Aunt Amalia looks like one of those actresses who plays the role of the old maid in Greek movies. But she’s a very modern old maid: she goes to the movies alone, takes off one shoe in the middle of the street to scratch her foot with the heel, whistles old songs like “Let Your Hair Down” or “In the Morning You’ll Wake Me with Kisses.” When she was young she got an idea in her head: she wanted to marry Constantine, who back then was prince and later became king. She didn’t want anyone else. When Constantine married Anna-Maria—who’s from Denmark, where they call her Anne-Marie—Aunt Amalia told my parents that she was giving up on marriage: she dug a hole in her head and buried all the bouquets and wedding dresses. Whenever anything bad happens, she digs a hole in her head and shoves it in there. Now she’s telling me to do exactly the same.
We’re headed to the lake to feed the swans. Aunt Amalia always buys two koulouria, one for me and one for her, but she doesn’t eat hers, just crumbles it up and throws it to the swans. “Pssst, pssst,” she hisses as if they were cats, but these particular swans understand and waddle over. Then they swim back to their little wooden house, fold up their wings and go to sleep.
“Aunt Amalia, if you dig a hole in your head, how many things will it fit?”
“Oh, lots. Lots and lots . . .”
I imagine a hole that’s not very big but not very small, either, maybe the size of the wooden house where the swans live. Only I have to fit all of Africa in there: the goldfish pond, the badminton court, Carnival that isn’t really Carnival, the puff puffs at Mrs. Fatoba’s house. Then I’ll squash it all down and put our apartment on top, and Kyria Aphrodite, and the ice cream that isn’t really ice cream, and Angeliki and Petros, and our spelling lessons in school.
And I won’t remember anything anymore.
Kyria Aphrodite is giving us our first penmanship lesson. We copy out the sentence “Andron epifanon pasa gi tafos” in our notebooks with curlicued letters. It’s ancient Greek and I only understand the last two words, gi, earth, and tafos, grave, since they’re the same in modern Greek. I would rather write “I hate Angeliki because she’s a stupid brat,” but I’d get in trouble. So I finish my exercise and write a reply to Apostolos, the boy who sits at my desk during the evening high school. He’s my only friend in Greece. Each Monday we erase our notes from the previous week and start fresh. I told him I was in the sixth grade, because Apostolos is in the ninth grade and wouldn’t want to be writing to a little kid.
I read over last week’s correspondence one last time:
Me: I don’t know. I hope we can at least go to Ikeja for Christmas!
Apostolos: Why don’t you like Greece?
Me: 1) It’s cold. 2) I’m not allowed to ride my bike in the house. 3) There’s school every day. 4) There are too many cars. 5) Our teacher is strict and doesn’t have a parrot.
Apostolos: Did your teacher in Nigeria have a parrot?
Me: Yes, our English teacher, Mrs. Fatoba, had a parrot that talked! And she made us puff puffs, which is round fried dough with sugar on top.
Apostolos: Why don’t you ask your mother to make some?
Me: Mom is sad, she doesn’t sew anymore, and barely cooks. Only frozen biftekia and lentils, for iron.
Apostolos: Are you going to the Polytechnic on November 17?
Me: I don’t know. Are you?
Apostolos: Of course. Give the junta to the people!!!
I’m not sure what I’m going to ask him next, but I go ahead and start to erase. Kyria Aphrodite grabs me by the wrist the way Mom does, only harder. The eraser falls from my hand.
“What are you doing, Maria?”
She bends down and reads over my shoulder.
“That’s it, go stand at the board! And tell your mother to come see me tomorrow.”
Mom and Kyria Aphrodite are standing in the yard, talking. Mom is wearing her denim skirt with the horizontal red stripes, which makes her look even bigger than she already is. Kyria Aphrodite is tiny, half a mouthful, but she gestures as if she’s the boss and Mom bows her head. The whole scene reminds me of one of Gwendolyn’s sayings: The elephant and the tiger don’t hunt in the same place. Mom is the elephant, she’s been getting fatter and fatter since we got to Athens.
“What did she say?” I ask Mom when they’re done talking.
Kyria Aphrodite said she’d done her research and discovered that I have “relations” with a seventeen-year-old plumber who goes to night school. She also said that at my age I shouldn’t be getting involved in politics. I feel like showing off, so I tell Mom all the things I learned from Apostolos.
“But Mom, the dictators killed the students, don’t you get it? They ran them over with tanks!”
“That’s none of your concern.”
Angeliki comes over and tries to kiss up to my mother. When there are no adults around I call her Diaboliki. She calls me Teapot, ever since the first day of school with the toilet paper and the jungle. She says “teapot” over and over until it sounds like “potty.” Who’s she to speak, with that smushed turd on her eyebrow?
“Are you Maria’s mom?”
“Yes, dear. Who are you?”
“I’m Maria’s friend, Angeliki.”
“See, here’s a nice girl for you to be friends with. No more scribbling on desks. Will you promise me that?”
And that’s how I lose my only friend, Apostolos. I had no idea he was seventeen years old, and studying to be plumber. Now that I know, I invent a dramatic story in my head. He’s Hausa, I’m Yoruba, and we can’t get married because we’re from different tribes. Apostolos climbs onto the gate of the Athens Polytechnic and shouts: “Give the junta to the people!” Then he pulls me up beside him and I shout: “No matter how wrong things go, salt never gets worms!” The police beat us up a little bit, but the worst that happens is that they break my tooth and cut off one of my fingers, and in the end we win. All the dictators from Greece and Nigeria come pouring out of the tanks and run off as fast as they can. Then we climb into one of the tanks, which turns into a house-submarine, and before we even realize what’s happening the current has carried us all the way across the Atlantic and, oops, here we are on the coast of Nigeria. We wring out our clothes, spread them on the sand to dry and eat a couple of bananas. The tank is a tank again and we head toward Ikeja. Dad and Gwendolyn are waiting for us on the covered veranda, under the bougainvillea. Apostolos will help Unto Punto with the plumbing in the house. Until we get married, that is. Because afterward he’s going to be a doctor and I’ll be a painter and we’ll have lots of kids, and Gwendolyn will take care of them. On second thought, we won’t have any kids, because one of them might die and then what would become of us? We would pull our hair and cry and eat nothing but lentils and biftekia.
A tear rolls down my cheek, then another. I keep forgetting to bring my monogrammed handkerchiefs with me to school.
When a ripe fruit sees an honest person, it falls, Gwendolyn always said. I decide to forget all the dramatic stories and say an honest person’s prayer. I stand in front of Mom’s little shrine of icons, cross my hands on my chest the way I’ve been taught, and say, “Lord have mercy, the Father and the Son, let us go back to Ikeja and I’ll never ask you for anything else ever again. Amen.”
One Sunday morning when he’s probably still lying in bed, like me, without much of anything to do, God actually listens.
“Wake up, Maria! I have a surprise for you!” Mom calls from the kitchen.
I jump out of