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The first thing was the front door. It was painted the most brilliant, egg-yolk-over-easy shade of yellow. Surrounding it, the house front was painted the brightest possible blue. Who could even imagine such a blue? Lena tipped her face upward to the cloudless afternoon sky. Oh.
In Bethesda, if you painted your house those colors, they'd call you a drug addict. Your neighbors would sue you. They'd arrive with sprayers at nightfall and repaint it beige. Here was color bursting out everywhere against the whitewashed walls.
“Lena,
go!” Effie whined, shoving Lena's suitcase forward with her foot.
“Velcome, girls. Velcome home!” Grandma said, clapping her hands. Their grandfather fit the key into the lock and swung open the sun-colored door.
The combination of jet lag, sun, and these strange old people made Lena feel as if she were tripping—hypothetically, of course. She'd never actually tripped on anything, except maybe a bad shrimp from Peking Garden once.
If Lena was glazed and stupefied, Effie without sleep was just plain cranky. Lena always counted on her younger sister to do the blabbering, but Effie was too cranky even for that. So the drive from the tiny island airport had been mostly quiet. Grandma kept turning around in the front seat of their old Fiat saying, “Look at you girls! Oh, Lena, you are a beauty!”
Lena seriously wished she would stop saying that, because it was irritating, and besides, how was cranky Effie supposed to feel?
Grandma's English was good from years of running a restaurant catering to tourists, but Bapi's didn't seem to have benefited in the same way. Lena knew that her grandmother had been the hostess and the beloved public face of the restaurant, charming everyone with tidal waves of affection. Bapi mostly stayed in the back, cooking at first, and then running the business after that.
Lena felt ashamed for not speaking Greek. According to her parents, Greek was her first language as a baby, but she slowly dropped it when she started school. Her parents never even bothered with Effie. It was a whole different alphabet, for God's sake. Now Lena wished she spoke it, just like she wished she were taller and had a singing voice like Sarah McLachlan. She wished it, but she didn't expect it would happen.
“Grandma, I love your door,” Lena piped up as she passed through it. The inside of the house was so comparatively dark, Lena felt she might faint. All she could see at first were swirling sunspots.
“Here ve are!” Grandma shouted, clapping again.
Bapi shuttled behind, with two duffel bags and Effie's furry neon-green backpack over both shoulders. It was cute and depressing at the same time.
Grandma threw her arm around Lena and squeezed her tight. On the surface Lena felt glad, but just under the surface it made her feel awkward. She was unsure how to return the gesture.
The house came into focus. It was larger than she expected, with ceramic tile floors and pretty rugs.
“Follow me, girls,” Grandma ordered. “I'll show you your rooms and then ve'll have a nice glass of drink, okay?”
Two zombie girls followed her upstairs. The landing was small but gave way to two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a short hallway down which Lena saw two other doors.
Grandma turned into the first door. “This one for beautiful Lena,” she said proudly. Lena didn't think so much of the simple room until Grandma threw open the heavy wooden shutters.
“Oh,” Lena said, sighing.
Grandma pointed out the window. “Caldera,” she announced. “Cauldron, you English say.”
“Oh,” Lena said again with genuine awe.
Though Lena was still iffy about her grandmother, she fell instantly in love with the Caldera. The water was a darker copy of the sky, teased by the wind just enough to make it glitter and shine. The thin, semicircular island hugged the wide expanse of water. A tiny island popped up in the middle of it.
“Oia is de most beautiful village in Greece,” Grandma proclaimed, and Lena couldn't imagine that wasn't true.
Lena looked down at the whitewashed buildings, much like this one, clinging to cliffs jutting down to the water. She hadn't realized before how steep it was, how strange a spot it was to make a home. Santorini was a volcano, after all. She knew from family lore that it was the site of the worst explosion in history and countless tidal waves and earthquakes. The center of the island had literally sunk into the sea, and all that was left was this thin, wobbly crescent of volcanic cliffs and some black ash-tinted sand. The cauldron looked calm and beautiful now, but the true Santorinians liked to remind you it could start bubbling and spewing anytime.
Though Lena had grown up in a flat, sprawling, grassy suburb where people feared no natural disaster worse than mosquitoes or traffic on the beltway, she'd always known her roots were here. And now, looking out at the water, some deep atavistic memory bubbled up, and it did feel like home.
“My name is Duncan Howe, and I'm your assistant general manager.” He pointed with a large, freckly finger to a plastic nameplate. “And now that you've finished orientation, I'd like to welcome you as our newest sales professionals at Wallman's.” He spoke with such authority, you would have thought he was talking to a crowd of hundreds rather than two bored, gum-chewing girls.
Tibby imagined a string of drool dangling from the side of her mouth all the way down to the scuffed linoleum squares.
He studied his clipboard. “Now, uh, Tie-by,” he began, giving it a long i.
“Tibby,” she corrected.
“I'd like you to unload inventory in Personal Hygiene, aisle two.”
“I thought I was a sales professional,” Tibby commented.
“Brianna,” he said, ignoring Tibby, “you can start at register four.”
Tibby frowned sourly. Brianna got to snap her gum at an empty register because she had uncommonly huge hair and gigantic boobs that even the darts on her smock couldn't accommodate.
“Now don your headsets, and let's get to work,” Duncan commanded importantly.
Tibby tried to abort her laugh, so it came out as a combination hack-snort. She slapped her hand over her mouth. Duncan didn't seem to notice.
The good news was, she'd found her star. She'd decided the morning after the vow of the Pants that she was going to record her summer of discontent in a movie—a suckumentary, a pastiche of lameness. Duncan had just won himself a role.
She jammed her headset over her ears and hurried herself to aisle two before she got the boot. On one hand, it would have been excellent to get fired, but on the other, she needed to make money if she was ever going to have a car. She knew from experience that there were few career opportunities for a girl with a pierced nose who couldn't type and was not a “people person.”
Tibby went back to the storeroom, where a woman with extraordinarily long fingernails motioned to a very large cardboard box. “Set that up in deodorants and antiperspirants,” she instructed in a bored tone. Tibby couldn't look away from the fingernails. They curved like ten scythes. They rivaled the nails of the Indian guy in the Guinness Book of World Records. They looked the way Tibby imagined a corpse's fingernails would look after a few years in the ground. She wondered how the woman could pick up a box with those nails. Could she dial a phone? Could she type on the keys on the register? Could she wash her hair? Could a person get fired for having their fingernails too long? Could you maybe get disability? Tibby glanced at her own chewed-up fingernails.
“Any special way?” Tibby asked.
“It's a display,” the woman said, as though any moron would know how to set one up. “It's got instructions in the box.”
Tibby hefted the box toward aisle two, wondering how the woman's fingernails would look in her movie.
“Your headset is drooping,” the woman warned.
When she unpacked the box, Tibby was disheartened to see at least two hundred roll-on antiperspirants and a complicated cardboard contraption. She gaped at the number of arrows and diagrams in the instructions. You needed an engineering degree to put the thing together.
With the help of a little Scotch tape from aisle eight and a wad of gum from her mouth, Tibby at last managed to construct a pyramid of roll-ons with the cardboard head of a sphinx stuck to the top. What did antiperspirant have to do with ancient Egypt? Who knew?
“Tibby!” Duncan marched over importantly.
Tibby looked up from the momentous stack of roll-ons.
“I've paged you four times! We need you at register three!”
Tibby had failed to turn on her drooping headset. She had been too busy making silent fun of
it to pay attention when Duncan explained how to use it.
After she had spent one hour at the register and sold exactly two triple-A batteries to a zitty thirteen-year-old, her shift was over.
She took off her smock, turned in her headset, and strode through the doors, to a deafening barrage of bleeps. Duncan jumped in her path with stunning speed for a person on the fat side of fat. “Excuse me, Tibby, could you follow me back inside?”
She could see it all over his face: We never should have hired the girl with the nose ring.
He asked to see the contents of her pockets. She didn't have any pockets.
“Your smock?” he pressed.
“Oh.” She pulled the rumpled smock from under her arm. From the pocket she pulled her wallet and . . . a partly used roll of Scotch tape. “Oh, that,” Tibby said. “Right. See, I just used it for the . . .”
Duncan's face took on a resigned “I've heard all the excuses under the sun” expression. “Look, Tibby. We have a second-chance policy here at Wallman's, so we'll let this go. But be warned: I am forced to suspend your best-employee benefits, namely a fifteen percent We-Are-Wallman's discount on all items.”
After that Duncan carefully noted that the price of the Scotch tape be deducted from her first day's pay. Then he disappeared for a moment and came back with a see-through plastic bag with two handles. “Could you please keep your possessions in this from now on?” he asked.
Dear Carmen,
I guess when you have close blood relatives you've never met, you can't help but kind of idealize them in your mind. Like how adopted kids always believe their birth father was a professor and their birth mother was a model?
I guess with my grandparents it was kind of the same thing. My parents always said I was beautiful just like Grandma. So somehow all these years I pictured Grandma as Cindy Crawford or something. Grandma is not Cindy Crawford. She is old. She has a bad perm and an old-lady velour sweat suit, and horny-looking toenails sticking out of her pink, flat sandals. She's pretty ordinary, you know?
