Lidia Gianis walks the contours of Zeus’s sloping lawn with care. She has not attended this picnic in more than twenty-five years, having sworn never to return. In Lidia’s life, there are few vows she does not adhere to. She believes in will-ee thelesee in Greek. Spirit. Will cannot turn snow to rain, or roll back the sea, but it can keep you from being simply steamrollered by fate.
Now and then Lidia reaches out to Teri for support because she has chosen a pair of wedged espadrilles. That is more heel than she is accustomed to, since Mickey, two inches shorter to start, does not care to feel as if he were a child being led around by the hand. But she approached this gathering intending to look her best, which has proven a vain effort in the breathy Midwestern heat that has left her flushed, and damp with sweat. Preparing this morning, she examined herself solemnly as she applied her makeup. Not an old lady yet, she decided, but further on the way than she would prefer. The sturdy and abundant body of her girlhood was surrendered in the course of three pregnancies, especially the last one with the twins, and her wide figure is better concealed beneath a floor-length shift. The coils of black hair, pushed back from the brow by a discreet band to create a leonine rush, are now overgrown by wires of gray that she regards like weeds. What she practiced in the mirror was the piercing black-eyed look, clever and determined, by which she knows herself.
Now, treading carefully, she carries her head high on her long neck, even though her upper body is weakened by a seasick feeling of high anxiety. The nausea reminds her just a little of the mornings during her first two pregnancies with Helen and Cleo. With the boys, she was healthy as a horse-except for the fact that she thought of killing herself every day.
“My brother does it right,” says Teri, “but I sometimes think, when I watch him gliding around like a swan, that his pride will kill him.” Teri adores Zeus, even while she mocks his excesses. He sports the same white suit he dons every year, preening as he greets his guests. It sometimes seems that Teri and she have been talking about Zeus their entire lives-the adolescent kisses Lidia and he shared, his marriage, his children, his feud with Mickey, his titanic success. If you asked, each woman would claim the other one raises the subject.
There are some friendships that pass into permanency due solely to an early start. Choosing today, Lidia might not welcome the company of a woman so profane and odd. But Teri is central in her life, like a stout tree you watched grow from a slender stick in the ground, a physical marker of the mystery of time. These days, Teri and she seldom meet face-to-face. The Gianises moved to Nearing a few years ago, when Mickey opened a second grocery there. And Teri refuses to visit Lidia’s home, rather than tolerate Mickey’s inevitable rages about Zeus. Instead, the two women babble to each other on the telephone at the start of every day, often for as long as an hour. A few minutes afterward, neither can recall what they discussed, except on the frequent occasions when one has slammed down the handset due to a comment too unkind to be tolerated. It falls to the offender to call back first, most often the next day, at which point the disagreement goes entirely unmentioned. In a relationship so old, rebukes are pointless. Years ago, Lidia stopped asking Teri to curb her vocabulary, instead bringing up her children to understand that no one else on earth was allowed to talk like Nouna Teri. And decades have passed since Lidia last encouraged Teri to accept one of the many men who courted her. Teri prefers to believe she is too much for any male. ‘I don’t want one,’ she will tell you to this day. ‘Cold feet in bed when you don’t need them and a cold dick when you do.’
Suddenly, there is a commotion. People surge forward and Paul’s name is on the air, accompanied by laughter. Lidia leaves Teri behind, until she sees her son struggling back to his feet, laughing with a girl who looks somewhat like Sofia Michalis. The young woman is holding Paul’s elbow as she hands him an empty paper plate. Paul’s focus on her is intense-as the song says, eyes only for her. Watching, Lidia feels a surge of hope. Georgia Lazopoulos is an empty vessel, entirely incompatible with the huge hopes she holds for both her sons. Paul probably would have proposed to Georgia long ago if Lidia had been at all encouraging. Even Father Nik, who is as dumb as his daughter, has begun to figure out that Lidia is the problem and has been increasingly cold to her. But she is unconcerned. It has been her longtime belief that these boys, conceived and carried in agony, must in some recompense from God be destined for greatness.
As she returns to Teri, Lidia feels her stomach suddenly lurch into spin cycle. Zeus is coming their way.
“Lidia, agapetae mou”-‘my dear’-he says and throws his arms wide in triumph. The vast history between them reveals itself in not so much as a flicker in his broad expression. She tolerates only a quick kiss on her cheek, but he grips her tightly for one second-he is still hale and strong-then turns to wave over Hermione, who not surprisingly has already headed this way to insert herself between Lidia and her husband. “Look who is here,” he says in English. Hermione does not bother with a welcoming word, and merely extends her hand, beset with a diamond-circled Rolex that cost more than the house Lidia lives in. “We enjoy seeing Cassian,” says Hermione, “ena kala paidee”-‘a nice boy,’ almost as if Cass were a child who’d come over to play. Hermione is beautiful but dull. She is slender-why are rich women so often thin as wafers? — with her hair expensively colored the shade of weak tea and swept up in a beehive. She has mastered an elegant smile, but they both know she has never cared for Lidia, who is far smarter than Hermione, and once enjoyed a troubling emotional proximity to her husband.
“You have stayed away too long,” Zeus tells Lidia, “and I cannot imagine why.”
That is too much. She manages no more than a stiff smile and turns heel, with Teri trailing after her. Zeus’s sister grabs Lidia’s arm again after another ten yards.
“A lease on a grocery store? Lidia, really. It’s twenty years.”
“I had stopped coming before that,” Lidia responds, but curbs herself there. Sometimes, when she is alone in the house, and Zeus appears on the living room TV, which she has left on for company, she will slip into the room and marvel. He has grown to be so smooth-the younger man made no secrets about what he wanted. Now his ambitions are concealed like a dagger in a jeweled sheath. Back then, there was no denying her attraction to Zeus. He was her best friend’s older brother, big and good-looking and full of something she found irresistible-Zeus believed that greatness was his fate. Because of that, he was the only man she ever met who felt like a true match for her and her belief that her spirit should fill the world. She has always hoped, most secretly, that her sons have some of the same quality.
When Lidia was sixteen, her fascination with Zeus-and his with her-brought them to an evening that even now she recalls as one of the most fateful of her life. In those days, boys and girls would slip off from the Social Club at St. D’s to the choir room to kiss. Everybody tried it, pairing off almost at random. Zeus was nineteen by then, a little old for Social Club, and Lidia realized eventually he was there only for her. Each week, they stayed in the choir room longer. People were beginning to joke. And then one night he put her hand in his lap. ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked. He pulled it from his trousers. She stared, horrified but wildly pleased. ‘Touch it,’ he said, ‘please.’ She did, and he touched her, unleashing a tide of pleasure that felt at first as if it would stop her heart. But she would not allow the last step. ‘I must be married,’ she told him.
‘Then I will marry you,’ he answered. It seemed like comedy. She actually laughed, but Zeus was ardent. ‘No, I mean this. Truly. Let us go now to speak to your father.’