Something for Myself
You know, I can't honestly say I got on with any of my cousins. The boys were always out carousing and getting themselves into some kind of trouble—not that my father would have let me be alone with them, after the stunt they pulled with their cousins on the other side. Timandra and the other girls were so much younger that, before I was married, my only relationship to them was helping Aunt Leda change them and feed them. My father was half-brother to the king, and visits to Sparta were par for the course in the summertime.
I might have been able to like Clytemnestra. She was quick and clever, and rather practical, but very cold; she had very little compassion in her. We didn't get along. She seemed to always feel the need to prove that she was cleverer than me, and that irritated me, not so much because of the slight to my intelligence itself, but because I don't see such things as contests. So what if she and I were smart? That's a gift from some god.
Everyone who has seen Helen has remarked on how beautiful she was, and I won't say I was different. Women do not see beauty the same way men do; women want it and are intimidated by it in the same breath. They have a need to lessen it, or to say, Well, she's beautiful, but that's all she is. I've heard a great deal of unkind things said about Helen, and who knows—maybe some of them are true. We weren't close—we are still not close—and there is a great deal of her life that I haven't been privy to.
I was not, for instance, privy to all that went through her head one summer night, when half Achaea was gathered at my uncle's house. I saw her from a distance in that smoky, torchlit hall, safely chaperoned by her mother and sister, who was already married then. She was a small, frail figure, dressed in blue, and she moved through the hall, stopping to smile and flirt, having her hand kissed here and there. Everyone was taken with her; even my dinner companion, a clever man from Ithaca, was a little under her spell.
At Sparta a couple of years later, after we had both been married, she showed me around her quarters in the house my uncle had had built for her; I remember that she introduced me to a slave whose sole function was, apparently, to be her personal steward. A far cry from Ithaca, where my husband's nurse and I somehow managed to run the household between the two of us! I asked if the steward's upkeep didn't cost her very much—we were cousins and married women, such questions were normal. Helen blinked and said, "Oh, Menelaus doesn't like me to worry about those things."
He was always very kind and solicitous towards her in public. If there was anything else, I don't know about it. They had always seemed happy together, but in the last few years before Paris came, I had marked in her an increased dissatisfaction, a restlessness; it was subtle, nothing that couldn't be explained away by invoking her cycle or the lateness of the hour or the weather. When we were quite alone, I remarked on it.
Much to my surprise, Helen burst into tears; I recall my fumbling apology. "Good God, Helen, I'm sorry. I didn't know you were so—"
"Oh, Pen, you're so lucky," Helen said when she finally got herself under check again. She even cried beautifully—the tears now just barely moistened her lashes, making her eyes look huge and liquid, and there wasn't a blotch to be seen on her face. "You have things for yourself."
I said I didn't know what she meant. She went on, "People give you space, Penelope. Even Odysseus doesn't stand around breathing down your neck all the time. Maybe Ithaca isn't Sparta, but it's yours. I feel so…so caged here." I could only stare. I had never heard her say anything like this before; no god had told me that I never would again.
Later that summer, after we returned home, there was a huge storm, and the roof over the main hall finally gave in. It had been unstable even in Laertes' time, but this was its death knell. Thankfully, we seldom used the main hall, so in the interim before we could get someone to repair it, Eurycleia and I moved and emptied buckets full of rainwater.
Sweating, soaked to the skin, hair plastered to my face, I was carrying one out to empty it into the cistern when I thought of Helen, and I said a little prayer of thanksgiving.