Kyria Kontomina is at her desk, leaning on one elbow, reading the next chapter of our anthropology textbook out loud with somewhat more interest than usual. She must not have done any class prep before coming to school, and didn’t know what would turn up in today’s lesson.
“Look how she’s sitting,” Anna says. “Like a lounge singer on a piano.”
Poor Kyria Kontomina. She’s pudgy, with a bright red face, and puts her hair back in clips as if she were in elementary school. She always wears black, with a colored scarf around her neck to match that day’s clips. Her glasses hang from a chain around her neck and she’s always fidgeting with them during class: she peers at us over the top of her glasses, or through them, or lifts them up and peers at us from under them. It’s probably because there’s no smoking allowed in the classroom, and outside of class Kontomina smokes like a chimney. Just like us.
Quickie for a fag? Anna writes on my desk, then winks at me. Ever since I had sex with Pavlos I haven’t had a moment’s peace. Cigarettes are fags, every loose sidewalk tile is a hump, and if I go out with Pavlos she’s concerned the next day about how bushed I look, and can we snatch a moment to talk. She’s always punning on his name, too: she calls him Kavlos instead of Pavlos, from “kavla,” which means having the hots for someone. In psychology class she never misses an opportunity to whisper to me about “Kavlov’s dogs.” Not even Angelos’s mother can escape her wit: Kyria Pavlina is Kyria Kavlina to her now.
We tell Kyria Kontomina that we have a student council meeting. Anna is our class president and I’m treasurer. We not infrequently abuse the power of our positions to sneak off and smoke in the girls’ room.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“Angelos and I had a fight.”
It doesn’t even occur to her that this news might make me happy, that he actually meant something to me.
“Again?”
“Merde! We’re just so different. He says white, I say black.”
“What happened this time?”
“He wants me to go to a wedding with him next Sunday.”
“Blech!”
“His cousin is getting married.”
“Don’t go, Anna. Marriage is the greatest social hypocrisy there is.”
I’m parroting her own words back at her. Ever since Antigone took us to see those one-act plays at the Peroke, we’ve always sworn that we’d never go to a wedding, no matter what, because it’s like silently accepting the history of the oppression of women. Anna bows her head and crosses her arms. In that position she looks like a good little Christian, even a bride. I take a drag on my cigarette, inhaling her image along with the smoke. Anna a bride? Impossible!
“I promised I would go in a moment of weakness and now I want to take it back.”
“Weakness?”
“Yeah, we were in bed, you know how it is. . but it was so stupid of me!”
I try to mimic the tone Anna takes when she’s rebuffing me. “Really stupid,” I say.
“Do you think it matters, just this once?”
“It’s not the frequency that counts.”
“What about what Nietzsche said, Einmal ist keinmal?”
This year Anna started taking German lessons so that she can read philosophy in the original. But if she keeps going the way she is, she won’t need German at all, or philosophy, for that matter. The most she’ll be reading is wedding magazines and cheap romances. I tell her that — admittedly with a dose of glee. Anna takes a deep drag and blows the smoke in my face. Then she crushes the butt of her cigarette under her shoe with such rage that you’d think she was crushing me.
•
“Was the bride pretty?” I whisper, mimicking my mother’s tone of voice, from her days of drinking tea with Mrs. Steedworthy. They were always chattering about weddings, babies, and dress patterns. Anna gives me a look like a wounded dog. Her silence only encourages me. “And the wedding dress? Oh, tell me about the wedding dress, please!”
She slaps her palm against the desk. “Shut up, Maria!” The whole class turns to look. We’re in essay-writing class and she and I always finish first. I mean, how much is there to say about something like: In the context of our nation’s entry into the European Economic Community, certain historical changes are unquestionably taking place. Greeks themselves, no less than other Europeans, are being called upon to protect our cultural heritage and to proceed with the modernization of Greek society. Please present your views on this subject. The topics are always as demagogic as PASOK proclamations: context, unquestionably, modernization. Anna and I react by writing as formally as we can, and Kyria Zapa, our writing teacher, scrawls at the bottom of our papers: Mediocre. Try to express your ideas more simply. Or: Don’t forget, there’s only one accent mark now! The government recently abolished the polytonic system of accent marks, but we still use graves and circumflexes out of habit.
“If you’re finished, you can go out to the yard and work out your differences there,” Kyria Zapa says.
She doesn’t need to say it twice. We run to the girls’ room, hop up on the windowsill and light cigarettes. Anna gives me a pinch to end all pinches. Then she changes tack, droops on the sill, pale as a sheet.
“What’s wrong? Was there an earthquake and I didn’t notice?”
“Don’t be so hard on me,” she says.
“Don’t be such an idiot,” I say.
“I’m not an idiot, I’m pregnant.”
I swallow hard, the smoke trapped in my lungs.
“Will you come with me for the abortion?” she asks.
Merde, an earthquake all right. Off the Richter scale.
What our religion textbook has to say about abortion: An individual’s sense of self-importance leads to an arbitrary intervention in the progress and preservation of the world. Anna ostentatiously burns that page over the cinders we’ve heaped up over our potatoes. We’re sitting by the fireplace at the house in Plaka, pretending to be brave. Tomorrow is the big day. Angelos doesn’t know a thing. Anna broke up with him for good and doesn’t ever want to see him again. Anything having to do with children and marriage makes her sick.
“But he needs to accept his responsibility,” Antigone says.
“I don’t want him to!” Anna shouts, so loudly and hysterically that the conversation ends there.
I get kind of hysterical, too, with Pavlos. I check all our condoms to make sure they didn’t break, I wash myself obsessively after sex and keep having this recurring nightmare. There’s a store that sells sperm in little plastic containers. If you buy just the right amount you don’t have to worry about an unwanted pregnancy. So women come to shop there, only they go all gaga over the sperm, buy too much and end up getting into trouble. Among them is a girl who looks like Anna. I watch all this unfold and decide I can live without sperm, it’s not the end of the world.
“Be careful,” says the girl who looks like Anna. “All men are monsters.”
I haven’t heard that phrase since we were nine years old.
Digenis struggles for his life and the earth terrifies him. I don’t know why that line from a folk song in our Greek literature textbook comes to my mind as Anna opens her eyes on the stretcher and whispers, “Antigone? Maria?” We stand over her, each of us holding one of her hands, until the nurses push us aside and lift her swiftly and surely from the gurney onto the bed. In the other bed is a forty-year-old woman from the provinces. She has five kids already and doesn’t want a sixth. She’s watching The Bold and the Beautiful with the sound off. Fortunately Anna is completely out of it from the drugs. She hates soap operas. Still, I stand over her in such a way as to block her view of the television. Anna doesn’t open her eyes. When she speaks, she just mouths the words, as soundless as the actors on the show.