of an endless drop, as we had the morning I left for America.
“Lea Peraticos has this cat,” she continued, her voice now aggressive, and I pulled back a little.
“This big, white cat that she holds in her lap at night and caresses like a child. I just like to watch her stroke it, that’s all. I just like to watch.”
“You can’t do that,” I said. “You’re scaring her.”
Christina looked down in silence for two whole minutes. Then she nodded.
“I understand,” she said tiredly, and walked to the kitchen to make tea.
That night I had the expected dreams, of infants alive, and infants dead, and infants with retractable claws gently kneading my sister’s yellowing breasts. Needless to say, I was worried. While Kostas had been alive, there had been supervision; there had been someone to tie a thread of their garment to Christina’s wrist when she drifted in her personal labyrinth. But now she was clearly subsumed and dangerously close to some waiting monster.
I woke at 3 a.m. to the sound of the front door closing. I dressed in darkness and walked outside, just in time to see Christina’s widowy figure disappearing down the hill toward the bay. Following at a distance, I could see she was carrying something in her arms. I stalked her down the dirt path, past the cypress grove, past chicken yards and sleeping dogs, until she stepped onto the white–stoned shore and out into the water. She waded through the flat sea until it was at her calves, pluming the black skirts around her. She hunched. There was a lurching motion and a ferocious yowl, and I realized the object Christina held was Lea’s enormous cat. I watched soundlessly through the moonlight as the two fought, for what might have been seven minutes. A voice I never thought I had, deep in a knot between my groin and my ribs, was telling me not to move. And then there was a muffled, bubbling choke, and then stillness. For a moment the dying thing seemed to outbright the entire bay, the way a supernova does its galaxy before sending shrapnel through and through.
Christina’s figure straightened toward the quiet Aegean horizon. Beside her, shallowly submerged, floated a soft, white cloud in a saline haze, over a bed mottled with black urchins.
In the remaining three days of my visit, neither Christina nor I spoke about what had happened. I didn’t feel any need to tell Lea Peraticos, either, and she never inquired, though I did hear her calling for the cat several times. I did sleep in Christina’s bed all three nights. I did prepare luxurious meals and tea for her as much as she would let me. I promised to come back soon, maybe next Easter. I doted on her, suffocated her, tried my best to elevate her in an empty attempt to compensate for my total lack of that mystic intuition women are supposed to have for each other, that wombvoice that tells them to go to each other in times of desperation.
Christina walked me to the ferry at dawn. Everything facing East was pink and the sea looked more like silk than water. Christina kissed me on both cheeks.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I’m feeling a little better now.”