LITERARY FICTION
NOVEMBER 2018
ÇEŞME, JULY 2002
EZGI ÜSTÜNDAĞ
ÇEŞME, JULY 2002
EZGI ÜSTÜNDAĞ
Pervin opened her eyes when her daughter’s toes dug into her calf. Still asleep, Özge fidgeted until the hot Mediterranean air trapped between the linens and her bare legs dissipated somewhere above the bed. The tangled mass of sheets slid down the mattress’s right side. Pervin stopped herself from leaving the bed to address the small crisis; they were in the final hours of the night, and she deserved to rest a bit longer.
Sheets or not, Özge would remain asleep until one of her grandmother Gonca’s coughs ricocheted from the bathroom walls into the main part of the hotel room. The rhythm of her two travel companions’ footsteps on the tile floors served as Pervin’s cue to rise and prepare for the day ahead. By then, Özge had replaced Gonca in the bathroom.
As Pervin removed Özge’s striped pink-and-yellow swimsuit from the dresser, Gonca said good morning and settled into the wicker chair opposite her daughter and the imposing chest of drawers. “How did you sleep?”
“Fine,” Pervin said. “How did you sleep, anneciğim?” She knew what would come next. Not even a vacation could alter Gonca’s morning routine.
“I didn’t sleep a wink!” she said, unaware or unwilling to admit that she had been snoring just a half hour earlier. “Allah’ım help me! They say that not sleeping can kill you!”
Pervin mumbled something to the effect of “heaven forbid” while taking Özge’s swim goggles off the desk adjacent to the wall-mounted television. A mix of salt water and chlorine solution had formed a thick, cloudy film on its plastic lenses. The sound of the young girl singing in English floated through the crack between the door and its frame.
“It will be hot again today, won’t it? This climate could very well kill me.”
Pervin wanted to remind her mother that she had lived in Izmir her whole life, that the climate in Çeşme, just an hour outside the city, was no different, that her hypertension was not so severe that she couldn’t survive another day of reading in the hotel lobby. But this was only day four of their ten-day, all-inclusive getaway, too early for a family squabble, especially since Gonca had made all their travel arrangements. Pervin needed only to think of her mother hobbling to her travel agent after sweating on a city bus—without the help of her emigrant daughter—to retreat into a respectful silence.
“You won’t feel the heat in the lobby,” Pervin said. “Not with the air conditioning on.”
Özge emerged from the bathroom with a fresh toothpaste stain on her Minnie Mouse night gown before Gonca could make a comment about the dangers of air conditioning. The old woman instead invited her granddaughter to approach her chair, where she could help Özge pull on her swim suit. In the bathroom, Pervin lathered her hands and attacked the goggles’ grimy lenses with soapy fingertips and, when she realized her skin wasn’t abrasive enough, nails.
***
Breakfast, like every other meal at the resort, was an all-you-care-to-eat buffet, and kaşar cheese and a few pieces of baguette were all Özge cared to eat this morning. Seeds from the resort’s strawberry jam had lodged themselves between two of her molars the day prior, leaving her no choice but to shun fruit spreads forever, or at least for the duration of their stay. Pervin waved her daughter toward a round table near the tea and coffee station then helped Gonca cut away more pieces from the baguette. She remembered to take her own trip around the buffet and rejoined her family with a plate of olives, feta cheese, and sesame-coated simit bread.
Before Pervin could spit out her first olive pit, Özge asked whether they could call her father after breakfast. “It will be very late there, canım. Almost midnight,” Pervin said, stroking the child’s hair. Gonca was silent while mixing tahini and grape molasses in a small bowl and spreading the resulting concoction on a hunk of bread. Her lips were tightly, unnaturally sealed.
“Maybe he’s still up,” said Özge, now in English.
“Olsun kızım. We don’t know for sure. Let’s wait until dinnertime.”
“You called him yesterday, didn’t you? If you ask me, you don’t have to call him again this week,” said Gonca. The aging woman cleared her throat and let her tulip-shaped tea cup hang between her right thumb and index finger. Gonca took a long sip of her tea, her eyes darting between the novel sticking out of her purse and her daughter’s still-full plate of food, and remarked that after breakfast she would go straight to the lobby.
“I won’t be a burden to you two until lunchtime,” she added. Pervin neither sighed nor raised her eyes from the mound of olive pits on the far side of her plate.
Outside the restaurant, Özge petitioned to change her and Pervin’s morning plans. “Can we go to the pool again?” The sand at the beach was full of flies and slimy plants, and it wasn’t any fun. Pervin reminded her daughter she was bigger than the flies and that the plants had been dead even before they had gotten on the plane. Wasn’t Özge tired of being landlocked? How many kids at Allen Elementary had played on a beach?
“They don’t even have to go to the beach. They don’t even want to. They go to the pool,” said the girl. With a pause, she added, “Every day. Except for me.”
Failing to elicit a response from her mother, Özge accompanied Pervin silently to their preferred pair of chaise lounges. The girl was warned to not go into the water but had received permission to explore the beach, so long as she remained within sight of Pervin. She nodded and ran between the rows of plastic furniture to identify a playmate, whom she found minutes later: a monolingual Russian boy prone to fits of giggling. They exchanged a few words in their respective first languages and eventually arrived at the decision to fling wet balls of sand into the Aegean.
Pervin stared at the same block of text in her novel for several minutes. She should have called her husband at breakfast. He would have been awake. Throughout the past four weeks, she had dissected his justification of spending just seven nights in Turkey even though she’d be there for three months. He was far too busy at work to stay any longer, he had said, but how nice it would be for his princess to improve her Turkish and for his wife to spend more time with her family. Plus, Pervin hated Iowa’s sticky summers even more than its winters, so why should she suffer again this year? OooOh!—that distinctly Turkish declaration of contentment—she could breathe in the Aegean air without the homesickness that, where they lived, threatened to suffocate her. Pervin was still troubled by the relief she had felt more intensely than disappointment when her husband had shared his travel plans.
“Anne, Mikhail’s family is going to the pool,” said Özge. Her blonde companion was already out of sight.
“Ne yapayım yavrum? We’re still here.”
Özge promised she’d never ask to go to the pool “back home,” the one beloved and frequented by every single one of her friends, again if they joined Mikhail’s family now.
“After lunch, tatlım,” Pervin said. “First we’ll go and sit with anneanne for a while.”
“In the restaurant? Why doesn’t anneanne sit with us outside?”
“You know why. Sitting under the sun is very bad for her.”
“There’s shade by the pool.”
Pervin suggested, with less patience, that Özge read her new book so anne could also focus on hers. She reapplied sunscreen to her daughter’s face and shoulders and handed Özge an un-dog-eared copy of Viking Ships at Sunrise.
A chapter later, a sound tore Pervin’s eyes from the page. The Aegean, calm seconds earlier, was churning. A speedboat with a yellow banana boat in tow had taken to the water a few dozen meters from the row of chaise lounges. Pervin watched the motorboat speed up, first to a pleasant clip, then just fast enough to elicit a few shrieks from the six passengers seated on the yellow raft, and finally an acceleration so sudden that the inflatable tube drifted into the air. The motorboat captain surged forward. Her eyes shut, Pervin imagined the terror of a tourist’s loosening grip—how much longer could those few centimeters of string keep the black rubber handles, not to mention the white knuckles curled around them, attached to the raft? When she looked again at the water, the speedboat and its raft had grown smaller and quieter. There was now a large, foaming patch just a short swim from where the golden sand ended.
Amid a flurry of noise, the tourists surfaced unharmed. They threw back their soaked heads in joy and relief, laughing and treading water when they could have swum to safety. The tourists laughed so long and loudly that a few other women reading on their chaise lounges leaned forward and squinted past the open pages to get a better look.
“Gördün mü anne? Did you see? They were going super-fast, then they fell off!”
And now they remained in dark, foreign water—voluntarily—chatting in a strange tongue and giggling to the point of tears. The happy sound shocked Pervin. These bobbing, smiling heads, not knowing what lurked in the place the banana boat would deposit them, had paid for a seat anyway. She thought of herself twelve years earlier, piecing together the money for two seats on a plane. She imagined being in the water now, the salt burning her eyes as she pumped her arms and legs toward the familiar Turkish shore.
Sheets or not, Özge would remain asleep until one of her grandmother Gonca’s coughs ricocheted from the bathroom walls into the main part of the hotel room. The rhythm of her two travel companions’ footsteps on the tile floors served as Pervin’s cue to rise and prepare for the day ahead. By then, Özge had replaced Gonca in the bathroom.
As Pervin removed Özge’s striped pink-and-yellow swimsuit from the dresser, Gonca said good morning and settled into the wicker chair opposite her daughter and the imposing chest of drawers. “How did you sleep?”
“Fine,” Pervin said. “How did you sleep, anneciğim?” She knew what would come next. Not even a vacation could alter Gonca’s morning routine.
“I didn’t sleep a wink!” she said, unaware or unwilling to admit that she had been snoring just a half hour earlier. “Allah’ım help me! They say that not sleeping can kill you!”
Pervin mumbled something to the effect of “heaven forbid” while taking Özge’s swim goggles off the desk adjacent to the wall-mounted television. A mix of salt water and chlorine solution had formed a thick, cloudy film on its plastic lenses. The sound of the young girl singing in English floated through the crack between the door and its frame.
“It will be hot again today, won’t it? This climate could very well kill me.”
Pervin wanted to remind her mother that she had lived in Izmir her whole life, that the climate in Çeşme, just an hour outside the city, was no different, that her hypertension was not so severe that she couldn’t survive another day of reading in the hotel lobby. But this was only day four of their ten-day, all-inclusive getaway, too early for a family squabble, especially since Gonca had made all their travel arrangements. Pervin needed only to think of her mother hobbling to her travel agent after sweating on a city bus—without the help of her emigrant daughter—to retreat into a respectful silence.
“You won’t feel the heat in the lobby,” Pervin said. “Not with the air conditioning on.”
Özge emerged from the bathroom with a fresh toothpaste stain on her Minnie Mouse night gown before Gonca could make a comment about the dangers of air conditioning. The old woman instead invited her granddaughter to approach her chair, where she could help Özge pull on her swim suit. In the bathroom, Pervin lathered her hands and attacked the goggles’ grimy lenses with soapy fingertips and, when she realized her skin wasn’t abrasive enough, nails.
***
Breakfast, like every other meal at the resort, was an all-you-care-to-eat buffet, and kaşar cheese and a few pieces of baguette were all Özge cared to eat this morning. Seeds from the resort’s strawberry jam had lodged themselves between two of her molars the day prior, leaving her no choice but to shun fruit spreads forever, or at least for the duration of their stay. Pervin waved her daughter toward a round table near the tea and coffee station then helped Gonca cut away more pieces from the baguette. She remembered to take her own trip around the buffet and rejoined her family with a plate of olives, feta cheese, and sesame-coated simit bread.
Before Pervin could spit out her first olive pit, Özge asked whether they could call her father after breakfast. “It will be very late there, canım. Almost midnight,” Pervin said, stroking the child’s hair. Gonca was silent while mixing tahini and grape molasses in a small bowl and spreading the resulting concoction on a hunk of bread. Her lips were tightly, unnaturally sealed.
“Maybe he’s still up,” said Özge, now in English.
“Olsun kızım. We don’t know for sure. Let’s wait until dinnertime.”
“You called him yesterday, didn’t you? If you ask me, you don’t have to call him again this week,” said Gonca. The aging woman cleared her throat and let her tulip-shaped tea cup hang between her right thumb and index finger. Gonca took a long sip of her tea, her eyes darting between the novel sticking out of her purse and her daughter’s still-full plate of food, and remarked that after breakfast she would go straight to the lobby.
“I won’t be a burden to you two until lunchtime,” she added. Pervin neither sighed nor raised her eyes from the mound of olive pits on the far side of her plate.
Outside the restaurant, Özge petitioned to change her and Pervin’s morning plans. “Can we go to the pool again?” The sand at the beach was full of flies and slimy plants, and it wasn’t any fun. Pervin reminded her daughter she was bigger than the flies and that the plants had been dead even before they had gotten on the plane. Wasn’t Özge tired of being landlocked? How many kids at Allen Elementary had played on a beach?
“They don’t even have to go to the beach. They don’t even want to. They go to the pool,” said the girl. With a pause, she added, “Every day. Except for me.”
Failing to elicit a response from her mother, Özge accompanied Pervin silently to their preferred pair of chaise lounges. The girl was warned to not go into the water but had received permission to explore the beach, so long as she remained within sight of Pervin. She nodded and ran between the rows of plastic furniture to identify a playmate, whom she found minutes later: a monolingual Russian boy prone to fits of giggling. They exchanged a few words in their respective first languages and eventually arrived at the decision to fling wet balls of sand into the Aegean.
Pervin stared at the same block of text in her novel for several minutes. She should have called her husband at breakfast. He would have been awake. Throughout the past four weeks, she had dissected his justification of spending just seven nights in Turkey even though she’d be there for three months. He was far too busy at work to stay any longer, he had said, but how nice it would be for his princess to improve her Turkish and for his wife to spend more time with her family. Plus, Pervin hated Iowa’s sticky summers even more than its winters, so why should she suffer again this year? OooOh!—that distinctly Turkish declaration of contentment—she could breathe in the Aegean air without the homesickness that, where they lived, threatened to suffocate her. Pervin was still troubled by the relief she had felt more intensely than disappointment when her husband had shared his travel plans.
“Anne, Mikhail’s family is going to the pool,” said Özge. Her blonde companion was already out of sight.
“Ne yapayım yavrum? We’re still here.”
Özge promised she’d never ask to go to the pool “back home,” the one beloved and frequented by every single one of her friends, again if they joined Mikhail’s family now.
“After lunch, tatlım,” Pervin said. “First we’ll go and sit with anneanne for a while.”
“In the restaurant? Why doesn’t anneanne sit with us outside?”
“You know why. Sitting under the sun is very bad for her.”
“There’s shade by the pool.”
Pervin suggested, with less patience, that Özge read her new book so anne could also focus on hers. She reapplied sunscreen to her daughter’s face and shoulders and handed Özge an un-dog-eared copy of Viking Ships at Sunrise.
A chapter later, a sound tore Pervin’s eyes from the page. The Aegean, calm seconds earlier, was churning. A speedboat with a yellow banana boat in tow had taken to the water a few dozen meters from the row of chaise lounges. Pervin watched the motorboat speed up, first to a pleasant clip, then just fast enough to elicit a few shrieks from the six passengers seated on the yellow raft, and finally an acceleration so sudden that the inflatable tube drifted into the air. The motorboat captain surged forward. Her eyes shut, Pervin imagined the terror of a tourist’s loosening grip—how much longer could those few centimeters of string keep the black rubber handles, not to mention the white knuckles curled around them, attached to the raft? When she looked again at the water, the speedboat and its raft had grown smaller and quieter. There was now a large, foaming patch just a short swim from where the golden sand ended.
Amid a flurry of noise, the tourists surfaced unharmed. They threw back their soaked heads in joy and relief, laughing and treading water when they could have swum to safety. The tourists laughed so long and loudly that a few other women reading on their chaise lounges leaned forward and squinted past the open pages to get a better look.
“Gördün mü anne? Did you see? They were going super-fast, then they fell off!”
And now they remained in dark, foreign water—voluntarily—chatting in a strange tongue and giggling to the point of tears. The happy sound shocked Pervin. These bobbing, smiling heads, not knowing what lurked in the place the banana boat would deposit them, had paid for a seat anyway. She thought of herself twelve years earlier, piecing together the money for two seats on a plane. She imagined being in the water now, the salt burning her eyes as she pumped her arms and legs toward the familiar Turkish shore.
Ezgi Üstündağ was born in upstate New York but did most of her growing up in Ames, Iowa. Her Turkish short fiction has appeared in the literary journals YKY Kitap-lık, altZine, Lemur, and others. In English, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bosphorus Review of Books and Flash Fiction Magazine, and her novella 'Mother Tongue' is forthcoming from Urban Farmhouse Press.