“How far is your house, anyway?”
“I’ll tell you a secret. Promise not to tell? We lied and said I live where the bakery is, the one across the street from school. I actually live in Plaka. We gave a fake address because our school is experimental and I ab-so-lute-ly had to go there. See?”
“If our school is so good, I wonder what the bad ones are like. You mean there are worse teachers than Kyria Aphrodite?”
Anna laughs with her whole face: with her eyes, her cheeks, the dimple in her chin.
“You’re so beautiful!” I tell her.
“What matters most is inner beauty,” Anna replies. She must’ve heard it somewhere, it’s the kind of thing grown-ups say. But since it’s Anna saying it now, I learn it by heart.
Anna’s house is like one of the smaller houses in Ikeja. It has a yard with stone walls. Anna unlocks the door with her own key, tosses her bag on the floor and her mother yells “Allooo” from the kitchen. Anna runs in and hugs her. When she lets go, the most beautiful mother in the world suddenly appears before me: plump lips, sort of liquid eyes, like Gwendolyn’s, hair braided into a shiny black rope that comes all the way down to her waist. She’s wearing a black leotard and burgundy tights. She’s barefoot and very skinny, like all ballerinas. She bends down and smiles at me. I can see all of her ribs through the leotard, like an X-ray.
“You must be Maria. I’m Antigone.”
So I’ll call her by her first name, like I did with Gwendolyn! Anna calls her Antigone, too, only she says it funny, with a French accent. They talk in French for a while as I take off my raincoat.
“Where should I put my backpack?”
Anna gestures toward the living room. I can leave my bag wherever I want? On the floor, on the sofa, on the table by the bookshelf? At our house my backpack belongs only in my bedroom, on the floor by my desk.
“Maria, you told your mother you’d be eating with us, right?” Antigone asks.
I pretend not to hear. I didn’t tell my mother, but I won’t be here that long, will I? I put my backpack on the table, which is buried in books and electricity bills, papers covered with scrawled writing, overflowing ashtrays. Antigone smokes a brand called Gauloises. The pack is a pretty color. Everything in their house is beautiful and strange. They have African statues, like we do, and huge worry beads made out of amber. The tables all have wheels on the legs, because when Antigone practices she needs to roll the furniture out of the way. There’s a poster on the wall of a little boy peeing on a crown, and beside it a long, narrow, black-and-white picture with lots of people. All their faces look the same, they’re sad because they’re carrying a wounded girl on their hands. She might even be dead.
“Do you like that woodblock? It’s by Tasos,” Antigone says, lighting a cigarette.
“It’s nice.”
“Do you see how many people suffered in the name of justice and democracy?”
“All those people suffered?”
“Oh, many, many more . . .”
“When we were in Africa and you were in Paris?”
Antigone nods. Her forehead fills with tiny wrinkles. She doesn’t have any eyebrows, she draws them on with a pencil.
“Why don’t you put something happier on the walls, now that we have democracy?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, fruit. Or the old guy with the pipe.”
“We have to remember those who sacrificed their lives for us, Maria.”
She’s right. She’s beautiful, but she also has what Anna was talking about: inner beauty.
We eat our lunch backwards. First the main dish, chicken with mushrooms, then salad. And then some strange cheeses and Jell-O with chunks of fruit. Antigone eats the way Aunt Amalia does, absentmindedly, a bite now and again, when she remembers. But Anna and I are starving! Their kitchen is so cheerful, with blue walls and yellow cabinets. Like a nursery school.
“I owe you an apology, Maria,” Antigone says while she’s doing the dishes. Anna has gone out to bring her a newspaper from the kiosk on the corner.
“What for?” I ask.
“For what Anna said to you. You know, apart from good people like you and your parents, there are also lots of bad white people in Africa. Ones who want to take black people’s land away and turn them into servants.”
I feel my face getting hot. Gwendolyn and Unto Punto are servants. But they don’t mind.
“What were you doing in Africa?”
“Riding my bike, mostly. Our house was even bigger than yours!”
“Oh my!” Antigone says and bursts out laughing. “What about your parents?”
“Dad worked all the time. Sometimes Mom would sew me dresses. Or she would go for tea with Miss Steedworthy who had a glass eye because her husband hit her. Now she doesn’t do anything. She doesn’t have any friends in Athens.”
Maybe if Antigone feels sorry for Mom she’ll want to be her friend, and convince her to go on a diet so she can wear her dress with the daisies again.
Antigone’s face gets all wrinkled again. Whenever she’s thinking, her face looks like a crumpled piece of paper. “Do you think your mother might be interested in joining the League of Democratic Women? It’s an organization for women on the left.”
“What do they do?”
“They talk about their rights, discuss domestic violence . . .”
“If they sew, too, I’m sure she would go.”
“Here, let’s give her a call together.”
Fantastic! Mom and Antigone will meet and become friends, just like me and Anna. Dola and Bambi, minus the jealousy. I carefully dial the six numbers.
“Hi, Mom, Anna’s mom wants to know if you want to know about the League of Democratic Women.”
“What I want to know, Maria Papamavrou, is where in heaven’s name are you? If you think it’s okay to go traipsing around wherever you want, you’ve got another think coming! You’d better come home this instant! Now!” Mom is shouting. I cover the receiver with my hand so her voice won’t be heard all the way down in Plaka.
“Well, what does she say?” Antigone asks.
“She says she’s not feeling well and I should come home right away to take care of her.”
Antigone drives me home in her Beetle—a car that looks like a turtle and shudders all over as it moves. In my head I hear Gwendolyn say: The fear of tomorrow makes the turtle carry its home wherever it goes. That’s what I want for myself, too. To have a house I can carry on my back, like my red backpack with its shoulder straps. To not live with Mom and have to do whatever she says. Anna and I are in the back seat of the Beetle. She keeps stroking my hand, though avoiding my pinky finger, since it’s kind of scary. “Poor thing, I hope your mother hasn’t gotten malaria and lost any of her fingers, like you.” I lied and told her my finger rotted and fell off because of a terrible African sickness.
Antigone wants to come upstairs to the apartment and bring Anna, too. “Women’s solidarity,” she says. I tell her my mother doesn’t like to have people around when she’s sick, and to make it more dramatic I say that sometimes Mom breaks plates when she’s annoyed. That’s pretty revolutionary, the League of Democratic Women will love it. When we pull up outside our building in Exarheia I shoot from the car like a bullet, I forget to say thank you, and by the time I’m at the top of the stairs to the front door it’s too late: Antigone steps on the gas and the exhaust pipe belches