Why I Killed My Best Friend (5 page)

“Where will we live?”

“In Paris, of course! At our house.”

First we learn the numbers and the days of the week. Then how to answer the phone (
haalloooo, qui est à l'appareil?
),
bonjour, bonsoir
, I'm hungry (
j'ai faim
), I'm sleeping (
je dors
). I call hide-and-seek
cache-cache
now, not
dezi
like I did in Africa. Ripe fruit is
fruit mûr
, and honest person is
personne honnête
. Pretty soon I'll be able to translate Gwendolyn's proverbs!

The best French lessons are the ones with music. Anna and I sit on the coffee table with wheels and move it gently with our feet. We pretend it's a magic carpet and that we're revolutionary witches. Our carpet goes wherever we tell it to as we sing songs about the wretched of the earth: “
Du passé faisons table rase, foule esclave, debout! Debout! Le monde va changer de base! Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!
” Or we listen to the sad songs of Françoise Hardy: “
Que sont devenus tous mes amis et la maison où j'ai vecu
. . .” A woman is feeling sad because she's living far from home. Just like us.

Anna talks about her dad all the time, about the apartment in Paris, about all the books he's read, about the French and Greek people who used to come over every night with wine and cigarettes to brainstorm anti-dictatorship slogans.

“The smoke didn't bother you?”

“Are you crazy, merde? Smoking helps you think.”

We try to light a Gauloises in the kitchen.

“Suck in!” Anna shouts. “You have to suck in!”

I suck in and choke. I do whatever she tells me because she knows all about history and penmanship and how to fly a magic carpet, she knows revolutionary songs and can do all of the exercises in
The Key to Practical Arithmetic
. She has a beautiful, skinny
mother with no eyebrows and a dad who thinks all day long. She has the blondest hair in the world. Thank goodness I'm better at drawing. Otherwise I'd be jealous and then there'd be trouble, like with Dola and Bambi.

Carnival in Greece reminds me of the theme parties we used to have in Ikeja. One morning we'd say, Hey, why don't we all wear polka dots to the Marine Club tomorrow, and then next week we can dress up as Robinson Crusoe? Only Carnival lasts a long time, so you get to dress up a lot. For the parties at school my mother dresses me as a nun. The boys decide I'm a Catholic nurse and ask if I want to join their war effort. Anna gets annoyed. She's dressed as a flower child, and no one wants a hippie on the front lines. Whereas I can treat their wounds in the washbasins in the yard. Besides, my cast means I'm a wounded nurse, and
that
means I'm a true heroine. Not to mention my missing finger . . .

“Forget about that stupid war,” Anna says, trying to pull me away. “We're going to a protest.”

“What protest?”

“For the League of Democratic Women.”

She starts pinching all the boys so they'll let me go. Then she insists on us singing the song about Petros, Yiohan, and Frantz working together in the factory. But isn't that what we do every day? War is more original.

“War is what babies and Americans play,” Anna says.

With a heavy heart I leave the front line and go back to protesting. Angeliki wants to march with us but she's dressed as a harem woman. Anna tells her that women in harems are the slaves of men and any woman who does men's bidding deserves only pity. Angeliki starts to cry and takes off her fez. Her hair is a mess and her nose is running. I feel like hugging her, I always feel sorry for people when they cry, but Anna gets between us and shakes a
finger in my face, saying, “She's crying now, but later she'll be calling you Teapot.” What can I say? She's right. A bird doesn't change its feathers when winter comes.

After the protest we drink an orangeade, the kind without fizz. Anna is sunk in thought. “What's wrong?” I ask. She tells me that we should be going to real protests and hanging out with older boys from the working class, like Apostolos the plumber. She makes me write and propose a meeting.
Apostolos, do you want to meet the day after tomorrow, when school lets out?
He writes back,
How will I recognize you?
, and I reply,
I'll be dressed as a nun
.

We wait outside the gate, a nun and a hippie. Apostolos is pretty cute, but he has two chipped teeth, so he could never be my husband. Besides, he pays absolutely no attention to me. He asks Anna who drew the beautiful daisies on her cheeks. “Me!” I cry, but Apostolos just asks about Paris and if she liked living there, as if he didn't hear me at all. Anna goes on and on about the Fourth International, the proletariat, the League of Democratic Women and Georges Brassens, throwing in whatever she knows, and Apostolos gazes at her admiringly. I, meanwhile, am bored to tears. I sit on the curb, eyes glued to my knees, waiting for them to be done so we can finally leave.

Every Friday afternoon Antigone gives us ballet lessons in the living room of their house in Plaka. So I learn even more French words, like
pas de chat
, which means step of the cat. First, second, and third position.
Plié
, to bend.
Relevé
, to lift. In the end Antigone does a split and we clap and shout “
Encore
!” Then we go out for a walk. Antigone wears embroidered shirts and holds us by the hand as if we were both her daughters.

“We're Anna-Maria!” I say, laughing.

“Don't ever say that again!” Antigone says. “That's the name of that fool of a princess.”

Sometimes, on the weekend, Mom lets me sleep at Anna's. We take a bath together, then Antigone dries our hair with a towel and does it up in little braids or buns or ponytails. Then she smokes her Gauloises cigarettes or calls Paris, and while she's not paying attention we play house, or sometimes build a fort with a blanket. Anna always wants the houses we live in to have special furniture, special music, a special atmosphere. “You should be thankful, if I had my way we wouldn't live in a house at all,” she says, “we'd just fly around on our magic carpet!” The conversations about revolution are kind of boring, but I let her have her way on that, at least. After all, even in the half-light under the blanket, Anna can see right through me. If I disagree, she'll pinch.

Shortly before the end of the school year, Aunt Amalia buys me a game called Little Wizard, a box full of magic tricks. You learn how to make colorful bits of paper disappear or do card tricks or hide plastic animals in a hat with a false bottom. Anna and I climb onto the magic carpet and do magic tricks for an imaginary audience of poor kids. Everything always has to be about the poor. That's why Anna gets mad when Aunt Amalia takes us to see
My Fair Lady
, a movie about Eliza Doolittle, who starts out as a beggar but by the end is a real princess, after an aristocrat takes her in off the street and teaches her how to speak properly. Eliza's name in real life is Audrey Hepburn. She has a very long neck and wears her hair in a bun. Aunt Amalia gets tears in her eyes, probably because she's thinking how if things had turned out differently, she too could have lived like a princess. I want to tell her that the princess Constantine married was a fool, but Aunt Amalia says, “Shhh, don't talk in the movie theater.” My favorite scene is when Eliza Doolittle can't sleep because she's in love with the aristocrat. The maid puts her to bed but she keeps popping back up to her feet like a spring. Anna grunts in disgust and says that Eliza was happier back when
she was selling flowers in the street and hadn't gotten so hoity-toity. “But she's not!” I cry. “Of course she is,” Anna says, “just like you.”

“Where is your family going to spend the summer?” Aunt Amalia asks Anna on the way home.

“
A Paris
”

“I'm going to Ikeja, right?”

“No, honey. You're coming to Aegina with me.”

Merde, merde.

Martha and I are sitting on the low wall in the garden, playing beauty pageant. Martha and Fotini are sisters, and they're my summer friends on Aegina. Only today Fotini is grounded: she stole a teacup from Martha's tea set, hid it in the yard, and won't say where. Her punishment is that she has to stay in her room until it's time for the live broadcast of the Thessaloniki Song Festival. The girls have an older brother, Angelos, who is in high school, but he doesn't talk to us. Each summer Aunt Amalia rents a room on the ground floor of the girls' house, where their grandfather used to live before he died. She and I sleep together in the double bed. We leave the windows open and the bougainvilleas outside shape the shadows of junta fascists, or the grandfather's ghost. One night I got scared and woke up Aunt Amalia, who sleeps with curlers in her hair. “Oh, Maria, there's no reason to be scared, with these curlers I'd frighten even a ghost away!”

In the mornings we have breakfast together. The girls' mother, Kyria Pavlina, has a goat and makes her own yogurt. The only bad part is that we eat it at their kitchen table, under a strip of fly paper covered with dead flies. Kyria Pavlina doesn't like to kill flies with a fly swatter. She prefers for them to get stuck on the paper and die on their own.

After breakfast we go down to the beach to swim or to dig deep holes in the sand. Fotini and Martha are always singing a song by
the child star Manos:
You don't live in my time, Mom, you don't live in my time, Dad . . .
I like it a lot but I also know it would annoy Anna. In fact we do all kinds of things that Anna wouldn't like. We watch
Little House on the Prairie
and wear cherry lip gloss during our beauty contests. There are three titles, one for each of us: Miss Beauty, Miss Inner Beauty, and Miss Youth. Fotini always ends up being Miss Youth because she's the youngest. Martha likes being Miss Beauty, and I'm happy with Miss Inner Beauty, so it works out just fine for us all.

“Girls, the festival is starting!” Kyria Pavlina calls. Martha and I abandon our beauty pageant in the middle and run to the television. Fotini comes, too, since her punishment is over. We're rooting for a girl, Roula, who sings in the commercial for Roli cleaning powder.
Please tell me, Dad, is love good or bad? Today he gave me my first kiss, and I cried with bliss . . .
Her father gives his approval and Roula gets as excited as Eliza Doolittle:
Well, then, I'll say it, I love a boy, I love him and I want him tons!

This summer I'm in love with Angelos. He's very serious and wants to be a nuclear physicist. We only see him in the morning when he wakes up and at night before he goes to bed. The whole rest of the day he's out roaming around with his friends. I've lost all interest in tanks and submarines. No more lies. Mom has gone to help Dad empty out the house in Ikeja. She left me behind, with Aunt Amalia.

Next fall Gwendolyn will be telling her proverbs to other kids.

I keep whistling the tune to “Please Tell Me, Dad,” but Anna covers her ears when she hears it. Of course I don't tell her about the beauty pageants.

“Aegina ruined you,” she says, raising an eyebrow, the one with the white streak.

“Why?”

“It made you dumb.”

I look down at my shoes. She's right, after all.

“But maybe it's not your fault, it's those girls, what were their names again? Fotini and Martha.”

Anna lectures me about how the Socialist Party in Sweden lost power after forty-four years and how the Workers' Party in Great Britain is weaker than ever before, as if I were to blame. She tells me that in Paris she made some important decisions, when she grows up she wants to be like Gisèle Halimi, Sartre, and de Beauvoir's lawyer who risked imprisonment for supporting the Algerian National Liberation Front. I understand barely half of what she says, but I keep nodding my head. She's determined to bring me back to the proper path, and tells me about Patty Hearst, who disowned her rich father and started robbing banks, and sixteen-year-old Nadia Comăneci, the human rubber band from the Montreal Olympics. We braid our hair to look like Comăneci, put on our gym clothes, roll aside the portable table in the living room and practice our splits. Next is modern dance. Anna always chooses the theme. Our choreographies have names like “Long Live the Revolution” or “The Students” or “A Carnation on the Polytechnic Memorial.” The dances are full of
pas de chat
and when we start to sweat, we lie down on the rug and stare at the ceiling.

“A perfect score!” Anna tells me. “You're not dumb anymore.” I hug her and we roll like barrels into the hall, splitting our sides with laughter. That's where Antigone finds us when she opens the front door.

“You crazy girls,
on va manger quelque chose
?”

We eat backwards this year, too, main course first, then salad. Antigone shows me pictures from their summer in France. The whole family went to Deauville, to the house of some friends.
Anna's father has a blondish beard. In all of the photographs he's smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper. Anna is sitting in his lap, arms wrapped around his neck.

“Do you love your dad a lot?”

“What do you mean, don't you love yours?”

“Sure, I love him, only I've forgotten what he's like.”

And yet that very same night, Mom and Dad come home from the airport. I cling to my father's neck, just like Anna, and burst into tears.