When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

  “Edith wants you to meet with her in a couple days. She had to go out of town briefly, but in the meantime, you can start to prep like the commission is yours. I really think she’ll give it to you. Kat will shoot you details of the meeting. Are you in?”

  “I’ll be there. Wow. Really appreciate it, Lil.”

  “Of course. See you tomorrow to shower you, big sis!”

  Oh God, her bridal shower. Organized by her mother. And Joey still hadn’t even told Grant about Leo. Suddenly she longed for a Rip Van Winkle amount of sleep.

  “And Joey, if you need help picking out something stylish to wear, I’m here!”

  “Thanks, Lily, I’m stylish on my own,” Joey said, bristling, that tiny barb burrowing into her skin. She and Lily were close. Close-ish. As close as you could be, really, to a sibling sixteen years your junior. But sometimes Joey felt like they were competing for their parents’ attention and love and like Lily came out ahead, especially since Joey had left law, her high-flying career of which her father had been uber-proud. Maybe all siblings experienced it, a standard jostle for their fair-share slice of the pie. Or maybe Joey was a bit jealous of her little sister’s wild success, like everyone presumed.

  Joey set down her phone. Evil eyes? It was like Lily had a spy camera on her. Twenty thousand dollars? Vogue? Holy shit. But how was she supposed to paint some epic wall with her wedding in eleven days and Leo the Minefield now traipsing around town?

  She needed to tell Grant. That was the critical thing. She tried to rouse the will, to box herself into the task by calling him. He’d be out of surgery by now, eating a Tupperware of egg salad with that Paleo mayonnaise he bought in bulk. He’d be spent, but his voice would be light at the sound of hers.

  She should have told Grant about meeting Leo before she went to the beach. That was the part she was dreading. She was going to have to explain why she’d kept it secret when she’d had plenty of opportunities to share, to give him time to weigh in. And then of course there was another thing, Leo’s confession of love that Joey was certain he didn’t mean. He didn’t even know her now, besides. He knew a version of Joey that was long gone. Still, she was going to have to tell Grant about the love confession too.

  She couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t call him now. Not after the day she’d had.

  She considered the canvas again. The eyes flashing at her were intricate. Big. Larger than his real ones. Leo eyes with evil eye flair. Just the eyes had taken her weeks. The lids. The shadows. The crinkles. There was the outline of a face. Some lines of hair. The beginnings of an arm. The curve of a back. A smudge by an eye.

  Joey smiled at that smudge. She remembered it well.

  This was the one portrait Joey had ever begun that she’d liked. She loved the idea of a portrait, the turning of a person inside out. And she was good at certain frames: the backs of a mother and child walking away. A woman on a paddleboard with just her right cheek in the frame. But Joey wasn’t so good at portraits so exposed. Head-on. Her faces came out flat, her eyes uniformly vacant. No movement, Demetris had once agreed. No life. For some reason, this facial portrait was the sole interesting one that she’d ever produced.

  Correction. That she’d begun.

  Because in the midst of birthing it, she’d traded art for law. And when she’d returned to her old friend a year and a half back, it wasn’t with verve but with care. Like her art was something that could be shattered again.

  She would do evil eyes, she’d contracted with herself, but without faces attached. Evil eye walls. Those safe, distant portraits, yes. But now she’d violated the contract. The past couple of hours, she’d sat in front of this strange, unfinished, distorted Leo face. She’d sketched and remembered and considered. Her cheeks blazed.

  The same thought returned to plague her: I should change this to Grant. She flipped open her sketchbook and hashed out some ideas. She slashed a line at the jaw for him. Grant’s jaw was what people called chiseled.

  Joey’s pencil hovered over the page. Quickly, she flipped it so the point aimed up. She busied the eraser over the jawline, hating her relief as it reverted to Leo.

  Joey slammed her sketchbook shut. She eyed a pile of candy boxes. She could work on wedding stuff—the few items her mother had delegated. What she needed to do was dole Hot Tamales (Groom’s Favorite!) and Sour Patch Kids (Bride’s Favorite!) into welcome bags and affix the tags with calligraphy that had consumed hours in emails with an Etsy proprietress. Joey turned a Sour Patch box around in her hands, already tasting the salty sweet of a little bear on her tongue. Knowing how one bear would turn to one box, would turn to two, would turn to ten.

  No. No no no no.

  Joey knew she should feel her feelings—that was what she’d learned to do to defuse a binge. She bit her lip, reminded of that first binge, in the dark all alone after she was back at Penn and Leo and her grandfather were gone. But Joey didn’t want to feel her feelings now. What was she supposed to do, she wondered, when her feelings felt like they were killing her?

  Her heart beating fast, Joey stuffed the candy in a drawer and darted to her walk-in art closet. It was edged in cedar oak shelves, with special slots for canvases to rest, with thoughtful compartments for paints and pens. Joey had created the many canvases that now occupied the shelves for a show a couple of months before, but the gallery had backed out. She’d been devastated, her faith dampened that against all odds she’d make it as an artist.

  Joey plopped on the floor carpeted in a cream squiggle print. She ran her hand across an empty shelf, contented at the granulated wood dust that adhered to her fingertips. It smelled like her grandfather’s wooden shoe trees that she used to help him slip into his beautiful wing-tip shoes.

  His fine shoes now sat on her shelf. She liked to hold them from time to time, talk to them. Italian leather, he once told her proudly, when they snuck away from dinner. Joey didn’t think of her grandfather as an adult then. He was her buddy who led her to the back laundry room where his shoes lived. He showed her how to polish and buff them and insert the shoe trees. He only had one pair of special-occasion shoes. He didn’t need more than that, he explained. All his shirts went with black. If a shirt didn’t go with black, well, he wouldn’t buy it, simple as that.

  He was such a simple brick, her grandfather, such an unassuming Jenga piece. Joey shifted to a recline across the carpet, slipping a stray sweatshirt under her head. Her eyes felt like they had anchors attached to them, dragging them down. She reached for her grandfather’s shoe off the shelf and cradled it to her so the soft leather rested against her cheek. Then her eyes fluttered shut and sleep finally came.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sarah

  Corfu

  1943

  They arrived in Lefkada as the sun dwindled, still bright enough to experience the assault of colors, places, and people. As Sarah was hugged by people of varying shapes and smells, she endured the panic telling her that something was very wrong. Her whole life she’d known the Jewish quarter of Corfu Town, and now here she was, smothered to the bosom of Milos’s mother, whose brass breastplate on her velvet outfit threatened to take out Sarah’s eye.

  “Oh, it’s so wonderful, just wonderful! Our new daughter.”

  “Efharisto,” Sarah said, thank you, thank you, thank you, to the myriad wishes of na zeesete. May the both of you live long.

  On their way from Corfu, she and Milos had decided to tell his parents they’d already married. His family would expect that cemented union to accept her into the fold, and Sarah had no intention of a real wedding until her parents came around. She was still convinced that eventually they’d soften to a marriage.

  Milos found her hand, and his squeeze administered a little balm to her wounds. He led Sarah to his house, a stone affair with citrus trees outside, a garden in the front, and the day’s thunderous sea in a wide sweep beyond. On the main floor, dust stormed them like a welcome party, and when it cleared, Sarah saw a brick fireplace, a scuffed
black piano, ramshackle furniture upholstered in a range of sun-beaten, primary-colored velvets, and books stacked floor-to-ceiling in the corner.

  “My father loves to read,” said Milos with evident pride. “He thinks I can be as good as Tennyson and Joyce, if I apply myself. I wonder if…I mean, do you think I can, Sarah?”

  Sarah heard the import of the question mark. It wasn’t soft and light, like requiring confirmation of something he already knew. No, Milos needed Sarah to inform him what he was capable of. He’d recited passages to her before, which she’d thought wonderful, albeit commentary drenched in bias. When you loved someone so newly and completely, it was quite impossible to conceive of a critique.

  “I know you can,” she said, and when Milos smiled, she was struck by her power, to make him and to break him. And if she wielded that power over him, then couldn’t it work vice versa?

  Sarah paused at a teetering pile of books, wishing Benjamin was there to delight in the bounty. She could just picture him, assuming the preparatory stance of an Olympian to conquer every last tome.

  “The attic is over here.” Milos led her away, and somewhat reluctantly, Sarah followed him up rickety stairs to the tiny alcove on the very top, large enough only for a bed made up in yellow linens, framed by an oval window onto a garden. Sarah sat on the bed, atop a creaky spring. They hadn’t been together yet, like a married couple should. Well, they weren’t married. And what did it even mean, to be together? She was supposed to have a mother and friends to help her decipher how these things were meant to proceed.

  Rachel. Sarah’s heart panged, thinking how she hadn’t even said goodbye to her best friend.

  “You can put your things in the dresser.” Milos opened a drawer, and a moth scattered out.

  “My things?” Sarah remembered her bag and peered inside it, suddenly eager for a memory of home. Slowly, she removed a pair of pajamas and then the fancy dress her father had made her for a cousin’s wedding. He hadn’t even protested when she’d selected the cobalt brocade fabric that cost more than her mother had said she could spend.

  “That’s all you brought?” Milos extended his hand for the dress. “Here, I’ll hang it.”

  But she couldn’t bear to part with it yet. “It all happened so fast. I…I didn’t—”

  “It’s okay, kardia mou.” Milos sat beside her and slipped an arm around her shoulder assuredly, as if her wardrobe was all that was plaguing her. “My mother will have something for you to wear, I’m sure. She said…”

  When he didn’t finish, Sarah said, “What?” She was alarmed, all of a sudden, that she’d made a negative impression on this woman who was about to exert significant influence upon her life.

  “Don’t worry! She said you are wonderful. Beautiful. Of course, she would like you to convert to the Orthodox religion.”

  “I won’t. We talked about this, and I—”

  “Don’t worry,” Milos soothed. “I told her that. But she did say you should wear the kerchief in your hair.”

  “Oh.” Sarah had noticed it, the women all bedecked in white headscarves.

  “If you are married and don’t wear it, it gives the wrong impression.”

  “Okay.” Sarah fixed her eyes on her nails to distract them from spilling tears. “Should we go down for dinner?”

  “Not yet. My mother knows we would like some time alone.”

  “Yes.” Well, it was to be understood. Milos was a man, and she was committed to him now. Sarah tried to psych herself up to the task. “How should we—”

  “No!” He laughed. “You think I’ve brought you up here to make mad, passionate love with you?”

  At his joking tone, Sarah’s chest heaved relief. “Are you telling me you didn’t?”

  “Sarah, we have our whole lives for that. This is a huge sacrifice you’ve made, to come live with me—”

  “Until my parents change their minds,” she reminded him.

  “Yes. Until then. I just want you to feel safe. All I want in the world is for you to feel happy and safe.”

  And when Milos put it that way, and wrapped his arms around her, and the sun wrestled from the clouds and warmed them through the window, Sarah found she could feel happy. In the interludes she didn’t fixate on what she’d left behind, she could feel quite happy, indeed.

  * * *

  And so Sarah’s life went from her parents and Benjamin and Rachel, and laundering and ironing for Yanni the widower, and the Evraiki and synagogue and Jews, to Milos and his parents and his colicky baby sister, and Sarah’s new job baking pastries in the shop of an old lady with a large mole on her chin who smelled like the cheese she produced—and no Jews. Sarah was the only one on the island.

  For those first months, she and Milos just slept side by side, sometimes hugging or touching hands or feet, but not fully conjoining. Sarah thought how interesting it was, how different she felt when her foot touched Milos’s foot versus Benjamin’s. Missing Benjamin always made her sad and sober then, and she would write her little brother long letters to which she hadn’t yet received a response. Milos would watch her rush to the post office and return empty-handed and dejected so he began leaving her notes. He left Sarah notes in her apron, notes in her shoe. He left her notes in the pocket of the dress his mother gifted her, a folksy affair that made Sarah feel perpetually in a Purim costume.

  I am so happy.

  The red of your hair is my favorite color that exists.

  I’m sorry you can’t have all of the people you love at the same time.

  It was the last note that did something to her, made Sarah attune outside of herself, to sweet Milos and how her despondence was hurting him. It was fall by then, the air cool and pine-scented, and Milos was out fishing. That evening when he returned, he undressed in the dark and slipped into bed. And this time Sarah turned to him.

  From then on, every evening they came together in a symphony. They clung to each other under the gnarled brown blanket with the moon unpeeling little slivers of their limbs for the glimpsing. They were drunk off their love. It was the happiest time of Sarah’s life.

  The happiest time of her life came to a swift end in September 1943. Sarah stood in the kitchen of the bake shop where she worked. She was pulling ladokouloura, olive oil cookies, from the oven when her favorite patron, Costas, swept inside, bringing with him a crisp fall gust. He requested his usual baklava, which was the bane of Sarah’s existence to produce. The phyllo dough required inordinate patience. It was prone to tearing and drying and mandated a quick assembly with the local thyme honey.

  But Sarah loved serving Costas so she excused him his vice. He was old, in his fifties, and he seemed to be a man who liked to talk and had few people with whom to do it. He reminded Sarah of her father a bit, with his expressive eyebrows, grand mustache, and white hair combed neatly to the side—except Costas was gentler and thus far had found no aspect of Sarah to critique. Well, easy to be gentle when you are not the father, perhaps, Sarah thought. She’d noticed herself becoming wiser since leaving Corfu and longed to present herself to her parents and say, Look Mama, Look Baba, I am a person you would be proud of.

  As Sarah served Costas baklava on a blue-flowered plate, he said, “Have you heard? The Italians are out. The Nazis got them. And the destruction is terrible, especially on Corfu. It’s such a shame. Such a crying shame.”

  Sarah’s body went rigid. Of course, they’d heard the bomber planes. They’d crouched under the table with their hands over their heads. But she didn’t know the Nazis had won. She’d thought the Italians strong, powerful, capable. But apparently they too had toppled like dominoes.

  “They’ve killed all the Italian soldiers. From the generals on down.”

  “All…all of them?” Sarah thought of the general she’d helped bargain in the market—how he’d given her strawberries to take home to her family.

  “Yes. The Nazis are here too, you know.”

  “Here?” Sarah whispered.

  “Yes, they’v
e got all our Ionian islands now.” Costas shook his head. Over the yammer of her heart, Sarah noticed how his hair should have moved but didn’t because it was so shellacked into place. “But their main objective is the Jews, and as you know, no Jews reside on Lefkada. I fear for the Jews of Corfu. I fear for them deeply.”

  “For the Jews of Corfu?” Sarah didn’t feel her tongue form the words, but she heard them emit from her mouth.

  “Yes. They’ve made all the Jews in Corfu register. Nothing good comes from that, I tell you. Why do the Nazis need a registry? To invite the Jews to a party? No, it’s a sinister thing, a list. Mark my words. I wish there was something we could do. I just need to do something.” He lowered his voice. “Stop these German animals. It reminds me how powerless we are, this thing called war. Don’t you think, Sarah? I mean, tell me, have you ever felt so powerless?”

  And somehow Sarah’s head managed a small shake in reply, because it was quite true that she hadn’t.

  Chapter Twenty

  Joey

  Florida

  2019

  In her thirty-four years, Joey had attended many bridal showers, but none had involved barefoot guests sitting on poufs on the floor. And to Joey’s knowledge at least, none had been hosted by the bride’s mother who’d been recently exposed as a lying adulteress.

  “Joey loves Indian food,” her mother was explaining into a microphone to the thirty or so guests who had gathered to shower her.

  “I also love sushi,” Joey whispered to her best friend of over twenty years, Siya, who occupied a yellow pouf to her right. “I mean, I do like Indian food. I like your mom’s, obviously.”

  “My mom’s rasmalai is better,” said Siya as she ate the dessert on which she and Joey had grown up, made of ricotta cheese soaked in condensed milk and flavored with pistachio nuts and saffron. “Or it used to be.”