“May I?” Krista asked, hesitating at the door.
A very polite drug addict.
“Of course. Come in.” Carmen waved her in the door. “You sleep okay?”
Krista nodded. “Thanks. Do you happen to know the time?” she asked.
Carmen turned to her clock radio. “Five thirty. My mom will be home in a little while.”
Krista nodded. She looked tentative in her postnap disorientation. “Do you think this will be okay with her?”
“‘This’ meaning you?”
Krista nodded. Her eyes got big the way they used to last summer whenever Carmen cursed.
“Yeah. Don’t worry.” Carmen led her into the kitchen and poured a glass of orange juice for each of them. “So … hey. Do you feel at all like maybe … calling your mom?”
“I’d rather not.” Krista shook her head. “She’ll be furious at me.”
“She’s probably long past furious. She’s probably really worried. You know what I mean? You could just tell her that you’re safe and everything.”
Krista looked partway convinced. Carmen remembered her being malleable. “Maybe I will … call her tomorrow?”
Carmen nodded. She could understand that. If you were going to make a stand, you had to hold out twenty-four hours, at least.
Krista drank her juice in silence for a while.
“So you and your mom had a big fight, huh?” Carmen asked, keeping her voice gentle.
Krista nodded. “We fight a lot lately. She says I’m rude. She hates everything I wear. She can’t stand it when I raise my voice.” Krista swiped a frazzled blond strand behind her ear. Carmen was amazed to hear the hard little fiber of anger in Krista’s voice. “She wants everything quiet and perfect in her house. I don’t feel like being quiet and perfect anymore.”
Carmen knew she had trailed poison through Lydia’s orderly little world last summer, but she hadn’t known Krista was eating it. “I don’t blame you,” Carmen said.
Krista touched the rim of her orange-juice glass. Clearly she longed to confide in Carmen. “If I act the way she wants me to act, I’m just invisible.” Her voice was plaintive. “If I act the way I want, she says I’m ruining her life.”
Krista appeared to be searching Carmen’s face for some kind of wisdom. “What would you do?”
Carmen considered this position of responsibility into which she had been thrust.
What would she do? What would she, Carmen, do?
Whine, resist, complain. Throw rocks through the window of her father and stepmother’s house. Run away like a coward. Torment her mother. Act like a selfish brat. Destroy Christina’s happiness.
Carmen opened her mouth to try to give some advice. She closed it again.
There was a word for this. It started with an h. It not only indicated you were a horrible waste of a person but also somehow seemed to indicate that you were fat.
What was it?
Oh, yeah. Hypocrite.
Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.
—Charlie Brown
Tibby laid the stack of CDs on the counter. “It wasn’t any of these,” she said. “The one I’m looking for, it wasn’t just piano. It had other instruments too.”
The man nodded. He was in his forties, she guessed. He wore Hush Puppies on his feet and had the haircut of a person who didn’t care about his hair.
“Piano and other instruments?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“It was a concerto.”
Tibby’s eyes lit up. “Yes. I think you’re right.”
“You’re sure it’s Beethoven.”
“I think so.”
“You think so.” He looked as though he needed a cup of coffee.
“Pretty much totally sure,” she added quickly.
“Okay, well, if it’s Beethoven, there are five of them. Probably the best known is the Emperor Concerto,” he explained patiently.
Tibby was grateful. This man had already spent a good deal of time on her problem. Luckily there wasn’t much doing in the classical section at ten forty-five in the morning.
“Can I listen to it?”
“I have a listening copy of it here somewhere. It might take me a few minutes to find. Do you want to come back later?” He looked hopeful.
She didn’t want to come back. She needed it now. “Can I wait? I really, really need it.” She had nine days and so, so much work to do.
She watched him search too slowly. “Can I help you look?”
Reluctantly he allowed her to come behind the counter and search through a box.
“Here,” he said at last, triumphantly holding up a CD.
“Yay!” she called. She grabbed it and hurried over to the listening place.
She knew after just a few seconds. “This is it!” she practically shouted at him.
“All right!” he said, nearly as excited as she was.
She honestly felt like hugging him. “Thank you. Thank you so, so much.”
“You’re welcome,” he said happily. “It’s rare I have an emergency in this job.”
Back in her dorm room, she faced the computer. In one hand was the DVD with all the precious video she had copied from her equipment at home. In the other was the Emperor piano concerto.
She stuck the CD in the slot and stared at the blank screen. She let it play over and around her. She didn’t move. She couldn’t do it yet. She put her hand on the DVD and took it away again.
This was hard. She hadn’t looked at any of it since last summer. She wasn’t ready, she had told herself. But maybe she would never be ready. Maybe she just had to make herself do it.
She took the DVD out of its plastic case. She put it down on her desk. The music swooped and soared. Her heart was beating fast.
There was a knock on her door. Her head snapped up. She turned the music down. She cleared her throat. “Hello?” It came out rusty.
The door pushed open. It was Alex.
“Hey,” he said. His face was more tentative than usual. “You’re back. Where’ve you been?”
She kicked the wall under her desk. “I just had to go home for a while and take care of a couple things.”
He nodded. He gestured toward her computer. “You working on the movie?”
She considered him. “Not the one you’re thinking of. Not the one about my mom.”
“No?”
“I’m not doing it anymore.” She had wanted to throw the movie down the sewer, but she had forced herself to keep it around as punishment.
“What are you going to do for your term project?”
“I’m doing a new movie.”
“You’re starting a new one? Now?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh. You think you can do it in a few days?”
“I hope so.”
He acted so aloof all the time, but he obviously took this pretty seriously. She was beginning to see how it was with him. He could mock and smirk all he liked, but he also wanted to get into Brown. He was a fake risk-taker, a phony rebel. It took one to know one.
“What’s it about?”
She looked protectively at her DVD. She couldn’t let Alex into this. This was a lot harder and more dangerous than taking cheap, nasty shots at her mother.
“I don’t even know yet.”
She turned back to her desk. He turned to leave.
“What are you listening to?”
For a moment she seriously considered disavowing the music she had spent more than an hour trying to find. Pretending she had tuned the radio to the wrong station.
“It’s Beethoven,” she said instead. “It’s called the Emperor Concerto.”
He looked at her a little strangely. He turned to go again. Her heart was beating fast. “Hey, Alex?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“You know that guy Brian? Who didn’t like my movie?”
Alex nodded.
“He’s one of my best friends in the world. He
practically lives at my house.”
Alex looked confused. And then uncomfortable. “You might have mentioned that before,” he said stiffly.
Tibby nodded. “Yeah, I should have.” A reckless impulse was crawling up her ribs as if they were a ladder, making its way toward her mouth. “And you know what else?”
He shook his head very slightly. He didn’t want to know what else.
“That movie I made was awful. It was mean and shallow and stupid.”
Alex wanted to leave her room. He wasn’t the kind of person who tolerated confrontations well.
“And you know what else?”
He walked toward the door. He thought she was insane.
“Vanessa the RA is more of an artist than Maura or you or I will ever be!” she shouted after him. She wasn’t sure if he heard that last bit, and she didn’t care. She wasn’t saying it for his benefit anyway.
Lena walked around feeling as though she’d stuck her finger in an electrical socket and left it there. She experienced continual shivers and jolts, followed by the sensation that her entire body was encased in dryer lint. He was here. He was here! What if she never saw him again?
At breakfast she’d been so preoccupied she’d buttered her mother’s toast, forgetting the cold war they’d been having since she’d discovered Eugene.
At work her eyes were constantly darting to look out the window. Kostos was staying nearby. He could walk by anytime. The entire Washington, D.C., metropolitan area was a potential meeting place. Maybe she would see him in the next five minutes. Maybe she would never see him again. She was desperately afraid of both possibilities at the same time.
She walked all the way home from work in a near trance, imagining that every bus that passed contained Kostos looking out the window at her.
When she walked in the door at home, she felt that something was strange. Effie was setting the table. Effie was setting too many places at the table.
When Effie saw Lena she nearly exploded. “Kostos is coming over for dinner,” she erupted breathlessly.
Shivers, jolts, and dryer lint. Lena put her hand to her head. It felt as if it didn’t balance on her neck anymore. “What?”
“Yeah. Mom invited him.”
“How? Why?”
“She talked to Mrs. Sirtis. Mrs. Sirtis told her Kostos was in town. Mom couldn’t believe we didn’t know and we hadn’t invited him, seeing as he’s practically family, practically Valia and Bapi’s grandson.”
Lena stood there blinking. She had been bypassed. She was not important to anyone. Kostos was everyone’s friend but hers.
Lena was not only mad and jealous of Kostos’s new girlfriend, Lena was also mad at everyone in the Kaligaris family, and all the Sirtises as well, even the ones she’d never met.
“Do you think Mom is trying to torture me?” Lena asked.
“Honestly? I don’t even think she thought about you.”
Okay. That didn’t help.
Effie observed the stricken look on Lena’s face. “I mean, she knows you and Kostos liked each other last summer. She knows you wrote some letters. She probably figures you lost track of each other. Have you ever talked to her about it?”
“No.”
“So there you go,” Effie said.
Lena fumed. Since when did you have to tell your mother everything for her to know?
“When’s he coming?” Lena asked.
“Seven thirty,” Effie said sympathetically. She felt sorry for Lena.
Lena felt sorry for herself that her younger sister felt sorry for her. She looked at her watch. She had fifty minutes. She would go up to her room and take a shower and get dressed, and when she came down she would be a different person.
Alternatively, she would lie down in her bed and fall asleep till morning and probably no one would even notice.
Carmen couldn’t help feeling sad when she saw her mother in the door later that evening. She was a post-pumpkin Cinderella. The magic was gone. Three weeks ago Christina had stood in the same doorway wearing the Traveling Pants. Back on that night she had towered and shone like a woman who was loved.
Tonight she looked distinctly underloved. She wore her hair and her shoes and her expression for no one. Her whole body seemed angled toward the floor.
“Hi, Mama,” Carmen said, coming out of the kitchen with Krista behind her. She gestured to Krista. With her eyeliner smudged from sleep, Krista looked even more peculiar. “This is Krista. She is actually, uh, kind of Dad’s stepdaughter.” Carmen tried to keep it light.
Christina raised her head and blinked. A few weeks ago she’d been too happy to be fazed by anything. Now she was too unhappy. She nodded. “Hi, Krista.” She saved her look of extreme confusion for Carmen.
“Krista is, um, taking a little break from home, and we were hoping she could stay here for a couple days.” She shot her mom a look that said she knew it was weird and could they discuss it later. She pointed to the messy bed that had already transformed the small living room. “You know, on the couch?”
“Well, I guess that would be all right.” Christina’s bafflement didn’t appear to harden into judgment of any sort. “If it’s all right with her mom.”
“Thank you,” Krista murmured. “Thank you so much, Mrs….” She trailed off. She looked somewhat desperately to Carmen for help.
“Mrs. Lowell,” Mrs. Lowell supplied.
The awkwardness was at last dawning on Krista. Her mother was also Mrs. Lowell. Krista’s entire upper body, from shoulders to scalp, turned pink. “Sorry.”
Dinner was one of the least comfortable meals Carmen could remember. Krista tried politely to make pleasant conversation, but all roads led to Al. Christina was a good sport about it, but it was obvious she just wanted to go to bed.
“Do you want to go out for ice cream?” Carmen asked her mom as they cleaned up. “We were thinking of going to Häagen-Dazs.”
Christina sighed. “You two go. I’m exhausted.” She almost looked apologetic, which made Carmen feel horrible. Christina hadn’t left the house for days except to go to work. But she wasn’t mad at Carmen. She was just sad. She had surrendered to her fate. It was as if she had no business being happy.
Why did you let me ruin everything? Carmen found herself wanting to ask her mother. She had the perverse wish that the ugly consequences of her tirades would magically dissolve within a few hours. She wished her victims would just snap right back like cartoon characters after they got their heads flattened by a frying pan. Instead, the wreckage lived on, far longer than her anger.
Krista was looking for something in her duffel bag. She walked to the door in a pair of blue plastic slides exactly like a pair sitting in Carmen’s closet. Krista looked eagerly at Carmen. The tips of her ears stuck through her sad, wrinkly hair. Carmen felt like an agent of destruction.
Why do you want to be like me? Carmen found herself wanting to ask Krista.
Carmen had always wanted to be important. But she didn’t want to be this important.
Lena was clean. Her hair was washed. She smelled fine.
When Kostos walked in the door she tried to keep her head from falling off.
She watched him, as though in a dream, as he greeted her father. She watched him kiss her mother on both cheeks. She watched him hug Effie. She watched him not hug her but shake her hand instead. As he was shaking it, she felt that her hand was several hundred degrees below zero.
She watched him speak Greek to her parents, maybe even tell a joke, because her parents both laughed and beamed at him like he was a superhero and a comedian all rolled into one.
Lena wished she could speak Greek. She suddenly felt like a dolphin that couldn’t swim.
They sat in the living room. Her dad offered him wine. Kostos was a man, practically. He was dazzling. He was a parent’s dream.
Lena’s dad offered her apple juice. She felt like a scrawny fifth grader in comparison. As if she hadn’t even hit puberty. It was a good thing she’d broken up w
ith Kostos, because she’d saved herself the misery of discovering that she wasn’t nearly good enough for him. Well, actually, she hadn’t saved herself that misery, had she?
Lena tried to remember things to like about herself. She tried to remember reasons why Kostos might have liked her. She couldn’t think of one. Maybe she should just go upstairs.
At dinner, Lena sat next to him.
He told a funny story about Bapi Kaligaris, when Grandma had tried to get him to wear new eelskin shoes in favor of his preferred white ones. “This are good, honest shoes!” Kostos bellowed in a perfect imitation of Bapi. “Are you trying to turn me into a dandy?” Lena’s father looked so joyful and homesick Lena half expected him to burst into tears.
Kostos was everything she remembered him to be. Why had she had so little faith in him? So little faith in her memory? Why had she been so impatient?
When Lena was eating her lamb chop, she felt a shoe brush against the sole of her bare foot. She nearly choked on her food. A tingle ran right up her leg and out the top of her scalp. Her entire body was on alert. Every nerve ending was reporting to her brain in one tangled traffic jam.
Had he meant to do that? Her heart roared along. Could he be trying to tell her something? To send a tiny message?
She didn’t dare turn her head to look at him. She couldn’t even make herself finish chewing the bite in her mouth. Did he know she was feeling hopeless? Did he want to give her one small pinprick of hope?
You broke up with him, the Carmen-Effie-Bee combo pointed out once again.
But I didn’t stop loving him!
Okay.
It was out. At last it had been acknowledged. She’d finally chosen, and she’d chosen B. She resumed chewing. She did love him. She loved him, and he didn’t love her anymore. That was the hard, cold truth. She would have relocated to Alaska to avoid admitting that, but now it was out. It was done. It was horrible, but it felt better to be honest.
The nerves in the sole of her foot reached out to him. The slightest touch would mean the earth to her. It came. The gentlest graze. She looked down.
It wasn’t Kostos’s foot. It was Effie’s.
Second Summer of the Sisterhood Page 16