The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (3 page)

On planes, Bridget always sat next to adorable college guys who asked for her number before they landed. Carmen always got the middle seat between men with fat fingers, class rings, and sales reports.

“Flight attendants, please take your seats,” the captain said over the P.A. system. Carmen felt a thrill in the bottom of her stomach. She uncrossed her legs, putting both feet on the ground. She made the sign of the cross like her mother always did at takeoffs and landings. She felt like kind of a faker, but was this really a moment to break superstitions?

Tibby,

You are with me, even though you aren't. I love everything about this trip but being apart and knowing you're sad about being home. I don't feel right being happy knowing that. I feel so weird without you guys. Without you here being Tibby, I'm being a little bit Tibby-doing it badly compared to you, though.

Infinite X's and O's,
Carma

T
he first thing was the front door. It was painted the most brilliant, egg-yolk-over-easy shade of yellow. Surrounding it, the house front was painted the brightest possible blue. Who could even imagine such a blue? Lena tipped her face upward to the cloudless afternoon sky. Oh.

In Bethesda, if you painted your house those colors, they'd call you a drug addict. Your neighbors would sue you. They'd arrive with sprayers at nightfall and repaint it beige. Here was color bursting out everywhere against the whitewashed walls.

“Lena, go!” Effie whined, shoving Lena's suitcase forward with her foot.

“Velcome, girls. Velcome home!” Grandma said, clapping her hands. Their grandfather fit the key into the lock and swung open the sun-colored door.

The combination of jet lag, sun, and these strange old people made Lena feel as if she were tripping—hypothetically, of course. She'd never actually tripped on anything, except maybe a bad shrimp from Peking Garden once.

If Lena was glazed and stupefied, Effie without sleep was just plain cranky. Lena always counted on her younger sister to do the blabbering, but Effie was too cranky even for that. So the drive from the tiny island airport had been mostly quiet. Grandma kept turning around in the front seat of their old Fiat saying, “Look at you girls! Oh, Lena, you are a beauty!”

Lena seriously wished she would stop saying that, because it was irritating, and besides, how was cranky Effie supposed to feel?

Grandma's English was good from years of running a restaurant catering to tourists, but Bapi's didn't seem to have benefited in the same way. Lena knew that her grandmother had been the hostess and the beloved public face of the restaurant, charming everyone with tidal waves of affection. Bapi mostly stayed in the back, cooking at first, and then running the business after that.

Lena felt ashamed for not speaking Greek. According to her parents, Greek was her first language as a baby, but she slowly dropped it when she started school. Her parents never even bothered with Effie. It was a whole different alphabet, for God's sake. Now Lena wished she spoke it, just like she wished she were taller and had a singing voice like Sarah McLachlan. She wished it, but she didn't expect it would happen.

“Grandma, I love your door,” Lena piped up as she passed through it. The inside of the house was so comparatively dark, Lena felt she might faint. All she could see at first were swirling sunspots.

“Here ve are!” Grandma shouted, clapping again.

Bapi shuttled behind, with two duffel bags and Effie's furry neon-green backpack over both shoulders. It was cute and depressing at the same time.

Grandma threw her arm around Lena and squeezed her tight. On the surface Lena felt glad, but just under the surface it made her feel awkward. She was unsure how to return the gesture.

The house came into focus. It was larger than she expected, with ceramic tile floors and pretty rugs.

“Follow me, girls,” Grandma ordered. “I'll show you your rooms and then ve'll have a nice glass of drink, okay?”

Two zombie girls followed her upstairs. The landing was small but gave way to two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a short hallway down which Lena saw two other doors.

Grandma turned into the first door. “This one for beautiful Lena,” she said proudly. Lena didn't think so much of the simple room until Grandma threw open the heavy wooden shutters.

“Oh,” Lena said, sighing.

Grandma pointed out the window. “Caldera,” she announced. “Cauldron, you English say.”

“Oh,” Lena said again with genuine awe.

Though Lena was still iffy about her grandmother, she fell instantly in love with the Caldera. The water was a darker copy of the sky, teased by the wind just enough to make it glitter and shine. The thin, semicircular island hugged the wide expanse of water. A tiny island popped up in the middle of it.

“Oia is de most beautiful village in Greece,” Grandma proclaimed, and Lena couldn't imagine that wasn't true.

Lena looked down at the whitewashed buildings, much like this one, clinging to cliffs jutting down to the water. She hadn't realized before how steep it was, how strange a spot it was to make a home. Santorini was a volcano, after all. She knew from family lore that it was the site of the worst explosion in history and countless tidal waves and earthquakes. The center of the island had literally sunk into the sea, and all that was left was this thin, wobbly crescent of volcanic cliffs and some black ash-tinted sand. The cauldron looked calm and beautiful now, but the true Santorinians liked to remind you it could start bubbling and spewing anytime.

Though Lena had grown up in a flat, sprawling, grassy suburb where people feared no natural disaster worse than mosquitoes or traffic on the beltway, she'd always known her roots were here. And now, looking out at the water, some deep atavistic memory bubbled up, and it did feel like home.

“My name is Duncan Howe, and I'm your assistant general manager.” He pointed with a large, freckly finger to a plastic nameplate. “And now that you've finished orientation, I'd like to welcome you as our newest sales professionals at Wallman's.” He spoke with such authority, you would have thought he was talking to a crowd of hundreds rather than two bored, gum-chewing girls.

Tibby imagined a string of drool dangling from the side of her mouth all the way down to the scuffed linoleum squares.

He studied his clipboard. “Now, uh, Tie-by,” he began, giving it a long
i
.

“Tibby,” she corrected.

“I'd like you to unload inventory in Personal Hygiene, aisle two.”

“I thought I was a sales professional,” Tibby commented.

“Brianna,” he said, ignoring Tibby, “you can start at register four.”

Tibby frowned sourly. Brianna got to snap her gum at an empty register because she had uncommonly huge hair and gigantic boobs that even the darts on her smock couldn't accommodate.

“Now don your headsets, and let's get to work,” Duncan commanded importantly.

Tibby tried to abort her laugh, so it came out as a combination hack-snort. She slapped her hand over her mouth. Duncan didn't seem to notice.

The good news was, she'd found her star. She'd decided the morning after the vow of the Pants that she was going to record her summer of discontent in a movie—a suckumentary, a pastiche of lameness. Duncan had just won himself a role.

She jammed her headset over her ears and hurried herself to aisle two before she got the boot. On one hand, it would have been excellent to get fired, but on the other, she needed to make money if she was ever going to have a car. She knew from experience that there were few career opportunities for a girl with a pierced nose who couldn't type and was not a “people person.”

Tibby went back to the storeroom, where a woman with extraordinarily long fingernails motioned to a very large cardboard box. “Set that up in deodorants and antiperspirants,” she instructed in a bored tone. Tibby couldn't look away from the fingernails. They curved like ten scythes. They rivaled the nails of the Indian guy in the
Guinness Book of World Records
. They looked the way Tibby imagined a corpse's fingernails would look after a few years in the ground. She wondered how the woman could pick up a box with those nails. Could she dial a phone? Could she type on the keys on the register? Could she wash her hair? Could a person get fired for having their fingernails too long? Could you maybe get disability? Tibby glanced at her own chewed-up fingernails.

“Any special way?” Tibby asked.

“It's a display,” the woman said, as though any moron would know how to set one up. “It's got instructions in the box.”

Tibby hefted the box toward aisle two, wondering how the woman's fingernails would look in her movie.

“Your headset is drooping,” the woman warned.

When she unpacked the box, Tibby was disheartened to see at least two hundred roll-on antiperspirants and a complicated cardboard contraption. She gaped at the number of arrows and diagrams in the instructions. You needed an engineering degree to put the thing together.

With the help of a little Scotch tape from aisle eight and a wad of gum from her mouth, Tibby at last managed to construct a pyramid of roll-ons with the cardboard head of a sphinx stuck to the top. What did antiperspirant have to do with ancient Egypt? Who knew?

“Tibby!” Duncan marched over importantly.

Tibby looked up from the momentous stack of roll-ons.

“I've paged you four times! We need you at register three!”

Tibby had failed to turn on her drooping headset. She had been too busy making silent fun of it to pay attention when Duncan explained how to use it.

After she had spent one hour at the register and sold exactly two triple-A batteries to a zitty thirteen-year-old, her shift was over.

She took off her smock, turned in her headset, and strode through the doors, to a deafening barrage of bleeps. Duncan jumped in her path with stunning speed for a person on the fat side of fat. “Excuse me, Tibby, could you follow me back inside?”

She could see it all over his face:
We never should have hired the girl with the nose ring.

He asked to see the contents of her pockets. She didn't have any pockets.

“Your smock?” he pressed.

“Oh.” She pulled the rumpled smock from under her arm. From the pocket she pulled her wallet and . . . a partly used roll of Scotch tape. “Oh, that,” Tibby said. “Right. See, I just used it for the . . .”

Duncan's face took on a resigned “I've heard all the excuses under the sun” expression. “Look, Tibby. We have a second-chance policy here at Wallman's, so we'll let this go. But be warned: I am forced to suspend your best-employee benefits, namely a fifteen percent We-Are-Wallman's discount on all items.”

After that Duncan carefully noted that the price of the Scotch tape be deducted from her first day's pay. Then he disappeared for a moment and came back with a see-through plastic bag with two handles. “Could you please keep your possessions in this from now on?” he asked.

Dear Carmen,

I guess when you have close blood relatives you've never met, you can't help but kind of idealize them in your mind. Like how adopted kids always believe their birth father was a professor and their birth mother was a model?

I guess with my grandparents it was kind of the same thing. My parents always said I was beautiful just like Grandma. So somehow all these years I pictured Grandma as Cindy Crawford or something. Grandma is not Cindy Crawford. She is old. She has a bad perm and an old-lady velour sweat suit, and horny-looking toenails sticking out of her pink, flat sandals. She's pretty ordinary, you know?

Bapi, the legendary businessman of the Kaligaris family, I pictured as being at least six feet two. He's not. He's teeny. Maybe my height. He wears thick brown double-knit trousers even though it's over a million degrees here, and a white shirt with a zipper at the collar. His shoes are cream-colored vinyl. He's sort of moldy and speckled in that old-man way. He's very shy.

I feel like I should just love them right away. But how do you do that? You can't make yourself love someone, can you?

I'm taking good care of the Pants. And I miss you. I know you won't judge me harshly for being a brat, ‘cause you always think better of me than I deserve.

Love you lots.
Lena

T
he sunset was too beautiful. It almost made Lena feel panicked because she couldn't save it. The blobs of paint on her palette, usually inspiring, looked hopelessly drab. The sunset burned with a billion watts of light. There was no light in her paint. She put her palette and her carefully prepared panel on top of the wardrobe so she didn't have to look at them.

She perched on her windowsill, gazing at the lurid sun soaking into the Caldera, trying to appreciate it even though she couldn't have it. Why did she always feel she had to
do
something in the face of beauty?

She heard the bustle of a feast being prepared downstairs. Grandma and Bapi were celebrating their arrival with a big meal and a bunch of neighbors. Her grandparents had sold their restaurant two years ago, but they hadn't lost their love for food, Lena guessed. Spicy, rich smells, one after another, floated upstairs into Lena's room, mixing together for a preview of the full meal.

“Lena! Almost ready!” Grandma shouted from the kitchen. “You dress and come down!”

Lena threw her suitcase and her duffel bag on the bed, so she could keep her eyes on the window. Getting dressed was rarely exciting to her. She wore practical clothes, “stodgy, dull, and pathetic,” according to her friends. She didn't like people having more reasons to look at her, to think that how she looked made them know her. She'd been the show pony too often as a child.

Tonight, though, there was a little carbonation in the bottom of her stomach. Carefully she dug under layers of clothes to find the Pants. They felt a little heavier than they deserved. She held her breath as she unfolded them, letting loose a thousand wishes into the air. This was the beginning of their history, their life as the Traveling Pants. As she pulled them on she felt the enormity of making them count. She momentarily tried to picture herself having big moments in the Pants. For some reason, she couldn't shake the vision of Effie wearing them instead.

She stuck her feet into a pair of beat-up brown loafers and headed downstairs.

“I made a meatball,” Effie declared proudly from the kitchen.

“Keftedes,”
Grandma clarified over her shoulder, equally proud. “Effie is a Kaligaris. She likes to cook and she likes to eat!” She gave Effie a hug to confirm what a good thing this was.

Lena smiled and went into the kitchen to praise and investigate.

She and Effie were already putting on their turtle-and-hare show. Everyone paid lots of attention to Lena at first, because she was striking to look at, but within a few hours or days, they always fully committed their attentions to exuberant, affectionate Effie. Lena felt Effie deserved it. Lena was an introvert. She knew she had trouble connecting with people. She always felt like her looks were fake bait, seeming to offer a bridge to people, which she couldn't easily cross.

Grandma cast a look at her outfit. “You are wearing that to our party?”

“I was thinking so. Should I wear something fancier?” Lena asked.

“Well . . .” Grandma did not look particularly stern or judgmental. She looked more mischievous, like she had a secret she wanted you to ask her about. “It isn't a fancy party, but . . .”

“Should I change too?” Effie asked. Her shirt was dusty with breadcrumbs.

Grandma was about as good at keeping her secrets as Effie was. She looked at Lena conspiratorially. “You see, there is a boy, he's like a grandson to Bapi and me. He's a
nice
boy. . . .” She winked.

Lena tried to freeze the pleasant look on her face. Was her grandmother seriously trying to set her up with a guy less than six hours after she'd arrived? Lena
hated
being set up.

Effie looked pained on her behalf.

“His name is Kostos,” Grandma plowed on, oblivious. “He is the grandson of our dear friends and neighbors.”

Studying her grandmother's face, Lena had a strong suspicion Grandma hadn't just cooked up this idea in the last hour. She suspected Grandma had been plotting something for a long time. She knew arranged marriages were still popular among Greek parents, particularly in the islands, but God!

Effie laughed awkwardly. “Um, Grandma? Boys love Lena, but Lena is very hard on boys.”

Lena's eyebrows shot up. “Effie! Thanks a lot!”

Effie shrugged sweetly. “It's true.”

“Lena hasn't met Kostos,” Grandma said confidently. “Everyone loves Kostos.”

“Sweetheart!”

Carmen's heart took off faster than her feet at the sight of her dad waving his arms at her from behind the Plexiglas half wall delineating gate forty-two. She felt like a cliché, running like that, but she loved it anyway.

“Hey, Dad!” she called, throwing herself at him. She savored that word. Most kids got to use it constantly, thoughtlessly. For her it lay unused, stashed away so many months of the year.

He held her tightly for just long enough. He let go, and she looked up at him. She loved how tall he was. He took her shoulder bag and tossed it over his own shoulder even though it was light. She smiled at the way he looked with her turquoise sequined bag.

“Hi, baby!” he said happily, putting his free arm around her shoulder. “How was the flight?” he asked, steering her toward the baggage claim area.

“Perfect,” she said. It was always awkward, their uneven strides with his arm around her shoulders, but she liked it too much to mind. Let other girls who saw their fathers every day complain. She saw hers only a few times a year.

“You look beautiful, bun,” he said easily. “You grew taller, I think.” He put his hand on the top of her head.

“I did,” she said proudly, always pleased at the idea that her height made her like him. “I'm five six and a half,” she reported. “Almost five seven.”

“Wow,” he said from his height of six foot two. “Wow. How is your mother?”

He always asked that dutiful question within the first five minutes.

“She's fine,” Carmen always answered, knowing her dad didn't want a full answer. Year after year, Carmen's mother continued to be rabidly curious about her dad, but her dad only asked about her mom to be polite.

Noiseless drops of guilt colored Carmen's pleasure. She was almost five seven, but her mother wasn't even five feet tall. Her dad called her bun and said she was beautiful, but he didn't care about her mom anymore.

“How are your buddies?” he asked, as they squished together onto the escalator, his arm still around her shoulders.

He knew how it was with her and Tibby and Lena and Bridget. He always remembered the details of her friends' lives from the last time he talked to her.

“It's a weird summer for us,” she answered. “It's our first summer apart. Lena's in Greece with her grandparents; Bridget's at soccer camp in Baja California. Tibby's home alone.”

“And you're here all summer,” he said, with an almost undetectable question in his eyes.

“I'm so glad to be here,” she said, her answer loud and clear. “I can't wait. It's just weird, you know? I mean, not weird in a bad way. Weird in a good way. It'll be good for us to branch out a little. You know how we get.” She was babbling, she realized. She hated for her dad to be uncertain.

He pointed to a conveyor belt, zipping luggage around in a circle. “I think this is for your flight.”

She remembered the time in Washington, when he held both her hands over her head while she rode the carousel halfway around. Then a guard yelled at them, and he pulled her off.

“It's a big black one with wheels. It looks like everybody else's,” she said. It was strange that he'd never seen her suitcase before. She'd never seen him without his.

“There!” she said suddenly, and he pounced. He pulled her suitcase off the conveyor belt as though his life had prepared him for that job alone. The turquoise sequins on her shoulder bag sparkled.

He carried the big suitcase instead of rolling it. “Great! Let's go.” He pointed them in the direction of the parking lot.

“Do you still have your Saab?” she asked. Cars were one of the interests they had in common.

“No. I traded it in this past spring for a station wagon.”

“Really?” She couldn't quite make sense of that one. “Do you like it?”

“It does the job,” he said, steering them right to it. It was a beige Volvo. His Saab had been red. “And here we go.” He opened her door for her and settled her in with her bag before loading her suitcase into the back. Where did dads learn these things? Why didn't they teach them to their sons?

“How did school finish up?” he asked her as he maneuvered out of the parking lot.

“Really good,” she answered. She always looked forward to giving him the rundown. “I got As in math, bio, English, French, and an A minus in world history.” Her mother thought she worried about school too much. To her dad, grades mattered.

“Bun, that's fabulous. And sophomore year is an important year.”

She knew he wanted her to go to Williams, just like he had, and he knew she wanted to too, even though they didn't say it to each other out loud.

“What about tennis?” he asked.

Most people she knew hated these kinds of dad questions, but Carmen worked all year for them. “Bridget and I played first doubles. We only lost one match.”

She wouldn't bother to tell him that she got an F in pottery—it wouldn't go on her transcript—or that the boy she'd crushed on all year asked Lena to the prom or that she'd made her mother cry on Easter Sunday. These conversations were about her victories.

“I got a court for us on Saturday,” he told her, accelerating onto a highway.

Carmen studied the scenery. There were motels and strip developments like there were around almost every airport, but the air smelled heavier and saltier here. She studied her dad's face. He had a tan already. It made his blue eyes stand out. She always wished she'd gotten his eyes rather than her mother's brown ones. His hair looked recently cut, and his shirt was crisp and neatly cuffed. She wondered if he'd gotten a raise or something.

“I can't wait to see your place,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said absently, glancing into the rearview mirror before he changed lanes.

“Isn't it pretty amazing that I've never been here before?” she asked.

He concentrated on the driving. “You know, bun, it's not that I haven't wanted you to come long before this. I just wanted to get settled better before I brought you here.” There was a trace of apology in his eyes when he glanced at her.

She didn't mean to make him uncomfortable. “Dad, I don't care if you're settled. Don't worry about that. We'll have a great time. Who cares about settled?”

He exited the highway. “I couldn't see bringing you into my hectic life. Working so much, living alone in a one-bedroom apartment. Eating every meal out.”

She couldn't talk fast enough. “I can't wait for that. I love eating out. I'm sick of being settled.” She meant it. This was the summer of Carmen and Al.

He didn't say anything as they drove along small wooded suburban streets with big Victorian houses rising on either side. Raindrops burst on the windshield. The sky grew so dark it felt almost like nighttime. He slowed down and stopped in front of a cream-colored Victorian with green-gray shutters and a wraparound porch.

“Where's this?” Carmen asked.

Her dad cut the engine and turned to her. “This is home.” His eyes were distant and a little mysterious. He didn't seem to want to take on the open surprise in hers.

“That house? Up there? I thought you lived in an apartment downtown.”

“I moved. Just last month.”

“You did? Why didn't you tell me on the phone?”

“Because . . . there's a lot of big stuff, bun. Stuff I wanted to say in person,” he answered.

She wasn't sure how she felt about big stuff. She turned in her seat. “So? Are you going to tell me?” Carmen was never graceful about surprises.

“Let's go inside, okay?”

He opened his door and hurried around to her side before she echoed his okay. He didn't get her suitcase. He held his coat over both their heads as they climbed stone steps up to the house.

He took her arm in his. “Careful. These steps get slippery when it rains,” he said, leading her up the painted wood steps of the front porch. It was as though he'd lived here forever.

Carmen's heart was thumping. She had no idea where they were or what to expect. She felt the shape of the apple in her bag.

Her dad pushed open the door without knocking. “Here we are!” he called.

Carmen realized she was holding her breath. Who would be here?

Within seconds a woman came into the room with a girl who appeared to be about Carmen's age. Carmen stood baffled and stiff as the woman and then the girl each hugged her. They were quickly followed by a tall young man, about eighteen, Carmen guessed. He was blond and broad, like an athlete. She was thankful that he didn't hug her.

“Lydia, Krista, Paul, this is my daughter, Carmen,” her dad said. Her name sounded weird in his voice. He always called her sweetheart or baby or bun. He never called her Carmen. She thought that was because it was her Puerto Rican grandmother's name, and Carmen Sr. had sent him several nasty letters after the divorce. Her father's mother was dead. Her name was Mary.