The Clover House (7 page)

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 that 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.

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 bookshelves 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.

“He wouldn’t tell me,” she says. “But I showed up at the hospital one time just as she was leaving and I heard their voices raised. Which meant something, because Nestor was pretty weak by then. Your mother gave me that look she has—you know the look.” I give a rueful laugh. “And Nestor was all upset.”

“She would argue with a dying man.” Here is proof that my mother shouldn’t be confronted. “Did she say anything to you?”

“No.”

I think back to the voice mail my mother left. I wonder if that argument in the hospital had anything to do with her insistence that I not come to Greece. Did he tell her something that convinced her I shouldn’t be left alone with his things?

“The aunts can’t wait to see you,” Aliki says brightly. “I convinced them not to come over last night. It would have been a bit too much.”

“The aunts,” I say, happy for the change of subject.

I am eager to see them, one spinster and one widow, living together with the cozy friction of an old married couple in what used to be Sophia’s apartment. Sophia is always expounding on something, and Thalia is always giving a little smile of friendly mockery. It is as if each woman’s personality was determined by the meaning of her name—Sophia’s by wisdom, and Thalia’s by comedy.

“I don’t suppose there was room for all three sisters to live in the one place,” I say.

“Sophia and your mother tried that decades ago, before she met your father. It didn’t go well, apparently.”

Aliki’s face tightens just a bit, and I feel again the vague shame I felt in childhood, for a mother who was somehow apart from her two sisters, who was treated with love but held separate for some reason I could not understand. Only Nestor tried to keep the childhood relationship alive, but she wouldn’t let him. And now, with this argument right before he died, she must have ruined any chance of reconciliation. She kept coming back to Patras, bringing me with her every summer, but I know my mother sensed the way her sisters kept her at a slight distance, and during the waves of sadness that often hit her once we were back in America, she raged at me against these unexplained slights and insults.