Page 10 of Slanting Towards the Sea
TEN
IN JULY, WHEN OUR summer term ended and we were finished taking our exams, Vlaho and I had to go home for the summer.
We said goodbye at the fume-filled bus station, and I struggled to let go of him, terrified that stretching our bond in space would make it snap.
So when he called to tell me his parents wanted to meet me and were inviting me to spend a few days in Cavtat, I agreed without thinking.
Three weeks apart, and I would’ve agreed to anything just to see him.
We hadn’t talked about meeting each other’s parents before we’d left Zagreb.
Regardless of how we felt about each other, we’d known our relationship was too young for our parents to label it as serious.
Of course, his parents had known about me, and I’d told my parents about him.
My mother had asked the pertinent questions—who was he (“a student, economics, smart, kind, serious”), his background (“middle-class family, and yes, Mom, they’re Croatians”), his parents (“his mom is a teacher and his dad is a first mate on a tanker”), but as soon as she’d gotten the general information, her interest had abated.
“Make sure you don’t get pregnant,” she’d say by way of goodbye in almost every conversation. “You need to finish college first.”
Vlaho and I were careful, of course, using more than one kind of protection.
I’d always been responsible, and it irritated me that my mother found it necessary to remind me to be what I’d always been.
The path of life had long been instilled in me: elementary school, high school, university, job, marriage, kids.
In that order, no aberrations. It was the natural order of things, like phases of mitosis.
But every time we talked, she’d say: “Opportunities pick strawberries,” an old Croatian adage intended to warn me that the more sex I had, the bigger my risk of getting pregnant was, which ultimately had me associating strawberries with sordid sex, until strawberries too started tasting bad.
My mother was chopping onions in the kitchen when I came to tell her I was going to Cavtat to meet Vlaho’s parents.
She only said, “Oh,” and pressed her lips and eyes tight, and I couldn’t tell if it was because of the onion tears, because she disapproved of my meeting them, or because they’d beaten her to inviting Vlaho over.
But that afternoon, she came to my room, sat on my bed, and said, “I’m not sure this is such a good idea.”
My stomach stirred, though I did my best not to betray it.
I turned to my closet, pretending to decide which one of my T-shirts was worth packing.
My mother was a defeatist, she saw a cloud to every silver lining, every calm came on the eve of a storm.
She saw big emotions, even when they were positive ones, as something dangerous, something inherently about to go wrong.
She never missed the chance to tug me down when I was flying too high, warning me—for my own sake—to temper my excitement.
Keeping joys moderate made the disappointments that inevitably followed easier to manage.
“You, meeting his parents,” she clarified. “It’s too soon.”
“It’s not too soon,” I said, sounding like a petulant teenager, a tone that was doing me no favors.
“I know you think you and Vlaho are serious, but you’ve been together for what… four months?”
“Seven,” I said, folding a summer dress into my suitcase. “And I don’t think we’re serious. We are.”
“You’re nineteen,” Mom said, resting her hands in her lap. “Things happen. You could change your mind, or he might. You don’t want to be meeting the parents of just any boy you date, do you?”
To imply that Vlaho was just any boy grated on my ears, though this was partly my fault.
When I’d come home earlier that month, I acted as if nothing of substance had happened in the year I’d been away.
My feelings for Vlaho were so powerful and all-consuming, I didn’t know how to talk about them in a moderate way.
So I didn’t talk about them at all. Instead, I’d clutched my happiness close to my chest, the way an octopus folds her tentacles when she’s hiding from a trident.
“You were nineteen when you met Dad,” I said.
Mom got off my bed, reached for the doorknob, and stood there for several seconds, facing the wall. “Yeah. And look where it got me.”
The bus ride lasted the entire night. Like the bus, sleep came in fits and stops, and by the time we reached Dubrovnik in the morning, my head was woozy, my skin had absorbed the smell of dusty upholstery, and the doubt seeds that Mom had planted inside me took root.
What if the spell Vlaho had been under, the one that had made him fall in love with me, had broken during our month apart?
What if we tried to fit together again only to find we couldn’t?
What if I rubbed his mother the wrong way, and her dislike of me slowly worked its way into him?
In Dalmatia, there’s nothing more formidable than a mother-in-law, and I’d seen more than one relationship fall apart because of the invisible hold mothers had on their sons.
But as soon as I saw him four platforms away, bathed in the early morning sun, everything else disappeared. The people between us, my doubts, even my mother’s voice. It was such a visceral thing, being loved the way he loved me then.
We drove in his mother’s rickety Opel Corsa over the cliffside road, climbing out of Dubrovnik, southward-bound to his hometown, Cavtat.
Only four hundred kilometers south of Zadar, yet the colors were more vibrant, the blues of the sea more sparkly and translucent, the greens of the vegetation more verdant and lush.
“My mom can’t wait to meet you,” he said. “She’s been cooking and baking and cleaning for days. Drove me and my dad crazy.”
It astounded me that his mother worried about meeting me, even if it couldn’t be a fraction of how much I worried about meeting her. “What did you tell her about me?” I asked.
“Only the truth. That you’re smart, kind, beautiful… Oh, and that the sex is amazing.” He grinned.
“You didn’t!”
Vlaho laughed. “Okay, I left that part out.”
His smile faded and he focused on the road. The view shot over the small islands, farther, to the gates of the Adriatic Sea, where it married the Mediterranean. After a while, eyes still on the road, he said, “I told her you see me.”
We pulled up to their home, a single-story house with a blossoming bougainvillea draped around the facade, tangerine and lemon trees standing guard at the entrance with their glossy, leathery leaves.
Vlaho’s mother opened the door to greet us, the smell of ro?ata trailing her.
She was almost as tall as her son, same dirty blond hair and prominent nose, only she had pale eyes that seemed sensitive to the light, as if the blue in them could easily be diluted, like watercolor.
She led us into their living room, awash in earthy, woodsy tones, and decorated with family portraits, from those more recent ones to black-and-whites with people I assumed were Vlaho’s grandparents or even generations before that.
On a credenza stood a photo of a little girl with a plump face.
Vlaho’s sister. The photo had been taken at a birthday party, Ane’s hair made up in French braids, lace adorning the collar of a crisp white shirt below her face.
She had been caught at the intake of breath, before she blew out the three striped candles in front of her.
She seemed so suspended mid-action that whenever I caught sight of her over the next few days, I held my breath too, waiting for her to exhale.
Next to the photo frame, there were two candles burning, and never once during my stay did I see them go out.
Vlaho’s father came in from the garden to greet us.
He was the tallest of the three, a boisterous man with a potbelly, thick black mustache, a hearty laugh, and a voice that came not from the throat but some place deeper.
He took a liking to me instantly, and kept saying to Vlaho, “Son, if you mess this up, you’ll be dealing with me. ”
As the days rolled by, I felt like I was back in the college lab, a silent observer behind the lens of a microscope, trying to grasp the secret of Vlaho’s family.
Apart from his father singing arias at random times, their home had a pervasive peacefulness about it.
It was the sort of place where you could curl up under a blanket and read, so different from the chaotic vibe of my home, and it soothed me despite the constant strain of being a newcomer, of being the object of observation myself.
With his mother’s school out for the summer, and his father home on rotational leave, Vlaho’s parents’ time was governed by a self-imposed schedule.
Every morning his mother would take her coffee into the garden while his dad went into town to have his espresso with friends.
Lunch was at one p.m. sharp, a massive display of dishes, savory and rich and plentiful, that made his dad’s stomach rounder and left me embarrassed for those poorly cooked excuses for meals I made for us back in Zagreb.
Afterward, his father took a nap while his mother puttered around the house and garden.
In the afternoon, the smell of coffee would again percolate through the air, and we would lounge around the garden table, watermelon and cantaloupe slices making the air juicy with their honeyed scent.