Never a Bride

Jessy Greer

May 22nd, 1979

Traditional social patterns are not lightly abandoned, and the tradition of male superiority dies hardest of all. When I moved to Athens, I spent a great deal of time with a charming young couple who had been married six months. I met them in a Kafeneion, among the trendy kibitzers who smoked filtered cigarettes and sported sideburns that would have made Tom Jones blush. The husband was a business executive, and I thought he had a thoroughly Western outlook. Yet, one day I heard him remark to his pregnant wife, “You look wonderful, absolutely radiant. I’m sure it’s going to be a boy.”

He spoke with emphasis and genuine pride, leaving no doubt in my mind that in Athens, discrimination between the sexes begins in the womb. The 20th-century businessman quoted Hippocrates, “If a pregnant woman has a good complexion, the child will be male; a poor complexion augurs a female child.”

Despite all the healthy signs during their pregnancy, the couple’s first child was a girl. Neither parent attempted to mask their disappointment with Demetra. I was invited to the baptism, but at the ceremony, everyone seemed mildly apologetic about her existence. The Orthodox Priest anointed her with olive oil, then plunged Demetra three times into the kolymbithra, rather perfunctorily. She began to howl, and her parents looked embarrassed. The priest immediately handed Demetra to her godmother, who dried the baby with a towel, dressed her in a white christening robe, and then whisked her away, still screaming, out of the church.

Three years passed, and I attended the baptism of her brother, Constantine, performed by the same priest. As the first son, he had been automatically named Constantine, after his father’s father (by tradition, only the second son may be named after a mother’s father). Constantine’s baptism was a more joyous and elaborate affair. The priest began by testing the holy water with his index finger. When he received the child from his godfather, he kissed the baby on his chubby cheeks. Neither of these signs of affection was bestowed upon Demetra. Then again, whereas she was smeared very hurriedly with oil, Constantine got a thorough massage. The priest anointed his nostrils, ears, chest, feet, and hands, and after the third and last immersion, Constantine came up gasping and bawling with rage. His parents and godparents rushed to comfort him. They patted him gently with a towel and caressed him, kissed his neck, toyed with his feet and hands, then dried his hair.

Though I write with poor Demetra in my mind, I’m also writing down the facts, and all the loving attention subjected to the boy had a magic, tranquilizing effect. Constantine cooed in the arms of his godparents, and as we walked around the front with lighted candles, the priest proclaimed Constantine now immunized against the devil and his works–a speech his sister had not heard. This was not entirely negative, for when she was old enough, I gave her some of my lipstick and comb, and not by my suggestion. She wanted to see what their function was, and I found it rather cute. I could hear her parents yell at her, but it only lasted a minute until she was forgotten once more, and the more she was forgotten, the more she turned up at my door, wrapping her arms around my waist and giving me heart palpitations. I am not a mother, and never planned to be one. When I was starting to write, I almost married, but my affair with Lieutenant General James M. Gavin helped me dodge that bullet. That was the last metaphorical bullet. I covered Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and have settled in Greece, rising to the rank of Demetra’s neighbor. It seemed like I was the only one who would have her. At first, I thought she needed attention, but the opposite was true. The lipstick and comb were trivial things to her. What she really wanted were my books. She didn’t take them with her, but she would sit on my couch as I wrote and read. I always let her know she could take whatever she pleased as long as she brought it back, but she read on my couch, would put the book down, come back the next day, pick it up, and begin two pages from where she left off. It made a remarkable impression on me. Then one day, I discovered a jar with a little bit of money in it.

The jar was white porcelain, decorated with hand-painted flowers between Angela Carter and The Bell Jar underneath the window in my study, but I knew straightaway where I had seen those hand-painted flowers before, on her parents’ dishes.

A decade passed, and when Demetra was 17, she ran into my home and emptied a pot that contained roughly 30,000 drachmas. Enough for her to “buy a few fertile acres and a cow.”

“Where?” I asked.

“In the country.”

By this time, a newspaper called Synikesion, or Arranged Marriage, was popping up in my trash. The subscriber was her father, who, usually after half a bottle of Tsipouro, boasted that he made 30,000 drachmas a month. It took Demetra years to gather this. From where, she never told me, and I never asked. I don’t think I did because I could sense how important it was, and I always thought about the differences in her and her younger brother’s baptisms. I did and didn’t know she was leaving, or trying to. She had been tossing the newspaper, Synikesion, and when I asked my friend if she had thought about marriage, she said I sounded like her parents. Like her father, she boasted as well.

“This is my money. Fair and square.”

I never questioned it, but the more I learned, the more I developed a private reservation of her plans. She told me I had never been married, which was true, and that I was happy, which was also true, but around Demetra, I was always curious about a multitude of moving variables that never seemed to be going in her favor, but she never seemed to be bothered. The military overthrew the King and Queen of Greece, and it was anyone’s guess as to what would happen next. In Synikesion, I saw ads that said: “Sturdy woman, 45, capable of manual work, virgin with a proika of 100 olive trees and 20 acres. Seeks someone aged 50-55.” Demetra was 17 in a country that was ruled by the military. She came in and out of my house like it was her bank and library, and this I did not oppose until she told me her dream was to be a spinster in the countryside, growing and slaughtering her own food, away from the home she did not understand and was not remotely familiar with the books she read in my library.

I looked at my Western canon, and besides the Greek Classics, all the novels I had were written by Americans, Britons, or Frenchmen. Her idea of hell was Cheever’s suburbs. Her rebellious attitude came from Albert Camus and Jean Genet, and she grew to adore someone she thought was French, but was a former British Agent, John Le Carre, or David Cornwell, author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. She said she’d make a great spy but an even better farmer. I asked if she’d be lonely, and she asked if I was. I said no. She grabbed her money and left. Her parents didn’t even bother looking for her, but they did look for her brother, Constantine. No one knew how he could have gotten anywhere. Not even I, until I visited Demetra a year ago and found her tending to her younger brother. She taught him how to walk and talk despite the doctors and professionals writing him and his incurable cerebral palsy off. He smiled and did a few chores on her property, but as the sun fell, I found him taking a deep breath at the top of a hill. Tears fell, and he told me he had never been so proud of anyone in his life as he was of his sister.

I hid in fading shade, but could still see. I was wrong about Demetra. Her hard work, generosity, and kindness showed me what I had forgotten about what women were capable of. The tradition of male superiority on her property never existed because, from the beginning, she helped people up, and those without a voice were heard. She loved her brother, and he was grateful. His tears were of love and joy.