t night she dreams of supermarkets. Florida supermarkets. Aisles and aisles of boxes and cans. Things she had always taken for granted, not even particularly liked. Muzak. Tubs of cookies. Soda water. Colors like pale mint-green and neon pink.

Every morning at dawn her mother-in-law awakens her by thumping on the ceiling with a stick. "Get up, lazy!" she shouts in Greek. Her mother-in-law speaks no English.

Here, nobody does.

It was in a supermarket that she met him. By the corn flakes. He backed around a corner, lost, holding a piece of paper and looking up at the aisle numbers in confusion, sleek in the dazzling white of his sailor's uniform.

She had never seen anyone so beautiful. When he turned to ask for help, she was unable to speak. She felt herself grow ungainly and plain in his presence, like a plant deprived of light.

Now at dawn three times a week, she gets up to load the donkey and lead him to market. Like most people on the island, her in-laws own no car, although it is 1975. Her job is to sell the herbs, melons, potatoes and sesame seeds that her in-laws grow on their rocky patch of land. If she sells well, she is allowed goat's milk and bread at bedtime. If she sells badly, the family will fast.

While she is at market she must on no account look at the soldiers. The island of Ifestia is overrun with them, hordes of teenaged boys barracked in every hotel and spare room in the place. Greece and Turkey have been bickering over Ifestia for centuries, so the Greeks keep it packed with soldiers. Just in case.

If Joyce is caught raising her eyes to a soldier or to any strange man, her mother-in-law says, she will be beaten and turned penniless out on the street.

In the supermarket, he came up to her in the aisle, slim and graceful in that lithe, unconscious way of young men. A cluster of black curls fell over his forehead. He looked at her with great wide eyes, a golden amber ringed with dark lashes. His face was delicate, cheekbones sharp, lips a bitten red. His skin was browned from the sea, but smooth, smooth as syrup.

"Scuse me," he said, his voice low and uncertain. "I no speak English." Joyce thrust her breasts forward. She couldn't help it. They weren't much but they were there. She also tossed back her long, blond American hair, bleached to a frosty platinum only last week. She even had time to wonder whether she had put on her shimmering pink lipstick.

"Let me help," she said, reaching out her polished fingernails to take his piece of paper. Back in Florida, Joyce was the kind of girl who polished her nails and bleached her hair. She read true romance magazines, too, and spent long hours dreaming about a love that would rise and swell like the crescendo of an orchestra. None of it prepared her for this.

Her fingernails are broken off now. The palms of her hands stained and calloused.

"It says oatmeal. You want oatmeal?"

The boy shrugged. He obviously had no idea what she was saying. She led him to the right spot in the aisle. "Instant or regular?"

"Yes," he said, and laughed. His teeth were white but crooked, his only flaw. He was taller than she by a head and a half. His hips, snug in his uniform, looked taut and promising, his shoulders broad. She slipped off her denim jacket, worn only for the air conditioning, and tossed it into her shopping cart. Underneath she had on a skimpy yellow shirt and a mini-skirt. On her feet were thin white sandals, showing off her pink toenails.

He looked her over. His gaze was like a caress.

Joyce was a still a virgin. Eighteen and still intact. When she felt him look at her like that, she knew, with a certainty she had never felt before, that she did not want to be a virgin any longer.

Now he is her husband and he is hundreds of miles away over the sea.

Ifestia sat in the middle of the North Aegean, isolated like a raft in a bay. The western half of the island, where Joyce lived, was the unlucky half: dry and treeless, rocky, its earth the color of sand, its scrub silvery and timid against the solid blue sky. Few tourists visited Ifestia, for it lacked the drama of the islands Lesbos and Thassos nearby; and it was constantly overrun by bored, restive soldiers.

The island was also poor. The peasants of Ifestia had to struggle like peasants everywhere, but on the western side they were helped neither by fertile soil nor natural ponds. Their goats were more suited to the land than they. Joyce's mother-in-law had worked so hard all her life that she'd never had the leisure to learn to read. Both she and her husband told time by the sun. They looked like shriveled prunes, but their muscles were as dense and knotted as wood.

In 1975, by the time Joyce had spent two years getting used to life on the island, more soldiers than ever came and drove away the few remaining tourists she liked to seek in town for company. They drove away the Germans, who shouted commands and never said thank you; the English, who drank too much and burned themselves a lobster red in the sun; the rare Americans, who gawked at Joyce when she spoke and begged her to find them bargains in the market. And they brought instead playfulness and lust and dark, quick eyes waiting to catch her like nets. They brought young male bodies, gleaming hair, laughter, carelessness; everything she had relinquished.

Joyce stood in the market place one summer morning, selling the week's produce from her in-laws' farm. She had grown thinner during her years in Greece, her once soft limbs now sinewy and hard; her family in Florida would barely recognize her. Her skin, unprotected by lotions, had deepened to a honey brown. Her hair, long since grown out of its frosty bleach, was tied back in a dark golden knot. Her green eyes looked paler than they used to against her new complexion; sage in the sunlight, olive in the shadows, giving her narrow face a look of feline secretiveness. Her lips, unadorned by cosmetics, were pale and thin. But her legs glinted with blond hairs, and her hands and feet were scraped and cracked and seamed with dirt. Her dress—her mother-in-law never let her wear trousers—was a shapeless pink, faded and stained. On her left hand, her gold wedding band had grown dull with neglect.

She was selling eggs and the oil and seeds from her in-laws' precious sesame plants. She also sold spinach, dark and crisp. Basil, lentils and beetroot that ran red as a wound. Beans, pungent marjoram, globes of perky garlic. Little red potatoes, sweet as plums. She sold from a rickety stall in the small market square, and she had learned to drive a hard bargain.

"For you, Kyria Fakinou, I will throw in an extra egg, but only if you buy my garlic here. It is the sweetest in the market, watered by my mother-in-law's own sweat and tears. Yes, and my eggs are three centimeters bigger than any others—you bring a measuring tape and see!"

The townspeople liked to buy from Joyce. They found her American malapropisms amusing as she wrangled with them in Greek. They liked to gaze at her hair, which she often forgot to hide under a scarf, as a proper young woman should. The old teased her about being a rich Amerikeedah who had come to live like a peasant. The young matched their wits against hers to see if they could outdo this upstart Yank. Joyce relished all this. It made her laugh. With triumph, with pride. With affection.

She sold from dawn until almost noon. Then, when the market was empty, the sun high and strong and her voice raw from calling out her wares, she strapped the wicker baskets onto her donkey and headed home for the remainder of the day's chores.

"Hey, little mama, you go home already?"

It was one of the soldiers. They taunted her every day in pidgin English or saucy Greek. She turned her back on him and steered the donkey out of the market square, frowning. Her only protections were Greek curses, her married status and spitting. Yet sometimes she longed to kick the donkey away, undo her hair and dance into the soldier's arms. Nikos, her husband, had been away this time for seven months, the last time for almost five. He had deflowered her, given her a taste for it, kissed her and fled. Left her gasping like a fish on a bank. In between he wrote her long, steamy letters in broken English that made her toss in the night, her fingers between her legs, hoping her in-laws on the other side of the wall could not hear her panting.

"Come with me baby. I lick you all over."

The men hissed in her ear.

The vegetables sold badly that morning—there was too much competition at that time of year—and as Joyce walked the donkey home, she worried about her in-laws' reaction. They lived hand to mouth, every bad market day a strain, every quirk of weather a potential tragedy. She had learned this on only her fifth night in the house. Lying wet and sweating in Nikos's arms, her thighs streaked with semen, she had been awoken by the shouts of his mother. A wind storm had risen from the sea and swept all the sesame seed capsules off the plants just a day before the harvest. Her father-in-law lit a kerosene lamp and plunged out into the storm, his wife shouting at Nikos and Joyce to join him. They ran from plant to plant in the darkness and rain, scrabbling at the ground for the seed pods, praying that they had not burst open and scattered their precious contents to the wind. But it was useless. The most valuable crop of the year destroyed in an hour.

That had been before Joyce knew Greek, when she and Nikos could barely speak to one another, only touch.

The first time Nikos had left was only six days after he had brought her home. "I back soon," he'd promised, then disappeared for five months. He was a merchant marine, working for Greece's great glory, its shipping magnates. The ships went tramping, as the Greeks called it, all over the world. Instead of following set routes like other shipping companies, they took one-time trips anywhere that paid. "I go only Spain," Nikos had assured Joyce. "I come home and bring back much money." His mother, Dimitra, had laughed approvingly and rubbed her fingers together. No one had told Joyce that was how it would always be.

For weeks after Nikos had left that first time, Joyce lay in her bed each night, aching with exhaustion and loneliness. After she'd overcome her fear of bats, she would leave her wooden shutters open so that she could see the night sky through her window; and the boundaries of her life, of the room around her, the bed beneath her would seem no more solid than the ceiling of the Milky Way. Where am I? she would find herself wondering. How did I get here? Who knows me? She felt herself floating loose, drifting on the edge of a void, tethered only by the thin, tenuous strand of Nikos's love.

Joyce led the donkey, a tired old male called Phoebus, through the dusty fields to her in-laws' house. They lived above Kastron, the main port on the western coast, upon a hill of treeless volcanic rock. As she left behind the cluster of whitewashed houses, their walls blinding in the sun, their umber roofs dulled in its glare, the heat seemed only to increase. It breathed down on her, cooking the pale dust beneath her feet as it cooked her hair, her flesh, her thoughts. Around her the grass was scrubby but fragrant with herbs: oregano, oleander, sage, mint, thyme. The only sounds were the clop of the donkey's feet, the rasping of cicadas and the creak and rustle of the baskets on Phoebus's back. The donkey's hooves scuffed up the dry earth, making Joyce cough.

Joyce was dizzy from lack of food. It was August and the people of the village were fasting for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. They could eat nothing that symbolized Jesus Christ, so could have no product from the olive, upon which they usually depended. No fish, either. No lamb, no sheep's cheese, no wine. For nearly two weeks she and her in-laws had lived on watermelon, potatoes and bean soup; not enough, for Joyce at least, to sustain her constant labor. At the end of the fast, however, Petros, her father-in-law, had promised, they would catch a boat to the neighboring island of Lesbos, hitch-hike to the mountain top and feast for three days.

Joyce tethered Phoebus to his post and stumbled through the back door of the squat stone house, scattering the chickens and hideous guinea fowl that ran at her feet. Inside the cool, white-plastered walls, the shade soothed her like satin. She threw herself on the Turkish pillows piled in a corner. As her sweat dried she felt the dust form a gritty seal over her skin.

"Any good today, little one?" Dimitra said, entering the house. She, too, in her blue sack of a dress and bare feet, looked layered in dust. She was carrying a huge earthenware jug from the well. They had no running water.

"No good, Mama, I'm sorry," Joyce replied. She handed over the meagre purse of drachmas. "Alexis was there with his crops—he had three times as much as ours. He cut the prices. And people aren't buying much because of the fast."

Dimitra frowned but said nothing. She heaved the jug up on the rough wooden shelf that served as a kitchen counter. Although Dimitra was sixty-four, the sun and work had made her look eighty. The skin on her heavy, square face was as cracked as dry earth, caving in at the mouth where she had lost several of her bottom teeth. Her once wide almond eyes were dim and hooded. Her hair was now a steel gray, braided and circled about her head like a crown. But her back was upright, her heavy bosom proud. She was as strong as any man.

"And the eggs?"

"The eggs I sold. And the potatoes. The money is there. Can I wash, Mama? I feel dizzy with the heat."

"Go wash. No soap on your feet!"

Dimitra said this to her every day, barking it in her gruff, rasping voice. Soap on the feet makes a young girl infertile, she told Joyce over and over. Joyce laughed to herself as she splashed water on her legs at the outside pump. How am I going to get pregnant with Nikos across the sea? What does Dimitra expect, immaculate conception?

In the supermarket, Nikos had followed her as she filled her shopping cart. He had mimed questions to her, compliments. "Amerikeedah pretty," he'd kept saying, the only phrase she had understood. But his teasing eyes, his strong, tanned limbs—she understood those. He paid for his oatmeal and followed her outside to her car, where he stood clutching his shopping bag and looking bewildered.

"Are you lost?" she said hopefully.

He frowned. "I walk here. Far." He lifted his shoulders in a shrug.

She invited him home. "My Mama and Papa will help you," she said, figuring those were universal words.

"Mama good, yes?" he replied and went with her without protest, as if he had planned it all along.

Her parents welcomed him with surprised curiosity, while she explained that he seemed to have wandered away from his shipmates. They were used to seeing sailors in Miami, although they had never had one to the house before—the sailors usually stayed around the bars and clubs in South Beach. Nevertheless, they took pity on him and invited him to a barbecue out in the yard. Her father flipped patties, her mother served drinks. Joyce's two elder brothers, meaty and blond, snickered uneasily at Nikos and refused to take their eyes off the living room television.

"Where did you say you're from?" Joyce's mother asked eventually, her smile oozing like her hamburger.

"Ehlenekoss." He patted his chest. "Amerikeedah," and he pointed to her.

"What in God's name is the man saying?" Joyce's mother murmured.

"He's Greek, Mom, I told you. I think his ship came in yesterday."

"Ah yes, Greek." The mother looked at him calculatingly.

"Moussaka!" she pronounced with triumph.

Nikos nodded and flashed his crooked white teeth.

After the meal, Joyce offered to drive him back to his ship. As soon as they climbed out of her car, he took her hand and kissed each finger as solemnly as if he were at prayer. "You are so beautiful," he said, a phrase he knew from pop songs. He said it to each finger, looking at her seriously with his amber eyes.

Joyce's heart squeezed until it hurt. He was so alive compared to everyone she knew, so exotic.

She moved to him, tilting up her face, opening her eyes as wide as she could.

"You are beautiful, too."

Every Sunday, Dimitra took Joyce to church, the Greek Orthodox in Kastron. She went on weekdays as well, particularly when she needed a favor from the Virgin or her name saint, but she allowed Joyce no other time to leave her work. In most local homes the mother was the one who kept up communion with the saints. The daughter-in-law scrubbed the floors.

"Don't forget your scarf!" Dimitra called to Joyce from the courtyard. "We must pray for a good harvest. Hurry!"

"I'm coming, Mama." Joyce tied her church scarf, a triangle of rough cotton, over her hair, and ran outside.

"I don't know why you bother to primp," her mother-in-law grumbled. "Father Poulianos does not care what you look like. Come, and keep your eyes off the soldiers." She hooked her elbow through Joyce's arm, giving her an affectionate squeeze, and propelled her down the hill.

Joyce had hated Dimitra at first. After Nikos had left, with a kiss and a promise, her mother-in-law had begun to work her mercilessly and Joyce had hated her. The moment they'd met, Dimitra had pinched Joyce's bicep as if she were buying a chicken. Then she had plunged her gnarled hand quickly down Joyce's shirt and squeezed her breast. Joyce had leapt back, horrified. The old woman had cackled and said something Joyce could not then understand.

Now she knew. "Too flabby," Dimitra had said to her son. "No good for work. Make her have children."

Since then, however, Joyce had learned that she was lucky in Dimitra. Most of the young brides in Ifestia suffered much more than she did at the hands of their husband's mothers. Beaten by them, humiliated daily, ordered about like servants. In some of the mountain villages, Joyce had heard, a new bride was forced to spend the first night in her mother-in-law's bed, not her husband's, to show who really owned her. And it was not uncommon to see young wives in Kastron with black eyes and bruised cheeks, received just as often from their mothers-in-law as their husbands. The people of Ifestia were not gentle. The old had lived through war and starvation, and the whole country had just emerged from seven years of dictatorship. Ifestians had no patience with mild encouragement or compliments, no time for the coddling of newcomers. Dimitra was a lamb compared to most.

When they reached the church, a simple, rectangular cube of whitewashed stone, topped by a dome and a bell, Dimitra hustled Joyce inside and up to the gynekeion, the women's section upstairs. There they greeted the other women, exchanged news and chatted between their prayers. There was little reverential about the church of Kastron. People thought nothing of milling about and talking, even during Mass, of comparing the sexual prowess of their goats or the marriageability of their daughters while the priest chanted, ignored, at his altar. Joyce had often thought that the church was more like a teeming marketplace than a house of worship.

Joyce had learned all about church on her second day in Greece. She had come down from Nikos's room early that morning wearing cut-off jeans and a sleeveless shirt—standard dress in Florida's heat—and Dimitra had let out a yelp at the sight of her as if she'd been stung. Picking up a long-sleeved shirt off a chair, she had thrust it at Joyce, knocking at her bare arms and legs in disgust. Dimitra always moved this way, Joyce was soon to discover—abruptly, forcefully, often thumping and bruising her, but never quite meaning to. Then she had shouted something Joyce could not understand, gesturing with disdain at her skimpy Florida clothes. Knowing her now, Joyce suspected she had said, "You dress like a Yankee whore. I won't have a tourist slut in my house."

Hastily, although somewhat amused, Joyce had climbed the ladder back up to the bedroom, pulled on a skirt and Dimitra's shirt, and presented herself again. She did, after all, want to make a good impression. She wanted to fit in, be accepted, even to be loved. She had no interest at that point in rebellion. With an approving grunt, Dimitra had pushed her out of the house, almost making her fall, and led her in grim silence along the dusty path to town, leaving Nikos asleep and satiated in his bed.

The first time Joyce had seen the village priest, Father Poulianos, she'd thought he looked like a painting of God. He was draped head to foot in a black robe, an imperious pillbox hat on his head, and his gray-streaked beard hung in a great bush down to the middle of his chest. He was an enormous man, and liked to stand at his full height, watching his flock with mocking gray eyes. As Joyce approached, she had glanced curiously into his face, but Dimitra had put a hand on the back of her head and pushed it down violently. Shocked, Joyce stared at her feet, not daring to raise her eyes. She knew so little, she realized, about how to behave.

Muttering something to the priest, her mother-in-law kissed his hand, then pulled Joyce into the dim, candle-lit interior of the church.

Inside, Joyce looked about her, amazed. The contrast between the ancient, crumbling village outside and the rich glitter within the church astounded her. Even by her second day in Ifestia she had grasped how poor it was. Her in-laws lived with a simplicity Joyce thought had ended hundreds of years before. No electricity, no running water, no indoor toilet, no stove. Yet the church was opulent to the point of vulgarity.

Impatiently, Dimitra pushed her up to the row of icons separating the sanctuary from the nave, her hand again firmly on the back of Joyce's head. Christ was first, a tall, gilded painting of an emaciated Jew with cartoon eyes. Then came the Holy Virgin, her teardrop face dark and mournful. Joyce stared. The Virgin's dress was smothered in silver and gold. She was surrounded by elaborate carving, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, enamel, even jewels. At her feet were a cluster of flickering candles, dripping like lava to a glowing mound of molten wax beneath. A crowd of tamata, votive offerings, were hung on the wood around her: Slivers of tin and silver cut into the shapes of tiny feet or arms, hearts or heads, of men crying in prison and children crushed in car crashes. The Virgin's hands, folded gracefully together over her protruding belly, were barely visible, washed away by a thousand kisses.

Grabbing the hair at the back of Joyce's head, Dimitra pushed Joyce's face up to the icon of Christ, making loud kissing noises. Too bewildered to resist, Joyce closed her eyes in disgust and kissed first Christ's feet, then the Virgin's painted fingers.

What she had been too afraid to say, what she had not even know how to say, was that she was Jewish.

It wasn't until her mother-in-law had made Joyce kiss the icons of Saint Dimitrios, other local saints and several angels that she'd led her to the gynekeion upstairs. There Joyce had stood, just as she would in a synagogue, staring down at the men, shocked, dazed, and ashamed of herself.

Now the church was a refuge for Joyce. It was always cool inside. It always smelled of incense and old women. It was the one place she was allowed to rest.

During the first year or so her prayers had gone like this:

"Dear God, I'm so sorry. I know I'm in the wrong place. My parents would scream. But I am being good. Keep Nikos safe."

Now her prayers went like this:

"Bring Nikos back, oh Lord. Help me stay a wife."

When Joyce had first met Nikos in Miami, he had been on a week's shore leave and had come to see her every day. The first time, the morning after he had kissed each of her fingers, he'd knocked on the door, a huge bouquet in his hands, and presented it not to her but to her mother. The woman was shocked. She stood in the doorway, round and sunburnt, her black hair showing gray at the roots, blinking in bewilderment. "Thank you," she finally managed to say, shouting at him as if he were deaf, and clumped off to the kitchen.

"Why the hell is he giving them to me?" she muttered to Joyce. "It isn't my pants he wants to get into." She rammed the flowers into a vase and waved Nikos away like a bothersome dog.

After that, Nikos bought a Greek/English phrase book. He began to lavish clumsy praise on their shabby clapboard house. The tiny yard, the clattery garbage disposal, the plastic deckchairs, stained and shredding. He learned to compliment the tent dresses Joyce's mother wore, decorated with giant flowers in turquoise or orange. "Pretty!" he would say. "Flowers pretty!" She would stare at him, then down at herself, and laugh. "He's shameless!" she once said to Joyce. But then she blushed.

With her father, Nikos was more reserved. He would hold a chair for him; fall silent whenever he spoke, his face serious and respectful. Joyce sensed that had Nikos been able to speak more English, he would bring up politics with her father, or try to draw him out about the shoe store where he was manager. It would have gotten him nowhere. Her father engaged in conversation as little as possible. He preferred to stare in grim concentration at the television.

With her elder brothers, Ben and Joey, Nikos was playful. He brought them beer and watched them drink themselves into a sodden daze, arm-wrestled with them both and let them win. One night he made them dance the Hasapiko, a serious dance of stately grace performed by three men. Slowly, Nikos tried to get her brothers to follow his steps, one under each arm. While he moved with the ease of a panther, his face lifted, patient, they stumbled beside him, tripping, hiccuping, embarrassed. Joyce sat on the kitchen table, choked with laughter.

The more Nikos shone in Joyce's eyes, the more paralyzed her family seemed to her. Her mother leathery from too much sun, dumpy around the middle, face bloated and eyes narrow with disappointments. Her father silent and inexplicably sad, a paunchy shadow slipping in and out of the house. Her brothers, stubble-haired jocks who had done nothing but ignore or torment Joyce her entire childhood. The cold silence of their lives. The blanks where passion should have been. They began to look gray to her, dull and gray.

At night, in the hot, silky air, Nikos and Joyce would go to the beach and lie down on the sand. She was ready to give herself to him then and there, disregarding every story she had heard about sailors and their diseases. Joyce was eighteen and she wanted everything. She wanted the exotic world embodied in Nikos's knowing eyes. The ancient history evoked by his strange, guttural language. The secrets promised by his uniform. All her life she had felt stifled, smothered by a family too passive and defeated to know ambition or adventure. So she opened herself to Nikos. Eagerly. Shamelessly. Bravely.

But Nikos insisted on taking it slowly. Each night he would prop himself on an elbow, kiss her lingeringly and expose only one part of her flesh. On Saturday he lifted her skirt up one leg, as if to reveal a dangerous surprise, sliding his hands up her thigh, brushing her hip. On Sunday he unbuttoned her flimsy summer shirt and pushed back only the left side to gaze at her breast, puckered at him longingly. On Monday the other breast, his lips running over it until she moaned. On Tuesday a hip, a hint of ribs. On Wednesday the taut plane of her young belly, the navel curling like a dimple.

Each night he kissed her, caressed her, made her pant for him. And each night he stopped too soon, until she could think of nothing but him.

Their talk was mostly sign language. He was good at it, funny, graceful, his fingers weaving words out of the air, but all they did was exchange words of love and name objects. He would point to a star and ask her for the word in English, then say it in Greek—astro—making her repeat it and laughing at her pronunciation. He would compare her to flowers, the moon, the pale silver of its reflection on a wave. These compliments meant nothing to Joyce. It was Nikos's own beauty that filled her eyes. She could watch him for hours, forgetting even to reply to him in her wonder that anyone this exotic could want her. His skin was so smooth that her fingertips felt rough and inadequate when she touched him. His cheekbones were high and sharp, his brows arched in promise. His black curls, glossy and dense, smelled of soap and the sea. When she gazed into his eyes they flickered gold, amber and green, the whites bright, the lashes thick. He moved with sinuous languor, the muscles under his skin rippling like contented animals. His beauty consumed her, made all around her, like her family, fade to insignificance. She wanted his body, his world, his mystery.

And so he worked her into such a fever that when, on Friday night, ten days after they had met, he asked her to marry him, she gasped yes, and felt a bird fly free from her chest.

He left the day after he proposed, forced away by his ship's schedule. But by pointing to the days on a calendar, he made it clear that he would be back in a month, during which time Joyce could arrange the wedding.

She cried when his ship pulled out. He had filled her with hope and the promise of escape, only to leave her bereft. Doubt, and a great chasm of loneliness, yawned within her.

Then came an endless month of counting the days, of watching the hours creep by, of seeing all around her with new impatience and distaste. A month of inwardly saying goodbye to all she had known and all she had been. A month of desperately pretending that she was sure he'd come back.

Her parents laughed at her, saying Nikos would never be seen or heard of again. "He may be a knock-out, honey, but you know what sailors are," her mother said in the kitchen one morning. She lit a cigarette and narrowed her eyes behind the smoke, leaning her heavy elbows on the formica table. "Forget him. Think of it as a summer fling and move on. Anyway, he's a goy. Catholic or something."

"What do you care?" Joyce said. "You've never even been to temple since Joey's barmitzvah."

"So? I care." Her mother waved her cigarette for emphasis, the smoke curling around her sun-cooked face like a cowl, the flesh under her arm swaying. "You should care, too. You need to find someone like us. Not some foreigner who can't even speak English."

Joyce leaned against the counter, scowling. "'Like us?' What's that's supposed to mean?"

Her mother shifted her weight on the kitchen chair. She coughed, a deep phlegmy hack, and tapped some ash into the cereal bowl in front of her. "You know, us. American, Jewish. Nice, normal folk." She sighed, almost as if she were losing faith in her own words. "You know, ordinary."

Joyce gazed at her mother, the body round and fleshy underneath an orange mumu, the eyes defensive slits in her swollen face. Her mother: brusque, critical, only willing to dispense affection in begrudging spurts, as if it were an expensive medicine. Was she "ordinary"? Joyce had gone through a period when she was younger of trying to find a word that would describe her mother and father. She had looked for the word in television sit-coms, in books, and in the complaints of her friends, searching for something that would help her categorize her parents, talk about them—that would help her know them. "Warm," "happy," "loving"—these words she'd had to discard. There was nothing warm about the isolating silence that seemed to smother her father and embitter her mother. But nor did "cold" or "cruel" fit. Nobody locked her in closets, beat her, slid their hands up her skirts. Even "strict" or "unfair," the favorite words of her friends, didn't apply. Her parents never dragged her off to synagogue, made her go to Sunday school or work for hours every night at her books or music; nor did they set unreasonable curfews or force her to spend her weekends doing hateful chores. But when she read portraits of citizens in the local paper whom she considered ordinary—the kind who joined the PTA or raised funds to open a Jewish preschool—she found nothing there to fit her parents, either. They never went out, they never voted, they never socialized. They seemed unaware of their community. Only she and her brothers ventured into the world, participated in the expected rituals of American suburbanites: baseball and football, dates and school dances on her brothers' parts; shopping and primping and waiting long hours by the telephone on hers. Her father's life, as far as she had ever been able to see, was to work all day and then come home to sit in front of the television. Her mother talked to the neighbors, but spent most of her time reading circulars and searching for bargains, while cigarette butts, potato chips and empty Coca-Cola cans piled up in front of her. Once, when Joyce had brought a fourth-grade friend home after school, the girl had hung around the kitchen staring at Joyce's immobile mother for several minutes, watching in fascination as she worked her way through a family-size sack of Doritos and a packet of cigarettes, ignoring the children. "Come on," Joyce had said. "Let's go upstairs." "No," the girl had whispered in reply. "Your mother's too weird. I wanna go home."

Joyce had never been able to find the right word for her family.

But "ordinary" certainly did not fit.

While she waited for Nikos, she took to going to the library, where she would take out travel books about Greece. She read about the Acropolis and the oracle at Delphi. She studied dozens of photographs of eyeless statues and contorted black figures on the sides of vases. Everything new and unfamiliar she absorbed hungrily, haphazardly, understanding little of what she read. Then, tired, her mind would wander, slipping into dreams of Nikos's lips, his teasing hands. Of the worlds he could open for her and within her.

Her father grew irritated. "Snap out of it," he barked at her one morning. "Now you've graduated high school you should be looking for a job like your brothers."

Joey worked in a garage. Ben was a pizza delivery boy. Joyce watched them, their arms like slabs of meat, their faces alternately cruel and uncertain, their minds shifting dully between football and money. Their girlfriends were sullen and shy. I don't want to be like them, like any of them, she thought. I want to make more of my life. I want adventure. Excitement. I want danger.

"He'll never show up," her brothers jeered when they heard her boast to friends that she was engaged. "He's a fag anyhow. He couldn't keep his hands off of us, the greasy perv."

Joyce eyed them with contempt. Her dead family. What did they know?

When Nikos astonished them all by reappearing a month later with a ring and a new, shiny suit, Joyce turned to her mother in triumph. "See? I told you he was serious. You never trust my judgment in anything."

"You're too young to get married," her mother said, her smoke-coarsened voice rough and bitter. "Look at me, stuck here with your father. Don't make my mistakes."

I'm not going to, Joyce thought. So she married Nikos at City Hall, a high school friend the witness, and rented a room in a cheap motel to serve as their honeymoon suite.

Joyce still liked to remember their wedding night, when Nikos finally undressed her completely. He made her enjoy displaying herself, for she had grown to feel safe, not exposed in his love. He laid her out on the bed and arranged her limbs as if she were a doll, while she felt her passion rising. Then he stripped off his own clothes, revealing himself in all his vigorous beauty, his waist tapered, his chest as smooth and soft as the inside of her own legs. He lowered himself over her, starting at her feet, brushing his lips up her knees, her thighs. Opening her slowly, he licked her with a delicacy that made her cry out. She had never been touched so reverently before—only groped by clumsy, ragged-nailed boys. Finally, when she was panting his name over and over, he slowly pushed into her. My virgin, my bride, he moaned in a Greek even she could understand.

It hurt, of course. It hurt and she bled, making her instinctive defenses clamp down. He stopped, waited for her to relax, kissed her lips, held himself above her on his arms. But then could contain himself no longer and thrust into her, adding his cries to hers, although his were of pleasure.

Thinking over that night afterwards, Joyce always brushed the memory of the pain aside. It had only been part of the necessary suffering, she had decided, only a part of earning love. Nothing compared to the glory of joining herself to him, body and soul. After all, she had been groomed to succumb. Her romance magazines. Her girlfriends' plotting. The sinister chatter on television. The seething fantasies of her supermarket novels. They had taught her that suffering, submission, patience and self-sacrifice were a woman's way of winning the redemption of love.

The next time she had been afraid. Nikos sensed this, so he went back to their earlier slow caresses, to his leisurely arousal of her lust. He got her used to opening her legs for him, letting him lick her, allowing him to stroke her gently until she became so wild and feverish that she lost her fear.

And then the real lovemaking had begun, the lovemaking that still made her writhe, alone in bed, with longing.

The morning after their wedding night, Joyce and Nikos had flown to Athens, insulated from their future in a metal tube in the sky. They left without saying goodbye. The City Hall ceremony, the shabby motel, the airport—and that was it; life with her family was over. All Joyce had managed to sneak out of the house was her baby-sitting money and an old canvas suitcase filled with summer clothes. The thought had occurred to her that if she'd insisted, tried a bit harder, she might have persuaded her parents to let her marry Nikos, to throw a proper wedding and say a real goodbye. But she had pushed the thought away. This was love, not a lesson in duty. She looked out of the widow as the plane took off, the land shrinking beneath her, and felt her body lift in excitement. Her old life, her old self, fell away from her like sand brushed off a knee. She felt elated, terrified. Free.

On the plane Nikos had stroked Joyce's then-soft hands and tried to teach her some Greek. Neh for yes. Ochi for no. Mother and husband. Please and thank you. When people nod they mean no, not yes. You must call my mother pethera, mother-in-law; my father petheros. The only warning he gave her of what to expect came after he searched his Berlitz phrase book for a long time, gave up on it, and said, "Mama, Papa, no dollars." He had not been able to find the word for poor.

Joyce gazed at him, only half listening, steeped in wonder. This beautiful man was her husband? She felt reckless with gratitude and love. Ready to do anything he asked.

After the plane had come a long, hot train ride to Thessaloniki and at last a series of rattling buses and slow chugging ferries to the island. Joyce looked about at the bundled peasants, the goats and chickens, the golden dust and pale olive trees, and thought it all thrilling. She had never gone anywhere, had never expected to. Nobody in her family traveled. Travel was for people who didn't like home, who didn't like America, her father had once said. She had never felt so defiant. She wrote her parents a postcard.

Dear Mom and Dad: We're in Greece and it's beautiful. Nikos is treating me like a princess. I've never been so happy.

Once they reached the house, Joyce slipped into a daze she would not emerge from for weeks. She was so disoriented by the unfamiliarity of everything she saw and did, by the new faces around her, the strange language, that she lost her footing and her judgment. She found it hard to measure distances in the clear, hard light. She kept stumbling and almost falling to her knees. They arrived in the summer, and the heat was so dry compared to Florida's that she felt constantly, unslakeably thirsty. Nikos added to her confusion by making love to her all morning, all night, sometimes dragging her up to their room in the middle of the day when his parents were working outside. She was sore and weary and dizzy with lovemaking, but never quite satiated. He teased her, taunted her, held off her orgasms until she would do anything he wanted. He made her so delirious with love and strangeness and desire that she was unable to grasp what she had lost, where she had come. Who she was.

Twice, in the midst of her disorientation, she persuaded him to take her to the telephone office in Kastron so that she could call home; like many of the villagers, her in-laws owned no phone. She had to borrow the money off Dimitra to do it, money her mother-in-law could ill afford, for Nikos had taken all her cash and handed it to his parents. "You my wife," was all he'd said in the way of explanation. The first time she called, her father yelled at her until she hung up. The second time her mother said, "I just hope you're happy after the stupid thing you did."

"I am, no thanks to you!" Joyce yelled back. And slammed down the phone. After that she'd written an angry postcard.

Dear Mom and Everybody: I'm doing great. Greece is much prettier than Florida, and there's more to do. You should have let me and Nikos have a real wedding, you wouldn't have been sorry. You never did trust me enough. I'm happier than I've ever been in my life. Here's my new address.

They had never answered. She wrote again and again. They still never answered. She thought of calling them once more, but her hurt and fury at their continued silence stopped her hand. They had her address—if they wanted her to telephone, let them ask her. Until then she would write, but she would never call them again.

Joyce would not admit to herself how much it hurt that her family had cut her off like this. Once she'd ventured a complaint to Dimitra and Dimitra had said, "A daughter belongs to the husband's family after she is married. Her parents have no obligation to her anymore." Joyce had stared at her. Was that what her own parents felt? That they had washed their hands of her? If that was the case, thank God she had left.

"You belong to us," Dimitra had said.

After church on Sundays, Dimitra allowed herself a rare few hours to socialize. Meeting up with the other old women of town, most of whom had been widowed by war and were in permanent black, she visited their houses to gossip and lick spoonfuls of sweet white mastic, plunged into glasses of cool water. Joyce was supposed to stay in church then and pray for Nikos's safety and for the chance to have children, but secretly she walked through the town instead. The shops were closed. The cobbled lanes quiet. There was nothing really to do. Yet the chance to walk unfettered by her in-laws, her donkey or her marketing baskets—the chance to walk as she would at home—was too precious to sacrifice.

Even so, these were the times Joyce missed Nikos the most. All week she worked so hard that she had little time to think of her loneliness. Her thoughts were taken up with the tasks at hand, with village matters and the gossip that filled her and Dimitra's lives. But on Sundays, as she was wandering the streets, an emptiness would seep into her like a cold fluid. It was not that she missed Florida. There she would only be battling with her mother, or raging unnoticed in her house. Drifting along the beach, the vacuousness of her family surrounding her like a cloud of ether. Anyway, she told herself, her family had given her up, proven that they'd never cared. But here, slipping through town, surrounded by ancient, shriveled people, she longed afresh for her husband's company. His adoration, his intoxicating body, the sensuous promise of his gaze. The safety and pride she felt holding his hand in the street. She liked working the land, selling in the market. She liked the life of the village and the sense of belonging it gave her. But at times she felt as abandoned as if she had been shipwrecked.

This Sunday, she walked for awhile before she saw anybody to talk to. Stratis Farmakides, the village butcher, was seated as usual in a plastic chair in front of his closed shop, his thick body sprawled in aggressive relaxation. He was holding a fat hand-rolled cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and watching with relish as two dogs wrestled over a hunk of gristle. The headless carcass of a skinned goat hung upside-down from an iron hook beside him, dripping blood into a bucket. Flies swarmed around it and Stratis, although the butcher seemed unconcerned. Given to profanity and sweat, his belly hard and his neck as wide as his jaw, Stratis never went to church. "I have the souls of too many slaughtered animals on my conscience," he had once explained to Joyce with a wink. So he spent his Sundays lolling about and dreaming of his future.

Joyce approached him, as she knew he expected. He was planning to move to Chicago and get rich, so he insisted on practicing his nonexistent English with her whenever possible.

"Plgety noming, si?" he said to her as she strolled up to him.

"Excuse me?" Joyce stopped in front of him.

"I am saying it is a pretty morning in your language," Stratis said, retreating to Greek. "What's the matter, you don't understand me?" He brushed a fly from his cheek.

"Oh, I see. I was confused because 'si' is not English," she replied with tact.

"Ah yes, I get all mixed up with the Italian I know from the war. My head is filled with pieces of knowledge, stuffed with it like a sausage." Stratis sighed and removed the cigarette from his mouth, leaving a piece of paper clinging to his lip. Balding and dark, his head looked like a round polished bone. "But this will do me no good in Chicago unless I speak better. I have the ear of a tree stump when it comes to languages. I need your help. When are you coming to give me lessons, little American?"

He had been asking her this for months but Joyce knew better than to accept. Respectable housewives did not sequester themselves with single men, as Stratis knew perfectly well. And it was more than likely that he would pounce on her among the lambchops.

"I'll start now," she said mischievously, and added in English, "Good bye."

"What is that?"

"It means andheeo, Mr. Farmakides." And she left him mouthing the word as she turned up the hill.

Joyce walked on, heading towards her friend Marina's house. She nodded politely to acquaintances, old women and housewives, ignoring their disapproving glares. She knew young women should not be out alone, but she had learned to use the fact that she was American as an excuse for an occasionally rebellious act. Sometimes being a foreigner was useful. Nevertheless, children ran up and stared at her, bare-footed, scuff-kneed, many in rags. Soldiers tried to catch her eye. Every step seemed a test.

Kastron was a winding port and market town that straggled up the foothills of Ifestia's westernmost mountain. It had barely changed since its stone houses had been built during the Ottoman Empire, the four centuries of Turkish rule that still made Greeks spit with hatred; and much of the town, now between two and five hundred years old, was slowly crumbling into a dusty heap of stones. The walls of the houses were rough, jutting, and splashed unevenly with whitewash. The narrow streets were so haphazardly cobbled that they were more like the rubble of a building site than roads. The town, Joyce often thought, looked as creviced and broken as most of its inhabitants.

The seafront belonged mostly to the fishermen, who gathered there each evening to mend their nets as the orange sun slipped quickly into the effervescent sea. Gulls and pelicans patrolled the harbor, on the lookout for unguarded catch. The smell of seaweed and fish pervaded the air, mingling with the sweet fragrance of the wind. Fishing boats rocked listlessly off the shore. As much as Joyce loved it here, however, she could not safely walk the seafront alone because it was a favorite haunt of soldiers, who went to drink at the tavernas and watch the fishwives' skirts blow against their legs. She dreaded the gauntlet of the soldiers' hungry eyes.

Instead, she climbed higher up the mountain, where the town was wholly residential. Here the streets were so tiny that two men abreast could touch a wall on either side. Alleyways snaked behind houses, providing secret entrances to courtyards and homes. The stony lanes dipped to a gutter in the middle, down which trickled soap suds and whitewash, spiced on occasion with the odors of ammonia and excrement. Scrawny dogs ran past, sniffing their mysterious trails, ignoring the cats who yawned and licked the dust off their hot, mangy fur.

Joyce turned up a narrow lane to her favorite part of Kastron. Here the houses were piled so close together that it was hard to tell where a particular house began and another ended. One person's terrace might be somebody's else's roof. Walls turned into staircases. And all were built of stone so ancient and thickly whitewashed that the houses had grown smooth and rounded, like melted sugar. Magenta flowers and pine-green vines trailed over walls and cascaded out of the pots people had arranged along outside steps, and the roof of each house was capped by overlapping waves of burnt-orange pantiles. To Joyce, walking these streets was like weaving through a vast, bleached honeycomb. The town here looked not so much like something people had toiled for generations to build, as something that had grown spontaneously out of the ground. It made her feel protected, sheltered. Cupped by history, as a stamen is cupped by a tulip.

She drifted around a corner, feeling lazy and a little tired, and found herself facing a clump of soldiers sitting at an outdoor kaphenio. Normally she never looked at the soldiers, not only because of Dimitra's warnings but because she knew it would invite trouble. But in her surprise at seeing them in this unlikely part of town, she found herself staring directly at them. They wore an expression on their faces that she had learned to dread: the intent, predatory glare of young men on the prowl. She turned on her heels to leave, but it was too late. They had caught her look and considered it an invitation. Shouting with laughter and obviously tipsy, four of them leapt to their feet.

"Check out the tits!"

It was only the new soldiers who behaved like this. The ones who had been stationed here awhile knew her now had learned to keep their advances to comments in the marketplace and to the flirtation that occasionally spun her into secret dreams. She had spat on their shoes, insulted them in Greek. Her mother-in-law had threatened them and they had finally accepted that although Joyce looked like a tourist slut, she was really respectable and married. But every few weeks a new batch of soldiers arrived in town and they had to prove their mangas, their unconquerable Greek machismo, by hunting down women.

"Hey, beautiful!" the soldiers shouted, and tumbled into the street.

Joyce walked rapidly in the opposite direction, trying to keep calm, but the four boys staggered after her, taunting. "Nice ass! Swing it for us, baby!"

Willing herself not to run, she quickened her pace, her skin tightening. Perhaps if she remained unflustered they would give up. They usually did. But their steps came closer. She could hear the men panting behind her.

Suddenly two of them materialized out of an alley and jumped in front of her, grinning. She stopped, shocked, and swiveled, but the two other boys were right behind her. "Leave me alone!" she hissed in Greek, furious at their audacity. They hesitated and blinked, surprised. "My husband is from this island. He will kill you!"

The soldiers looked uneasy, but then one laughed. "She has no husband. She's a German slut. Look at her."

They stepped right up to her. One reached out and clasped her breast. At his touch Joyce kicked out at him and spat, trying to shout, but one of the soldiers behind her clamped his hand over her mouth and pinned her arms to her side. No soldier had gone this far before. She could not breathe. The boy's hand stank of tobacco and dirt. She gagged. They pressed in closer, surrounding her, reaching for her, grunting. One of them began to lift her skirt.

"Let go of my wife!"

The shout rang out. The soldiers jumped, releasing Joyce, and she ran. Broke through the wall of them and ran. She had no idea who had spoken but could not stop to look. She sprinted down the hill, stumbling over the uneven stones, the gutters, startling the dogs, until she reached the church. "Dimitra," she found herself sobbing. "Dimitra!"

At the church she stopped, suddenly aware that the streets were quiet again, the soldiers gone. Panting, she crouched to the ground so that she could pick up her skirt modestly and scrub her mouth with it. She could still taste the boy's fingers, as if he had plunged them into her mouth, not simply clamped them over her lips. They tasted of tobacco and salt, and of something bitter. She scrubbed and scrubbed until her lips ached. So much for feeling safe. Her eyes stung with rage.

"Are you all right?"

She jumped, looking up from her crouch in surprise. The words were in English. It took her a moment to realize this, they sounded so strange. Not even Greek-accented English.

"Did they hurt you?"

The young man standing above her was tall and blond like her, but there the resemblance ended. Under his lanky hair, which fell unevenly over his eyes, his face was long and angular, his nose sharp and peeling from the sun. His body was angular, too, flat and wide-shouldered as a plank. A faded T-shirt hung on him like a pillowcase from clothespins, and white cotton trousers dangled over his legs.

Joyce surreptitiously wiped her eyes on her skirt and stood up. "Were you the one who shouted?" she asked. She didn't even know which language she used.

"Yes, I hope you don't mind. It seemed the thing to say."

He was English, she realized. Not even American, but pure English. His voice was like ice tinkling on a hot day.

"Thank you," she said, still trembling. "God knows what you saved me from." She paused, trying to calm herself. "How come you speak Greek?" she managed to add.

"My mother's from here. She taught me."

The hair on his arms was bleached by the sun, Joyce noticed, a golden fuzz over brick-red skin. His hands were long and delicate. Joyce looked down at her own. They had become farmer's hands, she realized. Brown, calloused, the knuckles already knotted with strain. She felt grimy and squat next to this man: a peasant.

"Why haven't I seen you here before?" she asked. Her voice was still shaking.

"I've only just arrived. I've not been here since I was sixteen." He peered into her face. "Are you sure you're all right? Those bastards!"

"Yes thanks. They probably wouldn't have really done anything. They'd get into too much trouble." She shrugged and looked away from him. Then glanced down the street, suddenly remembering her mother-in-law. She had not talked to a boy her own age alone for two years. If Dimitra caught her, God knows what might happen.

"I should go," she said quickly. "But thank you, thank you so much."

"Do you have to leave already?" He sounded disappointed. He didn't even bother to hide it. "You're the first person I've met here my age who isn't a soldier, let alone who speaks English. Can't I buy you a ginger beer or something, cool you down after all that running?"

Joyce smiled at the thought. Sitting in a kaphenio with a strange man for all to see! Heaven and earth would fall around her. Seeing the bewildered look on his face, she said, "I'm sorry. Thanks. I wish I could. But... well, it's hard to explain. I'm not allowed..."

"You mean you are married?" The young man's eyes dropped to her hand, where her wedding ring encircled her finger, glowing its dull, possessive gold.

"Yes. It wasn't a story. I'm married to a merchant marine, Nikos Koliopoulos. He's away at sea right now."

"Oh. I see." The boy nodded. "Well, I don't know him, but... my name is Alex Gidding. Alexandros here. Pleased to meet you."

He held out his hand. She looked up and down the street. She looked behind her to make sure the priest was not there with his judgmental gray eyes. Only then did she reach out tentatively to slide her slim, rough hand into his.

Except for the soldiers just now, it was the first time she had touched a man in seven months. She had forgotten how thick men's hands could be. How their palms were broad enough to enfold her wrist. How their fingers could enclose and tighten like a huge, protective glove. The heat of his hand immediately encased hers in sweat.

She pulled her hand away quickly, startled.

"Where do you live?" he said, and visibly colored. His eyes were a deep, faraway blue, the blue of the Aegean as it reaches the horizon. But his skin was so thin and light it lit up his emotions like a lamp.

"I can't tell you," she replied, shrugging apologetically. "You've got to understand... my mother-in-law. If she sees me talking to you, I'm..." She stopped, at a loss for words.

"Dead meat?" He laughed, throwing back his head, perhaps to hide his blush. His Adam's apple was delicate, vulnerable. Then he looked at her again, his brow pinched. "How can you stand all the restrictions?"

None of the tourists she'd met had ever asked her this so bluntly. Yet she knew it was what they were all wondering—why she stayed, how she could bear it.

"I like it here," she replied defensively. Why was she even bothering to answer this stranger? "I'm waiting for my husband. "

"How long has he been gone?" But this was too much. She turned her head away.

"I better go," she said quietly.

There was a pause. They both looked down at their feet. The sun was lowering into afternoon now, most people were asleep, but the heat only baked the stronger. The yellow dust throbbed around them, sucking the moisture out of air. Joyce closed her eyes, a sudden longing for that ginger beer clutching at her throat.

"My aunt owns the bakery," Alex said suddenly. "Perhaps when you are in town to do errands..."

"I can't," Joyce interrupted.

And she walked away.

© Helen Benedict