“I decided to study art, did I tell you?”
“What, so you can paint nonsense on black backgrounds?”
“No, I’ll improve, you’ll see.”
“What about me?”
“What about you? Aren’t you going to study psychology?”
“The way I see it, you and I are working together toward the same goal. We support one another.”
Merde, Anna, no. Please.
In order to discover your body, you’ll need a fair bit of time, and privacy, reads the first issue of Erotic Harmony. Mom and Dad have gone to a wedding with Aunt Amalia. The house is all mine until evening. I shut myself up in the bathroom. It’s now or never. You’ll need a mirror, I read. Spread the outer lips of your vagina and look at your body in the mirror. Love your body. There’s no way I can do all that at once, I can either spread the lips of my vagina or hold the mirror. Your clitoris is concealed at the spot where the two inner lips meet. Massage it gently, patiently, and feel it grow more and more firm with each circular motion of your finger.
It’s kind of like drawing. Like spreading lines of charcoal again and again on a small surface until the tendons in your arm start to hurt. The repetition effects a change: the skin tightens, becomes electric. At some point, unexpectedly, your body opens up into a series of trembling slices, or ripples. My whole belly has turned inside out like a piece of clothing and I can see all the seams, what it’s made of. I’m floating underneath my skin, in a deep, elastic space of darkness and nerve endings. The moment I realize what’s happening, tsaf! I’m back in my body. Only nothing is quite the same. It’s sort of how I imagine absolute happiness would be. You fight for it, you achieve it for a few seconds, and then it slips from your grasp and you’ve got to start all over again from the beginning. Each time I try it takes longer and longer; my head swells and goes numb. Night falls and I’m still sitting there on the toilet. The bathroom is stuffy, my sweat is heavier than usual. My feet are pins and needles on the bathroom tiles; in the mirror a tiny wet cave reveals itself to me.
So that’s my vagina. A half-open mussel. God, I’ll never eat shellfish again.
I get up and wash my hands, exhausted. I use soap, but the mussel smell sticks to my fingers, like the smell from roasting meat on your clothes after a meal at a badly-ventilated taverna. The phone rings and I drag myself into the hall. The receiver smells like my vagina, too.
“What are you doing right now?” Anna says.
I shudder at that right now. “Nothing,” I answer.
“Want to go for a walk?”
At last I have a secret. A new Ikeja, a chewed-up cricket in my mouth, a broken egg starting to smell in my suitcase.
“You’re somewhere else today,” Anna says when we meet.
“I’m tired.”
We sit on a bench in Exarheia Square, her head on my knees.
“I decided to study art, too.”
“Oh, nice.”
“That’s all you have to say?” Anna gives me a sideways glance. Since we got back she’s touchier than ever, perpetually on edge. If a floorboard creaks, her whole body tightens and she asks, “Earthquake?” Fear makes her even prettier. Annoyance, too. Her eyes widen, she tosses her hair and bites her lip as if she’s in the midst of an existential crisis.
“I think we could study different things and still be best friends.”
“Oh, really?”
“We don’t always need to do exactly the same thing, Anna.”
“But then we’ll grow apart, we won’t be so close anymore, like your mother and Mrs. Steedworthy. Or Antigone and Françoise.”
Françoise used to be Antigone’s best friend. She was an activist, too, but then she got married and had three kids and ended up doing two loads of laundry a day. She didn’t have time anymore to go out for coffee or talk about revolution.
“We’ll always be together, Anna.”
“What about this summer?”
“I’ll take you with me to Aegina.”
“Yeah, right. You’ll be busy with Angelos all day.”
I’ve been dreaming of him all year.
“You’ll be the death of me, child!” Mom says.
She’s standing in the doorway, gesturing toward the heaps of clothes and books on the floor of my room, at my drawings, at the records strewn around the stereo.
“Just look at this mess. Really, is this what a young lady’s room looks like?”
Mom thinks that anyone female should dust and sew dresses and cook lentils all day.
“I told you, I’ll clean it up. Stop being hysterical.”
She takes off one of her slippers and throws it at my head. I push her out into the hallway, but she manages to stick her other slipper through the crack and so I slam the door on her foot by mistake. Mom shrieks. She stands there before me, an awful look on her face, sobbing. These days she’s always crying. Because I don’t pick up my clothes, because I stay out late and go around with good-for-nothings, because I never think about how she might feel. She wanders through the apartment in a plastic suit that’s supposed to help her lose weight, though all it does is make her look like an overweight astronaut. The suit rustles like a trash bag. It’s an incredibly annoying noise that only stops when Mom lies down on the sofa to read the latest installment of some romance story in Woman.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
Mom isn’t crying because of her foot, it’s a different kind of crying. She’s making this high-pitched, inarticulate noise, which sounds as if it were coming from the body she used to have, the thin one, trapped somewhere in the depths of that plastic suit.
“I can’t take it anymore,” she says.
I hug her, not because I want to, but because she wants me to.
“Where did I go wrong with you?”
I wish that for once she would ask where she went wrong with herself.
Mom has to go to the hospital for a thyroid operation. Before she goes, she fills the freezer with biftekia. Dad and I eat silently in front of the television, watching Dallas.
“How’s school?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say.
The rest is silence, except for our chewing and J.R.’s voice: “Don’t think you’ll get away with it. You’ll pay for this!”
I spend my afternoons locked in the bathroom. I’ve got things to do. At night I read Cosmopolitan to learn tricks that Angelos might like, or Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to learn other things, for myself. It’s past midnight when I finally lie down and watch the reflection of headlights from cars in the street flitting across the ceiling and dream that I’m the perfect woman: a revolutionary, like de Beauvoir, but also just a normal person, like my mother, blond like Anna, and dressed like the models on the cover of Cosmopolitan. Only in real life a woman like that would be strange, almost a monster.
I’ll have to choose.
“Okay, let’s organize a plan of attack.”
Anna is sitting on the bed Aunt Amalia and I used to share. This year it’s Anna’s and mine.
“Nothing works, I’m telling you. All he’s interested in is rocks.”
Angelos isn’t going to be a nuclear physicist in the end. He’s studying geology, since that’s the department his exam scores were good enough for. He goes up hiking in the mountains with his friends from school and they dig up rocks all day. He has a 500cc motorbike and if you run into him on the beach, you can’t take your eyes off him: his curly hair blows in the wind, his white jeans are perfectly ripped at the knee and the leather band on his wrist gives him a wild, romantic air. Angelos is the first right-wing guy I like. Okay, so he’s not exactly right-wing, just apolitical. For him, politics is no match for digging up rocks. We grew up together in the summers. He barely speaks to his sisters, and only ever throws an occasional “Hey” in my direction, but he’s a good guy. He has that stern kindness I admire in boys. He could never be a “stuffed shirt,” like the boys at school. He’s not full of himself the way they are.