Work Text:
[Penelope]
here is what it actually feels like when someone you love is at war:
you get up in the morning. you think about it. you tell yourself, don't think about it. you do what needs to be done. you go to bed. you think about it. you carry him with you like lead around your ankles, like scars across your face, like a pin shaped like a goddess that might, already, be on the bottom of the ocean. but you don't think about it, because if you did, you would go crazy. you carry him with you wherever you go.
days turn to weeks turn to monthsturntoyears.
but hours are the worst because they refuse to turn into anything at all.
you are surrounded by snakes. you think, if only-
you tell yourself, don't think about it.
you can handle the snakes. there are laws that are older than all of you and you tell yourself they were made for days like these. as long as you play your role, they have to play theirs. as long as you’re the hostess. as long as you're the queen of ithaca. as long as you're telemachus' mother. as long as you're odysseus' wife. you cling to the structure that made up your life, as sturdy and alive as an olive tree. you plan your moves and you play your charms and you weave your shrouds. and in the nights, you unravel.
the child is small and when he comes to you crying in the night it shocks you how much he looks like his father. you soothe him and you tell him stories (stories with heroes in them, or rather, one hero, whose name is odysseus. he is smart, you tell telemachus, who looks at you with his father's eyes. he could outsmart even the gods.)
(one day your son giggles and says ''but mommy, today i want to hear a different story"
it's still years until the fall of troy.)
[Odysseus]
you did not want to go to war.
in this story, you did not feign lunacy to escape it and you did not sow your fields with salt. palamedes did not test your charade by putting telemachus in your plow's way and you did not give yourself away by saving your son.
in this story, agamemnon still burns iphigenia.
the wind indeed is excellent.
you think you can hear her little-girl-laughter every time the tides turn.
[Penelope]
for ten years you hear only that they are waiting on the beach outside of troy. you hate yourself for hoping they will stay there forever. you hate yourself more when you hope they attack. you can't bear a single second of it. and somehow, you do, all these years. day after day after day.
you think, at some point it must fade into a distant pain just at the edge of memory. at some point, you must get used to it, let it become part of you in a place where you won't lose it and it will not devour you. but it doesn't. always stays a little bit outside of you. sneaks up on you in places you do not expect.
telemachus does not remember his father. instead turns 10. turns 11. you tell him about a complicated man
and half the time he won't listen.
a part of you is glad for it / what would it help to have odysseus like lead around his ankles. he is there in him, when he laughs and when he sings.
[Odysseus]
you try to imagine what your son looks like. you fail. you try to remember what your son looked like the last time you saw him. you fail at that too.
imagine him faceless then, playing in the courtyard, toy soldiers, wooden horses.
and from somewhere, penelope calls him to come in for dinner.
you wonder if someone else has touched her in the years in-between. in your angry jealous dreams, her halls are full of silver tongued suitors. in your memories, you and her are completely alone.
most of the soldiers have other women. you have a metal pin and something in your heart that feels like a toothache.
you have her, still.
you have her.
[Penelope]
ruling ithaca in his absence is like herding fleas. there is a drought, there is an epidemic.
i miss you, odysseus, you think. you keep weaving the shroud of laertes. you think about no other shrouds you soon may be weaving. you have odysseus, somewhere.
telemachus now wants to be like his father.
you don't want him to become his father because you don't want him to leave. one day soon telemachus will be the age odysseus was when he first courted you.
you lose a tooth, your hair starts graying.
you start to fear that you might be an old woman when your husband returns. so much wasted youth and beauty. not that you don't have bigger problems.
you pick another sheep to be slaughtered for the feasts. you arrange for sword fighting lessons for telemachus. you go to bed alone and it’s as sturdy as an olive tree. as empty as an ocean.
[Odysseus]
you tell yourself, when it is still a brilliant plan burning in the back of your mind, that it is like child's play, the wooden horse, the crazy trick. if it were child's play, of course, they would say you were cheating.
but you are an adult and you are years and years into this war, and this is how you win.
later, only just so in the grand scheme of things, you see a trojan child clutching a toy horse. the house is burnt and so are the children.
suddenly, it is your son's faceless laughter you hear on the wind.
[Penelope]
it is worse when other wives' husbands start returning. worse still when they don’t. you still hunger for every piece of gossip. question every stranger. some women's waiting becomes widowhood, in a second that passed already a long time ago.
not me, you tell yourself. not him. but what if-
(this is the worst, the knowledge that by the time you will find out, it will have already happened. every piece of information will be useless to act on. you are not waiting for the future, which you are steadfastly building. what they tell you, if they will tell you, will be a story about your own past. by the time anyone would call you a widow, you will already have spent less time together than you now did apart.)
(not will, you tell yourself. 'will' is reserved for 'he will come back'.)
there is another drought. another epidemic. telemachus is becoming a man now. and someone tells you about the attacks from the sea.
[Odysseus]
it takes you years to remember.
the cyclops, circe, the sirens.
troy and troy and troy.
you clutch your pin in the shape of athena, you will never forget, though you have already forgotten.
you are adrift on a raft on the waves
and then suddenly
you land
[Telemachus]
you think you would have recognized zeus in disguise before you would have recognized your own father.
but suddenly he is here in front of you who knows him from stories. here in front of you who knows him by heart.
you know him by the way argos stops waiting. you know him by the way he is plucking his bow. you know him by the weight that falls off your mother’s shoulders. you know him even you don’t know him now.
in the morning he will tell you everything that happened, or as much as he is able. will be pleased that you know the story of him saving argos better than the one about the horse. will be all the men you imagined.
will say, telemachus, thank you for looking after your mother
will say, penelope, i am so sorry. please forgive me. i-
but right here, in this moment, when it’s just your parents and you in the courtyard, surrounded by the dead bodies of suitors, the stale breath of the last twenty years in the air
he hasn’t quite remembered yet how to be your mother’s husband, your father
and in fact almost looks to you like he is no one at all.