An Evening in Greece

Don’t worry about things like that | Deckard Enright

An Evening in Greece by Tate Flicker

I sit next to my brother, who sits next to the girl 

who is like my cousin or my sister, or my friend, 

and she sits next to my mother, 

who is surrounded by my father, 

my almost-uncle, my close-enough-to-aunt, 

and my might-as-well-be-cousins. 

The boy across from me points to his watch, 

a grin on his lips along with the taste of moussaka. 

“C’est quoi, là?” he asks, his gaze darting between me and my brother. Comment est-ce qu’on le dit? How could I have forgotten ce mot? “Mm...mo…” the word is trapped behind my teeth, 

I glance down at my half-eaten plate of chicken souvlaki, racking my brain for any remnant of the high school French vocabulary that I had believed to be useless. 

For why would I need to know the word for “watch” 

when I know the words for family, memory, and ocean? 

At the other end of the table, 

past the bottles of sparkling water and rosé 

and the candles whose flames move 

like the ripples of the Mediterranean Sea, 

The adults wonder how they could have grown up so fast, how they now have kids who are almost grown.

They reminisce about their own high school days in Belgium, about the first time they encountered my mother, 

the American exchange student 

who did not speak a word of French. 

How is it that they now celebrate fifty years of life, 

more than three decades of knowing each other, 

almost ten years of watching their kids grow up alongside one another? 

Their kids became friends without having to speak a word and now, years later, they hold a conversation that 

dances between English and French. 

The next generation, aged fourteen through twenty, 

sits at this restaurant on this tranquil island 

as the time approaches midnight, 

helping each other brush up on the second languages 

that their parents were so eager to teach them. 

C’est pour ça que je suis ici, à ce moment, 

trying to remember the word for a watch. 

But as I turn my gaze away from the scene 

at the other end of the table, 

the boy who is no longer seven years old 

reminds my brother and me, who are no longer six years old, that though we may know the words, famille et souvenir et océane, 

the word for a watch 

is une montre.