Allison Heather Rodgers
Vita’s Greece
I journeyed to Greece on a budget airline with no corresponding mobile app (!), a disconcertingly minimalist website, and the stingy promise of only one included meal during the nine-and-a-half-hour flight. Because I am terrified of flying and fear turns me into a very submissive, loyal little consumer, I normally pay to travel with brands I’ve decided, based on past survival and vibes, are safe and trustworthy. Delta would never hurt me, I think, taking out my credit card. Nothing bad can happen on JetBlue! Air France, the first airline to ferry me alone to Europe, with their calming, classical boarding music, will always have my love and my credit card number.
But for this vacation, my desire to save money won out over my fear— instead of spending $1,200 to fly from New York to Athens on my beloved Delta, I spent $800 to fly Norse—an airline I had never heard of before. Norse was only two years old and advertised itself as a “long-haul, budget airline,” a phrase that made me slightly uneasy. It’s one thing to hop on a budget airline for a two-hour jaunt across states or crowded European countries, it’s another thing to entrust a budget airline to carry you over the Atlantic Ocean. By the time I started second-guessing my purchase, there was no going back, I had bought the cheapest tier of ticket—non-refundable. So in the lead up to my flight, I tried to make positive associations with the name “Norse” in my mind. Norse . . . like horse . . . a big strong horse galloping through the sky . . . Norse like a viking, a serene . . . muscly . . . protective viking?? . . . or a viking ship! sailing through the air safely
. . . If my associative fugue state failed to convince my subconscious mind that I would arrive safely in Greece, I also had my beloved flying companion with me: Klonopin.
The lack of an app rattled me (were they too broke to build an app?) . . . but at the Norse desk, it was quickly obvious that the reason there was no digital check-in system was because every carry-on had a height, width, and weight test to fail. The gate agents were ruthless in their examination of each bag and merciless in the face of tears and arguments. Over and over again, I watched passengers in front of me lose the repacking battle and fork over another eighty dollars or so when their luggage failed to fit into the example storage bins. I also failed, but I had already paid for a checked bag just in case I went overboard souvenir shopping during my ten-day stay. I had also splurged on an extra vegetarian meal to complement my single free vegetarian meal.
While the thought of an extra meal coming my way in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, 35,000 feet in the air provided me some measure of psychological comfort and an illusory sense of control, gastronomically it might have been the worst three bites of my life. It was also embarrassing, as I seemed to be the only person on the plane who fell for the “extra meal” bit, the sole big-spending idiot among two hundred penny-pinchers who trusted Norse to carry them between continents but certainly not with vegetable lo mein. The food was delivered scalding in a tin foil container and made for an excellent lap heater for about thirty minutes until a terrifyingly young flight attendant came by and smiled as I threw the whole thing away.
Once I landed safely and shook the captain’s hand upon exiting the plane, I felt that I had made an excellent decision—I now had four hundred extra dollars to spend in Greece! And, if I didn’t want to fly back on Norse, I could always restart my life in Europe. This is the fairytale I repeat to myself every time I fly somewhere, to stop my brain from spending my whole vacation frightened of the return trip. I lie to myself the way you might lie to a child to end a tantrum. I say: you don’t have to fly home if you’re too scared! You can buy a ticket on a shipping container, or simply restart your life here.
In Athens, I met up with my friend, and we began the next leg of our journey: a four-hour ferry ride to the island of Paros. The ferry was huge, three stories— the bottom for cars and luggage, the top two for passengers. I had been eagerly looking forward to the ride. You see, the fearful flyer is a great romanticizer of ship travel. How often I had mourned the death of transatlantic ocean liners and wished for their comeback, hoping that, like low rise jeans, they would return to style! I was sure I would make an excellent ocean liner passenger. I would dress very smartly for dinner and deliver wry comments over cocktail hour. I would bring books and lounge on the sundeck, anticipating my vacation ahead. On an ocean liner, I would feel right at home, like a perfectly normal and well-adjusted traveler, never thinking about death at all. On an airplane, I am an anxious mess dosing myself with benzos at four-hour intervals to keep my fear at bay. My fear of flying makes me feel distinctly abnormal and out of place, like some kind of regressed, animal thing who can’t handle the realities of modern life. Like when my dog is scared of an electric scooter. The ferry ride to Paros seemed like an opportunity to live out my fantasy of being a well-adjusted, beautiful, elegant sea traveler.
This particular ferry ride reminded me that Glamorous Oceanliner Alli exists only in my mind. It was an exceptionally unglamorous, rocky four and a half hours. The sounds consisted mostly of children crying and screaming and ferry attendants yelling at people to “sit down! sit down!” Despite their pleas, a steady stream of people insisted on walking up and down the stairs, clutching the railing and giggling nervously as the boat swung violently from side to side. At one point the ferry attendants handed out vomit bags to anyone who felt sick, which did not inspire confidence. An American woman, who felt she had been seated in the wrong section, argued loudly with an attendant about her “VIP tickets,” horrified by the riffraff around her.
On this ferry, the dream of slow, safe ocean liners traveling across the world suddenly felt silly. I found myself a bit afraid, unable to focus on my book, checking for life jackets. I am a strong swimmer, I told myself, I am a strong swimmer! I found myself looking up into the sky, for the first time in my life I was jealous of the planes overhead that made our same journey in forty minutes.
I am not a strong swimmer, at least not anymore. While “strong swimmer” might have been part of my identity as a nine-year-old with regular access to her neighbor’s pool, once in Greece I found that I was a decidedly “mid” swimmer, easily exhausted by a strong current and uneasy in deep water without the embrace of an assistive pool noodle.
Vita was a very strong swimmer. Somewhere between 85–120 years old, she was a German who had been vacationing on Paros for almost thirty years. Every day she swam for hours with a little orange buoy attached to her back to keep boats from hitting her. I was amazed at how comfortable she was in the water so far from shore and how far she swam—much further than I dared. In the mornings while I drank espresso in my apartment above the beach bar, she was often already swimming. I could spot her little orange buoy from the eastern kitchen window by the boat launch and watch her swim out to the south window, swim parallel to the beach, and then back again. It felt like she was doing whole laps around the entire island like some kind of mermaid.
Vita introduced herself to me by saying in a thick German accent, “The way you get in the water is wrong!” Apparently, she’d been watching me as I crept inch by inch into the sea, drawing out the submersion process into an impressive thirty-minute slog. My friend had promised that the water in Greece was “warm like a bath,” but that had been in early September in the Saronic Gulf on the island of Aegina. It was now late September, shoulder season, in the Aegean Sea, a time when most tourists were gone, many of the island workers had already returned to Athens for the winter, and a chill had crept into the water.
Vita generously offered to show me the proper way to get into the water. Taking off her swim cap, she splashed some water in it and said, “you see how I wet my cap?” Then she splashed some water on her wrists and behind her neck and then dove in. We talked for a while, and she was horrified to discover I had traveled “all the way from New York” only to stay on Paros for ten days. “That’s awful,” she said, “I will leave you alone so you can relax now.” She spoke with me for another forty-five minutes. She was here for three weeks and swam every day “for my back.” She also disliked flying and seemed to have the same innate suspicion of the technology that I did, although it seemed more appropriate for someone her age, who probably had traveled on an ocean liner. “You flew all the way from New York!” she gasped. “You aren’t afraid the plane will fall out of the sky and into the ocean?” “No,” I responded, “I am in fact very afraid of that!”
I had a lot of questions for her since I was ninety percent sure she had memories of Hitler, but it was hard to know what to ask. I kept stumbling into cultural roadblocks and insulting her or frustrating her by accident. And she did the same to me. She thought it was very rude that I asked her what she did for work (a former Jungian analyst!). She felt fine making fun of a rounder American just within earshot of us but then complimented him profusely when she discovered he was flying home to America just to vote for Kamala Harris. “I put on my fanciest hat and take it off to you sir!” she said. I think about that phrase constantly. I only ever saw her feel shy when she wanted to know who I was voting for and what I thought of America’s fascist. One day I hurt her feelings by saying “I’ll see you later this evening, maybe at the beach bar,” before leaving with my friend to explore the island. I had meant it in the casual, American way. “I’ll see you later,” to mean “I will see you maybe someday in the wide, wide future which contains limitless possibilities.” Vita, on the other hand, took the invitation literally and had wandered over to the bar promptly at 7 p.m. that night, waited for an hour, asked the bartender if he had seen any “American girls” and went home feeling stood up. She had made recommendations for us to go shopping for beautiful leather gloves in a nearby town, going so far as to draw us a rough map of the area in blue pen, and was offended when, day after day, we followed our own vacation agenda instead.
So, on my last full day on Paros, when she told me she was sure I was an alcoholic and said, “I ask you dearly to promise me you will stop drinking when you return to America!” I felt we were having some kind of cultural disconnect. I was drinking more than usual in Greece but felt well within the normal limits of a person on vacation, having at most three drinks a day and two in one sitting. The most she had seen me drink was two cocktails over three hours: an aperol spritz and a Negroni. I tried to explain that I was on vacation, I was trying to relax, my job was very stressful, and maybe I was drinking a bit more than normal, but I wasn’t an alcoholic! She argued with me relentlessly. I knew I could quiet her simply by lying and agreeing that I would begin anew as a sober person in America! I am usually the type of person who will lie happily in these types of strange social situations to free myself from the snare of the present moment. I don’t see these kinds of lies as lies exactly but as creative escape hatches. In that way, I can be a kind of linguistic MacGyver.
But I found myself absolutely unable to lie about something so important. My father had been an alcoholic like his own father, and his sobriety has been one of his greatest achievements. There were alcoholics on my mother’s side as well, and those experiences had left most of the family so painfully aware of the risks that they either stopped stopped drinking or never started. I felt I was lucky to have a relatively healthy relationship with alcohol—however healthy drinking poison for inhibition impairment can be! And I felt that in this moment, despite our cultural and generational differences, it was vital to be understood by Vita, to convince her I was not an alcoholic.
“I had two drinks!” I said “I am not an alcoholic.” “You are,” she sighed, staring out at the sea. “It’s not about how much you drank, it’s about the look in your eyes. One day maybe you will rock bottom and realize. And maybe you will remember the conversation you had with the old German lady on Paros.” Then she asked about my father and his death (from cancer), and I suddenly felt my experiment in radical honesty with a stranger had gone too far. I felt raw and angry. How much time had Vita now taken from my precious vacation? What right did she have to know about my father, to know anything about me at all? I told her I had to go snorkeling, and she suddenly gasped, seeing the snorkel sitting in my lap, horrified she had taken up so much of my last day on the island. “Did I . . . was that conversation too much?” she asked. Normally, I would want to soothe other people and lie, but in this moment, I was honest. “It was, it was too much,” I said.
I walked straight into the ocean with no hesitation, braced against the cold, to get as far away from Vita as quickly as possible. I feared she would swim after me and continue the argument. If it came to a treading water contest, I would surely drown before I convinced her I was not an alcoholic. I swam towards some large rocks where there were always schools of fish milling about. I looked down at them. I listened to my breath in the snorkel. I was still hoping to see an octopus and had been told rocks were the best place to find them. From the beach, I heard Vita yelling and pointing at my bag. I had no idea what she was saying—I waved and went back to octopus searching. I literally prayed to God to see an octopus. Earlier in my vacation, I had found myself praying to him after years of silence, asking him to take my work anxiety away, and it had worked. I felt as long as the line was open, I might as well ask for an octopus. My friend had seen one on the island of Aegina, why not here on Paros? I swam closer to the rocks, but the tide was coming in, and the waves were very rough, slamming up against the shore, whirling around me. I saw Vita walk down the road toward her apartment out of sight—I felt safe from any impromptu interventions and returned to the beach. She had placed my phone and wallet in my backpack and secured it all to the lounge chair by placing a large rock on top. I took my things back to the apartment I was sharing with my friend who, ironically, was an alcoholic, three years sober.
Somewhere in our argument about whether or not I was an alcoholic, I agreed to let Vita ride with us to the main city on the island, Parikia, at 7 a.m. the next morning. I had to return to the port to get on the ferry back to Athens and then get on a plane for America while my friend stayed a little longer on Paros. In exchange for dropping her at the nearby market, Vita promised to bring me instant coffee and a boiled egg and an apple. She delivered, presenting me with hot instant coffee served in a re-used instant noodle cup. The boiled egg was in a napkin. I was still angry at her and also felt somewhat ill at ease with her, my mind slipping into the anxious magical thinking that overtakes me before I travel.
She had repeatedly joked to my friend and me that she was “110 years old.” She claimed to be a thirty-year visitor of the island, but no one on our little stretch of beach seemed to know her. She had insisted on showing us Roman ruins and pointing out where the ships came in and how they carved long ruts into the stone for ships to dock in. She wouldn’t let me take her picture. She was an eerily talented swimmer and seemed almost supernaturally certain that I was, or would be, an alcoholic. The rules of time and space felt flexible in Paros, God seemed real, and I began to wonder if, in fact, she was some kind of psychic or witch who had been coming to this island for centuries! I felt it was vital that I not eat the food she gave me, lest it was from some other realm and trapping me in some kind of Spirited Away scenario for which I was psychologically unprepared. I made an exception to sip some of the coffee out of desperation and the desire not to be rude, but when I arrived at the ferry terminal, I threw the rest of her snacks away defiantly, as if to say, I am not an alcoholic, and you do not know me at all! I still feel guilty about it—more than guilty, I have now decided her offering of food was an act of care that would have been cosmically beneficial to accept and by rejecting it so cruelly, I have pushed some unknown goodness away from my life forever. During the drive, when she wasn’t berating my friend and me for using Google Maps instead of following her shouted directions, she was asking if the three of us should split a house next year on Paros, “if I am still alive,” she said.
Four hours later, I was on the bus to the airport. I arrived three hours before my flight to find that Norse’s check-in counter wouldn’t open for another hour. Once checked in, I wandered to the Norse gate, obviously the worst and cheapest gate, in the international departures wing. I hoped the plane was in better shape than the gate, which was so sad looking that I almost laughed.
In the airport, I hurriedly bought an evil eye magnet, having mostly forgotten to buy souvenirs on my trip and hoping superstitiously that no plane with an evil eye magnet on board, seeing me across the ocean, could go down. On the flight home, Vita got her wish—I did not drink. Not because I was newly committed to sobriety, but because the last time I mixed Klonopin and alcohol, I vomited into the thirty dollar airport blanket in my lap, rattling the rabbi seated to my left.
After a brutal nine hours sandwiched between a man with startlingly bad breath and a nail-biting teenager who applied a stinky anti-nail-biting medicinal cream to his fingers when he wasn’t chewing on them, I arrived safely back in New York. My time away had given me a much-needed break from a stressful job, and I returned refreshed. Unfortunately, my time away had given my job a much-needed break from me and the powers that be axed me. I was suddenly thankful I had an extra four hundred dollars in the bank, as if the funds hadn’t been spent on a hammam spa experience with Dead Sea salt scrub, the last automatic car rental on Paros, the best brie I’ve ever had in my life, countless aperol spritzes (sorry Vita), pastries, freddos, a full day snorkeling, the smallest bikini on earth, and windsurfing lessons. Well, I thought, at least now I can devote more time to my destiny: becoming a raging alcoholic. In my last week of work, I daydreamed about what life would have been like if I had been too afraid to fly home. For once I wished I had given into fear and begun anew in Greece. My friend was still in Paros, working under the table for a beachside bed and breakfast, renting umbrellas and beach loungers, mixing cocktails, pulling espresso, sunning herself, and swimming when it wasn’t busy. On my fridge, the evil eye magnet stood guard, vigilant and still, unblinking, alive to all the ways the world can hurt. And Vita, of course, was still on vacation, still swimming.