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Ithaca is not hers, the island and she do not belong to each other. As a young bride, Penelope walked often the rocky path from the palace to the headland, to watch the waves rolling in and in and in, bringing the world no closer to her.
She felt homesick, for the halls of her father’s palace, the kitchen smells and myriad sounds of the yard and the stable, where she had played when she could give her wet nurse the slip. She missed Sparta the place, not Sparta the people: the coarse men of few words, the women tough as sandal leather. Her father, who’d let her go then run weeping after her husband’s carriage. Her mother, who’d taught her far less than Penelope had learned from her wet nurse (how to wear her hair, how to listen and observe, how to spin and weave and sew).
Odysseus had stopped his carriage and offered her to go back with her father, a challenge flung down between them. She’d turned her eyes to the road ahead and said nothing, knowing nothing of the future, not regretting the abandonment of any single person from her home. Her wet nurse was long dead, her parents strangers. At least her husband had been new and curious with his newness, shiny with it like polished bronze.
Despite his silver tongue, Odysseus wooed her with his hands rather than his words. His hands took longer and left more lasting evidence of his presence, his decision that he would make her a part of his home, whatever her feelings about it.
First he built them an ornate bed from the olive tree growing through the floor of their bedchamber. The olive tree had been unnecessary to his purpose, but it showed to all the visitors and servants how solid and deep-rooted their love would become.
Next Odysseus built her the loom. He could have brought in any number of craftsmen, but he insisted he would do it himself after a traveling peddler came to court, and Penelope selected a loom weight of carved stone from his wares rather than a necklace or comb.
In the late afternoons, when Odysseus sat under the old olive tree in the palace yard and listened to islanders’ complaints and disputes, Penelope would weave sitting by their bedchamber window, so she could look out and see him in the dappled shadow, with his long legs stretched out, but he could not see her, wrapped in the chamber’s shadows as into bridal veils. He could hear the clack-clack-clack of the loom, and would preen under his wife’s gaze while he dispensed justice and alms, and the world marveled at his cleverness.
With his hands, he lifted her onto his carriage and brought her to his home. With his hands, he populated their chamber with furniture he’d made. With his hands, he drew cries of pleasure and dismay like a silk string out of her at night, until he went away and left her with a babe at her breast, in a place she ruled but which was not her home.
Twenty years is a long time to be a widow in everyone’s eyes but her own. When she speaks the truth late at night, in the privacy of her skull, Penelope admits that after a while she could barely remember her husband’s face. She tried to imagine him older, weathered, grey-haired. What she conjured up was only her own face, the wavering reflection she saw in bowls of water, the blurred outline thrown back at her by smooth, polished metal. She got old, and all she remembered clearly were his eyes, grey as the sea in winter, and his hands, both rough and gentle, and always clever.
She sees him watching her sometimes, when he thinks she has eyes only for the loom or the needle. His mouth twists at the sight of her old flesh, her lined face, then his mouth quirks when he remembers he looks even worse. From what he has told her, the tale he spins for her late at night while the servants sleep, he has earned every deep crease of skin, every crack like parched earth at high summer in the flesh of his fingertips.
Penelope thinks and thinks but cannot decide: did she recognize him that day, stinking of the pigsty and dressed as a beggar? Did she know to whom she gave her husband’s bow and bid him draw it, flung down a challenge for this raggedy stranger to defeat the plague of suitors and avenge her, give meaning to her years of waiting? She knew what she was doing when she held her tongue and let him kill her maids, for they could have told many a tale, poisonous or true or both, to make her, Penelope, look like an enemy to their returning lord.
She walks every day across the patch of pavement which her maids stained red. Odysseus did not allow the girls to be hanged before he’d made an example of them, called the other servants’ and the islanders’ loyalty back to him like a flock of starlings, reclaimed their love by giving them a clutch of treacherous girls to sport with. He reclaimed his wife that night, too, in their chamber with the loom which had saved his home from complete destruction, while the girls’ cries were drowned out by the islanders’ revels in the yard. The blood was gone in the morning, the pavement shining wet and clean in the reborn sun.
Penelope is certain the stone is colder in that spot, icy fingers reaching under her skirts as she passes. She walks across the spot every day at least once, holding her head high, daring anyone to refuse to look her in the eye.
Her husband is still clever, but he talks less than she remembers he used to. His hands fumble with her flesh sometimes, for they have become strangers to each other as well as grown old. He smells of olive oil and dead skin and the dust of many foreign places.
If he mumbles other women’s names in his sleep from time to time, Penelope does not begrudge this – twenty years is a long time. Her own sleep is as silent as stone. She learned to keep silent and still in the years of Odysseus’ absence, when his house was full of grasping hands. Not even the besieging army of suitors could make Penelope feel more protective of Ithaca than before. She meant only to preserve herself and her son, the island and all its people could sink into the sea as far as she cared, so long as she remained aloft. Her mother had taught her precious little, but Penelope does know how to survive a drowning.
She has never deceived herself that her husband would not kill her if she displeased him in any way. She had no claim on his charity just because he’d built her a bed out of a living tree and dandled their son on his knee once upon a time.
Penelope still likes to weave in the afternoons, when the light remains strong but shadows fill the chamber and make it pleasantly cool. She takes her time as she has got used to do, and so works too slowly to be much use. Mostly her maids – new ones Odysseus bought off a passing ship – do her share of the weaving as well as theirs.
When the sight of the new girls’ faces becomes too much for her, she takes her sewing down to the yard, sits under the eaves so her upper body is in shadow but the lowering sun warms her hips and feet. From that spot, she has a good view of the yard with the old olive tree, old even when they were young, where her husband sits in judgment again, settling disputes and receiving visitors.
At night, by the light of an oil lamp, Odysseus talks often about trade, the cost of wine and the price fetched by Ithaca’s olive oil, pig diseases and the number of spring lambs. Penelope tells him what she learned of such matters during his absence, when she had to feed the suitors as well as her household. They each speak as though addressing the air or the gods rather than each other, for he has too much pride to ask her opinion, and she has become too accustomed to caution and furtiveness.
In the ruddy light of the summer days’ long, slow dying, he repeats what she told him as his own wisdom, clever Odysseus passing down orders about the harvest and the cattle as easily as he resolves blood feuds, disputes over boundary markers, and broken marriage contracts. Penelope can hear his voice from where she sits sewing, even if his words are not always clear. She knows some of them are her words, unacknowledged yet known as such by her husband and those who endured the years of his absence alongside her.
The people of Ithaca love their lord. Penelope cloaks herself in a wife’s modesty yet girds herself with pride, for she preserved them all, bodies and souls, and delivered them safe into Odysseus’ hand, his people chafed by time and many squalls yet his still.