This year I’m sitting at the third desk from the front and I can’t see the board very well. The letters are blurry and I have to squint to read our exercises.
“What’s wrong, Maria?” Kyrios Stavros asks. “Do you think you need to see an eye doctor?”
Antigone gives Mom the name of a pediatric optometrist who studied in Paris. We go and sit in the waiting room. Mom is happy because there’s a recent issue of Woman in the stack of magazines with an announcement for an embroidery and knitting contest. “I’ll knit a blanket,” she says. “Our family will sweep up every prize around!”
A man with a white coat and glasses shakes our hands.
“Come this way, miss.”
He tells me to rest my forehead on a metal surface with little plastic bits for your eyes and use a knob to put a parrot in a cage. He jots something down in his notes. Then he tells me to read some numbers on a lighted board across the room. The numbers are kind of blurry so he puts these little lenses in front of my eyes and asks, “Is it better now? Or now?” With some of the lenses I can read even the tiniest numbers on the board. The doctor says I’m nearsighted, enough that I need glasses. I feel like crying.
“What’s wrong, miss? Don’t you know how stylish glasses can be?”
Yeah, sure.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I’m going to be a painter,” I say, and then, looking at Mom, “and something else, too.”
“How wonderful! All artists wear glasses, didn’t you know?”
“All of them?”
“Anyone who thinks a lot, dear,” the eye doctor says, tapping his own glasses.
Well, then. If I’m going to be a great painter, I guess I might as well wear glasses.
The next day Mom, Aunt Amalia, and I go to Metaxas Eyewear near Omonia Square. Mom insists on black tortoiseshell frames with wavy bits of red. The saleswoman says they look great on me, but I can’t really see my face, I look blurry in the mirror.
“I really look good?”
“Miss Inner Beauty!” Aunt Amalia says.
These days inner beauty isn’t enough. I want to be beautiful on the outside, too. We order the glasses. They’ll be ready in a week.
“I’m so jealous that you get to wear glasses!” Anna says.
“Wait until you see them first.”
“Glasses are always pretty,” Anna says, and I sigh with relief.
“You’re an owl, Teapot!” Angeliki says.
“An African owl,” says Petros.
Anna and I pinch them as hard as we can so they’ll stop, but they just put their hands over their mouths and dissolve into laughter.
“You’re an ugly four-eyes!” Angeliki shouts.
“She has inner beauty!” Anna shouts back.
“Only inner?” I ask, but Anna is busy pinching the others and doesn’t respond.
“I’m sure Angelos will fall for you,” she says when the bell rings at the end of the day. “You look older, more mature. A ripe fruit!”
“And when a ripe fruit sees an honest person, it falls.”
Anna loves it when I use Gwendolyn’s proverbs. She gives me a sloppy kiss on the cheek.
“You’re my best friend!”
“And you’re mine!”
“Want to go pee?” she says.
When we’re best best friends, like today, we go and pee in a parking lot on the next street over from our school. We slip between the cars, pull down our underwear and a little fountain of pee spurts onto the ground, splashing our socks and shoes. We never pee at the same time, so that whoever’s not peeing can be the lookout. Anna wiggles her tush and sings Françoise Hardy. I don’t move at all and only sing on the inside, Well then, I’ll say it, I love a boy. . I always take off my glasses, too, so they don’t get splashed.
Only today there’s a man in the car next to us. He slowly opens his door and says, “Girls, do you want to see my ice cream?” Anna vanishes, but I feel like it wouldn’t be polite to run away. The man is holding his ice cream down low, between his legs, a reddish-brown rocket pop with a little cream at the top. Something isn’t right. I take a few steps backward. When I’m far enough away, my heart starts beating loudly in my ears. Now is the time to use a phrase only good-for-nothings say. I make my hands into a megaphone and shout, “Fart on my balls!”
Anna holds out her hand. She’s pale as a ghost. We wrap an arm around each other and run in no particular direction.
“All men are monsters,” Anna says.
Merde, merde. All of them?
“He tricked you, Paraskevoula, the mayor’s son. .” We’re dancing a kalamatiano in the schoolyard. We’re still so upset about the perversion of men that we’re not really paying attention to the words. The song gets stuck in our heads. The whole way home, all the way to Plaka, we dance the kalamatiano instead of walking. Our favorite bit is the little leap at the beginning when you lunge at the sidewalk and stomp your foot. At home, too, while Antigone is making us lunch, we’re in the living room dancing. Suddenly she rushes into the room holding a half-peeled potato and a knife.
“What is this nonsense?”
We don’t understand.
“Who taught you that?”
We shrug.
Antigone says that the kalamatiano was what people who supported the junta used to dance. And that the song we’re singing is about a rich man taking advantage of a poor girl and if that’s the kind of thing we like, we deserve whatever we get. Haven’t we come into this world to fight hypocrisy? She’ll take us to the Peroke Theater and give us something to think about: they’re presenting two one-act plays, Chekov’s A Marriage Proposal and Brecht’s A Respectable Wedding.
We eat somberly, in silence. After lunch I go to the bathroom to wash my hands and through the open door I see Antigone sitting at the dressing table in her bedroom. Should I tell her I’m sorry for dancing the kalamatiano? She’s fixing her hair, only her shiny braid is lying on the bed, and there’s a little bun at the back of her head full of hairpins and clips. Antigone has short hair! The braid is a wig!
Then why did she tell us we’ve come into the world to fight hypocrisy?
Antigone takes us with her to the anniversary of the events at the Athens Polytechnic, when the dictators sent in tanks to kill the students who’d occupied the building. We bought red carnations to bring with us to the peace march. I told Mom I was going to Anna’s house to do my homework, because she doesn’t like demonstrations. She won’t join the League of Democratic Women, either. She doesn’t have time, she’s too busy knitting her blanket for the contest in Woman. “Such a waste of time,” Mom says. “Anna’s mother has her head in the clouds.” I still like Antigone, even if she’s lying about her braid. She’s skinny and she’s fighting for justice, working to make the world a better place. Sometimes I dream that she’s my real mother, and I always feel proud when strangers in the street say, “What lovely daughters you have.”
“You should take off your glasses,” Anna whispers. “There might be trouble.”
Trouble? Like a state of emergency? Like with the Igbo and Hausa, people setting fires? What if someone grabs Antigone by the hair and her secret is revealed?
A man tells us that people are throwing stones over by the American embassy. But outside the Polytechnic things are calm. The huge bust in front of the building is festooned with carnations and the protesters are singing a Mikis Theodorakis song in unison: “Life keeps climbing upward, life keeps climbing upward. With flags, with flags and drums.” Luckily Anna already taught me that song. I don’t want to sing about boys and love anymore. I could care less! We sing ourselves hoarse, red in the face from trying to sing louder than anyone else. We’re the biggest revolutionaries in all of Athens! That’s the only way we’ll get a scholarship from the Institut Français to go study painting in Paris for free. Anna doesn’t want to be a lawyer like Gisèle Halimi anymore. She decided to study art, too. She wants us to be exactly alike.