Lena thought for a while. “I think Mom had a boyfriend named Eugene. I think she lived here and he lived in Greece, and I think she might have really loved him.”
Effie raised her eyebrows. “You do, do you?”
Lena nodded.
“Well, I think you should stick with your own tragic love story.”
“David wants to take us both out to dinner,” Christina announced that evening, as though Ed McMahon had just arrived with the giant novelty check.
“Why?”
“Carmen!” Christina was too happy to be mad. “Because he wants to meet you!”
Christina had the Weight Watchers cookbook open on the counter and onions sizzling in a pan.
“When?”
“Tomorrow night?” Christina suggested.
“I’m going to the movies with Lena.”
“Thursday?”
“Baby-sitting.”
“Friday?”
Carmen studied her mother in annoyance. Usually a person got the hint by the third try. “I’m … going out with Porter,” she said, satisfied with her answer even though it was a lie. Her mother wasn’t the only one in the world with a boyfriend.
Christina’s eyes turned from disappointed to pleased. “Bring him! We’ll go out, all four of us!”
“David wants to take us out to dinner,” Carmen announced into the phone an hour later. Her tone was somewhat different than her mother’s had been.
Tibby exhaled. “It sounds like it’s getting serious. You know, time to meet the parents. Except the other way around.”
“I told her I was going out with Porter, and she wants him to come too.”
“A double date with your mother?” Tibby said, at least partly enjoying the absurdity of it.
“I know,” Carmen moaned. “It might be better this way, though. I’ll have something else to pay attention to. And maybe the guys can talk about tire irons or something.”
“Maybe.” Tibby sounded doubtful.
“The only thing is, I don’t actually have a plan to go out with Porter. I made that up.”
“Oh, Carmen.”
“Yeah, so now I have to ask him.”
Tibby laughed, but Car men could tell it was appreciative. “Do you like him?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Porter!”
“Oh. Uh, I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
“He’s really good-looking. Don’t you think?”
“He looks fine,” Tibby said a little impatiently. “But Carmen, you shouldn’t ask him out if you don’t like him. It kind of sends the wrong message.”
“Who said I didn’t like him? Maybe I do like him,” Carmen snapped.
“Gosh. You make it sound so romantic.”
Carmen laughed. She bit at a loose piece of skin next to her thumbnail. “Did I tell you my mom put us on a diet?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Poor you.”
“Except I walked to Giant and bought three flavors of Ben & Jerry’s.”
Tibby laughed again. “Atta girl.”
Hey Bee Bee,
I am a big fat loser, but what else is new? The big event on my social calendar is a double date with my mother. I am totally serious.
How did this happen? A week ago my mom’s big plans were a dentist appointment. Now she’s doing something with David like every other night.
Don’t say you’re happy for her. You said that last time. You’re not the one eating the frozen pizza.
Last night she went out wearing this cropped shirt. I swear you could see her belly button. Not pretty, Bee.
This morning I called her at the office to see if I could go to a ten o’clock movie and she said, “Use your judgment.” !!!! How come my judgment was never good enough to use before David came along?
Am I just being a selfish brat? Be honest.
But not too honest.
Write soon and tell me everything about Gilda Tomko. I miss you so much.
Love,
Carmen “the Brat” Lowell
“Meet us for breakfast if you want,” Maura called later that night as the elevator door closed. “We’re walking down the highway to IHOP.”
“All right,” Tibby said through the door. Being New Yorkers, Maura and Alex liked to joke about how other places didn’t have sidewalks, only highways. Tibby nodded along like she was a New Yorker too, not a product of pure suburbia.
The pulsing sleep light of her iBook greeted her. “Hi,” she said to her computer.
“Hi,” it said back.
Tibby started. She felt her blood zooming around her body.
The computer laughed. It had the voice of Brian. Tibby switched on the overhead light.
“Oh, my God! Brian! You scared the crap out of me.”
He came over to her and pulled on her arm. “Hey, Tibby.” His smile was giant.
Her smile was giant too, and automatic. She had missed him. “What are you doing here?”
“I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” she said without thinking.
“And also, I thought I’d bring you home.”
“You mean for the weekend?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“That’s not for three days.”
“That’s true.” He shrugged. “I missed you.”
“How did you get in here?”
“Somebody let me in downstairs.” He pointed to her door. “And you could pick that lock with anything.”
“Really? That’s comforting.” She missed Bee when she thought of lock-picking.
“Is it okay if I …?” He pointed to a dark green sleeping bag in a roll on the floor.
“Sleep here?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Yeah. Of course. I mean, where else are you going to go?”
He looked a little uncertain. “Are you sure it’s okay?”
When she stopped to think about it, Tibby realized it was pretty profound having a boy stay all night in your room. It was really like college in that way.
But then again, Brian wasn’t a boy. Well, he was, technically speaking. But Tibby didn’t act or feel around him the way she did around any other boys she had ever known. Much as she loved him, Brian was about as sexy as tube socks.
She studied him for a moment. It was funny how much he had changed since the day she met him. He was much taller. (It helped that he’d been eating dinner at her house two or three nights a week.) He washed his hair sometimes. (Tibby was always taking showers; she suspected he had learned by example.) He wore a belt. (Okay, so maybe she had bought him one.) But still he was Brian.
“I could get in trouble, though,” Tibby said. “If the RA or anybody sees you.”
Brian nodded solemnly. “I thought of that too. I’ll make sure nobody sees me.”
“Okay.” She knew her parents wouldn’t get mad about it. That wasn’t the issue.
He sat down on her night table.
“I saw Nicky and Katherine yesterday,” he told her.
“Yeah?”
“Katherine fell down the steps. She wanted you to fix it.”
“She wanted me?”
“Uh-huh.”
Tibby felt her cheeks warm. Mostly she kept those two small creatures at bay. She knew how much her parents wanted her to interact with them. Every time Tibby let Katherine climb on her lap, she felt her mother’s opportunism, her constant desire for free baby-sitting. When Bugs Bunny looked at Daffy Duck on the desert island, he saw a big, juicy roasted duck. When Alice looked at Tibby, she saw an able-bodied teenage baby-sitter.
“I played Dragon Spots with Nicky.”
“He must have loved that.” Brian was fostering in Nicky an early love of video games.
She felt a little bit uneasy that Brian was still going to her house when she wasn’t there. Was it really Tibby he liked or was it the Rollinses’ tinies?
“How’s it going here?” Brian asked. He looked at the sketches a
nd notes scattered over her desk.
“Pretty good.”
“How’s your movie? Did you decide what it’s going to be about yet?”
Tibby had spoken to Brian many times since she had decided and started working on the movie. But for some reason she hadn’t told him about it. She gathered the sketches into a pile. “I think so.”
“What?”
“Maybe about my mom.” She didn’t feel like elaborating.
His face lit up. “Really? That’s a great idea.”
Brian had an annoying tendency to like Alice.
“Yeah.”
“How are your friends?” Brian asked. “I mean, those new ones you met.” His eyebrows peaked over his nose in that earnest way he had.
“They’re …” She was going to say nice, but the word didn’t fit. Great seemed to carry the wrong connotation too. “… all right.”
“I’ll meet them tomorrow, hopefully.” Brian began unrolling his sleeping bag.
“Sure,” she said. She wasn’t quite sure about that.
He kept his toothbrush and toothpaste in a crumpled plastic Wallman’s bag. Her bathroom kit was made of thick, see-through blue plastic with a zipper. “You can go first,” she offered. She peered out the door. The bathroom was only a few yards down the hall. “Go ahead,” she said.
While she waited for him, she decided to fish her extra blanket down from the closet shelf to give him a little extra padding on the hard floor. A big Jiffy envelope with Lena’s handwriting on it came down with the blanket.
The envelope seemed to stare at her critically. She knew the Pants were in there, and yet she hadn’t even opened it. Why not?
She knew why, really. When she opened the Pants, she would remember about last summer and Bailey and Mimi and everything else. She would have to see the crooked red heart she’d embroidered onto the side of the left knee. She would have to remember those strange, long days after Bailey’s funeral when she’d sat alone on the back screened porch making endless ragged stitches. Maybe she wasn’t ready to think about it right now.
A few minutes later the room was dark and Tibby and Brian were both lying on their backs looking up at the ceiling. Her first-ever sleepover with a boy.
“Did you quit Travel Zone?” Tibby asked.
“Yeah.”
Brian moved from one job to the next. He was a skilled Webmaster and all-around techno-dork. He could get hired at twenty bucks an hour no matter what he did.
They were quiet. She listened to his breathing. She could tell he wasn’t asleep yet. Her throat felt tight and achy.
In the first few months of their friendship, there had been quiet, full moments between them, and Brian had brought up the subject of Bailey. It was hard for Tibby every time he did. After a while she asked him not to. She said when they were quiet together, they would both know who they were thinking about.
Tonight in this small dorm room in this strange place, they both knew who they were thinking about.
lovers alone wear sunlight
—E. E. Cummings
David didn’t have any obvious physical deformities. His teeth were all there. He had hair even. Carmen surveyed David’s clothing in a quick glance. Acceptable. He wasn’t wearing a Star Trek shirt or anything. She studied his feet for evidence of an orthopedic shoe.
“This is Porter,” Carmen said. “Porter, this is my mom, Christina.” She turned back to David. “And this is David.”
She watched Porter and David shaking hands, trying to pretend they hadn’t just stepped into the weirdest date of their lives.
“Porter is going to be a senior next year,” Christina said to David, as if they were dear old friends. “He and Carmen are friends from school.” Carmen winced inwardly. Christina seemed to feel she needed to lay the world out for David.
The hostess showed them to their table. It was a booth. Carmen found herself wishing it weren’t a booth. Christina and David sat on one side, and Carmen and Porter sat on the other. David pushed close to Christina and draped his arm loosely around her waist. Carmen felt her back stiffen.
Carmen stared at her mother, wondering what this nondeformed man could possibly see in her. Did David realize that her mother was old? That she wore briefs instead of bikinis? That she sang along to Carpenters songs, and not in tune? Was he some kind of weirdo with a fetish for Hispanic legal secretaries?
But the truth was, Carmen realized, gazing at her mother’s vivid face, Christina was kind of pretty. Her hair was thick and curled nicely at her shoulders. She didn’t even need to dye it. She wasn’t a supermodel, but she wasn’t exactly obese, either. She had a nice, free, tinkly laugh, and she used it a lot. Especially whenever David opened his mouth.
“Carmen?”
Porter was gazing at her with the expectant look of someone who has just asked a question, possibly more than once.
Carmen opened her mouth. “Uhhhh.”
“Or not?” he prodded politely.
“Uhhhh?”
Now all three of them were looking at her like that.
Carmen cleared her throat. “Sorry. What?”
“Do you want to share the sesame noodles appetizer?” Porter asked, probably regretting the idea now that he had had to ask several times.
“Um. Sure,” she said awkwardly. It seemed like a caricature of a double date to be eating off the same plate. But wouldn’t it be mean to say no after she’d already ignored him?
“Could we have an extra plate?” Carmen asked the waitress while they were ordering, feeling as uptight as Tibby’s eighty-one-year-old grandma Lois.
She felt about as romantic as Grandma Lois as she divvied up the noodles and cut hers with her fork.
Her mother didn’t look anything like Grandma Lois. She was leaning into David, laughing at something he’d said. Her cheeks were flushed. She ate a dumpling off David’s plate without a trace of awkwardness.
“See, good, huh?” he asked her. David’s voice and eyes were asking Christina and Christina alone. He might as well have been asking her if she loved him. And she might has well have been answering yes. Their eyes stuck on each other in a way that would have been embarrassing if they had been at all embarrassed.
They were the caricature. Your happiness is generic, Carmen thought stingily.
“Carmen?”
Porter had that look again. “I’m sorry,” Carmen said. “What was that?”
He wasn’t yet comfortable enough with her to call her back from her mental travels, or better yet, tease her about it. Instead, he just looked bewildered. Sort of like Grandma Lois’s husband. Late husband.
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
Carmen cut up more noodles, feeling the odd sensation of watching the dinner progress without actually attending it.
At some point she realized that the humming conversation had come to a stop. David was looking at her.
“Your mom says you’re baby-sitting for the Morgans this summer.”
David was giving her one of his straight-in-the-eyes looks. An unwavering, direct, “I come in peace” sort of look. Carmen’s eyes flitted and danced around the restaurant. “Uh-huh. Yep. Do you know them?”
“Jack Morgan is a partner at the firm. Cute kids, huh? That little boy, what’s his name?”
Carmen shrugged. “Jesse?”
“Yeah, Jesse. He’s a piece of work.” David laughed. “At the firm picnic he counted all the ice cubes.”
Christina and Porter laughed. Carmen forgot to.
“He called me a wildebeest from his bedroom window when I went by to pick up Carmen yesterday.” Christina laughed very admirably, Carmen thought, at being called a wildebeest. Carmen wasn’t sure she herself would have admitted that in front of a date.
Carmen watched, semientranced, as David kissed her mother’s hair. Then Porter said something, but Carmen didn’t listen to what it was.
When at last the bill came, David paid it in a way that was decisive but not show-offy. “Next time,”
he said to Porter respectfully as Porter fumbled with his wallet.
Gallantly David got up and fetched Christina’s jacket from its hook. Carmen snuck a look to see if he had short legs. He didn’t.
Lena got up from her bed and put on the Lucinda Williams CD Kostos had sent her back in January. Tibby was gone, Bee was gone, Carmen was out on her demented double date. The music made Lena yearn for a feeling she’d had in Santorini and lost. She’d barely had it. Maybe she’d only glimpsed it. She couldn’t name it. It was rough and ragged and dangerous, but soaring and wonderful too.
Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness.
Lena wondered about her dread. Where had it come from? What did she fear? Nothing terrible had happened to her. Was it a case of past lives? Otherwise, she hadn’t lived long enough to explain it. Unless she lived in dog years. Did she live in dog years? Did she live at all?
She went to her closet and drew out her worn shoe bag. She spilled the letters on her bed. She tried not to do this too often, especially since she had learned about the girlfriend, but tonight she couldn’t help herself.
She used to read Kostos’s letters so often she had pulled out every possible nuance, every meaning, every drop of emotion. She had sucked them so dry she was surprised they didn’t burst into powder. She remembered the joy when a new letter would arrive—full of potential, unread. She remembered thinking that the multitude of fresh, unfelt feelings made the new envelope sit heavy in her hands.
She perched cross-legged, hypnotically opening them one by one. In the beginning she had often been struck by the formality of Kostos’s writing, constantly reminding her that he wasn’t an American or a teenager. Then it had all fallen away and he was just him.
The first one was from early last September, soon after she’d left him and Santorini for home.
The memories are so close I feel your presence everywhere. And I see forward so clearly and sadly to a time when the memories will be distant. I won’t be able to picture your painting things scattered on the flat rock in Ammoudi or your bare feet soaking up the sunshine on Valia’s garden wall. Now I see them. Soon I will remember them. Long after that I will remember remembering. I don’t want any more hours to pass to separate me from you. Tonight I was packing for London, hating to leave this place where we were together.