Why I Killed My Best Friend (9 page)

Natasha is straining her neck to see, even more curious than I am.

“Walk on the grass and mud in the big brown field, plaf, plaf. Hide, hide in the cave. The big witch finds you and says, Do you want to be a witch like me? Yes, yes, la la la . . . And the big witch says: eat these crickets and then we'll see. Mmmm, mmmm, yummy in my tummy, the little witch says. We'll take lightning and make the crickets turn blue, la la la. We'll sell them and make lots of money.”

“That's stupid. Who would want to buy crickets?” Natasha asks.

Daphne looks at her imperiously. “All the vampires and ghosts will buy crickets and then at night they'll come to your bed and eat you, too! Mmmm!”

Natasha shrieks. My eyes, meanwhile, have filled with tears.

“What's that on the kitchen table?” Kayo asks. He's opened his suitcase back up and put his little plastic animals back where they belong. He even made onion soup to butter me up.

“A drawing Daphne did.”

“I guess things are getting serious.”

“I brought it home so I could look at it more carefully.”

“What do you think you're going to learn from it?”

“What goes on in their house.”

“Don't you think you're overestimating yourself, Maria?”

Not at all. If there's anything I know how to interpret, it's children's drawings. I've read a lot on the subject, but more importantly,
I remember. I remember the kind of need that drives you to draw caves and rain. Sure, I may have talked to her about caves and witches who eat crickets, but she was the one who thought up the lightning that slices across the page like tiny swastikas. And she added those reddish-brown splotches of mud—as if the landscape had come down with the chicken pox.

Daphne draws the way her mother did, with sweeping gestures, practically tearing the page as she goes. She's not afraid of the color gray. She made the witch enormous and the witchlet microscopically small, suggesting a certain balance of power. A strong female presence in the family—who else but Anna? And the cave, symbolizing protection. I imagine a house ruled by underground terror. Either there's no father at all or he's completely powerless, since there's no sign of him in the drawing. No siblings, either. The mother witch and the little daughter witchlet. They climb onto their magic carpet and head off to help the poor. Another witch, flying by, reaches out a hand and shakes the carpet. The witch and the witchlet grab hold of the tassels just in the nick of time. Come here, my pretty. You thought you could escape me, but you can't.

“What's wrong, child? Did a bakery burn down?”

That's how Mom scolds me for my long absences. It's a common enough idiom, but the subtext to her irony is that I only come to see them when something's gone wrong in my life. She's a busy woman now, fairly well-known as a children's writer, but she still plays the stereotypical Greek mother to perfection.

“I just missed you guys, that's all.”

The house on Aegina, behind the fish market, was built in the '70s. The yard is like a faint memory of Nigeria: a well instead of a goldfish pond, pistachio trees instead of banana trees. On the
veranda—rain or shine—a wrought-iron table with a marble top, just like the one we had in Ikeja. I have no idea how they managed it, but as soon as I set foot in the house, I'm half expecting Gwendolyn to appear, and I'm surprised to see Dad sitting there in his armchair. He was always at work. Now he folds his newspaper and gives me a thorough once-over, from my face down to my shoes.

“Did you wipe your feet on the way in?”

“Yes, old man.” I kiss him on the top of his head, the way he used to kiss me once I'd reached the age when you're too big to be carried, but still too little for an adult to bend down as far as your cheek. It's as if he shrank. Of course he's sitting down, and curtseying isn't my thing.

The living room smells like incense and lentils. Mom is waving her censer in front of her icons and whispering something, as always, to the Holy Virgin and the saints.

“Mom made you lentils.”

“What, no biftekia?”

“Are you mocking me?” Mom says, not turning to look at me, the censer dangling in midair.

It takes me half an hour to calm them down. When the complaints and the cross-examination are finally over and they pull out the old family albums from Africa, I know the moment has come for me to kick off my shoes and curl up on the sofa. Mom keeps it covered so that the upholstery doesn't get ruined, but I push the sofa cover away with my hand, just a tiny bit at the edge, then lean my cheek down and inhale the only bit of concentrated Africa I have left: Gwendolyn's sweat, spills from Mrs. Steedworthy's tea, the acrid metallic smell—drin! drin!—of my bicycle bell.

We pore over the photographs for the thousandth time. Mom in pointy heels with a striped kerchief on her head. “What a beautiful wife I had!” Dad brags.

“Compared to Mrs. Fatoba, you mean, or to poor Jane Steed-worthy?” Mom asks with a touch of coquetry in her voice.

“Could anyone compare with you, my dear?”

Mom bursts out laughing. “What about my little girl?” She points to a photograph in which I look absolutely pitiful—already Miss Inner Beauty even then. White shoes and hair in curls, a ridiculous Shirley Temple her parents dragged along to some tea party. Scabs on my knees beneath the white dress. My hair is nice, sure, but my smile shows a broken tooth.

“Dad, what a funny little colonist you were, with your socks up to your knees and your khaki shorts.”

“If you only knew how long I spent ironing that crease,” Mom says in a dreamy tone of voice. She's bending over my shoulder to admire us as if we were actors from the '60s, playing in her favorite soap opera.

“You? Not Gwendolyn?”

“Oh, please, Gwendolyn never ironed your father's pants. That was my job!”

“Your mother was an incredible woman,” Dad says, as if referring to some prehistoric era.

Mom nods her head with a satisfaction tinged with sadness. These days she's written seven children's books and has a huge file of newspaper clippings and interviews—but she's never been as happy as she was back then.

After lunch the small family dramas begin. The table is strewn with crumbs; uneaten lentils are drying on our plates; after his first glass of wine Dad blows up at the least little thing; a note of exasperation creeps into Mom's voice. All signs point to the imminent eruption of the first argument of the afternoon. They bicker over the most ridiculous things: the telephone bill, who left the feta out on the counter, the motorbikes on Aegina.

“I'll slash their tires—then they'll think twice about making a racket during afternoon siesta!” Dad says.

“Enough already, you're always saying that and you never do a thing!”

I can't help but laugh as I picture my father sneaking around slashing tires, terrorist-style, Mom keeping watch to make sure no one is coming. They get mad at me for laughing and direct their irritation toward me instead. They insist that I go and lie down in the room they refer to as mine because they've put my old desk in there, and hung up an old poster of The Cure. A mausoleum for my childhood years. They've saved all kinds of appalling things: a box of dried-up pastels, the newspaper clipping of my Savings Day drawing, an old class picture with
A Souvenir from Grade Three
written on it.

I lie down on the bed, clutching the photograph. What else am I supposed to do on Aegina? Mom is busy writing her African stories or answering letters from kids, and Martha, two blocks down the road, is surely watching her afternoon soaps, so I might as well fix my eyes on something for a while, too: Anna, for instance, perched on a stool smack in the middle of the back row. You can't see the stools, so the kids in that row look like angels hovering in mid-air. Or, better, devils: Petros is picking his nose. Angeliki, with her satanic laugh, has her face in profile so the smushed turd won't show. I've been exiled to the very edge of the front row, in my cast and matching white tube socks, one pulled up to my knee, the other slouched around my ankle, the elastic apparently loose—what a mess. How young we were! What tiny fingers wrote that note to “
Dear Mrs. Anna's Mother
”! What non-existent hips emerged from our corduroy bell-bottoms during our peeing contests!

But why did they put me in the front row, so far from my best friend?

Of course—Anna's short! How could it never have occurred to me before? On the outside, at least, I've always been the stronger of the two.

“Surprise!” Anna is hovering in the doorway of my room, just as in our class picture. How does she do that? She's dressed as a hippie and before I can take cover, she lobs a Molotov cocktail in my direction. The sheets catch fire, I'm engulfed in flames.

Mom throws a blanket over me, trying to put out the fire.

“Where did she come from? How did she get into the house?”

“Who, honey? Calm down! You were having a nightmare. Haven't I told you not to sleep without a blanket? You'll catch cold.”

I pull the blanket over my head, making a little cave. Mom shuffles out of the room, slippers flapping. She stops at the door, hesitates.

“Do you want a candy?”

She always carries candy in her pockets. On her visits to schools she treats the kids as if they were horses. She stuffs them full of candy, so you can't ever tell if she's actually their favorite writer or just a grandmother spoiling her grandchildren rotten. Personally I think her stories are atrocious, full of friendly colonists and cheeky little African kids, but then again she thinks I'm useless and don't even know how to draw. “What are those things you draw, honey? I could do that as well as you can!” She took my charcoals, copied a few of my oldest and worst sketches, and now passes herself off as an illustrator, too.

“Maria, I know you don't like it when I tell you this, but you still grind your teeth in your sleep.”

“Okay, Mom, fine . . .”

“Honey, you have to be careful, that's how you broke your tooth when you were little.”

I pull the blanket down off my head.

“What exactly do you want me to do about it?”

“Don't get annoyed. I'm just saying you should be careful.”

I feel like telling her it's a sign of stress, something that stuck with me from the cave and the crickets. But I don't say anything. After all, I wasn't the only one who took years to recover.

“Turn around so we can see!”

Stella grabs the skirt of the dress I brought her and pulls it up just a smidge; her plump little legs do a girly spin in place. Then she starts to dance.

“Look at my little cabaret girl!” Martha says.

“Just yesterday she was learning to crawl, and now she's turning six!”

“You haven't seen the baby yet, either . . .”

“Oh, it's fine, let's not wake him up. I want to hear your news.”

Martha is sitting in her favorite spot on the sofa—I can tell because it's where the cushion sags. Her belly is still swollen from her second pregnancy, and she has that lost, half-pleading expression on her face of a woman who's recently given birth.

“What news could I possibly have?”

“How's Fotini?”

“We've sort of lost touch. She and I are so different, Maria. She never even calls to talk to Stella, can you believe it? She's opposed to the nuclear family, she says. I mean, really, revolution? Who still cares about revolution these days? She's thirty-five years old! How stubborn can she be?”

Oh, Martha, if you only knew how I live. Writing proclamations in an apartment with bad plumbing. I come here bearing dresses with lace trim, like the ones they used to make me wear. I come for Stella, who was once the baby I knitted hats for and pushed in her stroller on the dock. But I also come in hopes of
figuring out what on earth goes on in the head of a girl who's six, seven, eight years old. How she can shut out the whole world and just spin in circles around her own axis.

“What about your mother, how's she?” I ask, to change the subject.

“She's basically an invalid, just one illness after the next. If it's not some bug it's her back.”

“I'm sorry, Martha. It's not serious, though, is it?”

Martha tells me about her mother's near mania for illnesses, her quiet depression, her constant hypoglycemia. Then she asks, “Who was it who gave my mother that name, anyhow?”

“My friend Anna, remember her?”

“Of course. Who could forget that girl? I always felt like punching her in the face.”

“Why?”

“You really have to ask? I've never met a bigger, more frightening ego in my life.”

Merde. Neither have I.

“Do you have to leave so soon?”

“I've got things to do, Mom.”

“What things?”

Well, let's see, we're planning an event in the Athens Metro, it's been too long since we had a good, old-fashioned run-in with the police, with that absurd mediocrity that goes by the name of order. Every now and then we smash a shop window or two—a small, symbolic tear in the cloak of legitimacy that enfolds private property. But we're not nearly as active as we used to be. Kayo and I are the only ones with keys to the apartment, it's not all anything goes anymore. We don't just wreak havoc indiscriminately, either. And we've improved the fonts on our signs. We're revolutionaries with taste.