Milferatu

The mil started her campaign about a week before my mother left. She started calling every day, feeling me out. She had the perfect pretext to come and stay, a doctor’s visit she’d been postponing for six years. Suddenly she was in a hurry. She showed up last Tuesday and went to the doctor that night. The story could have ended there, except that the doctor went out of town for a week, so the mil stayed on. She wore out her welcome in a hurry. When she wasn’t dominating the baby for hours on end (and then complaining that she hadn’t had time to eat, or sleep, or take her medicine), she sat, on the couch, silent, in the same stiff, sad pose she’d seen in church a thousand times -- hands folded, head angled, an exact Virgin Mary. A patient saint, a selfless martyr, an icon that could make even the hardest heart, or the most innocent, feel guilty.

But that was the least of the guilt induction. First thing she said when she came in was that the baby’s hands were “frozen” and she felt so sorry for her (the standard refrain) that she wrapped her up in 25 blankets til she was sweating buckets. Then the cat sat on the mil’s pillows. I changed the pillow cases. The mil repeats the story seven thousand times -- how lucky she was that she noticed the cat before she put her face where the cat had been, how deeply disgusted she is by animals.

She asked me if the baby was eating well and reprimanded me for saying yes. “If anybody asks,” she said, “you tell them she eats very little.” Otherwise, she’ll get the evil eye. Greeks are sly, she says, too sly for a foreigner for me to understand.

She said a lot of things about foreigners like me.

I tried to be hospitable. I told her I had put some blue towels in the bathroom for her to use. “Mind your own business,” she said. “I brought my own towel.” She also brought towels for the kitchen because she thought I “didn’t have any.”

The criticism was constant. I spoiled the baby, I neglected the baby, I washed the baby in cold water. But the worst, worst thing was how she’d grab the baby and take her right out of my arms. There were two major blowouts over this. The first time, I slammed the door like a teenager, and we both sulked all night. The second time, I put her in her place, which was on the bus, and back to the village.