Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood 5)

What was she so scared of? She couldn’t even frame it. She didn’t want to have to talk about what happened. She didn’t want to have to acknowledge the impenetrably dark thing that they three—maybe only they three—knew and could not say. It isn’t just that she drowned.

Carmen didn’t want to have to digest it any further. She couldn’t.

The third plan was just to write out their addresses and stick the damned things in the mail, but even that proved too hard. She pictured their reactions when they got them. You are seriously going ahead with this? What would they think of her? They would think she’d had a lobotomy. That would be their kindest reaction.

What if she didn’t invite them? That would be insane.

She tried to imagine the feeling of walking down the aisle, seeing their faces in the crowd as she and Jones took their vows, just two more random spectators. If only she could think of them that way. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t imagine them and not imagine their honesty along with them. They knew her better than anyone.

She tried to imagine the feeling of walking down the aisle without seeing their faces at all, and she simply couldn’t do it.

Without them, her life was a farce. With them her life was a farce. Carmen sighed and put her head down on the cold table. Her life was a farce.

Kostos’s return letter came in an extraordinarily brisk three days. It had many parts, all of them funny or sad, none of them having anything to do with his girlfriend/fiancée named Harriet.

I dreamed of your lost city last night. Isn’t that strange. You gave me a dream. Thanks for it. It was lovely and serene and I saw some people I’ve really been missing, not all of them dead.

Any scuba diving allowed? Any transubstantiation in one direction or the other? Can you at least just go down and say hi?

Once again, Lena finished reading it, took out a piece of paper, and wrote him back. As she wrote to him, he didn’t seem to her so much a corporeal presence, a confusingly desirable and disappointing man, but as a kindred consciousness floating out there alongside hers.

I put on Valia’s housedress today. The one with the pink and purple squares. You probably remember it; she wore it all the time.

I don’t know why I did it. Maybe because there’s a cold, gloomy rain outside. It’s not a good fit, exactly, but it’s made me strangely happy. I feel like it’s still got some Oia sunshine in it, as well as Valia’s indomitable energy. You know I’ve always been superstitious about clothing. Now I don’t want to take it off. I’m going to wear it to teach figure painting today.

Under the part in her letter about the housedress, Lena took out her colored pencils and made a drawing of Valia wearing it along with her absurd pink plastic house shoes. She placed Valia in the loosely sketched doorway of her house with one hand on her hip.

Lena became completely absorbed in the drawing, remembering and articulating every subtlety of Valia’s fierce morning stance and her sleepy, wrinkly expression. There had been a running rivalry between Valia and her best friend, Rena Dounas, Kostos’s grandmother, over which of them woke up earlier and made the first appearance in the morning.

“I have been up for hours!” Lena wrote as the caption.

Kostos’s response came quickly.

I am torn between laughter and awe when I look at—or even think of—the extraordinary picture you made. It is sitting on my desk. You capture the seventy-year relationship between our two grandmothers in one image.

Why, you must be an artist.

You’ll see I’ve enclosed my own slight creation, not to be compared to yours. It’s a deck hinge, in case you weren’t able to identify it immediately.

I was in Oia this past weekend, and made a fish dinner for my grandparents. My grandfather took ambivalent note of my cooking skills and studied my hands with disapprobation. He has a deep respect for men with rough hands, and I could see he thought I was going soft.

So I went back to the forge for old time’s sake, and perhaps to restore myself a little in his eyes or mine. The forge is hardly used anymore. Bapi has been retired for ten years. It took me senseless hours to get it going, and senseless more to make the small, shabby thing here enclosed. But I took my blackened hands to the office with pride this morning.

You may not have much urgent use for a deck hinge. And it’s not a very good one, to boot. But short of enclosing an excellent fish dinner, which I didn’t think would travel well, it’s the best thing I could make for now.

In ten days’ time, Lena realized she was getting and sending a letter almost every day.

Thank you for the deck hinge. From the moment I get my first fishing vessel, it will be in constant use.

Honestly, Lena didn’t know what she had been doing with her life before the letters started. They filled her mind and the hours of her day almost completely.

Kostos, she decided, had more hours in his day than she had, probably at least five or six more. His letters were longer, more interesting, and cleverer than hers, and somehow he also managed to hold an important job and have a life.

Lena was teaching a total of four classes a week and spending time with no one but Eudoxia for an hour once a week. She’d had no desire to go into the studio and paint since October.

But more and more she was adding little drawings and designs to her letters. She made a sketch of her grandfather’s famous white-tasseled shoes. She drew a picture of a fishing boat, the kind that docked in Ammoudi, with an inset drawing of a magnified deck hinge. She made a watercolor of an olive tree and let it dry by the window before she folded it up to send.

There were so many things she wasn’t saying. There were so many memories pertaining to him and them in each of these images, many of them sad. Those were the only feelings, the only subject, that didn’t go into her letters.

Kostos left them out too. Probably without the same careful intention; he might not have been wallowing in those memories at all. But whatever the reason, he didn’t talk about love, good or bad, and that was a relief. Nor did he ever mention his fiancée/girlfriend. And that was a bigger relief.

Maybe this was the kind of relationship Lena and Kostos were meant for: abstract, contextual, but not intimate. She thought of Markos, the man her father had played tennis with every Saturday morning for the past twenty years. It was like a million other friendships in that it went along without their ever needing to talk about themselves or, God forbid, their relationship. Her father hadn’t found out Markos had gotten divorced until two years after it happened.

I think you and I are the last two letter writers on earth, she’d written to Kostos a few days before. Neither of them was suited to phone conversations or jotty emails employing only lowercase letters. But clearly they had found their métier.

It was a strange joy to get to know him again, to reveal herself honestly again, without all the heat.

She looked up from the current letter, on which she’d spent two hours making a delicate border of olive leaves. It would be hard to say there was no love in these letters.

“You have been an unbelievable help to me. To both of us. I don’t even know how to tell you.”

Almost three weeks had passed, and Brian was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of beer after having put Bailey to sleep. It was rare that he and Bridget had a moment to talk. He worked late and she went to bed early. He was working with a team in California and a team in Kolkata, he said, so he kept odd hours. Maybe they were avoiding each other.

“You don’t need to tell me,” Bridget said, mashing up ripe bananas in a bowl. She’d discovered that Bailey would eat anything that involved bananas, so she’d made up a recipe for whole-wheat banana muffins. Eric would like these, she found herself thinking.

“I don’t know how to thank you.”

“You don’t need to thank me.” She mixed the dry ingredients together and got the eggs out of the refrigerator.

“A package came for you today. Did you see it?”

I got it,” Bridget said. She’d ordered a pile of books for Bailey. Bailey loved books about dogs and monsters, so she’d ordered all the ones she’d remembered loving, mostly from reading them at Tibby’s house: Good Dog, Carl; Martha Speaks; Harry the Dirty Dog; The Monster Bed; Marvin and the Monster. She’d also ordered the entire Schoolhouse Rock collection on DVD.

She poured the batter into the muffin tin, imagining Tibby buying the muffin tin. “How’s the project going?”

“It’s going. I have maybe another week and a half of work. I have to send it out before the move.”

He was silent and she knew he wanted her to stay. “Do you want me to stay?” she asked.

“Can you?”

“Yes.” She didn’t say she couldn’t imagine leaving.

She noticed he’d brought home a huge pile of flattened cardboard boxes when he’d made a run to the supermarket that afternoon. “I can help you move if you want.” She was really, really good at moving.