How to Be Brave (11 page)

So Daniel Antell might be at the party, too. A Positive Thought indeed.

But then again.

Liss is going to be with Daniel in Belize.

Huh.

It shouldn't bother me, but for some reason, it does. Maybe because she hasn't mentioned anything about it until just this moment.

I wave my fingers to help dry them, and I try to pretend like nothing's wrong. “How many people are going from your class?”

“Four, I think. Marcus Garcia, Pete Hammell, Daniel, and me.”

Daniel and me.
Why does that last part bother me so much?

Okay, Georgia. Don't make this about you. Liss is telling you that she might very well have sex with Gregg. That's big news. That's her news. Focus on that. She has absolutely no interest in Daniel.

“Anyway, you'll come to the party?” Liss goes back to the original point of the conversation. “I figure we can cover for each other. I'll just tell my mom I'm sleeping here, and you can tell your dad that you're at my place.”

“Yeah, sure.” I shrug.
Be nice, Georgia. Don't be a bitch.
“Thanks for making it a point to include me.”

“Of course! Are you kidding? Anyway, I'll need you there for emotional support after. I mean, it's my big night, right?”

Our nails dry and we spend some time online searching for answers to some of Liss's more graphic questions about s-e-x that were either glossed over in health or that were so irrelevant to our experiences that we didn't pay close enough attention to remember the answers. Thanks to Cosmopolitan.com and Yourtango.com I learn quite a bit, but Liss still has all these questions about lubrication and positions that I have no idea about. It all still seems so unbelievable to me. And frankly, it all seems sort of frightening. I'm nowhere near even thinking about anything like what Liss is about to experience. Daniel Antell is a definite maybe, which could mean
something
or it could mean a whole lot of nothing. Maybe he was just being nice. Maybe he actually just blew me off. I mean, we didn't really set a date. I don't say this to Liss—this is the exact opposite of a positive thought—but I can't help but wonder.

We finally pass out sometime around three
A.M.
, Nina Simone on repeat, our nails perfect, and everything else a big unanswered question.

 

7

Turkey Day. Oak Lawn, Illinois. South Side, Chicago. The Middle of Nowhere, Land of Lawns and Driveways. Ah, the suburbs. I hate them. Even though we're sort of what my mom used to call “isolated” since we're downtown, away from my dad's many cousins and nieces and nephews, I like it better that way. I like the city with its congestion and grime. I like not being involved in the family drama, the politics of it all. I like seeing these people, whose faces I only sort of recognize in my own, only four times per year at baptisms and weddings and funerals. But they're strangers, mostly. I certainly don't speak the same language: Greek mixed with an obsession with all things White Sox and Chicago Bears, sprinkled with a dash of conservative politics and minimalls.

We've been driving for over an hour to get here. Traffic sucked and conversation was pretty much awkward and stilted and weird during that whole hour, since my dad and I have nothing to say to each other. Dad finds the street (I don't know how, since they all look the same) and parks the Buick in the driveway. Before he gets out, he takes a deep breath and looks at me with a long, deep, serious expression. I'm expecting him to say something about Mom or about the family or about how much holidays suck when someone you loved so much has died, but instead he exhales and says, “You can carry the pies?”

We walk up the steps, and my dad rings the doorbell. The house is big and plain and ugly. Sandy-white bricks, two-car garage, and evergreen bushes perfectly manicured to emulate floating planets. Everything you would have ever wanted in the American dream and more.

My godmother, Maria, answers the bell, and, along with her open arms, I'm immediately drowning in oregano and garlic. Inside, cute toddlers all dolled up in miniature suits and perfect taffeta ruffles run around at my feet. My many, many cousins (second and third), who are a little younger than me and who all hang out together every weekend, congregate in front of the Wii in the living room, yelling and screaming at Zelda or Mario or whoever they're chasing across the screen. Within minutes, I'm worn out by the noise and energy and maybe by the sheer amount of bodies crushed together in this house. Plus I don't have much in common with anyone here. I decide to plant myself at the dining room table next to my dad with the adults.

Thanksgiving in the land of the Greeks means lamb and pastichio, roasted potatoes and baklava, and the few store-bought pumpkin pies that we brought. When my mom was feeling well, she would cook a traditional American meal just for us—turkey, cranberry sauce, yams with marshmallows, green-bean casserole. But those were her recipes. My dad wouldn't even know where to start, since most of it was sourced from processed crap, and he's too good a cook to make processed crap. Then again, he's not cooking anything this year. Maria is in charge, and we'll probably be sent home with mounds of leftovers, all of it delicious and none of it even remotely reminiscent of Pilgrims or Native Americans or Plymouth Rock or whatever historical myths we're desperate to believe in.

I pick at some lemony potatoes—Maria makes the best in the world, so perfectly crispy and peppered—and I try to decipher the conversation my dad's having with her. I basically flunked out of Greek school in the fifth grade when the teacher,
Kyría
Anna, told my dad, “
Den mathéne típota
.” I guess I had learned enough to know that she'd said, “She won't learn anything.” It really wasn't fair since all the other kids had grown up speaking Greek from the moment they'd exited the womb, whereas I hadn't and was trying my best to catch up. My parents pulled me out, anyway, generously blaming
Kyría
Anna for being a bad teacher, and that was the end of my education in the Greek language.

Even so, I remember enough from her lame lessons to piece together conversations, especially since my family speaks a form of Greeknglish that goes something like greekadjective greeknoun englishverb greekpreposition englishnoun, et cetera, et cetera.

I recognize that they're talking about politics (I hear words like Obama,
lepta
[money],
politico
[easy enough], and
economi
[ditto]—I mean, they are Greek words, after all). Then they start to speak recipes. (Food is the international language.) Then I space out for a while and sketch on some napkins with a ballpoint pen that my godmother left behind after she wrote down my father's recipe for some exotic kind of cookie.

Seconds, minutes, hours disappear. I get lost in my drawings of my uncles' faces, their lumpy noses and wrinkled eyes, in the still lifes of pitchers and half-sucked bones, in the geometric forms of a crystal glass.

And then Maria is behind me, her arms tight around my shoulders, her muscular fingers squeezing my jaw.
“Koúkla mou, eísai kaló
korítsi.”
My doll, she says, you are a good girl.

This is what's most important in Greek-land. That you are a good girl. That you broadcast your goodness to everyone. That everyone will broadcast it for you.

If only she knew.

When I was baptized, she was charged to take care of me, but we rarely see her, just like everyone else. “Everyone's just living their own lives,” my mom used to say. I guess she's right. It's not like I ever call her, either.

She releases me and I go back to my drawing, just spacing out. Around me, the table is cleared and desserts are brought out. My little cousins fight over the chocolate-covered cookies. Maria puts a plate of baklava and pumpkin pie in front of me.

I tune back into the conversation while I eat. I sort of figure out that Maria is asking about me (my name sounds like Yeoryia in Greek), and I hear my dad say something about school (
skoleo
) and good (
kalá
).

Then she asks about the restaurant (
estiatório
), and he shakes his head and gets quiet. Maria puts her arm around my dad's shoulder, and I pretend to not understand. I just pick pick pick at the little crumbs of walnuts that fall out of the baklava. I wish I could talk to him about it all, too, but he would never tell me anything. I'm his little girl, his
korítsi
. Sometimes, when we're crossing the street downtown, he reaches for my hand to hold it as though I'm still five.

And then, Maria starts to whisper.

I pick pick pick.

And then, she says something about a g
ynaika
. I know this word. It means “woman.” And when she says it, she's serious. Secretive. Hopeful.

And then, she says:
“Nomezo”
(I think)
“einai”
(it's) “time” (in English)
“yia gamos”
(for marriage).

Thanks to
Kyría
Anna and my five years of Greek school, I understand this sentence perfectly.

What the fuck?

I look up at my dad, waiting for a protest, for some sort of objection.

What does he do?

He nods.

He fucking nods.

I drop my fork so hard that it knocks everyone at the table into silence, and I keep my stare on my dad. “She wants to set you up?”

Maria looks at me, her face drained of blood. She realizes that I understand way more than she thought (maybe even more than I thought I knew). She gives me this sad and sorry look and then hustles to take dirty plates to the kitchen. She urges the others to follow her, and they all scurry, grabbing half-eaten plates of cookies and cake and pie and sweeping out the little kids from under the table until my dad and I are left in the dining room.

My dad, who is finally clued in to the fact that
I do speak some Greek,
gives me a blank stare.

That's it.

A blank stare.

He can't say no.

He can't deny it.

I start to lose my shit. I can feel it inside, my heart pounding, my head pounding. I'm pissed. Beyond pissed. “Mom's been dead, what,
four
months?” I yell across the table. “And she wants you to get
married
again?” This is bullshit.

“
Georgiamou,
óxi
, no.” He reaches his hand out to me. “It's not like that.…”

“Well, did you tell
her
that?” I point to the kitchen toward Maria, my godmother—the one who stood up at my parents' wedding, who dipped me in holy water under the eyes of a priest and made a sacred promise to watch over me, to take care of me, to provide for me in case my mom and dad were to both die and I was left alone in this world to fend for myself—this woman who breaks this one, sacred promise by offering to play matchmaker when my mom's body is not even cold in the ground.

What the fuck?

I stand up. “Give me the keys to the car,” I demand. “I'll wait for you outside.”

But he doesn't give me the keys. Instead, he moves his stare to the table.

He can't even look me in the eye.

I run toward the front door and let myself out, slamming it behind me. I walk away from the house. I need to get away. I need to run, to be free of this day that is nothing but bullshit, but I make it only a few houses down before I realize I can't go anywhere. I'm in a fucking suburban nightmare. I plant myself on the curb under a streetlight, where it's cold and bare and quiet. There's nothing here. Nothing. A few trees, a few cars. No horns, no taxis, no sirens. The suburbs. I'm stuck in the fucking suburbs with nowhere to go. If I were downtown, I could walk for miles, but here—here, there's nothing.

Down the street, I hear the door to Maria's house creak open.

I hear my dad say good night to Maria in Greek.

I hear his footsteps coming closer to me.

He sits beside me on the cold cement curb. “Georgia—” He says my name with a heavy Americanized hard G and without the
mou
at the end, without the possessive
my
that he usually uses.

“Your mother was sick for a very long time.” He pauses, as if to think about what he wants to say or maybe to give me a chance to agree. I refuse.

“And, you know,” he continues, “we made an agreement.”

…

I refuse to give in to this. I refuse to respond.

…

There's nothing but the sound of our breaths.

The streetlight buzzing.

A lone car in the distance.

…

The cold November air moves around us, blowing dust and leaves down the barren street.

And then he repeats it again: “We made an agreement,” he says.

Fine.

I give in.

“What
exactly
do you mean, ‘an agreement'?”

Pause.

Breath.

Buzz.

“She knew she was going to die. She told me to keep on going.”

Pause.

Breath.

Buzz.

“To get remarried, when I'm ready.”

“Well, are you ready
already
?” I ask this question quickly, but as soon as the words leave me, I know it's a question for which I don't want to know the answer.

I already know the answer.

I'm not.

It's just too damn soon.

“No,
koúkla mou
.
Óxi
. I am not ready.” He inches closer to me. I can tell he's being careful. Like I'm some fragile glass or something. He motions that he wants to wrap his arm around my shoulders. I let him. “But one day, I will be. Not now, but yes, one day.”

Shit.

“I loved your mother. She was … she was Diana. There will never be anyone else like her.” He shakes his head.
“Katálave?”