When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

  But then Joey halted as the ballroom walls came into focus. They were adorned with black and white paper flowers, meticulous and layered, waxy green vines weaving throughout. It was maybe the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Joey tugged Grant back. She put her hand atop a flower on the wall beside the door. It was black with pearl beads lining it. Joey had seen flower walls before, small ones for Instagram purposes, maybe—but never the entire room. It had the effect of a wild, sexy garden. Bali, at night.

  Grant squeezed Joey’s hand. She needed to tell him. Her sweet husband. How could she tell him?

  As he wove her toward the dance floor, people kept reaching out to touch her, like somehow she belonged to them all. But she didn’t want to be Mrs. Grant Newman. She wanted to be Joey Abrams. She wanted to be Joey Abrams with the freedom to be with the one she loved the most.

  She wished she loved Grant the most. She wished love could take into account who you wanted the object to be. As Grant kissed her and transmitted with that kiss everything he was, she wished it were enough.

  She waited for the song to end before she said, “Grant.”

  He looked at her. His face crumpled. “No.”

  * * *

  Grant kept saying, “No.”

  He inspected a matte-gold fork as she told him she really hadn’t known until today. Until after they’d married. She should have known, she said. She wished so hard she could turn back the clock and spare him this pain. She was so unbelievably sorry.

  Grant sat motionless while Joey asked Lily to tell the DJ they were postponing the hora. As a cheery waiter served him his fillet and mashed potatoes—mashed potatoes of which he’d eaten a plateful at their tasting and proclaimed the best he’d ever had—Grant finally pushed away the plate and shook his head vigorously, like regaining his life force. “Joey, we’re married. I just…I can’t believe this. I want to be married to you! Please don’t do this! I love you so much.”

  Tears spilled out her eyes.

  “What about our plans together? What about our life together?”

  “I can’t possibly explain how sorry I am,” Joey said softly. “For the rest of my life, I’ll be sorry for hurting you.”

  Grant swished his scotch. He put a finger atop the baby cactus from which a mini banner was strung that read NEWLYWEDS. He pressed his finger down hard. When he pulled it up, a drop of blood sprang from his skin. “You should go,” he finally said, in a new toneless voice.

  “Go?”

  “Go. Stay. Actually I don’t care what you do. But I’m going.”

  “We’ll just go? But all these people—”

  “I don’t care.” He walked toward the door without looking back.

  The event planner popped up, brandishing her tablet. “I’m not sure why you guys want to save the hora for later, but we’ll do the father-daughter dance instead now.”

  Joey caught sight of her parents at their table beside the dance floor. Joey watched her father’s hand migrate atop her mother’s. It rested there. They didn’t speak. With her other hand, Bea pursed her lips at a pocket mirror. With his other hand, her father drank a margarita. Her mother retracted her hand first. She stood. She strode toward the DJ booth.

  “Jo.” Joey felt a hand at her waist.

  “Lil.” As she turned, she glimpsed a huddle of the Lilly Pulitzer Fan Club. Joey dove her head into her sister’s shoulder—part salve, part shield.

  “It’s okay, Jo.” Lily awkwardly patted her shoulder.

  “It’s so not okay, Lil. I’m terrible. I’m just like Mom. I’ve ruined Grant’s life.”

  “You didn’t ruin Grant’s life. You’ve been married for two seconds. You’ll get it annulled. You’re being a drama queen. Do you know how lucky you are? Leo loves you, and you love him. I knew you loved him. That’s why I had to tell him to go to Edith’s.”

  Joey lifted her head from Lily’s shoulder. “You couldn’t have told him to go yesterday though? Or this morning? You had to wait until right before my wedding?”

  Lily had the grace to blush. “Look, Jo, at first I wasn’t sure I should tell Leo. I mean, I like Grant. He’s always been so nice to me. And by the time I decided I had to tell Leo, I was so crazed with the party for the Sri Lankan jewelry, and it slipped my mind to call him after, and then I totally meant to tell him at the rehearsal dinner, but you can’t imagine my to-do list. My head was crammed with—”

  Joey put up a hand. “Okay. It doesn’t matter. But Lil, what if I got engaged to Grant just to try to prove something to myself?”

  “Then you did it, Joey. Seriously, why do you love beating yourself up? So you made a mistake, and now we’ll fix it. It will be fine, Jo. I’ll deal with everything here.”

  “Lil, that’s—”

  “I’m your sister.” Lily shrugged. “I got it.”

  Joey watched a couple she didn’t recognize pose by one of the flower walls.

  “Jo, you know Mom did the flower walls.”

  “What do you mean?” Joey saw her mother talking to the DJ across the gray marble dance floor.

  “I mean, Mom made them. She’s been working on them in the basement for…I don’t know, months.”

  “Mom made like…everything?” Joey did a spin around to absorb it. “All of the paper flowers? But…there are thousands.”

  “Thousands,” confirmed Lily. “She wanted to do something special for you. But, like…don’t go feeling guilty about this too. Get it together, sis. Seriously.”

  The event planner inserted her face between them. Her mouthpiece nearly took out Joey’s eye. “It’s go time, Joey.”

  Joey saw her father shuffling on the edge of the floor. His face fell when they locked eyes. He looked like a gangly middle school boy whose crush turned him down when he asked her to Snowball.

  Lily said quietly, “Joey, I’ll dance with Dad.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He’s my dad too.”

  “But that’s not how it works!” said the event planner. “It’s a dance for the father and the daughter who got married.”

  But Lily was already striding toward Scott. Joey watched Lily give their father a hug and then whisper something. Joey walked very fast to the door before she’d have to witness the look on her father’s face.

  She floated through the remains of the cocktail hour she barely even saw. Past the bathroom where Leo stood in her stall, telling her he loved her. She took off her one-inch block heels that nonetheless she couldn’t believe she was still wearing. She needed fresh air. Fuck the rain.

  She remembered an outside door by the room where she got ready. The makeup artist had gone through it for a smoke between layers of airbrush foundation spray. Joey burst into the night. A canopy shielded her head from the rain, but the ground was a muddy flood. Her lovely dress swished in the muck, and she didn’t care. She reached to the back of her dress and unzipped it as far down as she could force it. She sighed as the first sip of unrestricted oxygen hit her lungs.

  That’s when she saw the figure hunched over in the rain. That’s when she saw the back.

  * * *

  Joey sat on the curb beside him. Leo lifted his face, all red and wet.

  “You don’t have to console me on your wedding day, Jonesey.”

  “It’s not my wedding day anymore.”

  The hope that flushed Leo’s face was heartbreaking in its infancy—like a first press of grapes, their sweetest production. “What are you—?”

  By the thread of her hand through his, he quieted. She looked at their hands woven together. If hands could be a home, she knew that hers was here. They were both sweating, or one of them was, or else it was the rain filling in all the cracks. She’d lived so long avoiding the rain that she’d forgotten how good it felt when it met her in the dark places of herself. In punctuation, the rain turned torrential, like God kicking up the dial.

  You can take it, the sky was saying. Let’s fall apart together.

  Joey’s whole body was humming wi
th aliveness. Every molecule inside her felt cozy and in its right place.

  Leo looked into her eyes, and she met him there. So many questions sprouting, morphing, waiting. The answers in hers, insufficient.

  She could say: I’m terrified, Leo. You consumed me once, and the greatest void I’ve ever known was the absence of myself when I no longer had you.

  She could say: I love five hundred million things about you, but most of all, I love how you let me be lost. That you don’t try to hurry me up to get to the found. Today, Leo, today I think I’m lost and found, both at the same time.

  And: Maybe it will be the two of us when we’re eighty, drinking our coffees in the morning in some place I can’t imagine now. But maybe it will be just me, drinking my coffee alone, and honestly, truly, that will be okay too.

  The rain ebbed a bit, and Joey opened her mouth to try to lend it all shape, but nothing came out.

  Instead she felt her hand give Leo’s hand a squeeze. As if in punctuation, the clouds unleashed more—first in fuzzy sheets, like static on an old TV set, and then the lashing. More. More. More.

  Because of the rain, Joey could no longer make out Leo’s eyes, but she felt him squeeze back. Hard. But then his grip softened, giving her space to air herself out, like one of those sheets on a line, coming back to life in the Corfu sun.

  And then she squeezed him again, and he did too in return. Again. Again. Again. Until Joey wasn’t sure when her squeezes ended and Leo’s began. Just that somehow, he knew that she knew that he knew everything there was to say.

  Reading Group Guide

  Dear Reader:

  The first sparks of my idea for this novel came on a trip to Jamaica in 2015. On the beach one day, I watched two kids from different families and places playing happily together. I thought about the magic of vacation friends and romances. There is something different and special about exiting your everyday life that alters the relationships developed with people you meet on your travels. And so Joey and Leo were born.

  If you ask me to vote for the beach or the mountains, I, like Joey, would choose the beach a thousand times over. I feel happiest when next to or in water. I grew up on a lake in Michigan and now live in Tel Aviv, mere steps from the Mediterranean Sea. And so, in choosing the novel’s setting, the island aspect of Corfu appealed to me immensely, from Corfu Town’s pebbled city beaches nestled in tiny coves to the western coast’s endless, spectacular caramel sand beaches leading to an impossibly turquoise sea.

  Continuing on the beach motif, I decided to set the remainder of the book in South Florida. Aside from its sunny ambience, I’ve spent a lot of time there, so it is like a second home. My maternal grandmother, with whom I share a closeness like that between Joey and Sarah, lives in Delray Beach.

  And finally, I mined my own experience for Joey’s unlikely career transition. Like Joey, I was a lawyer at a large law firm, and I quit my job the year I’d go up for partnership to travel and work on creative pursuits. (Although, unlike Joey, the firm I worked at was wonderful and the people I worked with even more so.)

  Joey isn’t me, of course, but so much of me is in this book. As a writer, the delight I find in fiction is in collecting the truest things I know and shapeshifting them into a story. I feel privileged you chose to read mine.

  Discussion Questions

  One of the inspirations for the novel was the author seeing two kids meet and become friends on vacation. Have you ever connected with someone on vacation, or outside your everyday life, as friends or romantic partners? How do you think that experience went differently than it would have had it originated amid your everyday life?

  A theme in the novel is the trauma of “postmemory,” that is, how later generations bear the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those generations who came before. How does this theme play out in the novel? How are both Bea and Joey affected by what Sarah and Sam endured?

  Even years after the fact, Joey struggles to find closure to her relationship with Leo. Was it selfish for her to agree to meet with Leo eleven days before her wedding? How have you experienced closure in a relationship? Did the time it took or way it happened surprise you?

  Why do you think Joey switched from art to law after Leo broke up with her? Have you ever given up on a passion? What would it take for you to revisit it?

  Sarah must live her entire life with regrets that were impossible to make right. Why was it easier for Sarah to marry a man she didn’t love than the man she did? Do you think that even after communicating with Milos, she will ever fully forgive herself?

  Many characters in the novel are holding on to secrets they eventually reveal. Are secrets in a relationship ever justified?

  Bea is in many ways an unlikable character. On page 162, she says, “Maybe sometimes you have to risk hurting people you love in order to be happy.” Do you agree with her? In what circumstances would you find the statement valid? How does your view of Bea change as the book progresses? Do you think that Joey ultimately finds more compassion for her mother after she leaves Grant for Leo?

  On page 43, Joey says that with Leo love felt like falling, but with Grant she learned to love on solid ground. Do you think that love can be divided into these two categories? Which have you experienced in your life? Do you think it is possible for Joey to love on solid ground with Leo too?

  Neither Bea nor Joey was born on Corfu, but nonetheless the island becomes a central facet of their lives. How does the way each of Joey, Bea, and Sarah feels about Corfu change with the events of their lives and the events of the novel? Do you think that any or all of the women would choose to return to Corfu for a visit after the events of the novel? Have you ever considered a place not your birthplace or home as nonetheless important in your life? Perhaps it is a vacation spot or a place where a family member lives or lived. How did that place become important to you? Have your feelings toward that place changed with time or events?

  Family history plays a critical role in the plot. How is Joey affected by her mother’s and grandmother’s paths? Do you know your family history? How does it affect your life? Does it cause you to try to follow your ancestors’ lead or take a different path?

  The concept of forgiveness percolates throughout the novel. Do Bea and Scott deserve Joey’s forgiveness? Do you think she has truly forgiven them? Does Bea deserve Sarah’s forgiveness for not passing along the message from Milos? Do you think Sarah has truly forgiven her daughter? Is it easier for a parent to forgive a child or for a child to forgive a parent? Why?

  Were you glad Joey chose Leo? Do you think Grant would have been the better choice? Why or why not?

  Where do you see Joey five years in the future?

  Historical Note

  I knew I wanted to write a novel with multiple generations harboring secrets. My father is a Soviet emigrant, and when I was growing up, he never really spoke about his first twenty-eight years before he immigrated to the US. But in my early thirties, my family traveled to my dad’s hometown in Ukraine, his first time back since he’d left, and he finally told us his stories. I wanted the protagonist—Joey—to transform, as I did, as she understands the history of her ancestors.

  My paternal grandmother escaped Ukraine when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. But her parents and some other family members did not manage to escape, and were murdered by the Nazis and buried in mass graves in the rural outskirts of Zhitomir, a small city a few hours from Kiev. I am named after this paternal grandmother, and I feel very connected to her, despite never meeting her as she died shortly before I was born. I wanted to write a grandmother character loosely inspired by her, someone who narrowly escaped the Holocaust but was greatly impacted by it.

  I chose to partially set the novel on Corfu because of its lesser-known Holocaust history, and also its island and European appeal. Initially, I spent a few weeks in Greece doing research, including on Corfu, and I met with an expert in Athens on Greek Jewish history. And then over the course of a few years, I
read everything I could get my hands on regarding the Corfiot Jews, and I met with and spoke to many people with personal Greek Jewish stories, as well as further experts on Greek Jewish history. Many of them told me, “The world doesn’t even know what happened to the Greek Jews during the Holocaust. Our stories have largely been ignored.”

  I am so grateful to the kind and generous people who shared insights and stories, often painfully tragic. All of it was invaluable to an accurate portrayal of what life was like for the Corfiot Jews in the forties, prior to, during, and after Nazi rule.

  The story of Sarah and her family is fictional, but it is interwoven with many real stories and events of the time. For instance, Rabbi Iakov Nechama was once the rabbi of Corfu, and how the Nazis dehumanized him during their rule is historically accurate.

  And Costas, who is Sarah’s customer on the island of Lefkada, is a fictionalized character based upon Costas Stagiannos, a member of Lefkada Resistance, who courageously aided the escape of some Corfiot Jews imprisoned on Lefkada.

  The scene where the Jews of Corfu are imprisoned on Lefkada is rooted in fact. Many of the Corfiot Jews did indeed pass through Lefkada on their deportation to Auschwitz, and many of the townspeople of Lefkada, putting their own lives at risk, bravely tried to help the Corfiot Jews. Pope Dimitris Thomatzidis attempted to give a cigarette across the fence to a Jew named Daniel Johanna, for which the pope was injured by a Nazi soldier. Daniel, the Jew who accepted the cigarette, was then murdered by a Nazi soldier. And subsequently, a Nazi soldier also injured (and possibly even murdered, according to differing sources) two or three more Jews standing nearby. All of these events are depicted as accurately as possible in the backdrop of the scene in which Sarah sees her family for the very last time.