The effect of the woman and the place were quite dazzling to all of Lena’s senses, but her brain was wondering how she, Lena, could possibly fit into it. Leo was less conventional than she’d even guessed. And apparently he liked older women.
Leo appeared behind Jaclyn. “Hey. Welcome. Come in.”
She followed them through the big room to an open kitchen under the balcony. The table was set, and pots were steaming on the stove. The air was spicy and garlicky.
“I hope you like, uh, flavorful food,” Jaclyn said. “Leo uses a head of garlic every time he makes dinner.”
Another sense dazzled. Another surprise about Leo. Lena nodded. “I’m Greek,” she said.
Jaclyn smiled. “Excellent,” she said.
Leo was manning all four gas burners with an admirably cool head. Lena had grown up in a family of cooks, but she couldn’t manage even one burner.
“Mom, could you get me the butter?” Leo called.
All the bits and pieces swirling in Lena’s head came apart and recombined. Jaclyn was his mom?
Jaclyn got the butter. More evidence that she was indeed his mother. There wasn’t anyone else around who could be his mother.
Lena looked from Jaclyn to Leo and back. Huh. She considered Leo’s dark gold skin. It made sense now. Lena saw, now that she really looked, how much of his mother’s beauty Leo had.
Lena realized that as a dinner guest it was not desirable to be completely mute. “Can I help with anything?” she asked politely.
“I think we’re set,” Jaclyn said, looking for something in the cupboard. “Leo, how’s it going?”
“A couple minutes,” he said. “Hey, Lena, will you bring me the plates and I’ll fill them up here?”
She was glad to have a job. She gathered and carefully stacked the yellow plates. “These are beautiful,” she murmured.
“They’re my mom’s,” Leo said.
It took her a second to realize that he didn’t just mean that his mom owned them.
“You mean like…”
“She made them. She’s a ceramicist. Mostly.”
“You made these?” she said stupidly to Jaclyn, who was setting glasses on the table.
“Yep. Water with dinner? Juice? Wine?”
“Water, please,” Lena said. She couldn’t help looking at Jaclyn with bald admiration. She was beautiful. She was young. She made exquisite yellow dinner plates. Lena suddenly wondered about Leo’s dad. Was there a dad? There were only three plates.
Lena thought of her own mother with her tailored beige clothes and her shiny briefcase.
Lena’s taste buds were her only sense yet undazzled, and a few bites of dinner did the trick. It was a spicy curry with lamb and vegetables over some eventful and delicious kind of rice. “This is so good,” she said to Leo, her awe undisguised. “I can’t believe you made this.”
He laughed and she realized it hadn’t come out all compliment, as she had intended. “I mean, not because you don’t seem like you could cook,” she added lamely. “Because I’m so bad at it.”
Why was she always putting herself down in front of him? What charm, exactly, did that hold?
“You probably haven’t practiced that much,” Leo said.
“That’s true. Everybody else cooks in my family, so I haven’t needed to yet.” She thought of all her ramen noodles with silent shame. “My grandparents owned a restaurant in Greece.”
The conversation rolled on from there. Jaclyn wanted to hear all about her family and how her parents ended up in America. Lena talked for a while, and when she remembered she was shy and lost, Jaclyn rescued her with a funny story about the time she went to Greece with an old boyfriend, lost him in a market near the Acropolis, and never saw him again.
After that Lena discovered that Leo’s dad was a businessman from Ohio who was no longer in the picture and that Jaclyn had brought up Leo mostly on her own.
“She supported us selling her ceramics and her tapestries,” Leo explained with obvious pride.
Lena admired the tapestries and then all the other lovely things lining the walls and shelves. The whole place was filled with things the two of them had made. Drawings, pots, sculptures, paintings. It was almost overwhelming to Lena.
She thought of the empty beige walls of her house and of the hard, minimal surfaces of metal and polished stone. Her parents, hailing from a romantic, disheveled homeland, had grown up in ancient, disheveled houses. Now they wanted only American sleekness.
You grow up, Lena thought, about herself and them. You leave home. You see other ways of living.
Lena looked around, intoxicated by her sense of longing. She wanted this.
It was late and Bee still had two hands and two knees against the floor. She had cleared several more feet and could not leave it. She’d work through dinner. She’d do it by moonlight if she had to. She could do it in the dark. She’d dreamed about it the past three nights. She simply loved the feeling of finding the floor, inch by inch, under her hands. By now she really trusted herself to know where it was.
The difference tonight was that Peter was kneeling two feet away, clearing next to her. He had not yet learned the floor as she had, but she was slightly proud to note that he had put aside his trowel and adopted her technique. She was faster, smoother, and surer every hour she worked.
“You can go,” she said. “Seriously. I’m fine. I’m a crazy nutjob, I know. I can’t help it. But I swear I won’t ruin anything.”
“I know you won’t,” he said almost defensively. “I’m not staying for you.”
She laughed. “Good to know.”
He had the slightly abstracted look she also wore when she had her hands on the floor. “I mean.” He raised his dirty hands. “It’s addictive.”
“Don’t I know.”
“Worse than pistachios.”
“So much.”
He disappeared briefly to find a spotlight and hook it up to the generator. He hopped back down.
“Hey, look,” she said. She held up a large piece of pottery. “Another one.” They had piles of them. They had left off with the proper labeling as it got later and later in the night.
“From the kalyx krater,” he said.
“I think.”
“Dude. We might find the whole thing.” He was excited. He did what he did for good reasons. She could understand wanting to spend your life like this.
“Dude, we might,” she teased him back.
He left again later to find a few pieces of pita bread and
a large chocolate bar and a half-empty bottle of red wine. He gallantly shared them with her.
After the eating were long periods of silent work. Occasionally she heard laughter from over the hill, where the nightly party was rolling on.
“Another sherd,” he said. “It’s from a lamp.”
“Arrrrg!” she erupted. “Say shard! Don’t say sherd.” The word potsherd was the single thing about archaeology she really did not like.
He passed her a challenging look. “Sherd.”
“Stop it!”
“Sherd.”
“I hate that.”
“Sherd.”
“Peter! Shut up!”
“Sherd.”
She reached over and shoved him hard. He was not only startled, he was poorly balanced. He fell over into the dirt.
Even though she felt bad, she was laughing too hard to stop. She walked over to him on her knees. She wanted to say sorry, but she couldn’t get it out.
He reached up and shoved her in retaliation. She fell onto her back, laughing so hard she was practically suffocating. They both lay in the dirt, punch-drunk and wine-drunk.
Once he’d gotten his breath and sat up, he reached out his hand. “Truce?” he said, hauling her up.
She was back on her knees. He was still holding her dirty hand in his. He pulled it toward his chest.
“Truce,” she meant to say, but she started laughing again midway through.
“Sherd,” he said.
“How’d it go?” Julia asked when Carmen joined her for a late dinner after her audition. By Julia’s expression, it looked to Carmen as though she had a specific idea in mind about how Carmen should answer.
It was a disaster, Carmen was supposed to say. I made a total fool of myself.
She could tell that that was what Julia wanted to hear, and that if she said it they could both laugh over it and be close again.
Carmen put her tray down and sat. But if Julia was actually her friend, why did she want to hear that? And if Carmen was so good at standing up for herself, why did she feel the need to say it? Why did Julia require that she be a failure, and why did Carmen go along with it?