Why I Killed My Best Friend (6 page)

“Why are you crying, little grasshopper?” Dad says.

“Don't call her that, please!” Mom says, and she starts crying, too.

I'm afraid that now that he's come back to Athens Dad might start calling me Maria Papamavrou and saying that I'm a naughty girl, the way Mom does. I'm afraid that now that we live in Athens I might actually be turning into a naughty girl, not to mention a dumb one. That I might have left all my goodness and smarts in Africa.

This fall we have a man for a teacher, Kyrios Stavros. He's short and wears silk vests that barely contain his big belly. The fifth-grade reader is called
The High Mountains
and Kyrios Stavros says we're going to like it a lot because it's full of adventures. My biggest adventure, though, is the week when Anna stays home because she has the mumps. Angeliki keeps saying “teapot” over and over until it sounds like “potty,” and Petros picks his nose, chases me down, and wipes his snot on my legs.

“When are you coming back to school?” I ask Anna over the phone.

“Not until my cheeks aren't swollen anymore.”

“Anna, you have to come back. It's awful without you!”

I tell her about the things the other kids do to me during recess
and Anna plots our revenge: we'll handcuff them to the fence and tickle them, we'll spit in their food.

Since she's been sick in bed, Anna finished the entire fifth-grade reader. She says it's almost as good as
Petros's War
or
Wildcat under Glass
.

“What are they?”

“You mean you've never heard of Alki Zei? Merde!”

I make Mom buy me all of Alki Zei's books and I read them at night in bed. Anna's right. They're wonderful, especially
Wildcat under Glass
, with the two sisters who say ve-ha, ve-sa when they want to show whether they're very happy or very sad.

“Ve-ha? Ve-sa?” I ask Anna over the phone, so she'll know I read
Wildcat under Glass
.

“Ve-sa, because I have the mumps.”

I puff up my cheeks, trying to imagine what it would be like to have the mumps. Sometimes I'd like to be Anna, for better or for worse.

Kyrios Stavros tells us Savings Day is coming up and there are going to be two contests, for best essay and best drawing; the prize is a money-box from the postal bank. Anna and I both enter the drawing contest. Anna draws a bank all in pastel colors. The teller is giving money away to everyone. There's a cloud over his head with the words “
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!
” There are doves flying all around, and Patty Hearst is standing in one corner with her machine gun. Over her head it says, “
With so much justice in the world, who needs me?
”

“You didn't follow the theme,” Kyrios Stavros tells her, and Anna sticks her tongue out at him when his back is turned.

My drawing is in colored pencil, of the storage room in Ikeja and a family living in there. I make the mother like Antigone, skinny, with a braid and fake eyebrows, only she's wearing Mom's dress
with the yellow daisies. The dad has a beard, he's smoking a pipe and reading the newspaper
Acropolis
, which is the newspaper my father reads. The little girl has long blond hair, bangs, and a dimple in her chin. She's taking a can of milk down off the shelf and handing it to her little brother, a tiny baby who can't walk yet. The baby is hard to draw, it comes out looking like a caterpillar. I keep erasing it and trying again. When I finally get it right, my picture is beautiful. Up top I draw a rainbow that's raining drachmas, naira, and francs, which all turn into daisies as they fall to earth.

Kyrios Stavros comes into the classroom with the school superintendent.

“Will Maria Papamavrou please stand up?” the superintendent says.

What did I do now?

“Your drawing won first prize for our school. Come up front to accept your prize.”

I walk toward the teacher's desk with bowed head. The superintendent congratulates me, kisses the top of my head, and hands me a blue money-box with a metal handle.

“Now applaud your classmate,” Kyrios Stavros says.

Everyone claps, except for Angeliki and Anna.

“You're a thief!” Anna says. “You stole my family.”

“But your family is better than mine, that's why.”

She wants to split our desk down the middle again. I'm so happy about the prize that I don't object. When the bell rings at the end of the day Anna says, “I'll forgive you, but only if you give me your drawing.”

“What if my parents want it?”

“Tell them you lost it.”

Fortunately my drawing gets published in
Acropolis
. Dad clips it out carefully so he can have it framed.

“When I grow up, I'm going to be an artist,” I tell him.

“That's not a job,” Mom says. “You should choose a proper career, you can make art in your free time.”

“But if I have some other job, where will I find free time?”

“You'll manage. Don't I find time to shop and to cook, and to take you to the park?”

“Yeah, but all you cook is biftekia and lentils, and you don't take me to the park all that much, either.”

Mom gives me a threatening look, but she doesn't punish me. After I broke my arm she got rid of the key to the pantry. Now when she gets angry it's different: she just clenches her fists, lifts her eyes to the ceiling, and mutters under her breath.

Anna ruined my drawing!

“I didn't ruin it, I corrected it!” she shouts.

She drew doves all over the top of the page. She crossed out Dad's
Acropolis
with red poster paint and made it into an
Avgi
, the left-wing paper her parents read. She colored in the baby entirely, turned it into a coffee table and added Gauloises cigarettes and an ashtray on top.

“We're both only children, don't forget,” she says.

I don't like being an only child. It's like saying lonely child. I'm jealous of Fotini and Martha, who share a room and can say ve-ha, ve-sa every night, like the sisters in
Wildcat under Glass
.

“I'd like to have a little brother or sister,” I say.

“We're like sisters, aren't we?”

“Sure, but only on weekends.”

And there's something else, too: when Fotini hid Martha's teacup in the yard, Kyria Pavlina sent her to her room. But who's going to punish Anna for destroying my drawing?

•

This year I'm sitting at the third desk from the front and I can't see the board very well. The letters are blurry and I have to squint to read our exercises.

“What's wrong, Maria?” Kyrios Stavros asks. “Do you think you need to see an eye doctor?”

Antigone gives Mom the name of a pediatric optometrist who studied in Paris. We go and sit in the waiting room. Mom is happy because there's a recent issue of
Woman
in the stack of magazines with an announcement for an embroidery and knitting contest. “I'll knit a blanket,” she says. “Our family will sweep up every prize around!”

A man with a white coat and glasses shakes our hands.

“Come this way, miss.”

He tells me to rest my forehead on a metal surface with little plastic bits for your eyes and use a knob to put a parrot in a cage. He jots something down in his notes. Then he tells me to read some numbers on a lighted board across the room. The numbers are kind of blurry so he puts these little lenses in front of my eyes and asks, “Is it better now? Or now?” With some of the lenses I can read even the tiniest numbers on the board. The doctor says I'm nearsighted, enough that I need glasses. I feel like crying.

“What's wrong, miss? Don't you know how stylish glasses can be?”

Yeah, sure.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I'm going to be a painter,” I say, and then, looking at Mom, “and something else, too.”

“How wonderful! All artists wear glasses, didn't you know?”

“All of them?”

“Anyone who thinks a lot, dear,” the eye doctor says, tapping his own glasses.

Well, then. If I'm going to be a great painter, I guess I might as well wear glasses.

The next day Mom, Aunt Amalia, and I go to Metaxas Eyewear near Omonia Square. Mom insists on black tortoiseshell frames with wavy bits of red. The saleswoman says they look great on me, but I can't really see my face, I look blurry in the mirror.

“I really look good?”

“Miss Inner Beauty!” Aunt Amalia says.

These days inner beauty isn't enough. I want to be beautiful on the outside, too. We order the glasses. They'll be ready in a week.

“I'm so jealous that you get to wear glasses!” Anna says.

“Wait until you see them first.”

“Glasses are
always
pretty,” Anna says, and I sigh with relief.

“You're an owl, Teapot!” Angeliki says.

“An African owl,” says Petros.

Anna and I pinch them as hard as we can so they'll stop, but they just put their hands over their mouths and dissolve into laughter.

“You're an ugly four-eyes!” Angeliki shouts.

“She has inner beauty!” Anna shouts back.

“Only inner?” I ask, but Anna is busy pinching the others and doesn't respond.

“I'm sure Angelos will fall for you,” she says when the bell rings at the end of the day. “You look older, more mature. A ripe fruit!”

“And when a ripe fruit sees an honest person, it falls.”

Anna loves it when I use Gwendolyn's proverbs. She gives me a sloppy kiss on the cheek.

“You're my best friend!”

“And you're mine!”

“Want to go pee?” she says.

When we're best best friends, like today, we go and pee in a parking lot on the next street over from our school. We slip between the cars, pull down our underwear and a little fountain of pee spurts onto the ground, splashing our socks and shoes. We never pee at the same time, so that whoever's not peeing can be the lookout. Anna wiggles her tush and sings Françoise Hardy. I don't move at all and only sing on the inside,
Well then, I'll say it, I love a boy
. . . I always take off my glasses, too, so they don't get splashed.

Only today there's a man in the car next to us. He slowly opens his door and says, “Girls, do you want to see my ice cream?” Anna vanishes, but I feel like it wouldn't be polite to run away. The man is holding his ice cream down low, between his legs, a reddish-brown rocket pop with a little cream at the top. Something isn't right. I take a few steps backward. When I'm far enough away, my heart starts beating loudly in my ears. Now is the time to use a phrase only good-for-nothings say. I make my hands into a megaphone and shout, “Fart on my balls!”

Anna holds out her hand. She's pale as a ghost. We wrap an arm around each other and run in no particular direction.

“All men are monsters,” Anna says.

Merde, merde. All of them?

“
He tricked you, Paraskevoula, the mayor's son . . .
” We're dancing a kalamatiano in the schoolyard. We're still so upset about the perversion of men that we're not really paying attention to the words. The song gets stuck in our heads. The whole way home, all the way to Plaka, we dance the kalamatiano instead of walking. Our favorite bit is the little leap at the beginning when you lunge at the sidewalk and stomp your foot. At home, too, while Antigone is making us lunch, we're in the living room dancing. Suddenly she rushes into the room holding a half-peeled potato and a knife.

“What is this nonsense?”

We don't understand.

“Who taught you that?”

We shrug.

Antigone says that the kalamatiano was what people who supported the junta used to dance. And that the song we're singing is about a rich man taking advantage of a poor girl and if that's the kind of thing we like, we deserve whatever we get. Haven't we come into this world to fight hypocrisy? She'll take us to the Peroke Theater and give us something to think about: they're presenting two one-act plays, Chekov's
A Marriage Proposal
and Brecht's
A Respectable Wedding
.

We eat somberly, in silence. After lunch I go to the bathroom to wash my hands and through the open door I see Antigone sitting at the dressing table in her bedroom. Should I tell her I'm sorry for dancing the kalamatiano? She's fixing her hair, only her shiny braid is lying on the bed, and there's a little bun at the back of her head full of hairpins and clips. Antigone has short hair! The braid is a wig!

Then why did she tell us we've come into the world to fight hypocrisy?

Antigone takes us with her to the anniversary of the events at the Athens Polytechnic, when the dictators sent in tanks to kill the students who'd occupied the building. We bought red carnations to bring with us to the peace march. I told Mom I was going to Anna's house to do my homework, because she doesn't like demonstrations. She won't join the League of Democratic Women, either. She doesn't have time, she's too busy knitting her blanket for the contest in
Woman
. “Such a waste of time,” Mom says. “Anna's mother has her head in the clouds.” I still like Antigone, even if she's lying about her braid. She's skinny and she's fighting for justice, working to make the world a better place. Sometimes I dream
that she's my real mother, and I always feel proud when strangers in the street say, “What lovely daughters you have.”