“When are you coming back to school?” I ask Anna over the phone.
“Not until my cheeks aren’t swollen anymore.”
“Anna, you have to come back. It’s awful without you!”
I tell her about the things the other kids do to me during recess and Anna plots our revenge: we’ll handcuff them to the fence and tickle them, we’ll spit in their food.
Since she’s been sick in bed, Anna finished the entire fifth-grade reader. She says it’s almost as good as Petros’s War or Wildcat under Glass.
“What are they?”
“You mean you’ve never heard of Alki Zei? Merde!”
I make Mom buy me all of Alki Zei’s books and I read them at night in bed. Anna’s right. They’re wonderful, especially Wildcat under Glass, with the two sisters who say ve-ha, ve-sa when they want to show whether they’re very happy or very sad.
“Ve-ha? Ve-sa?” I ask Anna over the phone, so she’ll know I read Wildcat under Glass.
“Ve-sa, because I have the mumps.”
I puff up my cheeks, trying to imagine what it would be like to have the mumps. Sometimes I’d like to be Anna, for better or for worse.
Kyrios Stavros tells us Savings Day is coming up and there are going to be two contests, for best essay and best drawing; the prize is a money-box from the postal bank. Anna and I both enter the drawing contest. Anna draws a bank all in pastel colors. The teller is giving money away to everyone. There’s a cloud over his head with the words “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!” There are doves flying all around, and Patty Hearst is standing in one corner with her machine gun. Over her head it says, “With so much justice in the world, who needs me?”
“You didn’t follow the theme,” Kyrios Stavros tells her, and Anna sticks her tongue out at him when his back is turned.
My drawing is in colored pencil, of the storage room in Ikeja and a family living in there. I make the mother like Antigone, skinny, with a braid and fake eyebrows, only she’s wearing Mom’s dress with the yellow daisies. The dad has a beard, he’s smoking a pipe and reading the newspaper Acropolis, which is the newspaper my father reads. The little girl has long blond hair, bangs, and a dimple in her chin. She’s taking a can of milk down off the shelf and handing it to her little brother, a tiny baby who can’t walk yet. The baby is hard to draw, it comes out looking like a caterpillar. I keep erasing it and trying again. When I finally get it right, my picture is beautiful. Up top I draw a rainbow that’s raining drachmas, naira, and francs, which all turn into daisies as they fall to earth.
Kyrios Stavros comes into the classroom with the school superintendent.
“Will Maria Papamavrou please stand up?” the superintendent says.
What did I do now?
“Your drawing won first prize for our school. Come up front to accept your prize.”
I walk toward the teacher’s desk with bowed head. The superintendent congratulates me, kisses the top of my head, and hands me a blue money-box with a metal handle.
“Now applaud your classmate,” Kyrios Stavros says.
Everyone claps, except for Angeliki and Anna.
“You’re a thief!” Anna says. “You stole my family.”
“But your family is better than mine, that’s why.”
She wants to split our desk down the middle again. I’m so happy about the prize that I don’t object. When the bell rings at the end of the day Anna says, “I’ll forgive you, but only if you give me your drawing.”
“What if my parents want it?”
“Tell them you lost it.”
Fortunately my drawing gets published in Acropolis. Dad clips it out carefully so he can have it framed.
“When I grow up, I’m going to be an artist,” I tell him.
“That’s not a job,” Mom says. “You should choose a proper career, you can make art in your free time.”
“But if I have some other job, where will I find free time?”
“You’ll manage. Don’t I find time to shop and to cook, and to take you to the park?”
“Yeah, but all you cook is biftekia and lentils, and you don’t take me to the park all that much, either.”
Mom gives me a threatening look, but she doesn’t punish me. After I broke my arm she got rid of the key to the pantry. Now when she gets angry it’s different: she just clenches her fists, lifts her eyes to the ceiling, and mutters under her breath.
Anna ruined my drawing!
“I didn’t ruin it, I corrected it!” she shouts.
She drew doves all over the top of the page. She crossed out Dad’s Acropolis with red poster paint and made it into an Avgi, the left-wing paper her parents read. She colored in the baby entirely, turned it into a coffee table and added Gauloises cigarettes and an ashtray on top.
“We’re both only children, don’t forget,” she says.
I don’t like being an only child. It’s like saying lonely child. I’m jealous of Fotini and Martha, who share a room and can say ve-ha, ve-sa every night, like the sisters in Wildcat under Glass.
“I’d like to have a little brother or sister,” I say.
“We’re like sisters, aren’t we?”
“Sure, but only on weekends.”
And there’s something else, too: when Fotini hid Martha’s teacup in the yard, Kyria Pavlina sent her to her room. But who’s going to punish Anna for destroying my drawing?
•
This year I’m sitting at the third desk from the front and I can’t see the board very well. The letters are blurry and I have to squint to read our exercises.
“What’s wrong, Maria?” Kyrios Stavros asks. “Do you think you need to see an eye doctor?”
Antigone gives Mom the name of a pediatric optometrist who studied in Paris. We go and sit in the waiting room. Mom is happy because there’s a recent issue of Woman in the stack of magazines with an announcement for an embroidery and knitting contest. “I’ll knit a blanket,” she says. “Our family will sweep up every prize around!”
A man with a white coat and glasses shakes our hands.
“Come this way, miss.”
He tells me to rest my forehead on a metal surface with little plastic bits for your eyes and use a knob to put a parrot in a cage. He jots something down in his notes. Then he tells me to read some numbers on a lighted board across the room. The numbers are kind of blurry so he puts these little lenses in front of my eyes and asks, “Is it better now? Or now?” With some of the lenses I can read even the tiniest numbers on the board. The doctor says I’m nearsighted, enough that I need glasses. I feel like crying.
“What’s wrong, miss? Don’t you know how stylish glasses can be?”
Yeah, sure.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I’m going to be a painter,” I say, and then, looking at Mom, “and something else, too.”