Authors: Ariella Papa
I
’d planned on taking the cab to Jamie’s apartment, but she wasn’t home when I called from my cell phone. I didn’t want to be alone. Usually, I knew what she was up to on the weekends, but I couldn’t remember what she had said she was doing when we talked. For all I knew she was home making a massive attempt at conception.
Instead, I went to Better Burger and bought a tuna burger. I had one more stamp left on my card before I’d be able to get a freebie. I was working on a story for
NY BY NIGHT
about the proliferation of cards, so I was collecting them. I had a nail card, the burger card and a coffee card. I sat in the window and watched the cute gay boys of 8th Avenue walk by as I dunked my fries in karma catsup, which tasted of curry.
I was reluctant to go home and see how the move had gone. I didn’t want to get involved with Kelly. She was sure to be just another roommate that passed through our apartment. First, she’d probably see me as a rival for Armando’s affections, then she’d confide in me about the ways he flirted and try to get me to speculate with her on a relationship with him, and finally,
when all was said and done, she’d be gone just like everyone else in my stupid life. Why even bother? I hated people.
I realized that all of this anger was protecting me from thinking about what I didn’t want to think about. After Cristina died, my sister Helen went a little wild. Wild is good when you come from parents like the Jacobses who admit to smoking pot and still have sex. Wild isn’t good when you come from the Pavlopouloses. I covered up for Helen so many times, even when I knew she was dating guys and bringing hair spray bottles full of booze to school.
My mother searched Helen’s room constantly, and broke her silence to scream and yell when she found notes from boys. My mother planned such elaborate methods of spying on my sister that she might as well have worked for the government. She’d walk by places where she thought Helen was hanging out. She’d pick up the phone quietly whenever Helen was on it. Years later, when Georgia was first studying psychology, she said she thought my mother was looking to release all the tension she felt over Cristina’s death.
I tried hard to be good during all this. Georgia psychoanalyzed me too, and said that I was trying to deflect what I knew was an explosive situation. It didn’t matter, though. My mother never bothered to praise me, she just continued to go after my sister; to spy and scream and sometimes to hit. I dreaded being in our apartment back then. My father stayed out of these battles between my mother and sister—until the night that Helen didn’t come home.
It was the first night that I’d slept over at Jamie’s. Maura Jacobs came into Jamie’s room and said that my mom was on the phone. I figured that she was checking up on me as she did with Helen. I remember feeling confident when I picked up the receiver. I knew I had done nothing wrong, and maybe my mother would be ashamed of herself.
Instead, my mother was hysterical. Helen had been forbidden to leave the house. Other people got “grounded,” we were “forbidden to leave the house.” We didn’t know what the penalty was if we disobeyed—none of us had been that brave—
but Helen had finally decided to test the boundaries. My mother had gone to the store, and when she returned, Helen was gone. It was unthinkable. I knew without asking that I had to come home immediately.
My dad was sitting at the kitchen table drinking strong Greek coffee out of a tiny cup. My mother, crying, had searched Helen’s room again, this time uncovering notes to her boyfriend, Andre. If anything, my parents had returned momentarily to the people they were before Cristina died. My mother asked me to translate certain words—usually slang or curses—that she didn’t understand from the notes spread before her. Even though I created benign definitions, it didn’t matter. I worried that my parents would be upset with me for some reason, but they weren’t. My father didn’t say a word, which wasn’t unusual for him, but something about the set of his lips and the look in his eyes made me more afraid than I had ever been.
“It’s the Puerto Rican,” my mother said over and over again.
Each time she said it, I looked at my dad and became more and more convinced that they were going to kill my sister when she came home.
That night when I finally went to bed around midnight, I realized that not even my bed felt safe anymore. Cristina was dead, and now who knew what was going to happen to Helen. There was nowhere for me to be at peace. Everything could be taken at any second.
I stared into the blackness of my room, my heart pumping fast, for what seemed like forever. Eventually, I must have dozed, because when I woke up it was as if the house were alive. I could see all the lights on outside our door. I could hear thumps, screams, crying and cursing. Cristina would have taken the beating quietly, crying just enough to satisfy my parents, to show them that she was sorry, but not defying, not yelling at them. Helen was much tougher.
She ran into our room and my father followed with the belt, my mother shrieking and wailing, all three of them playing out some kind of crazy scene. My sister jumped back and forth
across our beds. I don’t think either of my parents even saw me. It was all about my sister. Then she said her damning words.
“Leave me alone, I’m pregnant.”
Time stood still. We were all frozen, waiting to see what one statement could do. Then my father was pulling my sister out of my room, my mother screaming louder than ever, and the sounds I heard coming out of my sister didn’t seem real. It was worse than the usual punishment.
After that, our world changed again. The police came and got my dad, my sister went to the hospital and my mother seemed even more empty than she had been before.
We didn’t visit my sister in the hospital. I didn’t even know where she was. My father spent the rest of the night in jail, but was out in the morning thanks to Georgia’s dad. When Helen came home a few days later she brought her boyfriend. They cleared out only the stuff that she’d bought with her own money. My mother yelled about things she was and wasn’t allowed to take. It was awful. I have to admit, I’m ashamed about the way I handled it. I didn’t know what to say to Helen. I couldn’t quite comprehend that she was leaving for good. My father left the apartment cursing in Greek about Puerto Ricans.
I went to sit outside on the stoop.
Finally my sister came out, gave a plastic bag of belongings to her boyfriend and asked him to wait in the car.
“Voula,” she said, but I didn’t look up. “Okay. I just want you to know that you saved my life. Two lives, actually. So, thanks, and I guess I’ll see you around.”
Then my sister was gone. What she meant and why I didn’t run after her and hug her I don’t know. I think I was just too scared.
But I didn’t see her around—not for almost fifteen years.
I never caught a beating like that. I never did anything to deserve one. And my father moved to Cyprus that summer….
When I finished my burger, I tried Jamie’s apartment again
but got the machine. I almost left a pathetic pick-up-if-your-listening message, but I didn’t. I walked up 8th Avenue back to my apartment.
I heard laughing as I put the key in the door. It was starting already.
Kelly and Armando were standing in the kitchen holding glasses of red wine and smiling at each other. I so couldn’t deal with this.
“Ciao, bella,”
Armando said.
“Hey,” Kelly said, reaching out and grabbing my hand to shake. “It’s nice to see you again, Voula.”
The way she said my name was a little too slick, like I should be impressed that she remembered the name of the person she was living with. Raj was a TV person—I knew how slick they could be.
“Hi, how was the move?”
She sighed and kind of smiled at Armando. “Well, getting movers was the best money I ever spent, but moving is still a pain in the ass.”
I smiled. She was wearing an obscenely short skirt, but from the looks of it, she had a bra on this time.
“Yeah,” I said. I kind of wished they would just skip the wine and cut to the sex scene. I wanted them to go into Armando’s room and leave me alone. Maybe they could get all the drama out of the way quick, so Kelly wouldn’t have to unpack her boxes.
“Do you want some wine?” Kelly asked. “It’s great. Armando has fantastic taste in wine.”
“No thanks,” I said, ignoring Armando’s smirk. “I have some work to do.”
“On a Saturday?” Kelly said.
“Yeah,” I said quietly, and went into my office.
I closed the door behind me and turned on my laptop. The cursor blinked at me, mocking me. It said, “auntie, auntie.” I was an aunt to two kids somewhere.
I was also still a sister.
I put my iPod on shuffle and swiveled once in my chair. Then I focused and wrote,
“There is no greater sense of accomplishment than getting the free cup of coffee at the end of the coffee card.”
Okay, I was in. For the next hour or so I wrote. I stopped to check whether a song was Audioslave or Sound Garden, but other than that, I was in the perfect zone. I came up with a halfway decent rough draft that accurately portrayed something that everyone could relate to, with enough inside New York references to make commuters on subways smile as they sipped the coffee that might have been free or at least leading them to a free cup.
I always hoped articles like this made life seem better, even if just for a minute. I knew they were fluff, but I could also picture the readers smiling in recognition. Obviously it wasn’t going to change their lives, but it could take their minds off the fight they had with their boyfriend, the fabulous or dumb job they were headed to, or the stinky-breathed guy on the subway reading over their shoulder.
I used to work as an administrator for a nonprofit agency that raised money for international sculptors, but I had always wanted to be a writer. Since I was a girl I dreamed of leading a writer’s life in New York City, working from home in my pajamas, waking up whenever I wanted, and writing exposés about injustice in the world. I was a long way from exposing war atrocities, but everything else came pretty close.
I started writing reviews online for various Web sites to get clips, and then I got my first assignment for
NY BY NIGHT.
It was four paragraphs about the etiquette for running into an acquaintance on the subway in the morning, but it paid. I made a dollar a word, I popped my cherry, I was a paid writer. And after that I got assignments here and there. I kept working at my day job because I was scared I wouldn’t be able to support myself (and truth be told, I got a lot of writing done during my downtime).
Then
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
came out and I wrote a
scathing review. It was hard not to. I mean, I guess it could be argued that it was a good movie if you like innocent extended sitcoms, but what bothered me was that it really glossed over the Greekness of it. I mean, Toula’s family could have been Jewish or Italian or any safe ethnicity, but they weren’t—they were Greek. And where were all the Greek traditions? And who has Greek parents that wind up being that accepting at the end? I just felt diminished, and I wrote my most emotional review ever.
On the Verge
magazine published it and I started getting steady gigs.
Sometimes I had to travel or do research, which made it harder and harder to keep my day job. So I did the riskiest thing I’d ever done—probably will ever do—I trusted my talent and quit my job. My mother couldn’t believe it, and maybe that made it sweeter. I believed. I had to. And it worked. I made a living—not a fabulous one, but a decent one.
The one place in my life where I seem to have done all right is my job.
There was a knock at the door of my office. I pulled the door open expecting Armando, but it was Kelly. She smiled and inched her way in. The office was tiny. I had garbage-picked a desk off the street and it took up most of the room.
“It’s so cool in here,” she said brightly. “I didn’t get to see this the last time.”
“Thanks,” I said. I felt myself growing protective of my space. It was one thing to move into my apartment, but another to come into my work area.
“I was wondering if you wanted to go get a drink.”
“Oh, um, thanks, but I really have to do some work.” To her credit, she actually looked disappointed. She could drop the act. “I’m sure Armando will go.”
“Actually, he went in to cover a shift at the restaurant. So I guess I’m not going to get to know my new roommates tonight.” She smiled, her tone was even a little self-deprecating. “I’ll let you get back to work.”
She closed the door, and I turned back to my draft and spell-checked it. It wasn’t due for another couple of days. And hon
estly, it was one of those pieces they could run at any time. I had a good enough relationship with the editor to know my deadline on that story wasn’t hard. I felt a little bad about being so curt with Kelly. I mean, she was reaching out. But she was too cute and perky, too up, plus I knew she was going to screw Armando, and then it would be more agita for me.
I tried Jamie again—still no answer. I started to read over my article. I knew I had lost the thread. I kept imagining my mother’s face when she found out that people in her family were talking to Helen.
I got up and knocked on Kelly’s door. She was playing Joni Mitchell—at least I think that’s who it was. It sounded folky. She opened the door and smiled a toothy smile.
“Come on in.”
I entered cautiously. She seemed the type of person who is always at ease. How did she do it? Why couldn’t I ever muster this kind of calm?
“Sorry about the mess,” she said. “I decided to get a jump on unpacking. Since you dissed me for drinks.”
I waited for her to say “just kidding,” one of my pet peeves. The secret to good humor is knowing your joke may not go over and not really caring if it doesn’t. I may not have been comfortable in my own skin, but I was comfortable with my sarcasm. She smiled at me, but didn’t qualify her statement.
“I’m just a working girl,” I said.
“You do it all for the cheese.”