I go to the low chair in the foyer and pick up the phone. It’s the old receiver, with a thin Bakelite handle connecting mouthpiece and speaker. I crank the dial around and wait for Jonah’s office phone to ring.
“Jonah Sullivan.”
I hear the rustling of papers. He’s picked up without looking at the caller ID.
“It’s me.”
“Hi.” His voice is soft now, hesitant. “How is it going?”
“Okay. There’s a lot to do.”
“Did you see your mother?”
“Yes.” I feel scolded somehow.
“And?”
“She keeps calling you Jason.” I laugh.
“You told her?”
“She knows about you, Jonah.” I’m smiling, but I can’t even convince myself that this is a lighthearted moment.
“About us. She must have seen the ring.”
“She doesn’t notice things.”
“And you didn’t point it out.” He doesn’t ask. He knows the answer already.
“That’s not a conversation I want to have with my mother.”
“Callie, you can’t let her control you like that. So she’s a hard-ass, or a bitch, or whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
“Then why should I tell her, if she doesn’t matter?”
“She should know her daughter just got engaged.”
“That would work for your mother, not mine.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“See, this is what you don’t get, Jonah. You can’t really understand that it’s possible for a mother and her kid to not have any connection at all. I don’t want my mother in my life anymore. And I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t want me in hers either.”
He must hear something in my voice, because his response is tender and quiet.
“You deserve better, Callie. I will give you better.”
I can’t say anything for a little while. What Jonah said should move me, but mostly it terrifies me. He evokes these powerful bonds and connections, but all I can think of is what will happen when the cables snap and lash like whips at the poor souls holding on to either end.
“You there?”
“Yeah,” I say. “But I should go. It’s Aliki’s phone bill.”
“You can pay her back.”
“I know, but it’s easier if I keep it short.”
“Sure.”
“We’ll talk again, Joe. I promise.”
We say our goodbyes and I-love-yous and hang up. I sit back in the little chair and wipe the tears with my palms. I don’t know what I expected from that conversation. Some kind of transformation of myself? A wave of insight that would show me the right way forward, the right way back to Jonah? All I know is that I feel deeply alone, and all I want is to stand with my cousin and her family—my family—in a crowd of people, cheering at the floats and dancers in the parade.
I haven’t undressed, so all I have to do is grab my coat from the closet. In a few seconds, I am in the elevator, descending toward the noisy Carnival streets. Momentum carries me through the lobby and as far as Ellinos Stratiotou Street, which runs almost exactly into Plateia Georgiou, George’s Square. The street is crammed with traffic now as people head home from what little work they have managed to do during Carnival, and others head into the center of the city for the night’s festivities. Many of these people sport some sort of Carnival decoration, like antennae on a headband, or a giant felt flower in their lapel, or a hat made of crepe and LED lights. I wonder if they have gone to their offices like this or simply whisked their Carnival accessories out just now, anxious to be festive.
Closer to Plateia Georgiou, there are mimes on street corners, tableaux vivants in shop windows, musicians on the sidewalk. The first installment of the citywide Treasure Hunt began today, and I can see groups of searchers darting through the steadier crowd as they scramble for clues. The crowd becomes denser as I near the square, and everyone seems to be dancing to the loudspeaker beat I can feel in my sternum. I wonder how I will ever find Aliki and Nikos and Demetra among all these people.
They might find me more easily. I stand out, I’m sure, as the only woman in Patras who isn’t dressed to impress. All around me are women in tight trousers and silky button-front blouses showing plenty of cleavage, which their open coats do nothing to conceal. Aliki doesn’t dress flashy, but even she was sporting heels and a clingy sweater when they left the apartment. I am still wearing my boot-cut jeans and my white turtleneck sweater from the morning. I look young for thirty-five, but I am dressed the way these other women would dress to do yard work.
For various reasons, I am thinking this whole thing was a ridiculous idea. Never mind how out of place I look; how could I possibly have expected to find two people and their little girl in a crowd of thousands, in the dark? I start to turn back when I see a purple velvet hat poking up above the crowd. I stand on tiptoes and, sure enough, it’s Stelios. I realize that my route has brought me to the northeast corner of Plateia Georgiou, exactly where Anna said she and Stelios would be.
Giving in to impulse, I push through the crowd toward where I spotted the hat.
I feel two hands on my waist.
“Geia sou, ré,” comes a voice in my ear, and I turn to see Stelios’s face peering over my shoulder. A few people in front of me, I see Anna jumping up and waving. Now she is the one wearing Stelios’s hat low over her eyebrows.
“You came after all,” he says.
“I came.” It’s too loud here for me to explain that I was looking for someone else.
“Anna!” I call, and Stelios, with his hands still on my waist, steers me toward her. This seems a little odd to me, but I figure it’s part of the Carnival atmosphere.
“Callie!” she yells. “Callie, Callie.”
“Geia sou, Callie,” says a man standing beside her.
“Andreas,” Anna says, by way of introduction. “Ela.” She tugs me by the hand across the street that rings the Plateia. Here the crowd thins among the café tables warmed by propane heaters. Anna is dressed in the same style as the other women: a silver blouse unbuttoned to there and lavender trousers beneath a long white coat with astrakhan trim. A hot-pink feather boa circles her neck.
“The hat matches your trousers,” I say.
“I know!” When she laughs long at this observation, I realize she is quite drunk.
I look around at the rest of the parea and see that Stelios and the others appear to have had less to drink, though they are all ahead of me. We sit at one of the cafés and order several beers, and soon I have caught up. I can stand, I can see clearly, but my limbs feel loose and easy, and I slouch back into the low chair, tipping my chin up as I laugh at a joke, twisting my head languorously to follow the conversation.
Most of the talk is inside jokes and stories about previous exploits. This is a group that has been to Carnival many times together.
“Maki, here, is from Patras,” Stelios says to me at one point. “Callie’s family is from here,” he says to the giant, round young man who is sitting on Stelios’s other side.
“What’s your name?”
“Notaris,” I say, a name I hardly ever hear or say. In my lifetime, it belonged only to Nestor and to nobody now.
Maki shakes his head.
“Nope. I’m Makopoulos. Ring any bells?”
“No,” I say, leaning over Stelios. “Maki Makopoulos, I have never ever heard of you.” Then I say to Stelios, “This isn’t that guy you called maláka on the phone yesterday?”
He laughs in a sudden enough burst that Maki wants to know what I said. Stelios looks back at me and winks and tells Maki it’s nothing.
People on the edge of the square begin cheering. The crowd pushes toward the cafés and nearly knocks over the people in chairs at the outer edge. We all get up and stand on our chairs to see the parade, which is now making its way across the top of Plateia Georgiou. The music of several different bands has melded into one cacophony punctuated by the rhythmic
peals of somebody’s whistle. Among the musicians are groups of dancers in brightly colored costumes, some of them seeming to move in unison and others simply prancing down the street. Some dancers carry large papier-mâché heads on long poles. I hope Demetra has a good view of all this. She must be up on Nikos’s shoulders. Among the dancers are several enormous floats—homecoming-queen style—and flying banners scrawled with political jokes. This is Greece, where beauty and politics are twin obsessions.
After a few moments, there are no more floats, just large groups of identically costumed dancers. Several men and women are pushing children in strollers, their costumes miniature versions of what their parents are wearing. My parea’s interest shifts to the people gathered immediately around us. Maki and Stelios are standing on their chairs and trying to knock each other off, to the jolly annoyance of whoever is standing nearby and being buffeted by the arms and legs the two men wave to keep their balance. Andreas jumps down from another chair and crouches in front of Anna. She jumps onto his shoulders and holds the purple hat with one hand as Andreas rises to full height. He grasps her thighs and slides his fingers up as high as he can. She laughs and smacks his head playfully.
I look at Stelios, who is still play-fighting with Maki, unconcerned. Carnival, I guess. And then I look at Stelios again. It’s a good face to look at—angular and lean, with dark hair curling slightly now in the humid night. He sees me, and I tilt my head to one side and smile. He smiles back just as Maki, sensing weakness, aims a hip check at Stelios’s side and knocks him to the ground. Maki raises both fists in the air and shouts, “Winner!”
“Skáse, shut up, ré maláka!” Stelios laughs over his shoulder. He comes toward me and crouches before my chair. “Come on,” he says.
I grab his shoulders and jump up. He puts his hand on the small of my back, beneath my peacoat, and presses me forward against his head as we begin moving through the people. His shoulders are warm, his shirt slightly sweaty. His hands squeeze my thighs as I sway from side to side. It feels good. I’m not drunk enough to forget about Jonah, but I am drunk enough not to care. I’m riding that expanded consciousness that lets me see my bad behavior without changing it—and fools me into thinking that awareness makes it all right.
I allow my fingers to slip under Stelios’s scarf, where I can feel the stubble of a day’s beard. His head moves back against me.
“Where to, Miss Notaris?”
I lean forward and speak softly, letting my lips touch his ear.
“Anywhere you like, Mr.…”
“Pappamichaïl.”
“Anywhere you like, Mr. Pappamichaïl.”
The sounds of the parade grow fainter as we go toward the harbor and away from the center of the city. From my vantage point up on Stelios’s shoulders, I see couples twined together behind cars and kiosks, and I wonder if one of them is Anna and Andreas.
“Put me down,” I say, and he obliges, holding my legs behind him as I slide along his back. We are standing very close to each other when he turns, and I am sure that we both want the furtive grappling going on all around us.
“Let’s go find Anna,” he says after a moment.
“Sure,” I say. “Let’s find Anna.” I try to ignore the fact that I’m more than a little disappointed.
He leads me back a block and then along a road parallel to the harbor. There are smatterings of Carnival festivities here—musicians, dancers, children with their parents. I see now why there are children here: On the sidewalk before a row of simple, brightly lit tavernas is a group of stalls selling balloons, masks, and various trinkets. Among them, I spot the purple hat. Stelios, without registering surprise, goes toward it.
“Geia,” he says, slipping his arm around Anna’s waist.
“You found us,” she says. “This is where I always come,” Anna says to me. “It’s a ritual now. We always buy something as a souvenir. Last year it was this hat and now we’ve come back to find something else.”
We begin to look through the merchandise, most of it plastic and made in China.
“Found it,” Stelios calls, and we gather around him. “Look at these. They’re pretty nice, probably handmade.”
“From Zakynthos,” says the stall owner, a middle-aged man in a bulky down jacket. He shows us a dowel from which are hanging wooden-beaded bracelets on thin leather cords. The beads are painted deep red, like blood. Anna takes one.
“It’s like an abacus,” she says.
“Yes,” says Stelios. “A bracelet for my sexy mathematician.”
“Four, please,” Anna tells the merchant, and gives him the money. She puts hers on and passes the others to Stelios. He takes my hand and slides a bracelet over my knuckles.
“For all the sexy women,” he says.
“Me too,” Andreas says, waving his wrist in front of Stelios’s face. “I’m sexy too.”
It is ten-thirty now, too late to catch one of the many performances going on in the city’s theaters, so we continue along the street past the stalls and the tavernas to find a bar. We settle on one that makes crêpes stuffed with chocolate and honey. Now I’ve been with these people long enough that we have our own inside jokes from earlier in the evening. They don’t seem to care that they only just met me, and neither do I. But eventually I give in to jet lag, faking interest as my eyes close, and then dozing off altogether. I wake up at one point with my head on Andreas’s shoulder. He smells of cigarettes.
Sometime later, with Maki lost to the crowd, the four of us head back to the center of town, our arms clasped together out of glee and a need for support. I tell Stelios I should be getting home.
“Don’t go now. They’re already in bed at this point. What difference will a few more hours make?”
But that is what I am worried about. Like my mother, I have no key to Aliki’s home. If Aliki and Nikos are in bed, I will have to wake them or keep roaming the streets until we all crash on someone’s floor.
At the corner of Kolokotronis and Kanakaris, Anna pulls us all to a stop.
“Pact!” she says, freeing her arms from Stelios’s and Andreas’s grasp. “We keep these on for the entire Carnival, and when we return next year”—she swoops around exaggeratedly to me, emphasizing the words—“we will wear them as a sign of our parea.”
“Indeed! Done!” we all say, thrusting our braceleted hands in the air.
At Aliki’s building, I take a deep breath and press the buzzer. I am startled to hear it answered immediately. She has been waiting up. With one foot holding the door open, I kiss my friends good night and vaguely agree to various offers for the next day without really paying attention.
Aliki is in her bathrobe, standing in the open door to the apartment. She presses her finger against her lips silently and follows me into my room.
“What happened to you? I was worried.”
“I’m so sorry, Aliki. I went looking for you.”
“In a bar?”
“No, really, Aliki, I did. I wanted to be there with you. At the parade. Then I found these friends and we watched the parade. I couldn’t find you.”
“No,” she says. “We didn’t take Demetra to a bar.”
She shakes her head at me and leaves, returning with a glass of water for me. I drink it and go to bed, the smell of smoke in my hair and beer on my breath.
6
Callie
Saturday
Aliki is standing over me, saying something. As I open my eyes, I am conscious of the hangover I deserve: the aching head, the felted tongue, the lids clicking over dry eyes. Aliki seems to relish the discomfort she sees on my face.
“What time is it?”
“It’s already eleven. I don’t think I’ve seen you like this since that time we went to Kythira.”
“Oh, God.”
“Yeah,” she laughs. “Remind me again, was it you who thought we should all go skinny-dipping?”
“I didn’t know there wasn’t a moon!” I remember how long it took us to find our clothes
in the dark afterward and how we all stumbled around on the island beach, boys and girls, wet and suddenly ashamed of our nakedness. I clutch my head. “Don’t make me laugh,” I moan.
She watches me try to compose myself.
“Listen,” she says, “I have to go with Demetra to the Children’s Carnival. Nikos is coming too, and we’re meeting Marina and her family. You met her the other night.”
“Too much information. You’ll make me barf.”
“You already did,” she says. Suddenly I remember rising in the night and vomiting in the toilet. I look around me, as if for traces of the mess I must have created.
“I’m so sorry, Aliki. I left last night just a few minutes after you’d gone. I thought I’d be able to find you.”
“I’d say your plan failed pretty spectacularly.”
“It was stupid, I know.”
“I can’t have you staying here if you’re going to carouse like that. Demetra doesn’t need to see that.” Aliki tries to catch herself, but it’s too late. She’s right. No little girl should have to see the adults she cares about losing control or, worse, going missing.
“I get it, Aliki. Believe me, I get it.”
“At least leave a note, Calliope. This isn’t Kythira. It’s a city. I had no idea where you were. Demetra was worried, and I made something up so she wouldn’t be upset.”
“I’m sorry, Aliki,” I say, taking her arm. “I promise I won’t do that again.”
She rolls her eyes at me. “When you’ve gotten yourself together, there’s some cake you can toast for breakfast. Butter’s on the counter. Our key is on the hall table, and I’m leaving the key to Nestor’s house. I’ll be at the kids’ Carnival all day.”
“I could come with you.”
“Demetra doesn’t want to be late. And you won’t be ready in time.”
This hurts, but I understand.
“You can go on over to Nestor’s by yourself.”
“I look just as foreign as yesterday, Aliki.”
“If anyone asks you, you can explain it to them.”
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