Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (4 page)

Planes are so clean.
Carmen liked that. She liked the orderly, corporate smell and the sheer number of wrappers in her snack basket.

She admired the snack itself, the miniature apple. Exactly the right size, shape, and color. Kind of fake, but reassuring at the same time. She tucked it into her bag. She’d save a little order for later.

She’d never been to her dad’s apartment—he’d always come to see her instead. But she’d imagined it. Her dad wasn’t a slob, but he didn’t have that second X chromosome either. There wouldn’t be curtains in the windows or dust ruffles on the beds or baking soda in the fridge. There would be a few dust creatures roaming the floor. Maybe not right in the middle of the room, but over by the sofa probably. (There would be a sofa, wouldn’t there?) She hoped she would be sleeping on cotton sheets. Knowing her dad, he might have the polyester blend kind. Carmen had polyester issues. She couldn’t help it.

Maybe between tennis games and John Woo movies, and whatever things they found to do on a Saturday afternoon, she could take him to Bed Bath & Beyond and get some matching towels and a real teakettle. He would complain about it, but she would make it fun, and afterward he would appreciate her for it. She imagined that maybe he would be sad at the end of the summer and investigate the local high school and ask her, seriously, whether she could ever feel at home in South Carolina.

Carmen glanced down at the row of bumps on her forearm that were making the fine, dark hairs stand up.

She hadn’t seen her dad since Christmas. Christmas was always their time. Since the year she was seven and her parents split up, her dad had come every year and stayed at the Embassy Suites in Friendship Heights for four days, and they hung out. They’d go to movies, run on the canal, and return the hilarious Christmas presents she got from his sisters.

Often there were other nights, maybe three or four during the year, when he would come up to D.C. on business. She knew he took almost any excuse to get up to the Washington area. They always had dinner at a restaurant she picked. She tried to choose places he would like. She always checked his face carefully as he studied the menu and then as he took his first bite. She hardly tasted her own food.

She felt the grinding sound under the plane. Either an engine was falling off, or the wheels were unfolding for landing. It was too cloudy to gauge how close they were to the ground. She pressed her forehead to the cold plastic window. She squinted, wishing for a break in the clouds. She wanted to see the ocean. She wanted to figure out which way was north. She wanted the big picture before she landed.

“Please put your tray in its upright and locked position,” a flight attendant chirped to the man sitting next to her in the aisle seat; then she grabbed the remains of Carmen’s snack basket. The man next to Carmen was heavy and mostly bald and kept pushing his pleather briefcase into Carmen’s shin.

On planes, Bridget always sat next to adorable college guys who asked for her number before they landed. Carmen always got the middle seat between men with fat fingers, class rings, and sales reports.

“Flight attendants, please take your seats,” the captain said over the P.A. system. Carmen felt a thrill in the bottom of her stomach. She uncrossed her legs, putting both feet on the ground. She made the sign of the cross like her mother always did at takeoffs and landings. She felt like kind of a faker, but was this really a moment to break superstitions?

Tibby,

You are with me, even though you aren’t. I love everything about this trip but being apart and knowing you’re sad about being home. I don’t feel right being happy knowing that. I feel so weird without you guys. Without you here being Tibby, I’m being a little bit Tibby-doing it badly compared to you, though.

Infinite X’s and O’s,
Carma

T
he 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.