The Lyre and the Lambs

by Sydney Avey

  Laura hands each of us a small flute glass and that’s when she explains why she’s selling the house.

  “It was always too big for the two of us, and now that it’s just me it doesn’t make sense to hold onto it.” Mike moves to Laura’s side, but I’ve noticed he never touches her unless it’s a gesture of comfort. Apparently this is not one of those moments.

  “So, we’re toasting the sale of your house?” I don’t raise my glass.

  “Yes we are. I have decided that this will not be a sad affair. I’ve had enough sad occasions.”

  A sad affair. I release all my expectations and raise my glass with the others.

  “To the future.” Mike lifts his glass above ours in salute. We bend our heads toward the stemmed flutes of bubbles that tingle our tongues and pinch our noses.

  Dinner is served and Roger relaxes into his juicy steak. I pull a cloth napkin across my lap and look over at Laura.

  “Laura, what does the future look like for you?” This doesn’t come out in the friendly way I intended. She’s leaving, and she’s happy, and I won’t have a friend left.

  That’s what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket, the accuser in my head says.

  My, we’re selfish, the judge says.

  You love Laura; of course you’ll miss her, says the mediator, but you don’t know the whole story yet.

  Laura ignores my rudeness. “I’ve found a darling little two-bedroom house to rent near the high school. It has a decent sized living room so I can still meet with my girls, and there’s a small, fenced yard for Goldie.” Laura bends down to where the dog has planted herself on top of Laura’s feet. I’m not the only one who would like to see Laura stay put.

  “I wouldn’t move without my girl.” She scratches Goldie’s soft ears and looks up at me. “Is there any chance you would still help me with the girls, even though it will be less convenient?”

  “You really need to do this?”

  “I do.”

  R

  On a busy Saturday morning, Valerie is running the vacuum cleaner; Andy is finishing up the breakfast dishes; and Roger is in the shower. Danny has taken Andy’s car to deliver some legal documents; David is in his room studying for entrance exams; and I’ve got the laundry started. I head out the door to pick the weekend paper up off the driveway. The sprinklers have just gone off, and robins hop around on the lawn tugging up fat worms that have just had their cover blown.

  These are the days I love. Things are getting clean; things are getting done; the people I love are productive and safe and happy. I can file them away in the back of my mind and enjoy my coffee and Herb Caen’s column in the Chronicle.

  I’m bending down to pick up the paper, a huge calzone stuffed with the weekend ads and held together with two rubber bands, when a car drives up the street. A yellow cab comes into view, slows down in front of our house and stops. Somebody must be lost.

  I move toward the street as the cab driver jumps out and goes to the back of the cab to pull suitcases out of the trunk. When will he figure out he’s at the wrong house? A tall, slender girl with hills of chestnut-colored hair cascading over her shoulders comes around from the passenger side, tips the driver, and sends him away. She stands with her luggage at the top of the driveway. Her full lips break into a wide, cockeyed smile. She looks like a Greek Sophia Loren.

  My hand claps over my mouth and then drops to my chest to over my thumping heart. “Sophie! Sophie Doulis!” I drop the paper and stand there like a dope.

  Sophie looks relieved that I’ve recognized her. She picks up her cosmetic case and walks toward me.

  “You remember me. I’m really glad.”

  My brain does a fast rewind to 1955 when I was in New York visiting Roger and we looked up my mother’s family. By then I’d pieced together my father’s side of the family, but I was still a little curious about the big Greek family that Leora was fleeing when she met my father. All I had to go on was that her maiden name was Doulis and that her parents were first generation Greek immigrants who went into the produce business.

  It wasn’t hard to track down a brother who was living with his son’s family in a Ditmars Avenue row house in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens. There had been six Doulis brothers and a baby sister, my mother. Their parents were street produce vendors. Equally as enterprising, the boys formed the Doulis Produce Company and stocked the local grocery stores.

  My mother wanted nothing to do with the family business. Her brother Gregory told me how much they all regretted putting pressure on Leora to stay in the neighborhood when it was so clear that she had intelligence that could take her places she desperately wanted to go. Sophie is Gregory’s granddaughter, my cousin Christopher’s daughter. The last time I saw her, she was nine years old.

  I walk up the driveway and pick up the lightest of her two other suitcases. I’ll have to send Roger out to retrieve the heavier one.

  “Why didn’t you write and tell us you were coming for a visit, Sophie?” She dips her head, tucks a long lock of her hair behind her ear, and follows me to the front door.

  “This is a gorgeous house, Cousin Dolores.” She stands in the front hallway clutching her train case in front of her with both hands and swivels her head around, trying to take it all in. Then she flashes that crazy generous smile at me.

  “What should I call you?”

  “Call me Dee.”

  I point her toward the atrium and take a quick step into our bedroom to drop Sophie’s suitcase. Roger has just finished dressing. I whisper at him to go up the driveway and bring in another suitcase and then come into the living room to meet someone. I ignore his questioning expression and wave him out the front door.

  Following the commotion in the hall, David emerges from his room, blinking like a bat at sunrise. I motion to him to follow me and we go into the living room, where Sophie has dropped her bag and stands staring through the glass panels. She looks like Alice in Disneyland. When she hears us, she rises slightly on the balls of her feet, pivots in a graceful motion, and lands in a lovely third position. Now I remember. Sophie was studying at the New York City Ballet School when I met her all those years ago. She fixes David in place with her smoky blue eyes and bright smile. He comes to a halt and his jaw drops. I have never seen David so unguarded.

  Like a Marx Brothers pileup, the others spill into the room.

  “Sophie, this is everyone.” I sweep my hand around the room as each member of my family goes for a chair. They want to know who this arresting creature is and why she’s here.

  “Everyone, this is my cousin Sophie from New York City.”

  I can’t answer the second question. I want to know why she’s here, too.

  R

  Sophie deflects questions by chattering on about her father and mother, her uncles and aunts, her brothers and sisters. She paints a pretty picture of her family engaged in their various enterprises, growing the business, branching out into the professions, planning weddings and baptisms. I get a glimpse of what it must have been like for Leora to grow up sandwiched in between so many people’s conflicting interests.

  Sophie wants to know about our marriages, our jobs, and the house. She sorts us out pretty quickly. It is Valerie who finally takes the bull by the horns. By now, I think we have all figured out that Sophie’s running monologue is designed to put our minds at ease about any problems that may exist back home.

  “Sophie, are you on vacation from school?”

  “Actually, no.” Sophie swipes her hair back behind her ears again. She pulls her knees tightly together and tugs on the hem of the plum-colored, A-line dress that skirts her legs a discreet few inches above her kneecaps. While we wait for young Sophie to spill the beans, I find myself captivated by her shiny, black, square-toed, chunky heels. This girl is a fashion plate. It briefly occurs to me that maybe she’s here for an audition at the San Francisco Ballet.

  “I’m moving to California. I’m eighteen, and it’s time for me to be out on
my own.”

  Bells are going off in my head. “Do your parents know that you’re here?”

  “Yes,” she says, inspecting the clear polish on her carefully manicured nails. “I left them a note.”

  That’s more than Leora did when she made her mad dash at the same age. Her family didn’t know where she was for decades. I imagine that Christopher and Pamela are worried and upset. “You need to call your parents. Go into the kitchen and do that right now.”

  Sophie freezes.

  “Sophie, your parents will be very worried. Let them know that you’ve arrived safely.”

  The men have been quiet, but now Andy weighs in. “After that, we’d like to hear a little more about your plans.”

  Three Musketeers

  Three Musketeers

  While Sophie is talking to her parents, we stay in the living room discussing the surprise visit of yet another out-of-town relative. Are we becoming some sort of mecca for the salad days set?

  “I can make space in the hobby room,” Valerie says. “I don’t need to use it for a while.”

  “Oh Valerie, you just moved your desk in there.”

  “Well, I was planning to move it out any way. My writing is not a hobby. I need some serious, dedicated space. I was planning to ask the architect to design a small writing studio out in back.”

  This house isn’t big enough for you? I guess not, since Roger and I have filled it up with his son, my nephew and now my cousin. Oh dear.

  “You wouldn’t mind? My collage studio is really too small to be a bedroom.”

  “That will be five adults using one bathroom,” Roger is quick to point out.

  “You’d think the plans for a four-bedroom house would have called for at least three bathrooms.”

  “I don’t think the architect figured he was building a house for seven adults.” Andy speaks up in defense of his wife, who approved the design.

  We all troop down the hall after Roger, who pokes his head into Valerie’s hobby room and studies the small space as if he is planning a quick remodel project.

  “Maybe we can rent one of those portable johns for the boys,” Andy says. “We can throw it out on the front lawn.”

  We all laugh, except for David.

  “I don’t think your neighbors would like that very much.” David never seems to know when Andy is kidding.

  “We’ll make it work,” Roger says. David looks alarmed. “I mean we’ll make room for one more person. It won’t be for very long. We’ll set up a schedule.”

  “Some things can’t be scheduled.” I snicker, but that is so typical of Roger. He thinks a plan and a schedule fixes everything.

  Sophie comes back looking shaken, but I can tell she is firmly resolved to stay. Her eyes are dry.

  “I told my parents I will let them know what I plan to do.” She chooses an empty chair next to David to sit in.

  I can’t gauge what David thinks of this sophisticated, gamine creature. Is her chattiness nerves or an open valve that will be hard to turn off? Whatever he thinks, he doesn’t draw away from her.

  “What do you plan to do?” Valerie is so forthright. Well, some of the time.

  Sophie folds her hands in her lap and sits up straight. She reminds me of me at a job interview. If she thinks our questions are intrusive, she makes no indication. Then she surprises us with complete candor.

  “I was in the New York City Ballet School until this season. I did well in my auditions for the company. I thought I’d be picked up, at least for the tour company, but I’ve been nursing a chronic condition. I have a patella subluxation.”

  Sophie pauses to let that sink in. Her hand moves gently back and forth across her left knee. “That’s the medical term for an unstable kneecap. My knee has never been dislocated, but as I got older, the sequence of steps I was expected to perform got more challenging. My condition showed up on a medical exam I had to take to join the company, and that ended my ballet career.”

  She holds up her hand against any sympathy we might be preparing to offer. “It’s okay. It wasn’t really a surprise, but it was a tremendous disappointment to my parents. They invested a lot of money in my dance, and they were so proud of me.”

  Sophie leans back in her chair and sweeps back the long curls that have fallen over her shoulders. “Ballet has been my life, but now I have to find something else.” She looks at me. “Even though I never knew your mother, she was an inspiration to me.”

  I open my mouth to protest that shocking statement, but Sophie continues to talk. “No, really. I know my family. They are big and noisy, and they run right over people. They think they know what everyone should do. It took a lot of courage for Great Aunt Leora to get on a bus and go follow her dreams.”

  I cannot believe what I’m hearing. My taciturn mother is this young lady’s heroine? The thought that Sophie might end up angry and bitter like my mother is outrageous.

  Sophie sees that I am struggling with what she is saying. “My dad told me she had a cool career, and that she traveled and hung around with lawyers and judges and knew famous people.”

  Did he also tell you that she abandoned my father and twin sister, and that she had no time for me or Valerie until she retired and needed a place to live?

  Valerie responds to Sophie’s eagerness with a bright smile. “My Abuelita, I used to call her. She’s the reason I got my PhD in Spanish literature. She was the inspiration for my first novel.”

  This opens a wound. In her last years, Leora and Valerie were close in a way I never was with my mother. But this is an old story. I’ve come to terms with it.

  “Well, you can stay here while you figure out your next move. We’re going to move you into my hobby room. I won’t need it for a while. You can help me get it cleared out. I plan to redecorate it soon anyway.”

  That’s news to me.

  R

  Now we are seven. This has not escaped Carlo’s notice. He leers at Sophie through his peephole in the hedge when she suns herself on the patio. I hear him rant at Gunther and Kay about the damn beatnik commune we are running over here.

  Sophie was here barely two days before Kay was over with another plate of cookies. This time, she didn’t stay long. Apparently she’d been instructed not to accept any offers of refreshment. No liquid or spiritual encouragement. She was in the house just long enough to encounter Sophie. Her only comment was, “My goodness, the skirts on you young girls are getting short these days.”

  The Dolds are having a problem with Lukas. Kay doesn’t share this information, but I can see that he is in the painful grip of early adolescence. Rather than toss the evening paper onto the driveway like he used to do, he rides his bicycle down and places the paper on our doorstep. Then he turns his bike around and sticks his head in the garage to see if Sophie is hanging around with the boys. If she is, the neighbors on his route who expect their delivery after ours get their papers late, and Kay gets phone calls.

  Danny is as taken with his cousin as David seems to be. I made a point to introduce Sophie to Danny as his cousin the night of her arrival. Danny has an eye for pretty girls. If the family tie isn’t enough to put him off, I’m hoping he will have the good sense to realize that their seven year age difference makes a close relationship inappropriate. If I see anything untoward, I won’t hesitate to speak to him directly.

  David I’m not so worried about. Although they are matched in age, David is a reticent young man. Roger cautions that still waters run deep, but I trust my instincts on this one.

  Valerie has taken Sophie over to the college to see if she can interest her in getting an education. Foothill is starting a dance program, but Sophie has already been where these students probably want to go. She has danced on the stages of New York. I think a junior college dance class would be a huge step backward for her. Valerie thinks Sophie should look into getting a teaching degree. Andy says we should all back off and let her breathe instead of trying to plan her life for her. And Roger starts spending mo
re time out in the garage, keeping an eye on things.

  Scott is hanging around a lot too. This afternoon, Roger has gone for a run. I decide to work in the flowerbed near the garage, dividing bearded iris. I watch Scott hang all over Sophie, see him try to pull her attention away from the project that holds David and Danny in thrall.

  David has completed a design for a device that can modify sound in a solid-state guitar or bass amplifier. Sophie examines the drawings while David gives her a tutorial in acoustics.

  “This device can enhance the level and quality of sound by minimizing distortion and boosting the sound levels at both ends of the sound spectrum. It can analyze the acoustics of whatever space a musician is playing in, and automatically adjust the sound levels and reverb.”

  Sophie stretches her shoulders and looks into David’s eyes. Those horn-rimmed glasses intensify the mystery of this young man and add weight to his words, not that a discussion of sound spectrum needs any more weight.

  Danny takes over. “Think about it, cuz. The musician can get a clear sense of what their music sounds like to an audience without having to step away from their instrument.”

  “Can’t they just listen to each other, like musicians do in an orchestra?”

  “Different problem,” Danny tells her and a discussion ensues, but Scott isn’t listening. He stands close behind Sophie, playing with her hair. I guess dancers are at such ease with the press of bodies in a small rehearsal space, she doesn’t notice. In any case, she doesn’t react.

  David listens intently as Danny translates his technical explanations into plain language even I can understand. At the same time, David frowns a warning at Scott that clearly says, back off, buddy. From where I am kneeling in the iris bed alongside the driveway, I see Scott narrow his cold eyes at David. Like a cougar marking prey, he starts to weave Sophie’s hair into a single braid down her back.

  Sophie has had enough. She reaches behind her to grab her hair out of his hands. “Stop it, Scott. I don’t like that.”

  Scott gives the half-braided hair a hard tug, opens his fist, and lets her hair drop.