Sisterhood Everlasting

“For me. Hold on.” She slowed down, taking in each of the parts, and Tibby’s scribbled message at the bottom. “Oh, my God. She bought each of us a ticket to Greece. She planned a trip for us.” Bridget felt tears fill her eyes and bend the words on the paper. “Can you believe that?”

  “Wow. That’s a big deal. To Lena’s family’s place? When?”

  “Twenty-eighth of October. I can’t believe this.” She felt herself bouncing on her feet.

  “For how long?”

  “Just about a week. I guess it’s a reunion.”

  Eric saw her tears and her uncensored joy. “That’s great, Bee. I’m happy for you. I’ll miss you, but I’m happy.”

  She nodded. God, how unexpected this was. The answer to a wish she hadn’t let herself articulate in a long time. “I think this is what we really, really need.”

  Suddenly her legs took root,

  and her arms grew into

  long and slender branches.

  Apollo reached the laurel tree,

  and,

  still enamored with Daphne,

  held the tree in

  a special place in his heart.

  —Encyclopedia Mythica

  On Friday night, after she finished work, Carmen went directly to the SoHo Grand to meet her father. It was a forbidding lobby, all right angles, muted surfaces, and minimal cheer. She was a successful actress in New York with a big loft in Nolita, a closetful of enviable clothes, a boyfriend—make that fiancé—who was a network executive. This was her world, and even she felt constrained by the coolness.

  “Albert Lowell,” she said to the brittle, long-nailed woman at the front desk. “Can you tell him Carmen is here?”

  The woman conducted her brief conversation with Carmen’s father in hushed, proprietary tones, as if he belonged to her and not Carmen.

  “He’ll be down,” the woman informed her.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  She settled into a chair with a view of the elevators. She quickly checked her three different email accounts on her phone.

  She realized she had an idea of the man who would emerge from the elevator, and though the one who appeared in the blue Izod shirt was certainly recognizable, it wasn’t him. Her father was tall, and this person was sort of bent over. Her dad had light brown hair, whereas this man was mostly gray. Her father was confident, where this man looked slightly bewildered. When her dad was in her apartment, she didn’t need to see these things. Leave it to an elevator in the SoHo Grand to make you change everything you thought.

  She stood. “Hi, Dad.”

  He came over to hug her. “Hi, bun.”

  She held on to him for longer than usual. She felt sad. “How’s the room?” she asked when she let him go.

  “Great. Great. It’s got everything. In the minibar there are these fantastic nuts. Kind of spicy nuts.”

  She was glad Jones wasn’t there to hear her father talk so eagerly about the nuts. Her dad seemed sophisticated to her in places other than here. And then she wondered why she let Jones judge her dad when Jones wasn’t even around.

  But it wasn’t Jones, really; it was her, wasn’t it? She could blame Jones because she didn’t want to be the one questioning or judging her dad. She preferred to stay innocent.

  “That’s great,” she said. “So do you want to go somewhere and get a cup of tea? Or a drink? Or we could just sit here in the bar. Jones is meeting us at eight at a restaurant on Bond Street.”

  “Is that nearby?”

  “Pretty near, yeah. Maybe a ten-minute walk.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I know a place around the corner. Let’s go there.” She didn’t like what the SoHo Grand was doing to either of them.

  She realized as they crossed the lobby that her dad was wearing jeans. He almost never wore jeans. It broke her heart to think of him choosing his outfit, thinking this would be good for the chic hotel in SoHo.

  They settled into an Irish bar on Grand Street. She waited for her dad to grow back into himself.

  He ordered a whiskey sour, which came with a maraschino cherry, and she ordered a glass of white wine. She still felt a little weird ordering a drink in front of him.

  “How’s Paul?” she asked. She actually knew how Paul was, because she exchanged emails with him almost every week, but Paul was such a hero to them all he seemed like a safe subject to talk about.

  “It’s good to have him back from Afghanistan. He’s doing well. He always asks about you. What a life, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Carmen said. She thought of Paul as her stepbrother, but was he still her stepbrother, since his mom had died? He was the only one in the family Jones hadn’t met yet.

  “He sent me a video of F16s taking off from the aircraft carrier. One of them was his. Pretty incredible.”

  In the old days, Carmen might have felt threatened by her father’s obvious pride, but a year and a half ago Lydia had died of breast cancer and all she felt was sad. And anyway, Carmen was an actress on TV. She knew her dad was proud of her too.

  “How’s Krista?”

  This was a little more complicated, and her dad was smart enough to know it. Krista, Lydia’s daughter, was the one whose house he went to for dinner every Sunday night. “Good. The baby is … almost one, I guess.”

  “Is that Tommy?”

  “No, I think the middle one is Tommy.”

  She wasn’t sure whether this confusion was for her benefit. “The baby is … Joey?”

  “Yes. And the oldest is … he’s gotta be five.”

  “Jack.”

  “Right, Jack.”

  Krista was younger than Carmen, and yet she’d already managed to produce three children. Sometimes that seemed kind of thrilling to Carmen and other times grotesque. But it was good, really, that Krista was stocking the family with grandchildren, because Jones was adamant about not having any.

  “Have you babysat recently?” He and Lydia used to do it together every Friday night, and now he sometimes volunteered to go it alone. He was brave that way.

  He nodded and raised his eyebrows high. “There’s a handful for you.”

  Carmen nodded too. She was glad Krista was still in Charleston, living in a house with a proper dining room just a few miles away, giving her father grandchildren and keeping an eye on him. Carmen was grateful for that. Whatever else she might feel, gratitude was the main thing.

  There was pathos in the way it all fit together. When Carmen was growing up, her dad had been more of an idea than a father to her. Now she was more of an idea than a daughter to him.

  “How’s your mom?”

  Her dad always felt the need to ask that question at some point. It used to seem dutiful, but now it had a different cast.

  It was amazing, the reversals you could see if you only kept track. It used to be that her dad was in the middle of a happy marriage and a boisterous family and her mom was single and uncertain. It had been her mom who would ask in that wistful way, “How’s your dad?” Now her mother was happily married to a successful lawyer, living in a big fancy house in Chevy Chase with Carmen’s eleven-year-old half brother, Ryan, and her dad’s face was the one that betrayed longing when he asked about her.

  “So, I have something exciting to tell you,” Carmen announced. She couldn’t hold it in any longer. Her father, of all people, was the right person for this news.

  “What?”

  “Tibby sent me a plane ticket yesterday. To Greece. To Santorini.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “Santorini? Where Lena’s grandparents lived? Where you all went when you were in college?”

  “Yes, exactly.” Her dad was always good for remembering the facts. “She sent tickets to Lena and Bee too. We’re going to have a reunion.” She felt the tears spring to her eyes as she said it. Nobody could want this, need this, more than she did. She hadn’t known how much until it was presented to her, and now she felt she would perish without it.

  “That’s wonderful news.” Her d
ad was nodding. “Tibby must be doing well for herself.”

  “I think Brian’s doing well for the two of them. That’s the impression I get. He’s got his software company going. He’s kind of a genius.”

  “Well, good for them. When do you go?”

  “October twenty-eighth,” she said, savoring the date. “I’m so excited we’ll be back together.” She breathed in the bar smells and felt the white wine melting all that was left of her reserve. “I really cannot wait.”

  Her dad took a sip of his whiskey sour and gazed at her thoughtfully. “I picture you four girls back when you were small. I hardly knew where you ended and the other ones started.”

  Carmen nodded. “Me either.”

  For the last four years, Lena had sharpened her Greek by means of weekly hour-long conversations with Eudoxia. She had first been referred to Eudoxia through her online Greek course, and had paid sixteen dollars to talk to her for an hour on the phone. Lena could have easily talked to any number of people fluent in Greek, including her parents, but they all had in common that they knew her, and when they were talking they wanted to talk about her. Eudoxia had the benefit of being a stranger at first, and somewhat old and hard of hearing and kind of loopy.

  After the first year, Eudoxia had advised that they move their conversations from the telephone to the (Greek) coffee shop equidistant from their two apartments. Initially Lena had paid the sixteen dollars plus the price of coffee and the occasional pastry, but about a year in, Eudoxia started refusing her money. And for the past year Eudoxia had insisted on picking up the tab every week because her husband, a police officer, had retired with his full pension and gotten a job as a security guard at a shoe store. Lena had offered to help Eudoxia practice her English part of the time to make things fair, but Eudoxia wouldn’t hear of it.

  Wednesday at four o’clock, Lena walked into the coffee shop as she always did and spotted Eudoxia, perched in their regular booth. No matter how early Lena got there, Eudoxia always got there first. Eudoxia jumped up and hugged Lena. She was fat and soft and droopy where Lena was tucked in tight.

  “You are excited about something,” Eudoxia declared in Greek.

  Lena kissed her cheek and replied in Greek. “How do you know everything?”

  The waitress appeared, another Greek transplant with dark teased hair. Lena saw her more often than she saw her dearest friends. “Just coffee for me today,” Lena said in Greek, exactly the way Eudoxia always said it. Lena was a fairly gifted and subtle mimic. She was so used to copying Eudoxia’s expressions and rhythms that she had begun to suspect she spoke Greek like a sixty-four-year-old lady from Salonika.

  After Lena got her coffee she unleashed the big news. “I am going to Greece.”

  Eudoxia bowed her head and whacked her palm on the table, as she did when she was excited. When she lifted her head her curly hair was still bouncing and the coffee cups were still quivering in their saucers. “That is wonderful. When?”

  “Twenty-eighth of October. Tibby planned it. She bought the tickets for all four of us so we could be together.”

  “Tibby?” Eudoxia knew about all of them. She talked about Lena’s friends as though they were hers.

  “Yes, Tibby.”

  Lena secured her cup while Eudoxia whacked the table again. “In Greece! How wonderful. How wonderful.”

  “I can’t quite believe it.”

  “Nor can I.”

  “I didn’t know if I should accept. It’s a lot of money and everything. But I emailed Tibby and she said I had to. She said I was doing my part offering the house.”

  “You’ll all stay in your grandparents’ house in Oia?”

  “Yes. It’s still empty. My father keeps pledging to go over there and sell it, but he hasn’t found the time. And with the economic climate over there the way it is …”

  “Maybe he likes to keep it.”

  “No, I think he likes to sell it. You should hear him complain about the taxes and the upkeep.” Lena touched her saucer and considered for a moment. “But I don’t think he wants to have to confront all their old stuff and not know what to do with it. He hates not knowing what to do.”

  “That will fall to you, then.”

  Lena nodded. “Maybe so.”

  One of the good things about Eudoxia was that her life overlapped with Lena’s in no way other than these lessons. She was like a therapist or a bartender. Lena got to represent her world exactly the way she chose without needing to balance it for fairness or fearing that her words would make their way around in some distorted or uncomfortable way.

  Eudoxia sipped her coffee. Her face was thoughtful.

  “Has something happened to Tibby?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You haven’t seen her. You barely talk to her. You say it wasn’t always like this. Why do you think she has planned this?”

  Lena prodded her backpack under the table with the toe of her boot. “I think she just misses us and wants to be together.”

  “You think that’s all it is?”

  “What else could it be?”

  “I don’t know her. I couldn’t guess,” Eudoxia said honestly. She called the waitress over and ordered a cheese Danish with her customary look of relief and surrender. When it arrived she cut it into careful shapes with her knife. “Maybe you will see your young man there,” she said with a note of mischief.

  Eudoxia always referred to Kostos as “your young man.” Drew she referred to as “the sandwich maker.”

  Lena was tempted to act like she didn’t know what Eudoxia was talking about, but she didn’t bother. “Probably not. Imagine how busy he is. He works in London now.”

  “He goes back and forth. That’s what he said in his letter.”

  Lena pressed her fingers to her warm face. It was her own fault. She’d spent a lot of hours stumbling around in Greek trying to describe that letter. In fact, her fervency had ushered in a series of conversational breakthroughs, and Eudoxia had noticed it. She started calling Lena “my Daphne,” and when Lena asked why, she said, “Don’t you read your myths?” After that she always liked getting Lena to talk about Kostos.

  As for the subject of Drew, it did not yield any breakthroughs.

  “You should write to him and tell him you are coming,” Eudoxia declared. “You could write it in Greek! I could help you! Wouldn’t that be a surprise?” She whacked her hand on the table again.

  Lena hesitated. She could imagine how many people from Kostos’s old life were clamoring for his attention. She didn’t want to do that to him.

  In the silence Eudoxia seemed to recognize this was not something she could reasonably hope for. “But promise me this, my Daphne,” she said, leaning forward. “Promise me that at least you will call him. You will call him before you leave that island.”

  Lena just laughed. Not bloody likely. “Maybe,” she said aloud in Greek. “You never know what will happen.”

  When you jump for joy,

  beware that no one moves the ground

  from beneath your feet.

  —Stanislaw J. Lec

  Carmen was a terrible one for bargaining with God. She knew it was wrong, but she found herself doing it anyway. When she was nine, the night before she was flying to Orlando for a holiday weekend in Disney World with Lena’s family, she flopped around in her bed for hours, so excited she couldn’t stand it. As the hours passed, excitement grew so big it transformed into terror that she would die before morning. Her desire turned monstrous, and she was suddenly sure it would swallow the happiest day of her life. She begged God to please just keep her alive through tomorrow, please, and then he could do whatever he wanted with her.

  Two decades had passed since then, yet she lay in her bed on the night of October 27 with the exact same feeling. She wriggled and turned and stuck various limbs outside the covers to cool down, asking God to please just look after her until she was reunited with her friends in Santorini the following day. If she could just get to
that, she would be happy. He could do whatever he wanted with her after that.

  What could she offer in return? She’d be a better person. She’d spend less money on shoes. She’d play in the network’s charity softball game. She’d mentor a high school student. She would call her father twice a week absolutely and without fail. She would read the editorial page of The New York Times every day. She would no longer search the Internet for cellulite photos of actresses who got the roles she was rejected for.

  Though Carmen felt foolish, she also felt lucky that she was bargaining with God, who was all-forgiving, as opposed to somebody who would surely come back to collect on her wager.

  Lena prided herself on her capability as an abstract thinker, but sometimes her brain was as concrete as a lizard’s. It took the actual sight of Bridget and Carmen, flesh and warmth and flying hair, racing toward her through the international terminal at JFK in New York City, to make her understand how terribly much she had missed them.

  Bridget reached her first and grabbed her without entirely braking. Lena felt herself pulled into the familiar momentum.

  Carmen in her tall cork sandals got there a few seconds after. She squeezed Lena’s forearm so hard it would make a bruise. She screamed so loudly in Lena’s ear she left it ringing. She stepped on Lena’s toes without thinking. Lena felt tears pricking in her eyes and she laughed. It was so good to feel these things, even the ones that stung.

  Bee made it a huddle. She tried to pick the two of them up off the ground, and Lena drew in the familiar stimuli: Bridget’s peppermint shampoo, the delicate sponge-cake texture of her skin against Lena’s cheek, Carmen’s grapefruit-scented hair junk and sticky lips. The smells on them were deeper, the colors brighter, than on other people.

  Lena liked them to stay the same, and they were awfully obliging about it. In recent years her joy at seeing them was always mixed with anxiety that there would be some telltale change. She wasn’t sure what it would be: a supercilious brow, the forgetting of some little ritual, a set of crow’s-feet, a this or a that, that would separate one of them from the rest, or from their bond or from their past.