“Aliki. What is it?” We haven’t been in touch in a long time, but I speak to her in Greek, as I have always done.
“It’s Uncle Nestor,” she says, the characteristic singsong of her voice taking a melancholy lilt. “He died.”
I feel relief that it’s not my mother, then sadness for Nestor, then shame over my relief. I can see Nestor standing before me five years ago, the last time I saw him, his crinkly black hair streaked with white. Beethoven is playing in the background. “Listen, Calliope. The tympani,” he whispers, his loose fist dotting the air in time with the music. I am sitting on his velvet-covered couch and we are drinking glasses of red wine.
“What happened?” Nestor would be around seventy now. But I’m sure only a crazy accident can have brought him down.
“It was a heart attack.”
“His heart?”
“They found heart disease the year before last.”
My face goes hot as I realize that I had no idea he was ill. I thought of him as the hale old bachelor who would hike Olympus in bad weather or ski across the French Alps during the holidays from his schoolteacher’s job.
“He didn’t want anyone to know,” she says.
“But he told you.”
“If you had been here, Calliope, it’s you he would have told. He was so proud of you.”
“Proud of me?” A little sob bubbles up.
“Paki,” she says, and I smile at this old nickname. Calliope to Calliopaki—Little Calliope—to Paki.
“I’m here. When is the funeral, Aliki?”
“That’s why I’m calling.”
It occurs to me now to wonder why my mother isn’t the one making this call. I imagine her for a second, dizzy with grief, eyes swollen, and unable to dial a number. But the thought shuts down. My mother doesn’t display unsightly emotions.
“The funeral’s Monday,” Aliki says. “I would have called you sooner, but I thought your mother already had.”
“What time?”
“In the morning.”
I think about all my childhood arrivals in the blazing sun of Athens afternoons.
“Aliki, I’ll check the schedules, but I don’t think I can be there in time. I wouldn’t be able to catch a flight until tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry about that. There’s another thing.”
“Is my mother all right?”
“She’s fine.” There’s a tight sound in her voice that I wish I understood. “But there’s the will. You kind of have to come to Patras for the will.” She goes on to explain, somewhat sheepishly, that Nestor has left his squat one-story house to her and her husband, Nikos, and all its contents, including a pile of boxes and books, to me. He’s also left me two million drachmas, at nearly six thousand dollars a fairly princely sum from someone who lived his life on a teacher’s salary. A princely sum for me too, given the state of my bank account.
“I guess you have to come and sign the form,” she says. “The Acceptance of Inheritance.”
“Aliki, I’d love to come,” I say, regretting the formulation. It’s a death in the family, not a vacation. “But I don’t think I can get away from work right now.” I hold a job raising money for a private school. I speak on the phone with old-money patriarchs
whose names are only slightly more WASP-ish than mine. “I’m sure I can do it here. The consulate’s a five-minute walk away.”
“Are you sure you can’t come?” She sounds almost worried now.
“What’s up, Aliki? Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“I don’t want to say.” This isn’t the Aliki I remember. Older than me by three years, she was always defiant and self-assertive. I used to watch her for lessons on how to stand up to the grown-ups and later to the men who would catcall her wherever she went.
“Tell me.”
“Well, there’s a reason your mother didn’t call. I don’t think she wanted you to make it here in time, Paki. She’s acting all funny about Nestor leaving you his things.”
“Funny how?”
“Like she doesn’t want you to have them. Or to go through them. I think she figured if she waited long enough to tell you he had died, there’d be some legal way for her to keep his stuff for herself.”
The phone crackles; a car outside on Pinckney Street spins its wheels in the snow.
“Wow,”
I say.
“So I think you should try to come, Paki.”
“Yeah,” I say, and it’s almost a whisper.
Nestor’s living room was lined with bookshelves that held plenty of books but mostly metal cases of film and reel-to-reel tape. All of Beethoven’s symphonies, recorded from the radio; Nestor’s ascents of dozens of mountains, captured on his 8 mm camera. As a child, a teenager, a college student, I loved when he showed me the films or played me the music. But what I think I loved best was when he would open his wooden cases
of seashells or tell me about his glass vials of sand from beaches around the world—all of it labeled by place and date of collection. He would sit me down on the velvet couch and hand me a vial, asking me to imagine the beach in North Africa or Sardinia where he had filled it at surf’s edge. I promised him I would go to these places and have adventures of my own. But there I let him down, spending more time digging around in my head than in any foreign land, wearing down a path between hope and resignation. I am so sad that my last memory of him dates from as long as five years ago. I know I don’t deserve Nestor’s pride Aliki mentioned to console me.
“You’ll have to call your mother,” Aliki says.
My mother always carped on her brother’s unruly home and mocked his habit of collecting odd objects from his travels. What on earth could make her want to keep these things for herself now—and prevent me from having them?
“Aliki, can I stay with you?”
A second’s hesitation—she knows what my mother will say at such disrespect—and then she tells me she can’t wait to see me again.
After I promise to call her as soon as I have my travel details, we say goodbye and I stand in the high-ceilinged room for a moment, listening to the hiss of the phone. Outside, the wind is blowing hard off the river, and people are walking with their heads bowed against the cold that I can feel seeping in through the windows.
Keys rattle behind me in the lock, and Jonah comes in, stomping his feet on the doormat and groaning.
“Cal, I think my nose is numb,” he says. I hear him set bags of groceries on the kitchen counter that lines the other end of the room.
“You all right, Cal?”
He has hung up his jacket and hat and slipped off his boots and is standing by the door, looking at me, his brown hair falling over his eyes. Cal: my four-syllable name of Homer’s Muse reduced to something that sounds like a cowboy or a baseball player. I like it.
“My cousin called,” I say, tossing the phone onto the couch. “My uncle died.”
“Which one?”
“I only have one. My mom’s younger brother.”
I met Jonah Sullivan over beer at The Sevens, and I moved in to his one-room apartment at the bottom of Beacon Hill almost two years ago. If he doesn’t know the details of my family, it’s my fault, not his.
“I’m sorry, Cal.” He comes and hugs me, squeezing my arms against my body. His face is cold.
“It’s okay.” I twist free and begin to unload the groceries. “Apparently he left me some stuff. I’m supposed to go to Greece and sign a form so I can take possession of the inheritance.”
“You going to?”
“I just told Aliki I would.”
“Why don’t you sound happy about that?”
“I’m sad about my uncle.”
“Not buying it. What’s the matter?”
“It’s complicated. You know that.”
“Cal,” he says, coming closer.
“Let’s not talk about it now, Jonah.” I attempt lightness. “Open some wine.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Who says I’m afraid at all?”
“Cal, I know you. You have your chin sticking out, all tough-guy, but you’re clearly scared of something.”
He cups my chin and tugs my face toward him. I let him kiss me.
“Fine,” I say. “Because I want to go. But this is exactly why I don’t talk to my mother. If I go, I’ll be hoping everything will be great and she’s going to end up making me feel awful.”
“See how this works?” he says, drawing the cork from a bottle of white. “You tell me what’s on your mind and it makes you feel better. Don’t you feel better?”
Jonah believes emotions are simple like that, as if you could just pour them out from giant transparent beakers. Except he forgets that the wrong combination—or the right one—can make everything explode.
“I feel better.”
We make love later, fueled by the rest of the white and by an extra bottle of good champagne we never got to on my thirty-fifth birthday. I’m determined not to let thoughts of my mother drag me into a darkness that could take days to lighten. Jonah delights in my aggression. I can see it in his eyes—his pleasure and almost pride in my suggestions, my requests. It would be so easy to turn in on myself. I could lie there with my back to him, looking out over the rail of our loft at the almost-bare room below and the curtainless windows glowing from the streetlight. But I force myself to think of who I am now—my pure self, floating free of ties or heritage. And as that person, I slide my leg over him and push up against him the way he likes, knowing that the momentum of the sex will protect me.
When I climb down from the loft the next morning, Jonah is eating a bowl of cereal on the couch, his wool socks sticking up loose on his feet as if he has been padding around in them for miles. I can see a patch of pale skin where the cushions are pushing his T-shirt up.
“Nude descending a staircase,” he says, smiling through a mouthful of Cheerios.
“Except I have your shirt on.”
“Not from my angle you don’t.”
I put an extra flounce in my step and get the coffee from the freezer.
“What are you going to do about your uncle?”
“I checked for flights. I can’t make the funeral.”
“What about the other stuff?”
“I’m still not sure I should go.”
“You already told Aliki.” He says the word with heavy consonants, American sounds that come from the front of his mouth.
“She can store the stuff for me. I can look through it another time.”
I run the coffee grinder.
“Maybe I should go with you.”
“What?”
“You know,” he says. “Go over, meet the relatives.
Impress
the relatives,” he says, setting his bowl in the sink and jumping up to sit on the counter.
“I am not going to deal with a family crisis by adding another family crisis to my life.”
“You saying I would be a crisis?”
“Jonah, I can’t just march you in there.”
“Why not?”
I give him a long look and then start spooning out the grounds. He takes my hand and runs his thumb over the three small diamonds in my ring. His grandmother’s ring, which his parents let him give me.
“Cal,” he says.
I glance at him. “Because I’m pretty sure you’d march right back out,” I say, answering his question.
“And you don’t want me to.” It’s a statement, but I know he’s not sure of the answer.
“No, Joe. I don’t want you to.” He likes it when I call him that.
I knock the spoon against the counter to shake the coffee dust off and throw it into the drawer. I fill the filter, switch the maker on, and kiss him on the cheek. I go into the shower, where I run the water hot.
I stand under the shower until I can see my skin turning red in blotches. Jonah comes in to brush his teeth and grab a sweatshirt from the back of the door. I can see his silhouette through the shower curtain. I suppose he can see mine and he knows that I am just standing there, neither washing my hair nor soaping.
“You want to talk later?” he says. He reaches through the curtain and touches the back of his hand to my face. The water soaks his sleeve. The cotton will ice up when he gets outside.
“Put a dry shirt on,” I tell him. “You’ll be cold.”
“I can skip the game if you want.”
“I’m fine, Joe.”
“Okay.” He sticks his head in and kisses my shoulder.
After a moment, he opens the bathroom door one more time.
“Back around one. Sooner if no one else is crazy enough to show up.”
“Okay.”
He closes the door, and the cloud of steam in the tiny room sways in the draft.
I am glad he is gone and hope his rugby friends will defy the
savage cold and the wind that will be howling across the Esplanade. I need a few hours to clear my head.
The champagne wasn’t just for my birthday two weeks ago. It was for the proposal Jonah made that night sometime after the first glass. He sent me up to the loft for something, and when I turned around, he was down below with his college guitar, singing Gershwin. When he got to the part about not being the man some girls think of as handsome and how to his heart I carried the key, I couldn’t keep from crying anymore.
At first I said no. I told him I liked our life together just the way it was. He pressed me and tried not to look devastated, and then he tried devastation after all, in case that would change my mind. And it did change my mind. Because I want to deserve that kind of love. I let him put the ring on me, and I’ve kept it on, but I’m always sliding it right to the end of my finger, just to see what it feels like. We both pretend that everything is fine, but I know Jonah wants more from me. I see it in every glance, every question about the future. Every time I pull him toward me, I have that sense that he wants to disappear into me, or wants me to disappear into him.
I’ve put Jonah in an impossible position. I won’t tell him the full truth about my mother, and so I make it inevitable that his reaction fails to match my needs, no matter how thoughtful he tries to be. And he does try. But all he knows is that I hated the ranch house I grew up in and was relieved when, soon after my father died, my mother sold the place and went back to Greece.
Doorjambs dented by the toes of shoes; sheetrock with holes punched through; hollow doors caved in: These are the marks of a childhood I prefer not to discuss, a violence between my parents whose emotional force far outweighed even these physical manifestations. Though perhaps worst of all was the overhanging atmosphere of forgetfulness, as if I had grown up in
the land of Homer’s Lotus-Eaters and no one could quite remember what was needed to take care of a daughter. They never hit each other, and they never hit me. But they lashed out again and again at the walls that confined them in their marriage, my family.