A Theater for Dreamers by Polly Samson

Author:Polly Samson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The next day is cooler and after our siesta I must leave Jimmy working in our room, his typewriter set up beside the door for the breeze. He returns to his writing slender and brown and naked as a reed. I dance about for a while, trying to distract him. I swirl within our new embroideries, doing my best Salome or at least attempting to interest him in working out how to fix them from the rafters above our bed. Red and blue flowers, birds, look at those millions of stitches . . .

He springs and I let him wrestle me. We tussle and play and it isn’t long before the bedsprings are singing their immodest song. After that I promise to give him the peace he needs. I make him a sandwich before I set off to consult Charmian.

I am so pleased with my flea-market find, and tell myself my mum wouldn’t mind me splurging out, just this once, on something so fine. The old lady at the stall in Monastiraki didn’t speak much English but I gathered they were from a bride’s trousseau, every stitch from her own fingers while she sat on her stoop, maybe more than a century ago. There are red peacocks, blue-and-red-striped jugs, a repetition of tiny knots of red thread that make flowers and vines.

There’s a blue boat in every corner. “And look, a dolphin for luck,” Charmian says, running her eye across the needlework. “She must have been waiting for her sailor boy for a very long time . . .”

Charmian tells me about the old families on Kalymnos, about wedding festivities that would go on until not another morsel could be eaten nor another drop drunk, at which point the bride and groom were locked for three days in their new house. “To fuck,” she said, as though I might not understand. “On the third morning the families would gather, very solemnly, at the door of the house and wait for the boy to emerge with the blooded sheet . . .”

My flea-market sheets are without stains, uniformly aged to the color of palest sherry.

It’s chaos; the whole family here. Shane’s had her way with the music and “Alley Oop” plays on the gramophone. Charmian is doing about eight things at once, a ragged tea towel at her shoulder, and a wildcat’s prowl as she chops and tidies. Zoe is filling the iron with charcoal embers, lettuce leaves crisp in an enamel pail. Shane and Martin peel potatoes at the table, bickering in English and Greek about one of them having to give up a room, about Shane’s appalling taste in music.

George looks up from the lamp he’s fixing to tell me about his friends who are coming with their children from Athens and, Martin hopes, some new comic books. “Charlie Sriber’s me old cobber, used to sub my copy in Melbourne. They let us bunk at their place in the Metz when we need to be in Athens and we have them here in return.

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