8:42 p.m. in Ayvalık
8:42 p.m. in Ayvalık is the untamed grass of the playground, a faint Serdar Ortaç remix playing from the beach club bar, Turkish oldies wailing from the road-end restaurant, and the sea sifting into a regal gray, still and silent. One or two black silhouettes shake the water alive with splashes and yells, disrupting the serenity of evening with sounds that belong to afternoons. Then there’s me, fingers dusty with Doritos. Sunset on the Aegean is a shift change: At night, in this tiny summer town, we settle into our rightful spots.
Daytime is light and easy. We are all at the beach club, and there is the clinking of tea spoons, the clatter of backgammon boards and cannonballs off the pier, all of us yapping while wrapping towels around our bodies and saying hello, hello to the friends of our grandparents who tell us our cheeks look sunken, or perhaps plumper, compared to last year.
It is in the evening that we shed our swimsuits and pull our personalities over our jeans and the conversation veers onto heady terrain. Nothing to do but talk and pass around shiny bags of chips, eyeing each other to understand who we are, really, on the off-season.
I am twelve years old, so my place at this hour is the playground, tonight on the smaller of the two double bench swings. I am swinging, squeezed in with my seasonal friends with one eye on the water as an orange sun tucks itself in closer to Greece. “Did you hear the one about…” someone begins, but oh, thank god, I will leave soon and do not need to understand the punch line which will surely be too fast, too highly-contextual, for a mind that’s spent months in take-it-easy California. When the sun is completely gone, my mother and grandmother, gossiping and peeling deep purple figs with their fingernails on the terrace, will turn their necks to the road and look for me. I will be there, unlatching the green gate at the other end of our rose garden.
The dopey Kangal dogs are sleeping by the stone freshwater spout in the corner of the park where a woman kneels to fill an empty liter of Fanta. Grandparents pause at the benches alongside the seaside promenade while walking slowly to the restaurant for meatballs and buttered rice, or grilled sea bream with lemon and arugula. Beyond these benches is the rickety pier where no one goes swimming, with wooden planks missing on the way to the giant, cracked hexagonal stone, where a few summers later I will carefully lay my head down and laugh at a boy's quip about Ursa Minor really being a Tefal advertisement. My shift change will take me elsewhere then, with a curfew pushed to sunrise. My fingers will be cold and wet from the neck of an Efes beer, those on the other hand salty with sunflower seeds. But tonight at the playground I am not allowed to see what happens when the stars come out.
The joke my friend is telling us is almost over but I look again at the sea and there is no more orange. “GOOD-BYE!” I interrupt, bellowing because it is a word I am used to, one I can pronounce correctly. They will not make fun of me, oh no, not for this one. I jump off the swing and run through the scratchy grass and onto the pink-and-beige bowtie bricks that line the road home. I race faster than the darkness to the garden gate, pull the latch well before the women look up from their fruit and remember not to worry. I am running through my playground of a town, freedom and safety everywhere inside its borders. My Californian comfort singes at the edges as daylight disappears, it's true. But a small price to pay to burn brightly, when, years later, it is finally my turn to go out into the night.
About the Author
İnci Atrek is the author of the multicultural novel Holiday Country. Holiday Country is an Apple Books Staff Pick, Amazon Editors’ Pick, and has been selected for January 2024’s Indie Next Pick and Popshift’s 2024 IP list. İnci lives in Istanbul by way of London, San Francisco, Dublin, Singapore, and two tiny towns in France. She writes monthly on her Substack newsletter, “the foreign familiar,” and is currently at work on her second novel.
Illustration by Jane Demarest.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
