Sisterhood Everlasting (4 page)

“Yes, please.” She considered his brown shirt with the hood. It seemed like everything he wore had a hood. Sometimes he had on as many as three hoods, when he wore a hooded shirt with a hooded sweatshirt and his hooded parka.

He expertly cut her sandwich in two, placed it on a deli paper plate with a ruffled edge, and put it on the counter in front of her. He added half a pickle.

“Thanks,” she said.

She stood and ate at the counter to keep him company, as she usually did. She was used to their conversations being punctuated by customers ordering sandwiches and she didn’t mind. If anything, it facilitated them.

She watched him as he made a complicated wrap involving some kind of cheese she’d never heard of. She watched him and chewed her sandwich and wondered whether he was the sort of person—or even the actual person—she might marry. Maybe it was because of Tibby, whom she had not seen in almost two years, and the mysterious thing coming in the mail, which got her thinking about time and the changes it brought or was supposed to bring. She would be thirty years old on her next birthday. All four of them would turn thirty in and around next September. Somehow the fact of their doing it together made her feel less accountable to it.

Though Carmen claimed she was engaged (maybe it was Lena’s wishful self, but she didn’t totally believe it), none of them was married.
When Lena had mentioned this fact to her mother’s friend Maria Cantos, Maria had said, “Well, who are you waiting for?”

Thinking about it after, Lena wasn’t sure whether Maria meant were they waiting for the guy to come along? Or were the four of them waiting for one another?

Drew was growing a beard. Lena could tell it was important to him by how often he touched it. It was kind of patchy, and fairer than the light brown hair on his head, so that even the parts that did grow blended into his face. He’d been growing it since the beginning of the semester and hadn’t made much progress. It seemed hopeless to her, but she tried not to judge. She’d grown up mostly among Greek men who could grow a full beard by bedtime but never did—who in fact shaved twice a day.

“Do you want to watch something after you close up here?” she asked between bites.

“Sure.” He wiped the counter down.

“A movie? Or an episode of
The Wire
?”

“Either one.” He wasn’t just saying that; he meant it. He was possibly the only person in her life who wasn’t opinionated or stubborn.

“Maybe
The Wire
,” she said.

He liked her to pick, because he said he could never tell, even while they were watching, which ones she hated and which ones she loved. And it was true she experienced even the strongest pleasures and poignancies down pretty deep. They tended not to make it all the way up to her face.

Lena finished her sandwich and sat at a table to wait while the rest of the customers made their way out. She rested her chin in her hand as she watched Drew put away the food, lock up the kitchen, turn off the lights.

“Ready?” he asked.

She followed him out of the shop and watched him pull down the noisy metal gate and lock it with a key. As they walked he didn’t reach out to put his arm around her shoulder or grab her hand, and she didn’t expect him to. They walked side by side along the dark sidewalk. Companionable as they were, she felt as though the night air encapsulated each of them separately.

A few months before, Effie had declared, having already broken two engagements (and sold two rings on eBay), that if you were almost thirty years old you should
not
be in a relationship with a guy you didn’t at least
think
you could marry. Lena wasn’t sure Drew met that qualification. No, if she was honest, she did know. Drew was considerate and smart. His eyes were a lovely pale blue and he liked most of the things she liked. But she wasn’t going to marry him. She knew that, and it didn’t put her in any hurry to break up with him. Truthfully, it was kind of a relief not to have to be spinning into the marriage vortex.

Lena was content walking beside him, but she knew there was more. Drew might not know that, but she did.

She’d fallen in love with a Greek boy the summer she’d turned sixteen, when she’d gone to stay with her grandparents on the island of Santorini. Kostos was the pride of the village, grandson of her grandparents’ dearest friends. He’d broken Lena’s heart by mail at seventeen, and later she discovered he’d gotten married to a girl he’d knocked up from his village. Two summers later he’d come to the United States to find her, and she’d angrily sent him away.

The last time Lena had seen him was at nineteen, when she and Tibby and Carmen and Bee had returned to Santorini together in search of their lost pair of pants. Kostos had explained a few important things that last night: there wasn’t a baby, there had never been a baby, the girl had manipulated him, his marriage had been annulled. He hadn’t stopped loving Lena, he said. He said they’d be together, not now but
someday
. He said the word in Greek, whispered it in her ear, where it had stuck.

When Lena was almost twenty-two, the day after she graduated from RISD, Kostos had sent her a long letter, seemingly out of the blue, asking her to come back to Santorini to spend the summer with him. No pressure, he’d said.

He might as well have sent her the Ebola virus tucked in with the letter. She’d been racked with desire, misery, uncertainty. She said yes. Her agitation grew. She bought a plane ticket to Fira, set to arrive on July 4. She called her grandmother and made arrangements to stay.

As the days passed she became too nervous to sleep. Her stomach and intestines teamed up against her and stopped digesting properly. Once, in the middle of the night, she went to the emergency room with terrible pains in her chest, fearing her heart had turned against her too.

On July 3 of that year, the morning of the night she was supposed to fly to meet him, she’d canceled the trip. By email. “Now isn’t the right time,” she’d said, and made some excuses that felt cowardly to her even as she typed them. Kostos didn’t write back for two long days. He didn’t try to talk her out of it. He was disappointed, he said, but he’d figure out a way to get over it. Instead of flying off to Greece, she spent another summer in the studio in Providence.

She didn’t see him or talk to him after that. Six years passed without a word between them. But while her life ambled along quietly, his did not. She first became aware of this by means of a newspaper clipping stuck to her easel by a so-called friend from her first year in graduate school. It was from
The Wall Street Journal
, and it declared Kostos Dounas to be the youngest managing partner in the history of his bank. At the top there was a line drawing of Kostos looking groomed and serious. The article went on to trumpet the multibillion-dollar deal he’d negotiated between one gigantic conglomerate and another. Lena had stared at that sketch, but she couldn’t see her old Kostos anywhere in it. Because the portrait was stiff and artless, for one thing, but also because she had the strange sense that he was rocketing irrevocably from her world into a different one.

That sense only increased over the next few years. She didn’t make a habit of reading business journals, but his name and picture found her anyway. She couldn’t avoid it. He’d been named one of
Time
magazine’s most influential people under thirty-five. Nobody from Santorini could help bragging about him, including her grandmother. Even her father rhapsodized about him occasionally, failing to pick up on the sharp looks from his wife. Once Lena saw Kostos’s face on the cover of
The Economist
as she passed a newsstand at the train station.

I doubt he’s thought of me
, she found herself musing with uncharacteristic
self-pity as Kostos stared at her from the magazine cover as if she were any other passerby.

Kostos had said “Someday” to her, but the notion seemed preposterous to her now. He was so far beyond the scope of her small, quiet life; he occupied an alternate universe that intersected nowhere with hers. He no longer represented
someday
, a possibility. He represented a road not taken, a road that suddenly shot so far into the distance she couldn’t see where it went anymore.

Did she regret her decision? She asked herself that question once in a while. What if she’d gotten on that plane? What if she’d gone to Greece that summer, as he’d wanted her to? Would a life with him have suited her?

Probably not, she decided. The force of her feelings, the fear for her heart, might have overwhelmed her. She liked the life she had. She loved habits. She craved a day with nothing in it, a long, quiet stretch of hours in the studio.

And in that quiet, her life as a painter had flourished. Her gifts as a teacher had blossomed. She was the only graduate student who’d been offered a salaried teaching job at RISD upon finishing her master’s degree. Now there was a waiting list among undergraduates to get into her class. She was proud of that. Could she have achieved any of it standing by the side of the mighty, world-conquering Kostos?

When her grandmother Valia had died the January before last at the age of ninety-two, Kostos had sent her a beautiful letter of condolence. Regardless of how alien the Kostos of the magazines appeared, those words came from the person she had loved. To say that the letter touched her didn’t come close to capturing the ache of it.

She’d carried Kostos’s letter around with her for two weeks. It had taken her four drafts to write him back. She’d lavished hours on the response. She’d written and crossed out and written and crossed out, done and undone, so that by the end it hadn’t said much of anything at all. The intensity of feeling summoned by that letter exhausted her.

And yet. A life spent with Kostos would have been something, wouldn’t it? She’d never felt about anyone the way she’d felt about
him. Not even close. She knew that when she got old it would be more fun to look back on a life of romance and adventure than a life of quiet habits. But looking back was easy. It was the doing that was painful. There were plenty of things she would like to look back on but wasn’t willing to risk: hang gliding, cave diving, ecstasy.

She and Drew stopped to pick up a pint of Ben & Jerry’s from the Foodmart on the way back to her apartment. She liked the kind with the cookie dough in it, and so did he.

Lena and Drew were waiting for the elevator in the lobby of her building twenty minutes later when she thought of something. “I’m going to check my mailbox,” she said. He let the elevator come and go without complaint as she fished around for her key and opened the slot. There was the regular junk and a thick yellow envelope from Tibby. She ripped it open with a tingle of excitement, both welcome and not.

She drifted back toward the elevator as she pulled out the contents. The first page was so unexpected it took her a long time to figure out what it was. Tibby’s handwriting, messier than usual, was scrawled along the bottom. “Here’s an insane idea,” she’d written. “Please say you can do it.”

It seemed to be a receipt for an eticket in Lena’s name, for a round-trip flight from New York. It had cost $603 and had been paid for with Tibby’s credit card. The departure date was October 28, less than four weeks away, and the return date was six days later.

The page behind was a similar ticket for Carmen and the one behind that for Bee, in her case departing from and returning to San Francisco.

“I’ll be there a day early and will be waiting for you at the airport,” Tibby had written at the bottom of the last page. Under that: “Lena, email me when you get this!” And under that: “Please, you three, say you will come!”

The most shocking thing was the destination: Fira, the principal city of Santorini.

If there was one thing Bridget was good at, it was riding her bike uphill. That was what she was thinking as she conquered the hill at Duboce and Divisadero by the late-afternoon light.

Besides some pictures and a few keepsakes from her friends, the one possession that really meant something to Bridget was her bike. It was sturdy, old-fashioned in style but modern in function. Eric had gotten it for her twenty-fifth birthday, and she’d spent the next four years tricking it out. She wasn’t very artistic, but she’d decorated it with bright enamel paints and silk flowers. It was the one thing, besides a duffel bag of clothes, she’d brought with her to California.

She was known throughout the Mission and the Castro as the blond girl with flowers on her bike. She felt some pride when she overheard neighbors or shopkeepers talking about her. “There is no hill in this town that girl can’t bike to the top of.”

In the old days, in high school and college, her physical accomplishments had been obvious and easily recognized. She scored the most goals, had the most assists, ran the fastest dash, did the most push-ups. She operated in the safe and structured universe of a high-level soccer team, where even when you did badly it was still a game. That was what she was thinking about as she glided down alongside Dolores Park and turned in to her street without using her brakes.

The problem with that universe was that it ended, and then it extruded you into the chaos of a post-team existence. That chaos appeared to be ruled by people who were good at talking and liked to stay inside. Bridget found herself seeking little ways to measure herself that gave her even a faint feeling of how it used to be. Like the hills.

As she coasted down her street she saw Eric waiting on the front steps. It was unusual for him to get home before her.

He stood up to kiss her and held out a letter.

“For me?” she said, kissing him an extra time.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s from Tibby.”

“Really? No way.” She flipped it over excitedly and looked at the return address.

“When was the last time you heard from Tibby?”

Bridget shook her head. “A while.” She considered. “On her birthday I emailed her a picture I found of her in her Wallman’s smock and she wrote back a few lines.” She turned the envelope over again. “Why did she send it to me care of you at your office?”