“Compared to Mrs. Fatoba, you mean, or to poor Jane Steed-worthy?” Mom asks with a touch of coquetry in her voice.
“Could anyone compare with you, my dear?”
Mom bursts out laughing. “What about my little girl?” She points to a photograph in which I look absolutely pitiful — already Miss Inner Beauty even then. White shoes and hair in curls, a ridiculous Shirley Temple her parents dragged along to some tea party. Scabs on my knees beneath the white dress. My hair is nice, sure, but my smile shows a broken tooth.
“Dad, what a funny little colonist you were, with your socks up to your knees and your khaki shorts.”
“If you only knew how long I spent ironing that crease,” Mom says in a dreamy tone of voice. She’s bending over my shoulder to admire us as if we were actors from the ’60s, playing in her favorite soap opera.
“You? Not Gwendolyn?”
“Oh, please, Gwendolyn never ironed your father’s pants. That was my job!”
“Your mother was an incredible woman,” Dad says, as if referring to some prehistoric era.
Mom nods her head with a satisfaction tinged with sadness. These days she’s written seven children’s books and has a huge file of newspaper clippings and interviews — but she’s never been as happy as she was back then.
After lunch the small family dramas begin. The table is strewn with crumbs; uneaten lentils are drying on our plates; after his first glass of wine Dad blows up at the least little thing; a note of exasperation creeps into Mom’s voice. All signs point to the imminent eruption of the first argument of the afternoon. They bicker over the most ridiculous things: the telephone bill, who left the feta out on the counter, the motorbikes on Aegina.
“I’ll slash their tires — then they’ll think twice about making a racket during afternoon siesta!” Dad says.
“Enough already, you’re always saying that and you never do a thing!”
I can’t help but laugh as I picture my father sneaking around slashing tires, terrorist-style, Mom keeping watch to make sure no one is coming. They get mad at me for laughing and direct their irritation toward me instead. They insist that I go and lie down in the room they refer to as mine because they’ve put my old desk in there, and hung up an old poster of The Cure. A mausoleum for my childhood years. They’ve saved all kinds of appalling things: a box of dried-up pastels, the newspaper clipping of my Savings Day drawing, an old class picture with A Souvenir from Grade Three written on it.
I lie down on the bed, clutching the photograph. What else am I supposed to do on Aegina? Mom is busy writing her African stories or answering letters from kids, and Martha, two blocks down the road, is surely watching her afternoon soaps, so I might as well fix my eyes on something for a while, too: Anna, for instance, perched on a stool smack in the middle of the back row. You can’t see the stools, so the kids in that row look like angels hovering in mid-air. Or, better, devils: Petros is picking his nose. Angeliki, with her satanic laugh, has her face in profile so the smushed turd won’t show. I’ve been exiled to the very edge of the front row, in my cast and matching white tube socks, one pulled up to my knee, the other slouched around my ankle, the elastic apparently loose — what a mess. How young we were! What tiny fingers wrote that note to “Dear Mrs. Anna’s Mother”! What non-existent hips emerged from our corduroy bell-bottoms during our peeing contests!
But why did they put me in the front row, so far from my best friend?
Of course — Anna’s short! How could it never have occurred to me before? On the outside, at least, I’ve always been the stronger of the two.
“Surprise!” Anna is hovering in the doorway of my room, just as in our class picture. How does she do that? She’s dressed as a hippie and before I can take cover, she lobs a Molotov cocktail in my direction. The sheets catch fire, I’m engulfed in flames.
Mom throws a blanket over me, trying to put out the fire.
“Where did she come from? How did she get into the house?”
“Who, honey? Calm down! You were having a nightmare. Haven’t I told you not to sleep without a blanket? You’ll catch cold.”
I pull the blanket over my head, making a little cave. Mom shuffles out of the room, slippers flapping. She stops at the door, hesitates.
“Do you want a candy?”
She always carries candy in her pockets. On her visits to schools she treats the kids as if they were horses. She stuffs them full of candy, so you can’t ever tell if she’s actually their favorite writer or just a grandmother spoiling her grandchildren rotten. Personally I think her stories are atrocious, full of friendly colonists and cheeky little African kids, but then again she thinks I’m useless and don’t even know how to draw. “What are those things you draw, honey? I could do that as well as you can!” She took my charcoals, copied a few of my oldest and worst sketches, and now passes herself off as an illustrator, too.
“Maria, I know you don’t like it when I tell you this, but you still grind your teeth in your sleep.”
“Okay, Mom, fine. .”
“Honey, you have to be careful, that’s how you broke your tooth when you were little.”
I pull the blanket down off my head.
“What exactly do you want me to do about it?”
“Don’t get annoyed. I’m just saying you should be careful.”
I feel like telling her it’s a sign of stress, something that stuck with me from the cave and the crickets. But I don’t say anything. After all, I wasn’t the only one who took years to recover.
“Turn around so we can see!”
Stella grabs the skirt of the dress I brought her and pulls it up just a smidge; her plump little legs do a girly spin in place. Then she starts to dance.
“Look at my little cabaret girl!” Martha says.
“Just yesterday she was learning to crawl, and now she’s turning six!”
“You haven’t seen the baby yet, either. .”
“Oh, it’s fine, let’s not wake him up. I want to hear your news.”
Martha is sitting in her favorite spot on the sofa — I can tell because it’s where the cushion sags. Her belly is still swollen from her second pregnancy, and she has that lost, half-pleading expression on her face of a woman who’s recently given birth.
“What news could I possibly have?”
“How’s Fotini?”
“We’ve sort of lost touch. She and I are so different, Maria. She never even calls to talk to Stella, can you believe it? She’s opposed to the nuclear family, she says. I mean, really, revolution? Who still cares about revolution these days? She’s thirty-five years old! How stubborn can she be?”
Oh, Martha, if you only knew how I live. Writing proclamations in an apartment with bad plumbing. I come here bearing dresses with lace trim, like the ones they used to make me wear. I come for Stella, who was once the baby I knitted hats for and pushed in her stroller on the dock. But I also come in hopes of figuring out what on earth goes on in the head of a girl who’s six, seven, eight years old. How she can shut out the whole world and just spin in circles around her own axis.
“What about your mother, how’s she?” I ask, to change the subject.
“She’s basically an invalid, just one illness after the next. If it’s not some bug it’s her back.”
“I’m sorry, Martha. It’s not serious, though, is it?”
Martha tells me about her mother’s near mania for illnesses, her quiet depression, her constant hypoglycemia. Then she asks, “Who was it who gave my mother that name, anyhow?”
“My friend Anna, remember her?”