“October twenty-eighth,” she said, savoring the date. “I’m so excited we’ll be back together.” She breathed in the bar smells and felt the white wine melting all that was left of her reserve. “I really cannot wait.”
Her dad took a sip of his whiskey sour and gazed at her thoughtfully. “I picture you four girls back when you were small. I hardly knew where you ended and the other ones started.”
Carmen nodded. “Me either.”
For the last four years, Lena had sharpened her Greek by means of weekly hour-long conversations with Eudoxia. She had first been referred to Eudoxia through her online Greek course, and had paid sixteen dollars to talk to her for an hour on the phone. Lena could have easily talked to any number of people fluent in Greek, including her parents, but they all had in common that they knew her, and when they were talking they wanted to talk about her. Eudoxia had the benefit of being a stranger at first, and somewhat old and hard of hearing and kind of loopy.
After the first year, Eudoxia had advised that they move their conversations from the telephone to the (Greek) coffee shop equidistant from their two apartments. Initially Lena had paid the sixteen dollars plus the price of coffee and the occasional pastry, but about a year in, Eudoxia started refusing her money. And for the past year Eudoxia had insisted on picking up the tab every week because her husband, a police officer, had retired with his full pension and gotten a job as a security guard at a shoe store. Lena had offered to help Eudoxia practice her English part of the time to make things fair, but Eudoxia wouldn’t hear of it.
Wednesday at four o’clock, Lena walked into the coffee shop as she always did and spotted Eudoxia, perched in their regular booth. No matter how early Lena got there, Eudoxia always got there first. Eudoxia jumped up and hugged Lena. She was fat and soft and droopy where Lena was tucked in tight.
“You are excited about something,” Eudoxia declared in Greek.
Lena kissed her cheek and replied in Greek. “How do you know everything?”
The waitress appeared, another Greek transplant with dark teased hair. Lena saw her more often than she saw her dearest friends. “Just coffee for me today,” Lena said in Greek, exactly the way Eudoxia always said it. Lena was a fairly gifted and subtle mimic. She was so used to copying Eudoxia’s expressions and rhythms that she had begun to suspect she spoke Greek like a sixty-four-year-old lady from Salonika.
After Lena got her coffee she unleashed the big news. “I am going to Greece.”
Eudoxia bowed her head and whacked her palm on the table, as she did when she was excited. When she lifted her head her curly hair was still bouncing and the coffee cups were still quivering in their saucers. “That is wonderful. When?”
“Twenty-eighth of October. Tibby planned it. She bought the tickets for all four of us so we could be together.”
“Tibby?” Eudoxia knew about all of them. She talked about Lena’s friends as though they were hers.
“Yes, Tibby.”
Lena secured her cup while Eudoxia whacked the table again. “In Greece! How wonderful. How wonderful.”
“I can’t quite believe it.”
“Nor can I.”
“I didn’t know if I should accept. It’s a lot of money and everything. But I emailed Tibby and she said I had to. She said I was doing my part offering the house.”
“You’ll all stay in your grandparents’ house in Oia?”
“Yes. It’s still empty. My father keeps pledging to go over there and sell it, but he hasn’t found the time. And with the economic climate over there the way it is …”
“Maybe he likes to keep it.”
“No, I think he likes to sell it. You should hear him complain about the taxes and the upkeep.” Lena touched her saucer and considered for a moment. “But I don’t think he wants to have to confront all their old stuff and not know what to do with it. He hates not knowing what to do.”
“That will fall to you, then.”
Lena nodded. “Maybe so.”
One of the good things about Eudoxia was that her life overlapped with Lena’s in no way other than these lessons. She was like a therapist or a bartender. Lena got to represent her world exactly the way she chose without needing to balance it for fairness or fearing that her words would make their way around in some distorted or uncomfortable way.
Eudoxia sipped her coffee. Her face was thoughtful.
“Has something happened to Tibby?”
“What do you mean?”
“You haven’t seen her. You barely talk to her. You say it wasn’t always like this. Why do you think she has planned this?”
Lena prodded her backpack under the table with the toe of her boot. “I think she just misses us and wants to be together.”
“You think that’s all it is?”
“What else could it be?”
“I don’t know her. I couldn’t guess,” Eudoxia said honestly. She called the waitress over and ordered a cheese Danish with her customary look of relief and surrender. When it arrived she cut it into careful shapes with her knife. “Maybe you will see your young man there,” she said with a note of mischief.
Eudoxia always referred to Kostos as “your young man.” Drew she referred to as “the sandwich maker.”
Lena was tempted to act like she didn’t know what Eudoxia was talking about, but she didn’t bother. “Probably not. Imagine how busy he is. He works in London now.”
“He goes back and forth. That’s what he said in his letter.”
Lena pressed her fingers to her warm face. It was her own fault. She’d spent a lot of hours stumbling around in Greek trying to describe that letter. In fact, her fervency had ushered in a series of conversational breakthroughs, and Eudoxia had noticed it. She started calling Lena “my Daphne,” and when Lena asked why, she said, “Don’t you read your myths?” After that she always liked getting Lena to talk about Kostos.
As for the subject of Drew, it did not yield any breakthroughs.
“You should write to him and tell him you are coming,” Eudoxia declared. “You could write it in Greek! I could help you! Wouldn’t that be a surprise?” She whacked her hand on the table again.
Lena hesitated. She could imagine how many people from Kostos’s old life were clamoring for his attention. She didn’t want to do that to him.
In the silence Eudoxia seemed to recognize this was not something she could reasonably hope for. “But promise me this, my Daphne,” she said, leaning forward. “Promise me that at least you will call him. You will call him before you leave that island.”
Lena just laughed. Not bloody likely. “Maybe,” she said aloud in Greek. “You never know what will happen.”
When you jump for joy,
beware that no one moves the ground
from beneath your feet.
—Stanislaw J. Lec
Carmen was a terrible one for bargaining with God. She knew it was wrong, but she found herself doing it anyway. When she was nine, the night before she was flying to Orlando for a holiday weekend in Disney World with Lena’s family, she flopped around in her bed for hours, so excited she couldn’t stand it. As the hours passed, excitement grew so big it transformed into terror that she would die before morning. Her desire turned monstrous, and she was suddenly sure it would swallow the happiest day of her life. She begged God to please just keep her alive through tomorrow, please, and then he could do whatever he wanted with her.
Two decades had passed since then, yet she lay in her bed on the night of October 27 with the exact same feeling. She wriggled and turned and stuck various limbs outside the covers to cool down, asking God to please just look after her until she was reunited with her friends in Santorini the following day. If she could just get to
that, she would be happy. He could do whatever he wanted with her after that.
What could she offer in return? She’d be a better person. She’d spend less money on shoes. She’d play in the network’s charity softball game. She’d mentor a high school student. She would call her father twice a week absolutely and without fail. She would read the editorial page of The New York Times every day. She would no longer search the Internet for cellulite photos of actresses who got the roles she was rejected for.
Though Carmen felt foolish, she also felt lucky that she was bargaining with God, who was all-forgiving, as opposed to somebody who would surely come back to collect on her wager.
Lena prided herself on her capability as an abstract thinker, but sometimes her brain was as concrete as a lizard’s. It took the actual sight of Bridget and Carmen, flesh and warmth and flying hair, racing toward her through the international terminal at JFK in New York City, to make her understand how terribly much she had missed them.
Bridget reached her first and grabbed her without entirely braking. Lena felt herself pulled into the familiar momentum.
Carmen in her tall cork sandals got there a few seconds after. She squeezed Lena’s forearm so hard it would make a bruise. She screamed so loudly in Lena’s ear she left it ringing. She stepped on Lena’s toes without thinking. Lena felt tears pricking in her eyes and she laughed. It was so good to feel these things, even the ones that stung.
Bee made it a huddle. She tried to pick the two of them up off the ground, and Lena drew in the familiar stimuli: Bridget’s peppermint shampoo, the delicate sponge-cake texture of her skin against Lena’s cheek, Carmen’s grapefruit-scented hair junk and sticky lips. The smells on them were deeper, the colors brighter, than on other people.
Lena liked them to stay the same, and they were awfully obliging about it. In recent years her joy at seeing them was always mixed with anxiety that there would be some telltale change. She wasn’t sure what it would be: a supercilious brow, the forgetting of some little ritual, a set of crow’s-feet, a this or a that, that would separate one of them from the rest, or from their bond or from their past.