afternoon gods

We weren’t trying to be bad. It just occurred to us. We stood on the beach in Tolo, my cousin Jacques and I, with the lapping Mediterranean bay enticing our bare feet, and asked the dockhand how much for the paddleboat.
I don’t remember how much it was. At fifteen, I had small amounts of cash given to me on vacations and what I spent it on was more important than how much it was. We were about half a mile down the beach from the apartment my parents had rented in the sleepy Peloponnesean town, and it was early afternoon. The accomodating Greek sun was slanting down through the citrus groves that blanketed the curved mountains around us. Ask my parents for permission? Why?

Besides, Jacques was a year older and thus much cooler than me and it wasn’t cool to ask your parents for permission to skip around the bay in a paddleboat with your cool cousin. So we paid the weathered dockhand for two hours of paddleboat ownership and got in, setting a course for the chunky little islands that ringed the sparkling bay.
I wore a denim bikini, a fact that my cousin found hilarious as he kept teasing me to take the top half off. Our summers together had started when I was ten or eleven, young enough to run around the pebbled beaches of Greece wearing nothing but a sand-packed little bikini bottom, shrieking at the waves and at Jacques’ impish insistence that yes, I was positively surrounded by deadly jellyfish. But at fifteen, I’d long grown into my bikini top and an adult sense of propriety, so I just punched him in his scrawny tanned arm and paddled harder.
The waves rolled us forward, closer and closer to the little monastary island of Koronis. We were almost halfway around the western side of it, our furiously paddling legs bringing us to the tempting lip of the open sea, when we saw the nude sunbathers, stretched out like content iguanas on the scorching rock, getting sprayed by foamy waves that crashed onto their refuge. Laughing and embarassed, we kept paddling into deeper blue water. At first, I tried to sound nonchalant about my unease, as the waves pushed under the paddleboat with growing intensity. But with typical teenager bravado, it took my water-splashed shrieks to make Jacques agree to turn the rudder bay-ward and to calmer waters. Boys, when it comes to their delight in girls’ terror, will be boys. And cousins will be worse.
We zig-zagged towards Romvi, the bigger island in the bay, and found the true treasure there. The island was a natural marine reserve so when we pushed our battered little paddleboat onto the shore, we found ourselves utterly alone, with a jaggedly steep rock path climbing up into the hill of the island and several ominous caves whose murky depths disappeared at high tide. I stuck to the glass-clear waters, pulling on my flippers and mask to get closer to the bottom of the bay. Jacques climbed up the face of the hill, not saying much on his descent except to shamefacedly pull the cactus prickles out of his heel and calves. I laughed at him, salty water stinging my throat.
For hours, Jacques and I sunk lazily to the bottom of the shallow sunlit sea floor and shot up to the surface for air. We played ridiculous games underwater, like seeing who could stand on moss-covered rocks longer, or uselessly jinxing each other when we’d point to the same thing simultaneously. It never felt cold, the water in Greece. It always felt like a dappled magic carpet that made you weightless and perfect. It was coming into the brisk seabreeze above that shocked you, sending your skin into rashes of goosebumps and leaving a harsh ringing noise in your ears. Diving down again was the only comfort. So dive down again we did.
As my feet searched for a place to stand on the seafloor, I very nearly stepped on a live sea urchin, a treacherous little ball of pain that Jacques diverted me from by throwing himself, full-bodied and in slow motion, into my body. After a moment of angrily confused tangled limbs and a water-filled eyemask, I saw the tiny little enemy gliding gently along, kicking up the sand that was his crafty disguise. I stole a nearby empty urchin shell as a vengeful memento.
Finally, the sinking sun ducked behind the hill and abandoned the sandy shore where our boat was grounded so we dragged the boat back into the surf, pointing our cycling legs towards the colorful crowded harbor. It was only as we paddled closer, skin stretched dry from the salty water and shoulders turning pink, did I realize we might have a problem. When we gave the boat (and the extra hour’s charge) back to the squinting surly dockhand, Jacques started translating his chastising rant.
“Tio Angelo,” said my cousin in our shared Portuguese. “He says Tio Angelo’s been looking for us.” There was that pit, that teenager’s moment of dread, when they know they’re in trrrroubbbllle. As we scurried back silently down the beach in the pink hues of twilight, I saw at least five or six fisherman looking at me as though they’d recognized my father’s frantic and gruff description of his precious daughter. Looking as me and shaking their heads a little, this daughter that had disobeyed!
There, in the distance, was my short and obviously angry dad, the pounding of his leather sandals along the sand roughly equatable to the pounding of his terrified overwrought heart. He nearly cuffed my cousin and he looked at me with mingled relief and fury. “Hours!” he yelled, “HOURS. We didn’t know where you were.” He didn’t know where I was, he kept repeating on to our hung heads.
There was so little use in explaining that it hadn’t been done out of surly rebellion or gleeful mischief, that it had been a genuine mistake. There was little point in telling him about the glorious clear waters of Romvi, the startled and naked Europeans caught sunbathing on the monastary island, the frantic brush with prickly pain on the bottom of the sea. My mother and father were, justifiably, furious with us for not telling them, for not being careful, for our reckless childlike irresponsibility. We could have drowned! We could have gotten hurt! We could have been carried out to sea! All consequences that had been nonexistent to us when Jacques had suggested we rent a paddleboat, and I had first squinted into the harbor and said, “let’s go to those islands!”
It was, in my memory, the first time I remember seeing the consequences of my stupidity, the effect it had on my parents. Later that night, my mother, gently forgiving me the way she always did, shook her graceful head a little and said, “you should have seen him, storming up and down the beach. You could have given him a heart attack.” That she was lovingly rubbing my shoulders as she said this didn’t make the cold shock of culpability any less jarring.
Like so many Greek stories before, realization had come a moment too late. The good intentions had still been a road to Hades. It had been a quiet attack of imagination-strewn nerves for a mother, an afternoon’s nightmare for a father, pacing the rooms and pacing the shores, while the trickster gods of Greece keeping their beloved daughter frolicking below the dancing waves.

Tolo, Greece, July 1995.