Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

  She thought back to the end of that summer, when she had first met Paul Rodman, Carmen’s stepbrother. Her response to him had taken her by surprise. She had never experienced such an instant physical attraction to anybody—not even Kostos. In Paul’s presence, that first time, she had spun these out-of-character fantasies about what she could mean to him, and he to her. But after he left, she retreated, as was her wont. Her romantic side went back into hiding, and after some time, her timid side took over, timidly, again.

  Now when she thought about him she felt ashamed. He was one of the many things she’d been hiding from this year. He was one of the people she’d been avoiding.

  In February, she had first heard from Carmen that Paul’s father was sick. She felt awful about it. She had thought about Paul. She had worried for him. But she hadn’t called him, or written, as she’d meant to. She had learned since, from Carmen, that Paul’s father was sicker and would likely not be getting better. She didn’t know what to say to Paul.

  She was afraid of his sadness. She was afraid to elicit his feelings. She was also afraid not to. She was afraid she would bring it up, and there would fall that most inept failure between them: total silence.

  It wasn’t until this class, this feeling, that she had regained a sense of balance. The time she spent with her charcoal and her fingers and her broad pads of paper and Andrew and Annik and these deep, stabilizing stretches of meditation—it all felt like too big a gift to be received. She would have to work to receive it.

  Her heart soared at the sound of the timer indicating the break was over. Back to work. It was amazing how much she could hate and love the very same sound.

  And so began the fateful pose.

  For starters, it was unfortunate that the door opened in the middle of the pose, when Lena was least able to process what was happening. It was unfortunate that the person who walked through the door was Lena’s father. It was also unfortunate that the door was located near the model stand and that Andrew was oriented in such a way that the first thing you saw, upon bursting through the door in the middle of a pose (which you really weren’t supposed to do), was a very up-close look between Andrew’s legs. It was particularly unfortunate that Lena didn’t recognize all of these unfortunate things in time to soften her father’s experience, but instead unwittingly treated her father to a long stretch of her unabashed fixation upon the glories of Andrew.

  When her father started talking, overloud, she came to. He was looming over her. It was a rude transition. It took her a moment to find any words.

  “Dad, you are—

  “Dad, you didn’t—

  “Dad, come on. Let me just—”

  She started a lot of other sentences too. The next thing she knew, he had his hand clamped around her arm and was steering her back through the door, turning her forcibly away from Andrew.

  Annik appeared in the hall with amazing speed. “What’s going on here?” she asked calmly.

  “We are leaving,” Mr. Kaligaris blustered.

  “You are?” she asked Lena.

  “I’m not,” Lena said faintly.

  Mr. Kaligaris exclaimed three or four things in Greek before he turned to English. “I will not have my daughter in this…in this class where you have…in this place where she is—”

  Lena could tell her father wouldn’t use the necessary descriptive words in her earshot. When it came down to it, her father was a deeply conservative and old-fashioned man. He’d grown even more so since Bapi’s death. But long before that, he’d been way stricter than any of her friends’ fathers. He never let boys up to the second floor of their house. Not even her lobotomized cousins.

  Annik stayed cool. “Mr. Kaligaris, might it help if you and Lena and I sat down for a few minutes and discussed what we are trying to do in this class? You must know that virtually every art program offers—”

  “No, it would not,” Mr. Kaligaris broke in. “My daughter is not taking this class. She will not be coming back.”

  He pulled Lena through the hall and out onto the sidewalk. He was muttering something about an unexpected meeting and coming to find her to get the car back, and look what he finds!

  Lena didn’t manage to pull away until she was standing in the harsh sunshine, dazed and off balance once again.

  It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

  —This Is Spinal Tap

  How bad could it be?

  That was what Carmen asked herself as she fixed Valia a cup of tea first thing when she arrived at the Kaligaris house early Monday afternoon and brought it into the den, where Valia was watching television.

  “Awful.” Valia nearly spat when she tried the tea. “Vhat did you put in this?”

  “Well, tea.” Carmen was being patient. “And honey.”

  “I said sugar.”

  “The sugar bowl was empty.”

  “Sugar and honey is not the same. American honey you cannot eat.”

  “You can if you want,” Carmen began, but realized this was not a diplomatic avenue. “Here, I’ll try again.” She took the teacup back into the kitchen. She located the box of Domino granulated white sugar on the high shelf in the pantry. She refilled the sugar bowl.

  While she waited for the water to boil a second time, her mind traveled to September. From a chilly distance she imagined her mom very pregnant. She imagined a baby shower. She imagined her room, filled with expectations for somebody else.

  When she used to think about September, she imagined herself arriving at college, meeting her roommate for the first time, unpacking her stuff. Now she could only seem to picture what would be going on in her absence, and in those pictures, it was as though she were dead. Or as though she were the one who hadn’t yet been born.

  She used to be able to look forward to college. She had dreamed of Williams for so long. It was one of the best colleges in the country. The place her dad had gone. As agonizing as it was to leave her friends, college was something she’d really wanted. Why couldn’t she want it anymore?

  She was angry. She wasn’t angry at the baby, exactly. How could she be? She wasn’t angry at her mother. Well, she sort of was, but that wasn’t the real root of it. She was angry that she couldn’t picture her own life anymore. She was angry that her mother and this baby had somehow stolen her future and plunged her back into the past.

  The pressure was building up behind her eyes again. Reflexively she snatched the phone from the wall.

  “Hey, it’s me,” she said when Tibby answered.

  “You okay?” Tibby asked. It was so nice how a person who loved you could pick up on your mood in three small words.

  Carmen could hear Nicky shouting about something in the background. “I guess. How ’bout you?”

  “Nicky, could you do that in the other room?” Tibby called, away from the phone. “How’s Valia?” she asked into the phone.

  “She’s—”

  Suddenly a beeping sound overwhelmed the connection. “Tibby?”

  Beep beep. Beeeeeep.

  “Hello?”

  “Sounds like a modem.” Tibby had to shout over the noise. “It must be from your end.”

  Carmen hung up the phone and went into the den. Sure enough, Valia had moved from the TV to the desk and was steering the computer’s mouse like a race car. Carmen watched in surprise as Valia expertly negotiated her way through a series of menus into a rapid instant messaging conversation. Presumably with somebody in Greece, considering that Carmen couldn’t read a single letter. She was used to the look of the Greek letters from all her years in the Kaligaris household, but she couldn’t tell you what sounds any of them made.

  Carmen was supposed to help Valia with her correspondence? And here she had been picturing crumply airmail paper and blue envelopes.

  “Vhat?” Valia turned around somewhat belligerently, obviously feeling Carmen’s eyes on the back of her uncoiffed head.

  “Nothing. Wow. You really know wha
t you’re doing.” Carmen decided to be mature and not mention how Valia was hogging up the phone line when she really wanted to talk to Tibby.

  Instead, she sat down in one of the comfortable TV chairs, mindlessly picked up the remote, and started flipping channels. Brawn and Beauty would be starting in seven minutes. She settled back into the chair, resting her heavy head. How bad could it be, spending the summer watching her favorite soap and getting paid while Valia burned up the lines IMing her Greek friends?

  “Not that channel.” Valia had turned from the computer, her hands still poised over the keyboard.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I like channel seven. The Vorld Apart.”

  “But you’re not even watching. You’re on the computer.” Carmen could hear her own voice rising.

  “I like to listen,” Valia proclaimed.

  “But I like to watch,” Carmen said tartly.

  “Who’s the vun getting paid?”

  Ouch. Carmen felt as though Valia had bit her. She felt the flush rising in her cheeks. “Well, could you get off the computer, then? You’re hogging up the phone line,” Carmen snapped in a manner that was not very mature.

  Tibberon: How’s it going with the ancient Greek?

  Carmabelle: Ahem. Not bad. Not not bad. Not good. If you see what I mean.

  “Just tell me every, every single thing. After that you can drink your smoothie.”

  Tibby felt her heart rising again. Carmen’s enthusiasm was everything she could wish for. She shook her clear plastic cup of frothy pink smoothie so it wouldn’t separate.

  “Well, first we danced to that—”

  Carmen was waving her hands around. “No, no. Back up. I want the beginning. I want to hear the whole thing, soup to nuts.”

  Tibby smiled in spite of herself. She liked sitting outside under the umbrella at the smoothie place on Old Georgetown Road, feeling the sun bake her calves. She crossed her legs and let her green plastic flip-flop drop onto the hot sidewalk. Truth was, she wanted to tell the whole thing, soup to nuts. It made it real again. “Okay. So back up to my house. Doorbell rings. Katherine opens the door. He’s wearing the suit jacket and tie—kind of short in the arms and obviously cheap, but so, so, so, so cute. And he has—” Tibby wished her face weren’t turning pink, but she couldn’t help it. “A bunch of flowers. Dyed pink carnations, fairly hideous. You know, like flowers only a boy would buy, but totally perfect.” Tibby needed to stop and breathe or she was going to pass out.

  At that moment her cell phone rang faintly from the lower reaches of her straw bag. She pulled it out and squinted to see the number. It was her mother’s cell phone.

  “Hello?”

  Nobody was there at first. She heard background noise. And then she heard her mother saying something to someone else. She sounded strange.

  “Hello?”

  “Tibby?” Her voice was ragged.

  “Are you okay?”

  Her mother was crying.

  “Mom, are you okay? What’s going on?” Tibby felt a frigid load of adrenaline hit her bloodstream.

  “Honey, Dad and I—” Alice broke off. Her crying was too thick to make words. She could hear her father’s voice in the background, shouting.

  Tibby stood up, jamming her foot back into her shoe. “Mom, please tell me what’s going on? You’re scaring me.”

  Her mom took a few seconds to get her breath. Tibby had never heard her sound like this before. It set her mind swirling and leaping spasmodically with fearful possibilities. She paced around the table.

  What? Carmen was mouthing urgently.

  “We’re at the hospital. Katherine is hurt.” Alice paused to gain control of her breaking voice again. “She fell out the window.”

  Tibby couldn’t move or think. Waves of cold rolled through her body. Hot hysteria began to brew under her ribs. “Is. She. Okay?”

  “She’s conscious, she’s—” Her mother’s sobs took on a more hopeful tone. “That’s a good sign.”

  “Should I come?” Tibby asked.

  “No. Please go home and look after Nicky, okay?”

  “Yes. I’ll go.” Tibby was crying now. Carmen’s eyes were tearing and she didn’t even know what had happened.

  Tibby needed to ask a question that summed up her dread. But she was afraid, so she waited until the connection was dead.

  “Which window?”

  Lena sat on the back steps of the restaurant during her break. Inside was hot, outside was hot. She was sticky, and her apron was spattered with tomato sauce. It looked vaguely gory. Like maybe a customer had made one nasty comment too many.

  She hated this job. She hated the careless food, all hurried and overcooked in vats. She hated the constant pressure to turn tables over. She hated the green vinyl booths and the way the coffee cups rattled in their saucers, filling the saucers with hot coffee, which she inevitably spilled on her apron. She felt embarrassed by the lame painting of the Parthenon frieze that stretched across an entire wall of the dining room. She hated the fake windows and the fake ivy. She was bothered by the fact that her manager, Antonis, the one with the fuzzy gray hair spilling out of his ears, still thought she spoke Greek in spite of several one-sided conversations.

  She would happily sit out here in the back alley and smell the garbage if it meant not being in there. She needed time by herself. She was constantly being talked at, complained to, harassed. Even the polite customers were always waving her down, catching her eye, needing her to bring one more thing.

  Some people liked being in communication with other people all day long, but Lena was not one of them. Looking back on the relative peace of Basia’s clothing store the summer before made it seem like a dream job.

  Her father had pressed hard for the restaurant job. He had personally recommended her to the owner of the Elite. It was what his parents had done back in Greece. It was the life he had grown up in. Since his own father’s death less than a year before, these things had become more important to him.

  For most of his life her dad had rebelled against Bapi and against his upbringing. He had eschewed the restaurant business in favor of law school. He had changed his name from Georgos to George. He made a point of being American, not even teaching his daughters to speak Greek. It seemed sad to Lena that he had waited until his father was dead to start caring about the stuff his father had always wanted him to care about.

  “The restaurant business is very practical,” her dad had told her on several occasions, implying that being an artist was not very practical. “It’s a good business,” he’d say, and she was sure it was a good business. For somebody else. She sort of wondered whether he’d ever stopped and considered who she was. Did he really imagine she was going to start a restaurant in the proud Kaligaris tradition? Could he not see how wrong it was for her?

  It had been four days since the disaster in her drawing class. She hadn’t been back and she was missing it terribly. She could stand this job if she had her drawing to look forward to. She could tolerate Valia’s loud misery and her parents’ tension at home if she could draw. But without it, she felt like she was sinking.

  She could take some other class maybe. There were still openings in metalworking and mixed media and something called Gender Issues in Three-Dimensional Representation, but she knew in her heart she wasn’t going to be that kind of artist. Her love of art wasn’t particularly philosophical or political. She wasn’t an avant-gardist or a rule breaker. She wanted to learn to draw and paint people like Annik could.

  Back in April she’d visited Capitol Street to pick up an application for summer classes. There were lots of showy, strange pieces in the gallery when you first walked in, but they didn’t mean much to Lena. Then, just as you turned the corner to the office, there was a quiet, simply framed drawing on the wall. It was a figure drawing of a young woman holding her hair back with one hand. It was quiet, but so beautiful it made Lena’s throat ache. It gave her chills from her scalp down to the balls of her f
eet. The drawing not only exhibited technical mastery and intricate detail, but it contained so much grace, so much feeling, it made Lena know what she wanted to achieve in her life.

  Lena had squinted down at the messy signature and then compared it to every teacher’s name in the brochure. Annik Marchand. Lena walked into the office of the art school with uncharacteristic boldness and signed up for Annik Marchand’s figure drawing class on the spot. For that drawing alone, she loved Annik before she’d even met her.

  “Break it down,” Antonis called at three-thirty, indicating the end of the lunch shift. Lena put chairs on tables so the busboys could mop the floor. Then she faced the unhappy prospect of going home. She cared deeply for Valia. That’s partially why Valia’s surliness made Lena so sad.

  Instead of taking the bus north, Lena took it south. She got off and walked a block to the Capitol Street School of Art and Design. She didn’t intend to go back to class, exactly. She just wanted to stop by and say something to Annik.

  The class was just setting up. Even the look and smell of the studio raised Lena’s mood. Annik turned, and when she saw it was Lena, she rolled over in her wheelchair. She looked happy and a little surprised.

  “Nice to see you,” she said.

  “I’m not here to draw,” Lena said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well…the whole thing with my dad.” She waved her arm in the direction of Andrew. “My dad’s pretty tough when he makes a decision. He already got most of his money refunded.” Lena glanced down at her fingers, her nails bitten short. “I really just came by to say thanks.”

  “For what?” Annik asked.

  “For your teaching. I wasn’t here long, but it’s a great class.”

  Annik sighed. “Listen, I’ve got to help set up. Why don’t you stay for a few minutes—until the first break? You’re welcome to draw if you want. I’ve got extra pads and charcoal. Or you can do whatever. Then we’ll have a chance to talk for a minute.”