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“Like two days?” I asked.

“A bit longer than that,” she said. “Maybe five days.”

“Five days!”

She nodded. “Could be six,” she said.

Even my low-grade arithmetic was good enough to show me that this meant nearly a quarter of my life was going to be devoted to bleeding. I put my head into my hands. “Why?” I said. “Why?”

“Every month your uterus gets nice and soft so that if you were having a baby, it would have a good place to grow. But then if there’s no baby, the uterus gets rid of all that and starts again the next month, making a fresh new spot in case of a baby. That’s why.”

That wasn’t really what I wanted to know.

“But I don’t want a baby,” I said. “What’s a uterus?”

“A place where the babies grow.”

“Can’t we tell it not to bother?” I asked.

“Nope,” my mother said. She got up and opened the top drawer of her bureau. “Now let’s get you fixed up,” she said. “I’ll give you a belt and some pads.” She poked around in the drawer for a minute. “I can’t find an extra belt, but here’s a pad.” She pulled a long, thick bandage-y thing out of the drawer and handed it to me. “Just put that in your underwear for the night. In the morning, before we go to Mycenae, we’ll get everything you need.”

“I don’t like belts,” I said. “Belts make me itchy.”

“You need this belt,” my mother said.

I held the pad away from me. “One pad a day?” I asked.

“No. You need several pads a day, at least three.”

I bowed my head. Belts and pads and hot, sore insides and nothing I could do about it. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it wouldn’t come back. Maybe it was just this one time. And what about my father! What would he think of me?

“Don’t tell Daddy,” I said. “Please, please, don’t tell him.”

“Okay,” said my mother.

But I knew she would tell him and they would talk about it and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop them, just as I couldn’t do anything to stop the blood.

George led the way in the rattly Fiat, down the coast to the Isthmus of Corinth and over onto the Peloponnese. The day was bright and still. Hawks were hanging above the fields. There was nothing anywhere: no towns, no ruins, no traffic except one dusty bus barreling toward us, going north.

“This is the plain of Argos,” my father said. “Right?” he asked my mother. She had the guidebook.

“Mmm,” she said.

“The Argives,” he told me. “Those who went to Troy.”

He was trying to be nice to me, probably because of what my mother had told him about my situation. I refused to answer.

“Are you awake?” he asked.

“Argus had a hundred eyes,” I said.

“That was somebody else,” my mother said.

“Are you sure?” my father asked. “Look in the guidebook.”

“He was guarding Io after she got turned into a cow,” I said. “Because he had a hundred eyes.”

“I don’t think that’s right,” my mother said.

“What does the guidebook say?” my father asked.

After a while, my mother said, “It’s confusing. There seem to be two of them. There was Argos, who built the
Argo
. And there was Argus, with a
u
, who had a hundred eyes. The plain is named after the first guy, so I’m right. But she’s right about the other guy and his hundred eyes.”

I knew I was right. It should have been an even more satisfying rightness because my mother had said I was wrong, but I couldn’t enjoy it. All I could think about was how uncomfortable I was. I was wedged onto a thick, damp pad with a scratchy elastic belt taut across my belly. Every time the car went over a bump, and it went over a lot of them, the clammy pad jammed up against me. My head hurt. My legs felt as if they were being poked by needles. I smelled funny too, like rusty metal. My entire body had become a foreign object that didn’t feel like me anymore. Probably I’d remembered Argus and Io not because we were crossing the plain where she’d been transformed but because my long-ago nightmare of being turned into a cow had come true. Like Io, I was stuck in this condition, which wasn’t my real self.

“Whoops,” said my father, putting the brakes on hard. “I see we have arrived.”

George had pulled off the road and parked the Fiat under an olive tree. We drove in beside him. It was the usual Greek arrangement: no sign, nothing to hint at a sight worth seeing nearby. Up ahead of us was a big hill, but there were big hills in every direction, and this one didn’t look especially promising.

“We walk up?” my father asked George. He tilted his head toward the hill in a Greek gesture; he was learning.

“The archaeologists have a road, but it’s very rocky and full of ruts—you call them
ruts
?”

“Yes,” said my father.

“That road is okay for a truck. I think the cars will be too banged around by it. We can walk up on it, though. And there are also donkey paths, which are steep but quicker.”

My mother was holding her big red-and-black Greek bag, which was filled with scarves and hats. “It’s so warm,” she said. “It’s a really nice day. Let’s walk on the road.”

“Did you bring the wine?” my father asked her.

She lifted the bag at him.

My father and George put my sister between them and started walking. My mother shouldered the bag, lit a cigarette, and turned toward me.

“Coming?” she said.

She made me so mad that I wanted to eat a rock. I imagined crushing a rock with my furious teeth or, just as satisfying, having my teeth crushed by a rock and spitting them out at her. Of course I was coming. What could I do but tag around after them? Anyhow, Mycenae was the one thing I wanted to see in Greece. I didn’t need a lecture from my father on its importance, and I didn’t need to hear my mother recite poetry about it, and I didn’t need to look in the guidebook. There was a Mycenae in my head already, full of people and stories. All I needed was the place itself.

I followed my mother up the twisty road, going slowly so as not to catch up with her, so as to fall, little by little, quite far behind her. Low, spicy plants—rosemary, thyme, myrtle—grew beside and sometimes on the road. If I stepped on them, puffs of fragrant oil came up to me. Despite George’s warnings, it was windless. The pad shifted around between my legs as I walked. Now and then I felt a gush of blood, which came out hot and quickly cooled. It was hateful, almost like peeing in my pants, and it was worrisome because I didn’t know how much blood the pad could absorb.

I trudged up through the switchbacks. As I got higher, the wind started. I could hear my parents and George talking, but I couldn’t see them, and the wind tossed their voices around in a confusing way. One minute they seemed to be right above me, the next they seemed far off to one side or another. I was getting chilly. I’d worn only a sweater and hadn’t, of course, taken one of the scarves or hats my mother had stuffed into her bag. I kept my head down to blunt the wind and to watch my step on the road. Also, to show, though nobody was looking, how bad I felt and how hard it was for me to walk with my blood and my pad and my wrenched-up insides. Windy, windy, then suddenly, the wind was gone. I’d entered a passageway between two huge stone walls. I looked up and saw the lions, on their gate.

The entrance beneath them was an almost square opening that seemed small at first, but, looking around, I decided it was small only in comparison to the size of the walls. I walked into it and stopped on the granite threshold, which was scored as if it had been raked—with a rake of the gods, a rake that could carve lines in granite. The opening was bigger than it looked. It was at least twice my height, and the slab that went across the top to hold the lions’ stone triangle was so thick that I couldn’t imagine how anybody had gotten it up the hill and put it there.

At the Parthenon I’d felt that something had been peeled back to let me see beneath. Things were different here. There was nothing to peel. I was looking at it straight on. I was standing on a hill fortified before the start of history, before there were flourishes like fluted columns or stone acanthus toppings to pretty up the situation. Everything was a big square declaration of power: We are strong, we built these enormous walls, we can crush you, go away.

I liked it. I went through the gate.

It was a brutal place, and it was unapologetic about that. It
wasn’t trying to beguile anyone with its perfection the way the temples did. It was a good spot to plan and carry out murders. The terrible wind was rushing across the hilltop, bending the grass that had infiltrated the ring of gravestones and the foundations of the palace buildings and some of the crevices in the tight stone courses of the walls.

My parents and George had got themselves nicely set, sitting on the ground against a broken wall, out of the wind. They were drinking their wine and eating bread and hunks of salami sawn off with my father’s pocketknife. My sister was cozied up next to my mother reading her animal-alphabet book, her perpetual owl beside her.

I hated them for getting comfortable, which seemed a kind of desecration of this cursed place. I didn’t want to eat salami and bread, so I was mad about that. But the really bad thing was that they looked complete without me.

I could see they’d be happy if I stayed by the Lion Gate, kicking at stones and bleeding, instead of coming over to be with them. They were enjoying their lunch and looking forward to their post-lunch pleasures. My father was going to drink another glass of wine while my mother blew her smoke at the mountains. George and my sister were going to take little naps. If I went over there, I would disrupt everything. I didn’t fit into their schedule. I would complain about lunch. I would complain about sitting on the ground (because I didn’t want to sit on my soggy horrid pad). Even if I resolved not to complain no matter what, not to say what I didn’t want to eat or didn’t want to do, my presence would be sulky in a way I couldn’t control, and my mother would say, “You’re in a mood.” When she said, “You’re in a mood,” she meant, You’re in a bad mood. She made me feel that having any sort of mood at all was forbidden. And though she hadn’t said anything yet, she was right.

My bad mood was the sum of several contradictory moods. I was wistful and sorry for myself, because I wanted to sit with them and be comfy and warm, but they didn’t want me. Why didn’t they want me? They never did. I also felt the opposite. I couldn’t believe I was related to them. I didn’t even want to look at them. I wouldn’t sit with them if they were the last people in the world or the only people up on the citadel of Mycenae—which they were. Also, how could they be so cavalier about being here, chewing their salami as if this were a normal spot for a picnic? Cannibalism, human sacrifice, matricide, murder: Just about every bad thing there was had happened up here, and they didn’t care. What was the matter with them? They always had to look in the guidebook to know what was going on.

But I could smell it and taste it: blood everywhere. Buoyed by how perceptive I was, I headed over to them.

“Hah!” my mother said when she saw me. “ ‘These roofs. Look up!’ ”

There weren’t any roofs. It was all in ruins.

“There.” My mother pointed. “ ‘There is a dancing troupe that never leaves.’ ”

I looked up but they weren’t there. It had been a long time since they’d been there.

George opened his eyes. “Don’t provoke the Furies,” he said, half asleep.

My mother laughed.

George sat upright. “I am serious,” he said.

What if time didn’t always move forward? What if there were places where time got stuck or became circular, where it was now but it was also all the times before now and everything was happening all at the same moment? That could explain why, though I didn’t see the dancing troupe, I knew they were there on the roof that wasn’t there now but had been there, once. George also
seemed to think they were up on the roof. Maybe he was just being extremely careful in a George-like manner, covering all the bases. Or maybe he knew things we didn’t know.

I knew something too, even if I wasn’t sure what it was. The difference between this place and a regular place was like the difference between knowing the melody and then hearing it played by an orchestra. Everyday life was just one line of song that ran from yesterday through today and into tomorrow, going along a narrow path. And then—these crazy places in Greece! Suddenly, huge symphonic chords whose bottom notes boomed so far down there was no knowing where they came from. The noise of time was enormous, but the places themselves were quiet. Like the underworld—nothing there except the click of crickets. That made it easier to hear the thrum of the menacing, subterranean ocean. And here at Mycenae the only sound was the intermittent hiss of wind, a whispered accompaniment to the screeching on the roof, clanging metal wheels on granite thresholds, the thump as the ax meets bone.

Perhaps my mother was quoting Cassandra in the same way she’d quoted Byron at Sounion, as a citation of a line that applied to this spot. I hoped so. I hoped she couldn’t actually see the Furies dancing.

I didn’t want to think she could do that. I wanted to be the only one sensitive enough to feel all the horrors of Mycenae. It was okay if George felt them—he was a Greek. But if my mother felt that sort of thing, we would have too much in common. I didn’t like that idea at all.

I’d always known I wouldn’t be like her when I grew up, because we were totally different. Clothes: She loved them, I hated them. Furniture: I didn’t care one whit about furniture or paint colors or how the living room was arranged, and she spent hours on that. The piano was her special thing, but I was
no good at it and that was fine with me. All her twisty, twirly ways of getting people to do what she wanted: Those were nasty methods I was never going to use. I wasn’t like her. I was like my father.

Except my father had to look in the guidebook. He had to look it up in the encyclopedia. He had to check on it in the dictionary or the concordance or the collected works of. Whereas my mother knew. She just knew.

They were packing up, brushing off crumbs and dust. My father jammed the cork back into the wine bottle. I wasn’t going to get even a bite of the salami and bread I didn’t want.