1THE SMALL CLUB
A man stands at the top of the ladder, blocking my way out from the sea.
“You must be Meltem’s daughter,” he says. He places a hand on each side rail and leans in toward me. “In fact, I’m sure of it. I can tell by the way you swim.”
It’s mid-July, and even though I have never seen this man before, I can tell that he’s spent long days in places of summer. His irises are too bright for such naturally dark features. His beard is coarse with salt, and his unkempt hair curls under his ears and traces, just for a moment, his jawline. Around his neck is a shark tooth on a leather string, an interesting choice of accessory—a child’s accessory—for someone my father’s age.
It’s one of the many things I still haven’t gotten used to around here. In this country, especially in this small town, all collisions are considered an invitation to conversation. Instead of getting easier over the years, like I thought it might, masking my irritation has only gotten harder. I climb out and motion for him to step aside, joining him on the dock. Then I gather up the two triangles of my bikini, give them a tug, and squeeze. A small rain empties out onto the wooden planks.
“Yes,” I confirm, feeling his gaze on me. “Meltem’s my mother.”
His eyes widen. Though a moment ago the relation was assumed, it’s now dawning on him that he really is of the age to know a woman with a nineteen-year-old daughter. Time passes, buddy. Get used to it. I nod to indicate that the ladder’s all his, then make a left on the T-shaped dock, walking down its length toward the Small Club. His footsteps trail my lead. Their hurried thuds are almost indistinguishable from those of the boys who dive off the dock in exaggerated acrobatics—though of course his are heavier, and pound over and over on the land, far from any silencing edge. Perhaps he’s heading back for his towel, as there should be no rush to catch me; we still have seven weeks before I disappear. All of us in the neighborhood run into each other continually, moving in circles from the water to the café to the market to the park and around again. I pass the showers, the changing rooms, the lawn speckled with striped sun beds. When I start up the steps to the Small Club’s beach café, the man grabs ahold of my arm, and I turn sharply. Large strokes of sunlight have already erased my footsteps. His eyes peer into mine, and he blinks once, twice. I hold my gaze steady, then jerk my arm out of his grasp. He lets his hand fall to his side.
“What’s fascinating,” he says, sounding lost in a memory, “is that you don’t look like her at all. Not like she used to. It’s all in the way you move.” The heat from the sun-boiled steps is too much, and I hop from side to side. “Yes,” he murmurs, continuing his inspection. “Yes, yes. That’s it. There’s something in the movement.”
I stop moving. The way his voice dipped into the past and his eyes fix onto my body almost makes me believe that he does indeed have some claim over me. An arrangement we’d made long ago that I’d since forgotten. I start to feel uneasy, but shut off the sensation by focusing on the hot pain at my feet.
“I’m an old friend of Meltem’s,” he says, as if this means something. All of my mother’s friends are old friends. She has yet to make a new friend in her American life. This is despite having moved continents over two decades ago, despite having raised me all those years in California. “I had heard that she had a daughter, but I wasn’t expecting to meet you on my first day in Ayvalık.”
I wonder who’s watching, and glance over at the Small Club’s café. In the far corner, Aslı sits alone in her tiger-stripe bandana, camouflaged in the chaos of nylon beach bags and magazines spread across our table, the towels draped over the plastic chairs. Steadily, she taps an index finger on a can of Nestea Peach as she surveys the scene, her face half hidden behind a newspaper. Her expression is a clear signal that she is available for rescue, should the situation warrant one.
Does the situation warrant a rescue?
No. I am not afraid of anything during the summers, surrounded by the sand and the sea. By the neighbors who watch everything unfold from their sun beds and terraces, timing their blinks so that the gossip is comprehensive. But as the man continues to search my face with his bright eyes, something in me leaps at the suggestion that I was being sought, and have now been found.
I think through my next sentence carefully before I speak, keeping my voice level. “You should not grab girls you do not know.” I choose a formal pronoun, pointedly addressing the man as a stranger, a respected elder. This is one of the things I admire about my mother’s native language: the dichotomy between what is said and what is meant. I smile, pleased at having regained control of the situation—it’s not something that happens often, here.
Whoever this man is, he’s definitely a newcomer to our little neighborhood, our site. Had I seen him during my previous summers here, I would have remembered. An old friend of the family from İstanbul, vacationing in our seasonal town. I mentally flip through my mother’s photo albums stored in our California home—I’d pored over them enough growing up that I’d all but committed them to memory—but can’t find a sepia match for his face. No likeness in any of the photos taken at her alma mater by the Bosphorus, by the gilded gates of her high school in Beyoğlu, or from the beach scenes of her childhood vacation home on the outskirts of the city. His presence was not among the memories she chose to keep.
“What’s your name?” I ask. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Aslı move to get up, but I shake my head to let her know that I’m fine. “I’ll tell my mother that you’re here.”
“There’s no need,” he says, and heads back to the dock for his swim while I remain where I am, my feet on fire. “I’ll stop by sometime. I know where the house is.”
“Everyone knows where our house is,” I call out after him. The sentence comes hurling out of me differently than I mean for it to, childish and petulant instead of powerful and indifferent. He turns to me, then shakes his head and chuckles. I shut my eyes and hate myself for how I always use the simple words. My American tongue cracks and guesses where it should flow and pop, and because I cannot properly place my inflections, I often leave conversations with the same questions I had upon arrival. We are at week five of my summer now, so I have managed to slip my accent out of the basic phrases, perfected the cadence of the hellos and the good-evenings and the orders of tea, tost, and coffee. When I keep things simple, no one can tell that I don’t belong here. In the longer conversations, sounds mix and mangle in my throat on the way up, and my personality gets lost in the shuffle. I am not myself when I speak Turkish, though every summer, I get just a little bit closer.
In the summer, when the days are sticky and cannot separate from themselves, my linguistic progress becomes its own calendar. Aside from that, the only other way to tell time in this town is through the sun’s demarcations on the skin.
I am now a toasted golden brown, my body glowing like a candied chestnut and my hair lightened from the sun and the bowls of water inside which I boil daisies, then rest my head. I learned the daisy trick from my mother, though she also taught me that the sun not only beautifies; it destructs as well. Flakes of burnt skin have already peeled off my shoulders, and the remaining topographies are encrusted with salt water. I don’t mind the peeling, though. It’s a small price to pay for these long days of summer bliss.
My mother’s skin, sadly, is charred. The summers of her past caught up with her in her middle age. She used to rub Coca-Cola all over her body, she told me, then bake until she swore she could hear a sizzle. These days, the color she used to crave manifests as deep lines in a leathered face. Now, on our annual summer trips to Turkey, she stays inside my grandmother’s seaside villa until late afternoon, and only then travels to a secluded section of the beach, several meters north of the main dock. She then pitches a tent of pink and green, colors that do not even attempt to blend into the seascape. There she is in the water now, underneath her large sun hat, rising and falling with the waves. All this protection, too late in the game. My mother always forgets that she cannot turn back time.
I walk back to our table, Aslı’s eyes following me each step of the way. “Who was that?” she asks as soon as I’m within earshot, slapping her palm against the table in a series of staccatos. “Who was that?” She stands to get a closer look. The man who says he once knew my mother walks down the dock, his back to us and his eyes on the horizon, toward the far-flung islands. Despite his age, his body is lean, his saunter nowhere near the hesitant waddle of first-timers shyly approaching their first swim of the season. It’s clear that he’s no stranger to the water. His back, its muscles carved into shape-shifting geometric figures, glistens in the sun.
About a quarter of the way down the dock, he slows down, then takes a giant leap forward. Then another. And another, shortening the time between each, the sound of his footsteps chopping the heaviness of chords into the elegance of a trill. Once on the edge, he springs into the air with full confidence. For the briefest moment, he floats above the Aegean, then bends his body into a flawless dive.
“Who cares?” I say. I pull out a chair for myself and sit down, leaning my neck all the way back. Upside down in this way, I catch the eye of a waiter and signal for a deck of cards.
“Right away, Miss Ada,” he says, and scurries off.
I stroke my arm where the man had latched onto me, where salt now dries into thin vapor trails. In my mind, I replay his perfect dive. Showing off like a teenager. There’s no urgent need to tell my mother about our encounter; she’ll find out soon enough.
After all, in this small town, nothing stays a secret for long.
* * *
Everyone knows where our house is because it’s the best-situated villa in the whole site, this development of two hundred or so similarly styled summer residences. It’s directly—and I do mean directly—across from the Small Club, whose oleander-lined entrance marks the beginning of the day. To start your day, you must walk past our front terrace, where one, two, or all three generations of us will be watching you. The site itself is a twenty-minute minibus ride north of the Ayvalık town center. It spills downward from a hilltop, collecting in pools where the land levels off—most centrally, at the market, which is semicircled by a crescent moor of dilapidated athletic courts.
In our neighborhood, the basketball hoops have no nets, and spectators sit upon layers of sunflower seed shells, cracked, then spat out the night before by teenagers perched on its concrete bleachers (my friends and I are responsible for many a shell). The volleyball court next door does have a net some summers, though instead of fine-grained sand, it stretches over a field of dead grass, similar to the surface of the soccer field across the street that’s always sprawling with kids in mismatched jerseys. The tennis courts, farther eastward on the slope, sparkle in comparison.
Between the soccer field and the sea is the children’s park, where the most important moment of my summers took place. When I was eight years old, my grandmother sold her property in Datça, in a fairly new site where I had no one to play with but the street cats, and bought the Ayvalık villa. I was thrilled to be surrounded with kids my age, and though I clung to my mother the first day at the beach, I gathered my courage and marched, head held high, to the park in the evening. A girl on the monkey bars immediately caught my attention. She had bruises along her arms—from falls and fights, maybe—and her lips were pursed in concentration as her body swung from one metal rod to the next. I stood underneath her and introduced myself. “I’m Ada from California,” I said. “We just moved here.”
The girl dropped down. “You’re not from California,” she said, looking me in the eye. Her face was wild and angular, lit aflame by the slowly setting sun. Suddenly I no longer felt safe. “You’re a liar. I can tell you’re a liar. I bet that’s not even yours, it’s too beautiful for you.” She pointed to the end of my braid, at the rhinestoned emerald green hair tie I had borrowed from my mother.
“No, I’m not a liar,” I said, unsure where the conversation was going.
She laughed at the way I couldn’t roll my r’s. Then we faced each other and I sensed a terrible heat radiating from her. “Give me that,” she said, and yanked the tie from my hair. She laughed as my braid started to unravel. It was a loud, ugly laugh, more of a bray than anything human. What would I tell my mother? I ran away to the swing set, but she followed me, insistent on total destruction. “If you love God,” she said, “you’ll get off that swing and let me have it.” My green stones shone in her hair. I didn’t know how to argue with her logic. I left the park and walked home with my head down.
I returned to the park the following evenings because I didn’t want to tell my mother that they hated me here. I would sit and cry by the slide, where the mean girl would approach me with her friends and demand that I recite “askerler dörder dörder yürüyorlar” (the soldiers are marching by fours) and other tongue-twisting phrases so they could laugh at my r’s again. On the fourth night, I watched her hang upside down on the monkey bars, that glint of green in her ponytail, while her friends cheered. Behind them, from the shadows by the fountain at the edge of the park, a girl stepped forward. She wore a terrycloth headband pulled down to her forehead. She carefully tracked the sway of long hair that hung like a pendulum from the monkey bars, her eyes narrowed like a hunter’s. Then, in one quick movement, she reached up and pulled down my beautiful green hair tie. The mean girl screeched a long, deafening screech, but she couldn’t drop down in time, and knew the battle was over.
“I’m Aslı,” the girl with the terrycloth band said, crouching down next to me by the slide. She opened her hand to reveal the glittering stones with a conspiratorial smile, then introduced me to her twin brother, Bulut, and their cousin Ozan, who had been sitting with her by the fountain. Ozan told me that the girl and her family would soon move away to a different site, that there was nothing to worry about. They all said they liked my large eyeballs, long lashes, and pointy chin. “You look like a beautiful fish,” said Aslı. “Fish are very important in Ayvalık, in the Aegean. That witch can go, but you will have to stay.” I got up from the grass and hugged them all. They walked me to the market and asked what my favorite ice cream was, then pooled their pocket money to afford the strawberry Cornetto. Never once did they laugh at my mispronunciations, my dumbfounded look in response to words I’d never heard before, having only the vocabulary of the summers and my mother to build upon.
That winter, all winter, I practiced rolling my r’s until they were perfect.
Beyond the children’s park spreads the sea, and along the seaside promenade the last and most important points of interest reveal themselves. On the north end of our site is the Big Club, where grandmothers and grandfathers dine to live music and play hands of cooncan. Behind the Big Club stretches Sıfır, the abandoned beach. As it lies at the edge of our neighborhood and the beginning of the next, nobody has reason to swim there, and its dock remains broken and unmaintained. Then, back to the southern end, us, and the Small Club. These “ends” I speak of are relative; it is a five-minute walk between the two. But, of course, everything moves slower in the heat.
I lean over our table and consider my fortune. My deck of cards has been arranged clocklike with a thirteenth pile in the middle, and droplets of salt water fall from my hair, mottling the faces of numbers and royalty. The top card in the middle pile is the first to be overturned and placed on its hour—say, a three of diamonds to be placed at three o’clock—then a card from that hour’s pile is overturned and moved accordingly. I made my wish when I cut the deck, whispered the fortune that I wanted to be mine. For my wish to come true, the last card to be revealed must be a king. I take a sip of iced tea and press the cool can to my forehead, considering the probabilities.
Aslı asks me what I wished for. She is very interested in my recurring wish, asking me about it every time I lay out the cards, though I have yet to give her a straight answer. I smile and wait for the usual round of guesses, during which she watches my face closely. Besides my boyfriend, Ian, who’s back in California, Aslı is the most perceptive person I have ever met. She’s aware that a question strategically phrased will always reveal its answer. A stark refusal to confirm or deny, an involuntary twitch at the mention of a sensitive topic—every response is a tell, if one can read it right. I keep my face tilted toward the cards just in case one of her guesses lands close to the truth, but so far, I’ve been pretty lucky.
“You wished for…” She stares into the middle distance and sucks in her cheeks. I am flipping, placing, hoping. The Small Club pulses around us, at its peak in the late afternoon. A pigtailed toddler with a floatie on each arm belts out a made-up song as she waddles among the tables; a woman in a baseball cap and aviators barks orders at a pimpled waiter; a group of younger girls run through a dance routine farther down on the lawn. Near the kitchen, Bulut and Ozan twist and jam foosball handles with such force that the table rattles and the woman in the baseball cap turns her attention from the hassled waiter to them and holds up a hand, yelling, “Enough now!” Just then, Bulut scores, ending the game. He howls and bangs his fists on his bony chest to celebrate his unlikely win. Ozan sneers and begrudgingly pulls a beer out of the café’s fridge. He shoves the bottle of his lost bet into Bulut’s chest, nearly knocking him over, then kicks the leg of the foosball table on his way back to us. The two resemble an unlikely duo from a children’s book: Bulut scrawny and hairless with a protruding Adam’s apple, his body all angles, while Ozan rarely shaves off his black beard, and is muscular and stout from years of disciplined chest presses. Ozan even has a tattoo, a line from a poem on his left shoulder: Above all, the seagulls.
Aslı watches the whole scene with a disgusted look. “Oh!” she says, her face brighter now. “Your wish is for Ian to come visit.”
I laugh, flipping over a queen. I hadn’t even considered Ian. “Talk about the twilight zone. I already have enough trouble adjusting. Him here, too? Just imagine. He’s interning in San Francisco this summer anyway. Busy.”
“He didn’t even ask to come along on this trip?”
“It didn’t come up. I mean, I didn’t offer. We’ve only been together a year, not even. Since … October, yeah.” One of hearts, two of hearts, three of spades. If Ian came here, he would expect me to show him this country, and I have nothing to show. I am far from conquering life here, not yet at the point where I can invite someone else in. It would be the ultimate embarrassment if my boyfriend, who knows my confidence in California, the strong praises I sing of my mother’s homeland, caught a glimpse of all the things I do not yet know.
“Still, that’s long. He didn’t think it was weird, being separated for three months?”
“Not at all,” I say, though I’m not so sure my nonchalance alleviates her concern. “This is here and that is there, and he is there.” It comes out sounding pathetic in Turkish instead of cryptic like I wanted it to, but Aslı is good at understanding what I mean. She smiles somewhat pityingly and doesn’t prod, and I return to another attempt at rewriting my future.
A month before we left for Turkey, my father expressed concern that my mother took omens too seriously. That was the same week he admitted his affair. The infidelity was news to both of us, though looking back on it, I realized it would have been impossible for my mother’s long sojourns in Turkey and her depressive episodes to have slipped by without consequence.
The day the omen arrived, all three of us were in the kitchen. My mother was inspecting the dregs in her coffee cup, searching for shapes. “But when it comes down to it, you do agree that it’s all a bunch of horseshit, right?” my father pressed. He came up behind her and cautiously rested his hands on her shoulders. She immediately shook them off, and they fluttered in the sky like frightened birds before he shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. His eyes dimmed, trying to interpret the interaction. He could never understand the pull of defeat my mother felt as the years went on, her confusion over how her body could still possibly be desirable to touch. I had grown up witnessing this push and pull for years, and only after I met Ian did I realize that theirs was not an ideal partnership. I began observing them more closely, trying to identify the problems.
One problem was that my father and his family are from Michigan, where people do not tell their fortunes.
Copyright © 2023 by İnci Atrek
