Four Times Blessed (16 page)

“I mean, no, I don’t like watching you two punching and slobbering over each other.”

“Slobbering? I’m not slobbering.”

“Maybe, but he is.”

Lium steers Larissa’s husband’s head up to face him. He cocks his head to the side. Then one of them seizes a smidge of space and they scrabble around. Larissa’s husband ends up on the top.

Then on the bottom.

Lium pulls up the collar of the other man’s shirt and wipes his chin.

“There. Are you happy now?”

“Not really.”

“You. Are impossible.” He coughs, and then rolls away.

Both men get to their feet and pant at each other. They start circling, but they each run into a wall of my uncles. Lium backs up one long, careful step after another, towards the next mooring, and the next, and the other man follows. In a more straightforward fashion.

The walls melt in. Both men are out of breath, streetlights making their skin shiny. It’s as if they simply fall into one another, rest against each other, though their faces and veins strain as if they would rent apart. The other men start getting excited.

Larissa’s husband collapses to one knee, and the jeers cut out. Her husband stops panting. It’s only Lium I hear, snatching his hands purposefully from one spot to another, some pattern it seems he’s practiced many, many times.

My uncles stop fidgeting. All too cool and controlled to be natural, as they prepare for Larissa’s husband to loose.

But again, he is making me nervous. Something’s wrong. I squint at him. I think I notice an angle, then the tiny shift, it’s all that’s needed, and it sends Lium’s whole body sprawling over his shoulder and flat over the edge of the walkway.

With a resounding clatter, he hits the rowboat I just used a bare foot to shove in between him and the water. 

He swears and sits up. The boat swings sharply.

“Ow,” he groans. He reaches over and grabs Larissa’s husband’s ankle. The man yells as he’s yanked down into the boat as well. All the men, plus me, crowd at the edge of the mooring.

We needn’t have hurried, as there’s really not much happening. Basically, the two men are just flopping around down there between the benches.

They roll too far into the stern, so I stomp down on the prow. It throws them off balance, and now they both swear.

“Honestly, after all that, now you complain?” I squeal.

Lium just frowns in my direction.

“What are you doing?”

“Keeping you from bellyflopping.”

“Well, it didn’t work.”

“I guess not, but you didn’t land in the water.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“It’s a less wet thing. Are you two done yet?”

They turn to each other. Larissa’s husband punches at Lium with no follow through. Lium pops the man’s knee out from under him, and then lays back on the bench. I can see the lower part of his ribcage rise and fall again and again.

“I’m just getting started,” he says, and waves an arm in the air.

“Me, too,” says Larissa’s husband from somewhere on the floor of the boat.

I’m about to start channeling my zizi, I’m pretty sure, and feel pretty powerful just revving up to it, but my Uncle Groton appears beside me.

“It’s done. You did well. We’ve got what we needed. You, nephew,” he finds Lium’s gaze and holds it. The boat rocks. “I’m trusting you. We all are. You will not let us down. I’m proud to call you my own. You, come on up, old man,” he reaches an arm down to Larissa’s poor husband. 

              The men start talking and milling around. I decide it’s a good idea to grope the mooring post like it’s my future husband again, just in case. I’m kind of surrounded, so while I wait for them to clear out, I make some conversation.

             
“So. No offense, but as you do live on an island now, you really should work on figuring out where the land ends and the water begins,” I remark to the guy still sprawled out in the rowboat.

             
“I know where it ends.”

“Well, then, maybe you should work on remembering it.”

He lifts his head up.

“For your own safety, I mean. It’s not your fault, don’t worry. Maybe the ocean just wants to eat you.”

              “Well, I am delicious. Here, come taste me.” He flings his arms out and they flop over the sides.

             
I try not to snort. “Uh, no thanks.” I lower my voice, “Hey.” He doesn’t look up so I nudge the boat. He grips the sides. “Not that I think you taste bad, but…what if it tried to eat you because you’re cursed?”

             
“That’s even better. I think I want to be cursed.”

             
“How is that better?”

             
“Because when you bit into me, you’d fall asleep, princess, and then you’d be just perfect,” he smirks at the sky.

             
“Hey!” I kick the boat. It sways out and jerks on the ropes.

             
Gripping hold again, he laughs at me.

             
“Crusa,” Andrew is there beside me. Thank the ancestors, he’s dry. I reach up for his arm and he lifts me out of my crouch. “I think it’s time we get you out of here, come on.”

             
I wave over my shoulder, down to the boy who looks like he might just spend the rest of the night there, and Andrew and I head for the uphill path.

             
On the way back, he tells me that island fights are not nearly as sophisticated as fights in the city. I say I’m sure they aren’t. He then takes the opportunity to enumerate all of the similarities and differences plus the significance of each one. Apparently, if he’s passionate about a subject then he is able to walk and talk, albeit at a rate of approximately twenty-percent less words per second.

             
“I was worried about you when you disappeared in all of those guys. Why would you do that? You could have been hurt.”

             
“It was fine,” I tell him. “I was off to the side. And Larissa’s husband was going to drown that kid.”

             
“That wasn’t a kid.”

             
“He still could have drowned.”

             
“He wasn’t going to drown, he was fine. He didn’t need help.”

             
I hesitate. Because when I think about it, he’s probably right.

             
Andrew sighs, “Let’s just not do that again, ok?”

             
“Alright.”

             
We’ve reached the green, and he tells me goodnight. I ask him inside for tea, but he says he’s arranged to enter the base at midnight so we say goodnight again and he leaves me standing on the steps.

              “So, how did it go?” My zizi’s voice is tired. She shouldn’t have stayed up to wait for me.

             
“Good.”

             
“Come in and tell me about it. What was he like? What did you two talk about?” She throws her nightgown over her head and comes to put her arms around me. It’s a gown that’s ragged along the seems, vellum soft everywhere else. It smells more strongly of her than she herself does, I think.

             
“He was friendly. I learned a lot about him.”

             
“Like what?”

             
I drop onto her bed and plop my head into a pillow. Muffled, I answer, “His job and stuff.”

             
“Did you two get along?”

             
“Yeah.”

             
“Can I have more than one syllable?”

             
I groan, “I don’t know. We had dinner. He talked, like, ninety-seven percent of the time.”

             
“Well, you can’t blame him for that. He was probably nervous. Weren’t you nervous?”

             
“Yes.”

             
I roll over and she has perfect composure drawn on her face like newscaster makeup. I wonder if that’s how my mother looked when she was an anchor. My zizi’s said she used to do her own makeup. Anywho, my zizi carries off the look better than anyone else I’ve seen attempting it all evening. I wish mine was that good.

             
“Yes, I was nervous,” I try again.

             
“So why are you so hard on the poor boy? Maybe he was talking a lot because you weren’t talking enough. You do have that habit, you know. Did you ever think of that?”

             
“No.”

             
“Well, there you go. Next time, you talk more and see what happens. You have to be actively engaged in a marriage relationship. Make it into what you want it to be. Otherwise it’s just two people living in a house together. Is that what you want?”

             
“No. I’ll try talking more next time.”

             
“You just have to be more understanding and patient, my Crusa. Do that, and you’ll be happy with this boy. Such a nice boy, isn’t he?”

             
“Yes, he’s very nice.”

             
“Do you think you like him?”

             
“There’s nothing not to like.”

She’s blessedly quiet for a moment. “It’ll all be fine, dear.”

“I know.”

I know because our marriage will make my uncle and my zizi and the rest of my family happy. Already, everyone’s had a test drive on the yacht. It’s how I get to take care of them. How my mother is taking care of all of us, even in her grave. How I can ease all their worrying over me. 

And I know Andrew is marrying me because of his family too, so neither of us loving each other at the moment doesn’t bother me. He loves his family, and I love mine. We both are capable of love, so there’s hope for us two together, I think. It’s a mutual understanding, is what it is.

I feel much better about it all. I really think it will be ok.

              My zizi asks for a kiss and I oblige. I go to my own room and have the same exact conversation with Cassie, who appears from the crawlspace. On her way to visit Milo, she says, and heaves an overstuffed laundry bag out the little door after her.

I hate to say it, but I’m jealous. She tells me to come along, but I can’t, I say. I can’t be caught sneaking around in the middle of the night what with the engagement. I watch her slip out the front doors and into the woods.

I remember summer nights like this one, how Milo and I used to sneak into the kitchen after bedtime. We’d steal handfuls of biscotti that turned into crumbs in our puny, sweaty hands. We’d spend hours hiding out in the old graveyard, have midnight picnics and play pirates, follow imaginary clues through the woods until we came upon an x somewhere, and then we’d dig for treasure. 

              Andrew spends all day on Sunday with my uncles, and at first I’m disappointed. However, it turns out Eleni and a few of my aunts come over for lunch and to do some washing, so I camp out in the kitchen with my slate and tons of sheet music and I actually get a bunch of assignments done before they make me stand on a chair and measure me with pieces of string.

             
After we serve supper, I find myself by the fire in the cleared out kitchen with a pile of clothes that need to be fixed. It’s just myself, my zizi, and one of my nonis, Noni Laurie, to be exact. It’s exactly what I need to soothe my head after all the work it did today. Because negotiating the style of your own wedding dress is not a restful activity. For anyone involved.

With the laundry, the first step is figuring out why the person who left it for us thought it needed our attention. Then you have to decide whether they were right or whether they were being overdramatic. Then, if you do see what they were talking about, you go and figure out how to fix it up best. Then you do it.

I’m stuck in stage one with a pair of trousers that I’ve turned inside out and right side in three times. Now I’m just trying to figure out who’s pants they are so I can hunt them down and ask them what they wanted me to do with a perfectly fine pair of pants.