Every Friday afternoon Antigone gives us ballet lessons in the living room of their house in Plaka. So I learn even more French words, like pas de chat, which means step of the cat. First, second, and third position. Plié, to bend. Relevé, to lift. In the end Antigone does a split and we clap and shout “Encore!” Then we go out for a walk. Antigone wears embroidered shirts and holds us by the hand as if we were both her daughters.
“We’re Anna-Maria!” I say, laughing.
“Don’t ever say that again!” Antigone says. “That’s the name of that fool of a princess.”
Sometimes, on the weekend, Mom lets me sleep at Anna’s. We take a bath together, then Antigone dries our hair with a towel and does it up in little braids or buns or ponytails. Then she smokes her Gauloises cigarettes or calls Paris, and while she’s not paying attention we play house, or sometimes build a fort with a blanket. Anna always wants the houses we live in to have special furniture, special music, a special atmosphere. “You should be thankful, if I had my way we wouldn’t live in a house at all,” she says, “we’d just fly around on our magic carpet!” The conversations about revolution are kind of boring, but I let her have her way on that, at least. After all, even in the half-light under the blanket, Anna can see right through me. If I disagree, she’ll pinch.
Shortly before the end of the school year, Aunt Amalia buys me a game called Little Wizard, a box full of magic tricks. You learn how to make colorful bits of paper disappear or do card tricks or hide plastic animals in a hat with a false bottom. Anna and I climb onto the magic carpet and do magic tricks for an imaginary audience of poor kids. Everything always has to be about the poor. That’s why Anna gets mad when Aunt Amalia takes us to see My Fair Lady, a movie about Eliza Doolittle, who starts out as a beggar but by the end is a real princess, after an aristocrat takes her in off the street and teaches her how to speak properly. Eliza’s name in real life is Audrey Hepburn. She has a very long neck and wears her hair in a bun. Aunt Amalia gets tears in her eyes, probably because she’s thinking how if things had turned out differently, she too could have lived like a princess. I want to tell her that the princess Constantine married was a fool, but Aunt Amalia says, “Shhh, don’t talk in the movie theater.” My favorite scene is when Eliza Doolittle can’t sleep because she’s in love with the aristocrat. The maid puts her to bed but she keeps popping back up to her feet like a spring. Anna grunts in disgust and says that Eliza was happier back when she was selling flowers in the street and hadn’t gotten so hoity-toity. “But she’s not!” I cry. “Of course she is,” Anna says, “just like you.”
“Where is your family going to spend the summer?” Aunt Amalia asks Anna on the way home.
“A Paris”
“I’m going to Ikeja, right?”
“No, honey. You’re coming to Aegina with me.”
Merde, merde.
Martha and I are sitting on the low wall in the garden, playing beauty pageant. Martha and Fotini are sisters, and they’re my summer friends on Aegina. Only today Fotini is grounded: she stole a teacup from Martha’s tea set, hid it in the yard, and won’t say where. Her punishment is that she has to stay in her room until it’s time for the live broadcast of the Thessaloniki Song Festival. The girls have an older brother, Angelos, who is in high school, but he doesn’t talk to us. Each summer Aunt Amalia rents a room on the ground floor of the girls’ house, where their grandfather used to live before he died. She and I sleep together in the double bed. We leave the windows open and the bougainvilleas outside shape the shadows of junta fascists, or the grandfather’s ghost. One night I got scared and woke up Aunt Amalia, who sleeps with curlers in her hair. “Oh, Maria, there’s no reason to be scared, with these curlers I’d frighten even a ghost away!”
In the mornings we have breakfast together. The girls’ mother, Kyria Pavlina, has a goat and makes her own yogurt. The only bad part is that we eat it at their kitchen table, under a strip of fly paper covered with dead flies. Kyria Pavlina doesn’t like to kill flies with a fly swatter. She prefers for them to get stuck on the paper and die on their own.
After breakfast we go down to the beach to swim or to dig deep holes in the sand. Fotini and Martha are always singing a song by the child star Manos: You don’t live in my time, Mom, you don’t live in my time, Dad . . . I like it a lot but I also know it would annoy Anna. In fact we do all kinds of things that Anna wouldn’t like. We watch Little House on the Prairie and wear cherry lip gloss during our beauty contests. There are three titles, one for each of us: Miss Beauty, Miss Inner Beauty, and Miss Youth. Fotini always ends up being Miss Youth because she’s the youngest. Martha likes being Miss Beauty, and I’m happy with Miss Inner Beauty, so it works out just fine for us all.
“Girls, the festival is starting!” Kyria Pavlina calls. Martha and I abandon our beauty pageant in the middle and run to the television. Fotini comes, too, since her punishment is over. We’re rooting for a girl, Roula, who sings in the commercial for Roli cleaning powder. Please tell me, Dad, is love good or bad? Today he gave me my first kiss, and I cried with bliss . . . Her father gives his approval and Roula gets as excited as Eliza Doolittle: Well, then, I’ll say it, I love a boy, I love him and I want him tons!
This summer I’m in love with Angelos. He’s very serious and wants to be a nuclear physicist. We only see him in the morning when he wakes up and at night before he goes to bed. The whole rest of the day he’s out roaming around with his friends. I’ve lost all interest in tanks and submarines. No more lies. Mom has gone to help Dad empty out the house in Ikeja. She left me behind, with Aunt Amalia.
Next fall Gwendolyn will be telling her proverbs to other kids.
I keep whistling the tune to “Please Tell Me, Dad,” but Anna covers her ears when she hears it. Of course I don’t tell her about the beauty pageants.
“Aegina ruined you,” she says, raising an eyebrow, the one with the white streak.
“Why?”
“It made you dumb.”
I look down at my shoes. She’s right, after all.
“But maybe it’s not your fault, it’s those girls, what were their names again? Fotini and Martha.”
Anna lectures me about how the Socialist Party in Sweden lost power after forty-four years and how the Workers’ Party in Great Britain is weaker than ever before, as if I were to blame. She tells me that in Paris she made some important decisions, when she grows up she wants to be like Gisèle Halimi, Sartre, and de Beauvoir’s lawyer who risked imprisonment for supporting the Algerian National Liberation Front. I understand barely half of what she says, but I keep nodding my head. She’s determined to bring me back to the proper path, and tells me about Patty Hearst, who disowned her rich father and started robbing banks, and sixteen-year-old Nadia Comăneci, the human rubber band from the Montreal Olympics. We braid our hair to look like Comăneci, put on our gym clothes, roll aside the portable table in the living room and practice our splits. Next is modern dance. Anna always chooses the theme. Our choreographies have names like “Long Live the Revolution” or “The Students” or “A Carnation on the Polytechnic Memorial.” The dances are full of pas de chat and when we start to sweat, we lie down on the rug and stare at the ceiling.
“A perfect score!” Anna tells me. “You’re not dumb anymore.” I hug her and we roll like barrels into the hall, splitting our sides with laughter. That’s where Antigone finds us when she opens the front door.
“You crazy girls, on va manger quelque chose?”
We eat backwards this year, too, main course first, then salad. Antigone shows me pictures from their summer in France. The whole family went to Deauville, to the house of some friends. Anna’s father has a blondish beard. In all of the photographs he’s smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper. Anna is sitting in his lap, arms wrapped around his neck.
“Do you love your dad a lot?”
“What do you mean, don’t you love yours?”
“Sure, I love him, only I’ve forgotten what he’s lik
e.”
And yet that very same night, Mom and Dad come home from the airport. I cling to my father’s neck, just like Anna, and burst into tears.
“Why are you crying, little grasshopper?” Dad says.
“Don’t call her that, please!” Mom says, and she starts crying, too.
I’m afraid that now that he’s come back to Athens Dad might start calling me Maria Papamavrou and saying that I’m a naughty girl, the way Mom does. I’m afraid that now that we live in Athens I might actually be turning into a naughty girl, not to mention a dumb one. That I might have left all my goodness and smarts in Africa.
This fall we have a man for a teacher, Kyrios Stavros. He’s short and wears silk vests that barely contain his big belly. The fifth-grade reader is called The High Mountains and Kyrios Stavros says we’re going to like it a lot because it’s full of adventures. My biggest adventure, though, is the week when Anna stays home because she has the mumps. Angeliki keeps saying “teapot” over and over until it sounds like “potty,” and Petros picks his nose, chases me down, and wipes his snot on my legs.
“When are you coming back to school?” I ask Anna over the phone.
“Not until my cheeks aren’t swollen anymore.”
“Anna, you have to come back. It’s awful without you!”
I tell her about the things the other kids do to me during recess and Anna plots our revenge: we’ll handcuff them to the fence and tickle them, we’ll spit in their food.
Since she’s been sick in bed, Anna finished the entire fifth-grade reader. She says it’s almost as good as Petros’s War or Wildcat under Glass.
“What are they?”
“You mean you’ve never heard of Alki Zei? Merde!”
I make Mom buy me all of Alki Zei’s books and I read them at night in bed. Anna’s right. They’re wonderful, especially Wildcat under Glass, with the two sisters who say ve-ha, ve-sa when they want to show whether they’re very happy or very sad.
“Ve-ha? Ve-sa?” I ask Anna over the phone, so she’ll know I read Wildcat under Glass.
“Ve-sa, because I have the mumps.”
I puff up my cheeks, trying to imagine what it would be like to have the mumps. Sometimes I’d like to be Anna, for better or for worse.
Kyrios Stavros tells us Savings Day is coming up and there are going to be two contests, for best essay and best drawing; the prize is a money-box from the postal bank. Anna and I both enter the drawing contest. Anna draws a bank all in pastel colors. The teller is giving money away to everyone. There’s a cloud over his head with the words “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!” There are doves flying all around, and Patty Hearst is standing in one corner with her machine gun. Over her head it says, “With so much justice in the world, who needs me?”
“You didn’t follow the theme,” Kyrios Stavros tells her, and Anna sticks her tongue out at him when his back is turned.
My drawing is in colored pencil, of the storage room in Ikeja and a family living in there. I make the mother like Antigone, skinny, with a braid and fake eyebrows, only she’s wearing Mom’s dress with the yellow daisies. The dad has a beard, he’s smoking a pipe and reading the newspaper Acropolis, which is the newspaper my father reads. The little girl has long blond hair, bangs, and a dimple in her chin. She’s taking a can of milk down off the shelf and handing it to her little brother, a tiny baby who can’t walk yet. The baby is hard to draw, it comes out looking like a caterpillar. I keep erasing it and trying again. When I finally get it right, my picture is beautiful. Up top I draw a rainbow that’s raining drachmas, naira, and francs, which all turn into daisies as they fall to earth.
Kyrios Stavros comes into the classroom with the school superintendent.
“Will Maria Papamavrou please stand up?” the superintendent says.
What did I do now?
“Your drawing won first prize for our school. Come up front to accept your prize.”
I walk toward the teacher’s desk with bowed head. The superintendent congratulates me, kisses the top of my head, and hands me a blue money-box with a metal handle.
“Now applaud your classmate,” Kyrios Stavros says.
Everyone claps, except for Angeliki and Anna.
“You’re a thief!” Anna says. “You stole my family.”
“But your family is better than mine, that’s why.”
She wants to split our desk down the middle again. I’m so happy about the prize that I don’t object. When the bell rings at the end of the day Anna says, “I’ll forgive you, but only if you give me your drawing.”
“What if my parents want it?”
“Tell them you lost it.”
Fortunately my drawing gets published in Acropolis. Dad clips it out carefully so he can have it framed.
“When I grow up, I’m going to be an artist,” I tell him.
“That’s not a job,” Mom says. “You should choose a proper career, you can make art in your free time.”
“But if I have some other job, where will I find free time?”
“You’ll manage. Don’t I find time to shop and to cook, and to take you to the park?”
“Yeah, but all you cook is biftekia and lentils, and you don’t take me to the park all that much, either.”
Mom gives me a threatening look, but she doesn’t punish me. After I broke my arm she got rid of the key to the pantry. Now when she gets angry it’s different: she just clenches her fists, lifts her eyes to the ceiling, and mutters under her breath.
Anna ruined my drawing!
“I didn’t ruin it, I corrected it!” she shouts.
She drew doves all over the top of the page. She crossed out Dad’s Acropolis with red poster paint and made it into an Avgi, the left-wing paper her parents read. She colored in the baby entirely, turned it into a coffee table and added Gauloises cigarettes and an ashtray on top.
“We’re both only children, don’t forget,” she says.
I don’t like being an only child. It’s like saying lonely child. I’m jealous of Fotini and Martha, who share a room and can say ve-ha, ve-sa every night, like the sisters in Wildcat under Glass.
“I’d like to have a little brother or sister,” I say.
“We’re like sisters, aren’t we?”
“Sure, but only on weekends.”
And there’s something else, too: when Fotini hid Martha’s teacup in the yard, Kyria Pavlina sent her to her room. But who’s going to punish Anna for destroying my drawing?
•
This year I’m sitting at the third desk from the front and I can’t see the board very well. The letters are blurry and I have to squint to read our exercises.
“What’s wrong, Maria?” Kyrios Stavros asks. “Do you think you need to see an eye doctor?”
Antigone gives Mom the name of a pediatric optometrist who studied in Paris. We go and sit in the waiting room. Mom is happy because there’s a recent issue of Woman in the stack of magazines with an announcement for an embroidery and knitting contest. “I’ll knit a blanket,” she says. “Our family will sweep up every prize around!”
A man with a white coat and glasses shakes our hands.
“Come this way, miss.”
He tells me to rest my forehead on a metal surface with little plastic bits for your eyes and use a knob to put a parrot in a cage. He jots something down in his notes. Then he tells me to read some numbers on a lighted board across the room. The numbers are kind of blurry so he puts these little lenses in front of my eyes and asks, “Is it better now? Or now?” With some of the lenses I can read even the tiniest numbers on the board. The doctor says I’m nearsighted, enough that I need glasses. I feel like crying.
“What’s wrong, miss? Don’t you know how stylish glasses can be?”
Yeah, sure.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I’m going to be a painter,” I say, and then, looking at Mom, “and something else, too.”
“How wonderful! All artists wear glasses
, didn’t you know?”
“All of them?”
“Anyone who thinks a lot, dear,” the eye doctor says, tapping his own glasses.
Well, then. If I’m going to be a great painter, I guess I might as well wear glasses.
The next day Mom, Aunt Amalia, and I go to Metaxas Eyewear near Omonia Square. Mom insists on black tortoiseshell frames with wavy bits of red. The saleswoman says they look great on me, but I can’t really see my face, I look blurry in the mirror.
“I really look good?”
“Miss Inner Beauty!” Aunt Amalia says.
These days inner beauty isn’t enough. I want to be beautiful on the outside, too. We order the glasses. They’ll be ready in a week.
“I’m so jealous that you get to wear glasses!” Anna says.
“Wait until you see them first.”
“Glasses are always pretty,” Anna says, and I sigh with relief.
“You’re an owl, Teapot!” Angeliki says.
“An African owl,” says Petros.
Anna and I pinch them as hard as we can so they’ll stop, but they just put their hands over their mouths and dissolve into laughter.
“You’re an ugly four-eyes!” Angeliki shouts.
“She has inner beauty!” Anna shouts back.
“Only inner?” I ask, but Anna is busy pinching the others and doesn’t respond.
“I’m sure Angelos will fall for you,” she says when the bell rings at the end of the day. “You look older, more mature. A ripe fruit!”
“And when a ripe fruit sees an honest person, it falls.”
Anna loves it when I use Gwendolyn’s proverbs. She gives me a sloppy kiss on the cheek.
“You’re my best friend!”
“And you’re mine!”
“Want to go pee?” she says.
When we’re best best friends, like today, we go and pee in a parking lot on the next street over from our school. We slip between the cars, pull down our underwear and a little fountain of pee spurts onto the ground, splashing our socks and shoes. We never pee at the same time, so that whoever’s not peeing can be the lookout. Anna wiggles her tush and sings Françoise Hardy. I don’t move at all and only sing on the inside, Well then, I’ll say it, I love a boy . . . I always take off my glasses, too, so they don’t get splashed.
Why I Killed My Best Friend Page 4