The Clover House

by Henriette Lazaridis Power

  Aliki comes out of the kitchen with a platter, sees me, and gasps.

  “Calliope! Ré, Nikos,” she says, “it’s Calliope.”

  She puts the platter down on a side table and embraces me, then holds me out in front of her to take a closer look. As she studies my face and body, she gives me a look that is both welcoming and cataloging, taking stock. I can tell Aliki sees not only the passage of time but traces of America on me. I dress in what passes as stylish for a WASP-y private school: small earrings, medium heels, and layered tops. I wear my hair long and straight with feathered bangs, and my jeans and sweater, though slim, are just a shade looser and more rugged than those of the women I have seen today.

  “You must be exhausted,” Aliki says, and I laugh, suddenly aware of how true this is.

  A large man has come over to stand beside Aliki and I recognize Nikos, whom she married when she was only twenty-four. She takes his arm.

  “How good is her Greek?” he says quietly to Aliki.

  “Pretty good,” I whisper, leaning forward.

  Aliki tugs his arm.

  “Sorry,” he says, then adds to Aliki, “It’s been so long, I forgot.” He turns to me again. “It’s good to see you, cousin.”

  He kisses me on the cheeks and I can feel the stubble on his face. He is dark and tall; his face is almost perfectly round, with round eyes and a double chin. Standing beside him, Aliki looks tiny. I see now that she is wearing an apron and that Nikos is wearing slippers, while she is in shoes.

  “Do you know it’s been almost ten years, Paki?”

  “Five,” I say, as if that will make it better.

  “We missed you last time,” Nikos says. “Weren’t you supposed to stay with us?”

  I look at Aliki. I shouldn’t blame Nikos for not knowing the whole story.

  “You know I couldn’t stay in Patras.”

  “I know.”

  “Not after what she said to me.”

  “I know, Paki.” Aliki puts her hand on my arm.

  Nikos looks from me to his wife and back again, then shrugs.

  “You’ll tell me what I need to know when I need to know.”

  Aliki smiles and rubs her hand up and down my arm briskly, as if erasing the troubling past.

  “Demetra,” she calls, “come see your aunt Calliope.”

  Three girls wander over, two looking curious, the third guarded. Aliki pulls the third girl forward.

  “This is Demetra. She turned nine last week.”

  Demetra was named after her grandfather Demetris, who was always busy at his taverna but whom I remember as a kindly figure, redolent of the kitchen. We would stop sometimes at his place for lunch on beach days, and he would bring us wedges of juicy watermelon or heaping plates of fried anchovies that we would eat whole. Demetra is tall, like her father, and I hardly have to lean down to kiss her. I wish her happy birthday and glance over at the dining room, where the other adults are talking loudly.

  “You hungry?” Nikos says. “Tsiknopempti. We all eat meat.”

  I want to tell him that I know all about Tsiknopempti—as of this afternoon—and that he doesn’t need to revert to idiot’s Greek, but I am too tired.

  Aliki leads me into the dining room and introduces me to the two other couples: Marina and Phillipos, Lena and Elias, and their collective children, one boy and two girls.

  “Here,” she says, and drags her chair to the corner, pulling a heavy armchair to the head of the table for me.

  “You don’t have to move,” I say.

  “No, no.” She opens a drawer in the sideboard and pulls out a place setting. “You’re the guest of honor,” she says, as she slides the heavy silver into position on the tablecloth.

  It’s my aunt Thalia’s silver; I remember it from special occasions when we were little. I smile at the others around the table and realize everyone else has knives and forks with bright red Bakelite handles.

  After a brief silence while Aliki takes her new seat, we all begin passing platters of meat and bottles of red wine.

  “Nikos caught this,” Aliki says, as she hands me a platter of some sort of poultry.

  “Caught it?”

  “She means I killed it,” Nikos says, “but she doesn’t like to say that. Daughter of a taverna owner and she doesn’t want to know where the food comes from. Who wants some Mavrodaphne?” he adds, brandishing a bottle of the local vintage.

  “I’ll make an exception,” Elias says, and leans toward me. “Avoid the stuff if you can, Calliope. It should never be drunk unless—”

  “It should never be drunk, period,” I say. The wine is cloyingly sweet and has always given me a blinding headache.

  “Oh, so you’ve been to Greece often?” asks Marina.

  “Most of my life, for the summers.” I glance at Aliki, though it’s not her job to confirm this.

  “Calliope and I were great summer playmates,” Aliki says. “Every day, it was the two of us with my mother and Sophia buzzing around us. Imagine, Marina, a little swarm of women.”

  “Your parents sent you alone?” Marina asks.

  Aliki looks at me.

  “Her mother came too,” she says.

  “She just didn’t buzz quite like the other two.” I laugh, and so do Marina and the others.

  “What do you do for work, cousin? I can’t remember.” This is Nikos. He’s smiling, as if he’s playing some sort of game with me.

  I think of simply translating my title—Assistant Director of Development—but then explain, “I raise money for a school.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Phillipos.

  “I identify wealthy people and ask them to contribute money to a school.”

  Nikos raises his eyebrows. “You mean you beg rich people for money.”

  “Nikos! Calliope is tired,” Aliki says. She is trying to protect me, but only because she finds the idea of asking wealthy people for money a shade distasteful.

  “Yes,” I say. “You could put it that way.”

  “Like the Arsakeion, ré, Nikos,” Aliki says, naming the old Athens girls’ school founded by one family’s donation.

  The meal winds down and Aliki begins to clear the dishes as the children, who have been coming and going all through dinner, scramble off again toward Demetra’s room. Nikos pushes his chair back from the table and lights a cigarette.

  “Let me help,” I say, but Aliki presses my shoulder.

  “Sit. You’ve traveled far today, Calliope.” She takes a load of plates into the kitchen.

  “Besides,” Nikos says, “guest of honor.”

  Marina follows Aliki with an empty platter in each hand.

  “What do we have for dessert?” Nikos asks when they return.

  “Karythopita,” she says.

  When Nikos finishes his cigarette, he leads me into the living room with the men, sits down on the couch, and puts his slippered feet up on the table. Elias teases him about being lazy, but neither Nikos nor the other men offer to help. I sit and watch as Aliki, Lena, and Marina bring small plates and fresh cutlery to the coffee table. These women are only a few years older than me, but they have long marriages, children, settled lives. I feel like the lone child at the adults’ table.

  All the same, Aliki’s compliance surprises me. As a teenager, she trumpeted her critiques of sexist culture and swore to do what she pleased in life. But Greek women possess a strong streak of obedience that even independence of mind cannot cancel out. My own mother would follow a day of fury at my father with a dinner at which she brought him everything, getting up several times during the meal to fetch him things he could have reached himself. I think of Jonah getting groceries on that frigid day when Aliki called about Nestor. Aliki and my mother would be shocked.

  The karythopita is good, a winter dessert I have had only the few times when my mother’s nostalgia spurred her to make it. I used to think her fits of baking were meant to include me, to share with me the world she valued so much. But I learned soon enough th
at I did not figure in my mother’s nostalgic re-creations. And her version of the walnut cake was so over-drenched in syrup that its sweetness made me ill. Even my mother must have felt sick after eating it and must have realized that it bore no resemblance to the karythopita her mother had made for her long ago. Aliki’s cake is light and nutty, and the syrup tracks over it in fragrant loops.

  After dessert but before the guests start to leave, Aliki shows me my bed in the spare room and sets out towels for me.

  “I’m sorry about all those questions at dinner,” she says.

  “It’s not your fault. They weren’t trying to be mean,” I say.

  “No, they were just being Greek. They can’t stay out of other people’s business. But still.”

  She pulls a blanket from a high cupboard and hands it to me.

  “Do you want to call Clio?” she says. “Let her know you’re here?”

  “Not now,” I say, knowing my mother will be angry that I am waiting a day. But I am tired and don’t want to face her now.

  “Anyone else you want to call instead?” She is fishing.

  “Not right now,” I say, smiling.

  “What happened to the one who came here with you that time, before we moved into this place?”

  “Luke.” He read Zorba the Greek before the trip; by the end of two weeks, he was greeting people and ordering meals with a decent accent.

  “I remember he changed Demetra’s diaper for me.” She shakes her head in amazement.

  “It didn’t work out.”

  Luke was more in love with Greece than with me.

  “I’m sorry Nikos brought up the whole thing about when you left so suddenly. I’ve never told him what happened.”

  “It’s all right.”

  After Luke there was Sam. Sam led to Pete, who seemed nicer than he was. Each of these relationships was shorter than the one before. But Sam was the one I thought might stick for a little longer. We had rented a tiny house on the island of Zakynthos, where we were going to try out being serious about each other. But days before we were to leave Boston, I broke things off. For some reason, I stopped in Patras at my mother’s before heading to Zakynthos alone. I should have known that no conversation with my mother could have gone well, but I had no idea how spectacularly badly it would actually turn out. I never got to Aliki’s at all and reached Zakynthos in a state of suspended fury, still shaking from the accusations and insults my mother had aimed at me so expertly. The island’s earthquake-blasted landscape seemed just right for my hollowed-out state.

  Fatigue must be letting my emotions show, for Aliki touches my arm.

  “I’m sorry, Calliope.”

  “It’s all right.”

  The guest room is a small, tidy space between Demetra’s room and her parents’ bedroom. The bed is narrow but fine for one, and there is a good light on the low table that serves as a nightstand. I dig through my bag for my T-shirt and bottoms and take my turn in the bathroom to brush my teeth. The layout is just as I remember it—like a galley version of a bathroom—but Thalia’s chrome and porcelain fixtures are all gone. In their place are what look like sculptural artifacts. It takes me nearly a minute to figure out how to run the water. It seems out of character for both Aliki and Nikos, but I remind myself that I really don’t know Nikos very well.

  As I lie in the narrow bed in the dark, I can hear Aliki talking to Demetra in the next room. She is tucking her in, and her voice is soft and low. The little girl’s voice slides into and out of a loud whisper as she tells her mother about her day.

  I try to sleep, listening to the sounds of Aliki putting Demetra to bed, padding around and turning off lights, Nikos flushing the toilet, kicking his slippers onto the floor. But my body thinks it is late afternoon and, after what seems like hours, I give in and get out of bed. The apartment is chilly from the damp air that comes off the Gulf of Patras, so I pull on a sweater over my T-shirt and slip out into the hall. I walk around the living room and the dining room, peering at photographs in the orange glow from the balcony windows. There are photos from Aliki and Nikos’s wedding, the two of them with flower crowns on their heads connected by a white ribbon. They are smiling, and in the background, out of the flashbulb’s glare, you can see guests laughing as if at an inside joke. There are photos of Demetra in various school and church celebrations: her baptism, Easter, a Greek Independence Day parade in which she and her classmates all wear their blue uniforms and carry little Greek flags. Here are Demetra, Aliki, and Nikos in bathing suits on a pebble beach; here they are sitting around a Christmas tree with my aunts Thalia and Sophia. And with my mother. The sight of her there in a Christmas photograph—in someone else’s Christmas—shoots a pang of jealousy through me. Alone in the dark room, I shake my head, chiding myself for this slip into sentiment.

  I remind myself that tomorrow I will have to speak with her—that I will have to see her in person and, more important, that she will have to see me. She will, no doubt, find me inadequate in some way. And even at thirty-five, I am still worried by this possibility, this inevitability. Never mind that the last time we saw each other I promised myself never to care about her again. Never mind that I decided that letting her in made me vulnerable to her malice. Here I am again, back for more, hoping as always that this time will be different.

  As if to remind me that I am no longer a child, the next thing I see is a folding frame with a pair of black-and-whites that depict Aliki and me. On the right, we are small children digging in the sand at the water’s edge at the Bozaïtika, a beach on the outskirts of the city near Demetris’s taverna. On the left, we stand side by side at ancient Olympia. I am twelve and she is fifteen, with breasts and long wavy hair and slender legs. I remember that trip to Olympia. I remember an argument between my mother and Aliki that began shortly after this picture was taken. And while I can no longer remember what the fight was about, I remember watching Aliki stand up to my mother and wishing she could teach me how to be defiant like that.

  3

  Callie

  Friday

  Aliki pours a coffee for me and slides a plate of biscuits across the kitchen table. I curl my feet up on the chair and hunch around the cup. It’s a cozy kitchen, with just enough room for the round pine table and the four chairs tucked beneath it. When I lean back after taking a sip, my head riffles the pages of the wall calendar. February’s photograph is the peak of nearby Panachaïko dusted with snow.

  “I’ll take you to Nestor’s house later today,” she says. “I started trying to organize it for you, but I didn’t get very far.”

  “Is there as much as I remember?”

  “Probably more. No rush, but when you’re done, we’re moving in.”

  She gets a cup and saucer from a cupboard stacked high with plates.

  “It’ll be nice to have more space,” she says. “Nikos says he’ll redo the garden, and we’re probably adding another level.”

  “You’ll change the house?”

  “It needs it.”

  I tell myself that it’s all right that Aliki feels this way. She can do this. For her, this is simply another move into another hand-me-down property. And just as she has made my aunt Thalia’s house her own, so will she make her own life in Nestor’s house. Just as he made his life in the house his parents moved into when he was still a young man. It’s a question of making do with what you’re given. And there is no reason I can’t do the same, if there is something of Nestor’s that I want to bring with me to Boston.

  “You’re doing all right, then, money-wise?”

  “People need electricity, and Nikos can give it to them.” Aliki shrugs, but it’s more impressive than that. Aliki stays home with Demetra because Nikos earns enough for both of them, a rarity in Greece. He started his own business, running an electrical-supply store, and the fruits of his bootstrap initiative are visible in the clean lines and blond wood of the apartment. The light fixtures are bright and modern, except for a pair of old sconces by the bookshel
ves still there from Thalia’s time.

  “You can use the morning to go to your mother’s,” Aliki says, filling her cup from the coffeepot.

  I look up at her.

  “Calliope, I know it was awful last time, but you have to go see her. Her brother died.”

  “I know.” I glance over at the refrigerator—a compact stainless-steel model in the place of Thalia’s bulbous enamel one with the levered handle that I used to like to yank open. “I will. At some point,” I say.

  “You know you can’t leave it beyond today, Paki,” she says.

  “And you know it’s never that simple between me and my mother. Especially after that last time.”

  She wags her head in sad agreement.

  I dip a biscuit into my coffee, thinking of the Pti Ber from the bus ride. Anna and Stelios are probably on a friend’s couch, sleeping off hangovers and sex.

  “You’ve never talked to her, have you?”

  “I’ve talked to my mother.”

  “You know what I mean, Paki. About”—she waves a hand—“her.”

  “No.”

  “Paki, you’re an adult now. You can confront her, or at least try to make her understand. Why won’t you give that to yourself? Create a solution.”

  Aliki must see how uncomfortable I’ve become, because she leaves her chair suddenly to top up a cup that’s already full. “I drink way too much of this stuff,” she says.

  Create a solution. I wish I could. But this is no Sound of Music, and I’m embarrassed to admit that my mother still scares me. What if I push her and she pushes me away for good?

  “You know they argued.”

  “What?” I say.

  “Your mother and Nestor.”

  “What about?”

  She swallows a sip, shaking her head.