Greece

Greece is part of the journey Dessa takes alone after Angela’s death, when the approaching first birthday of their daughter makes grief newly difficult to avoid. Though the trip is proposed as a shared attempt to travel together, Dominick refuses; her departure becomes both a separation between the spouses and the setting for a tentative reconnection after she returns.

Destination and Circumstances

Dessa anticipates how difficult Angela’s first birthday will be and plans a trip to Greece and Sicily. She has resigned from her day-care job, and she asks Dominick to join her, using the life-insurance money they received for Angela to pay for the journey. The proposed trip is therefore bound to the loss it is meant to help them bear: the money comes from their dead child, while the travel offers a possible way to confront the anniversary together.

Dominick refuses to go before the school year ends. When Dessa presses him to make the trip for her sake, he loses his temper and calls the idea sick. His objection conceals a more personal fear: he imagines being confined with her in a ship’s cabin, unable to leave, and worries that they might make another baby. He urges her to go without him, and she does.

A Journey Taken Alone

The account gives little detail about Dessa’s experiences in Greece itself. Her trip is presented through its circumstances and its effects at home: while she is away, she calls Dominick from ports, and he keeps secret that he has had a vasectomy. He chooses the procedure on Angela’s first birthday, making his refusal of the trip part of a wider, concealed retreat from fatherhood and from the possibility of another child.

Dessa’s journey also contrasts with Dominick’s response to their bereavement. She plans ahead for the anniversary and travels; he remains at work and makes a private decision that she does not know about. Greece is thus a destination in the narrative, but also the far side of a silence between the spouses—one that persists even as they continue to speak by phone.

Return and Narrative Significance

Dessa comes home from the Mediterranean looking tan and rested. On her second night back, she and Dominick share wine in the kitchen and look through her photographs. He interrupts her story about a passport mix-up, takes her hand, kisses her, and draws her into his arms. Their reunion turns from looking at the images of her journey to renewed physical closeness; she leads him upstairs and stops in front of Angela’s room before they lie down together.

The return does not erase the concealment surrounding Dominick’s vasectomy, but it marks a change in their immediate relationship: after his refusal and her solitary departure, the spouses find their way back to intimacy in the house where their daughter’s absence remains present. Greece consequently matters less as a described landscape than as the journey that separates their responses to loss and precedes this cautious return to one another.