Hold Me Today

by Maria Luis

  20

  To: Mina Pappas

  From: Nick Stamos

  Subject: question about flooring

  What’s your favorite food?

  P.S., I shifted some things around in the budget and managed to work in your slate floors. And, yes, I promise that I ONLY shifted around the budget. Before I pick them up from the warehouse tomorrow, I want to know how you want them laid out? On your Pinterest boards, you’ve got everything under the sun. Square? Large and rectangular? Herringbone? Something else? Any preference before I get to work?

  To: Nick Stamos

  From: Mina Pappas

  Re: Subject: question about flooring

  How in the world did you work around the budget for that? Please tell me you didn’t break a leg and donate it . . . although, that would be very gallant of you. (But, really, please tell me how??? Also, whatever you think looks best—and is the cheapest option.)

  P.S., How are you feeling? I didn’t make it into Agape the last two days now that I’ve been forced to evacuate the premises under someone’s dictatorial orders. I won’t name names to protect the guilty. (Good news: I booked a few clients and am doing house calls all week.)

  P.P.S., Please tell Vince and Bill thank you for getting my stuff out of the apartment for me. I really appreciate their help. And yours.

  P.P.P.S., I’m going to sound like a traitor of the highest order here, but . . . Italian food. Do I get to ask you a question now?

  To: Mina Pappas

  From: Nick Stamos

  Re: Re: Subject: question about flooring

  Wow. Throw down the gauntlet and tear my heart out. Italian? You don’t like cannoli so that can’t be the draw. It’s the pasta, isn’t it?

  And ask away.

  P.S., I’m feeling all right. My pride is more bruised than my leg ever was. All’s well over here.

  P.P.S., We’re happy to help, Ermione. I know it’s not easy but we’ll get you back in there soon enough, I promise. Trust me on this.

  To: Nick Stamos

  From: Mina Pappas

  Re: Re: Re: Subject: question about flooring

  Mr. Stamos, you didn’t answer my question about the slate floors. Do a girl a favor and tell me you didn’t axe something important . . . like a toilet.

  P.S., Your pride can handle the fall. Your butt too—it’s made of 100% steel, right?

  P.P.S., It’s totally the pasta. Carbs are my worst enemy (after you, of course) but also my fiercest lover. As for my question . . . are you a fan of Lord of the Rings?

  To: Mina Pappas

  From: Nick Stamos

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Subject: question about flooring

  Toilet’s out. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I’ve decided to dig a hole in the ground and buy one of those pop-squatter things from the store. Cheap and efficient, and you can admire your pretty slate floors as your clients throw fits about the lack of restrooms. You’re welcome, Mina.

  P.S., All steel, baby.

  P.P.S., Two things. 1) Elijah Wood may have done a good job as Frodo, but that doesn’t mean Frodo isn’t the dumbest character on the face of the planet. STAY IN THE SHIRE, FRODO. 2) My precioussss.

  P.P.P.S., In case you couldn’t tell from above, the answer to your question is . . . yes.

  To: Nick Stamos

  From: Mina Pappas

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Subject: question about flooring

  You never cease to surprise me.

  P.S., I left you a gift on the receptionist’s desk. Because I love to spoil surprises, here are the details: it’s an empty box, fitted perfectly for the size of your heart if I learn you did away with my toilets or anything else important. You’re welcome, Nick.

  21

  Mina

  Returning home after the stairwell debacle wasn’t my first choice.

  To be honest, it wasn’t my second choice either . . . or my third.

  I wait for guilt to assail me for preferring to be anywhere but where my parents are, but it doesn’t come. It rarely does.

  Sitting on my old twin-sized bed, I cross my legs and prop my laptop against my shins. Plastered all over the walls are magazine cut-outs of models from various catwalks around the world, mostly dated to the late 90s and early 2000s. In the corner of the room, beneath the old, white desk I rarely used as a kid, is a tub stuffed to the brim with dolls. I remember needing to sit on the plastic lid while Katya helped me duct-tape it shut.

  I feel a pinch in my heart that I studiously ignore by dropping my gaze to the voice-recorder app I’ve left open on my phone. Tapping the red, record button, I lean back on my childhood mattress and speak clearly for the microphone to pick up. “Date recorded: February seventh. Received invitation from local fashion show to participate as one of the hairstylists on recommendation from Tanya Banks, an old client and sister to model Chantelle Banks.” Leaving the app to record, I reach for my glass of water off the bedside table and take a sip. “Must leave confirmation of participation by the twenty-fifth. Also, uploaded job posting for Agape interviews.”

  After another sip of water, I pause the app and save the voice memo to my drive, as well. I’ll play it back later and make any notations in my calendar for cross-referencing, like the fashion-show gig. It’s not the first time I’ve participated in large-scale shows, but this is the first time I’ll be representing my own salon and my own brand. My stomach still flutters with giddiness whenever I think about the call I received early this morning.

  But, good news or not, being back in this house and under my parent’s roof, is a time warp I’d rather do without.

  The mattress dips as I set aside my laptop and swing my legs over the side of the bed. The fuzzy carpet greets my bare feet as I crouch low and lift the old-fashioned skirt that my mom picked out years ago from some catalogue she obsessed over. I thrust a hand under the bed, patting around in the darkness for the slim box I know everyone but me has forgotten. My fingertips graze plastic, and I drag it out into the light.

  Turning onto my butt, I pop off the box’s lid and take a moment to breathe. I breathe in the old desperation to fit in with my family, with my Greek community, and breathe out a sixteen-year-old’s identity crisis.

  Finally, I peer into the box. Spiral-bound notebook after spiral-bound notebook greet me, my name written in my sloppy Greek script across the front of each one. Ερμιόνη Παπάς. The metal binding protests with a whine as I crack open the notebook sitting on top of them all. My sixth-grade handwriting is atrocious. “So bad,” I whisper, flipping through the pages. But not as bad as all the eraser marks and crossed-out words in the columns of each page.

  I toss that notebook to the carpet and reach in for another. Seventh grade. A small part of me hopes this one will be better and show some progression. I see my attempts to remember the proper way to conjugate the past perfect tense of the verb, to love. Agape—the noun, not the verb. I don’t think I ever quite got the hang of it, but that didn’t stop me from slapping it across my LLC and DBA and the sign I ordered offline that’s sitting in my apartment.

  One by one, I move through the grades until there are none left to review but one.

  I don’t know why I feel the need to look through them all. It’s not anything I don’t still know: I never would have passed any grades in Greek school if it weren’t for the fact that kids flunking out didn’t happen.

  I passed on the sheer merit of pity from my teachers and some made-up rule by the priests of the church, who only cared to see kids in the ecclesia and learning the mother tongue. Kids like Nick and Effie, Katya and Dimitri, and, yes, even Sophia, earned their way through to our senior year. I faked it till I couldn’t make it anymo
re, and then I kept faking it because to do otherwise would admit the truth: that I wasn’t as Greek as them all, both by blood and otherwise.

  My forearm rests on the plastic lip of the box as I hesitate over the final notebook. I drop my head back against the edge of the mattress. Why torture myself with yet another workbook memorializing my weaknesses? Why bother going through them at all? Self-punishment, maybe? Or a push to get me moving faster and turn the wheel of ambition once more?

  A month ago, I would have messaged back the fashion show’s director within seconds of receiving the email. And yet here I am instead, combing through decades-old school notebooks like they carry some mysterious piece of my soul.

  “You’re a maláka,” I mutter, even as I snag the last notebook and prop it open on my knees. I’ve come this far. What’s another ten minutes of feeling like the dirt on the bottom of my shoes?

  Only, it’s not another one of my workbooks.

  Or, rather, it is—or was meant to be before I gave up completely, it seems, and used my time spent in Greek school penning my every thought down.

  Well, damn. I totally forgot about this.

  Even in English, my handwriting wasn’t all that good by senior year. It still isn’t, though I do my best to keep it neat and legible. I trace the heel of my palm over the penciled words. Then note the date at the top of the entry: September 4th, 2005.

  Dear Greek School Notebook (because, let’s face it, you’re no diary),

  Today is the first day of classes. I begged Mama to let me skip this year but she said no. I need to learn our culture, she said. No one else has any trouble but you, Baba told me. Why can’t either of them see how hard this is for me? I’m not a brat. I can’t remember the letters to the sounds and it’s so FRUSTRATING.

  No one talks in English, not even when we have a snack break. Even Effie, when we’re here, sticks to Greek. I know she only wants a good grade. It has nothing to do with me. I wonder if this is what it’s like for people who move to a new country where they don’t know the language. Do they feel lonely like me? Do they feel like they don’t belong?

  In American school, I don’t fit in because I’m weird and my parents immigrated to America, and I bring Greek food for lunch and my name is ERMIONE. No one can even spell it. Or say it. I see the panic on my teachers’ faces when they get to it on the attendance sheet.

  In Greek school, I don’t fit in because I can’t keep up with everyone else. It sucks. Big time.

  See ya next time,

  MINA

  Heart heavy, I palm the page, as though that alone might connect me with my seventeen-year-old self. Anxiety pools low in my gut, but instead of putting the notebook to the side, I flip a few pages and find another entry, this one for December of the same year:

  Dear GSN,

  Me again. As always, sitting in the back row and doodling. Doodling beats reciting my Christmas poem for the 100th time when I can’t even memorize the first line. Effie offered to help but I think I’m going to fake the flu. Maybe a fever. Whatever illness is going around the third week of December, so I don’t embarrass myself in front of everyone.

  Including Nick.

  Effie said he’ll be there, and I’d rather stab myself with this pencil than mess up talking to him.

  He’s so fluent that the last time he came out to dinner with us, the waitress thought he just arrived off the boat. Or plane, ya know, because modern times. I wish I could impress him, but I’m like the ultimate Greek failure.

  And Mama says Nick is going to marry a Greek girl, too, which means I’m SOL. I’m half-Greek. Other side of me: unknown. Sometimes I wonder if maybe that other half of me is stronger somehow. Like maybe I’m Brazilian? Or French-Canadian? Or Guatemalan? Maybe I could speak and read Portuguese or Spanish. Maybe I wouldn’t just stand around, not saying a word because I’m so scared of saying it all wrong.

  Then again, I’m pretty much failing Spanish class at American school. So maybe I should just hope I’m English or something, so I can stick to only sucking at two languages.

  See ya next time,

  MINA

  It’s a train wreck: my spelling, my verbal diarrhea on the page, and still I can’t stop reading. Blood pounds away like an incessant drum in my head as I thumb some pages over, closer to the end of the notebook. I stop when I spot doodles across the headline of the page. March of 2006, two months before my graduation from both schools.

  Dear GSN,

  Today, Mama got angry with me on the way to Greek school. I just wanted to know about my real dad, whoever he is. As I’m writing, everyone is standing up to do final presentations on our family histories. Athens. Thessaloniki. Sparta. Istanbul. The teacher made a face when Sophia admitted that her mom’s side came from Turkey, before that bad war in the 1920s when her family had to leave.

  I asked Mama about HIS ancestry. Maybe that would explain why my skin is darker than Katya and Dimitri’s? Than Mama’s, too? Or maybe why my hair is curlier and thicker than theirs? Everyone in my family has green eyes but me, even Baba, though I’m sure that’s just a coincidence or whatever since Theio Prodromos has dark eyes. I used to wish that Baba’s brother, my uncle, could be my dad. He’s always so nice and encouraging and he never makes me feel like I’m not part of the family, even though he doesn’t know I’m not actually a Pappas, but those were kid’s wishes.

  Now I just want to know WHY.

  Who am I?

  Can you be a part of a culture and still feel like an outsider? It’s Greek this and Greek that and I don’t look like my family and they don’t look like me, and I’m going to get up in front of my classmates and stutter over my words and this stupid talk and lie about it all.

  I can’t wait to move. I’m going to go far away. I’ll miss Effie but she can visit.

  No more being stuck.

  MINA

  Thirteen years later and I still don’t have the answers to any of the questions I asked myself then. Oh, I’ve thought about doing those ancestry tests and discovering the realities of my DNA. It’d be broken up by stats and color-coded charts and percentages that take a family’s roots and segment them into a scientific hypothesis of one’s genetic makeup.

  Unfortunately, doing that feels incredibly less satisfying than learning the truth from my mom. If the prelude to my birth had been only a one-night stand, I wouldn’t push. But she had an affair with my biological father, which means she knows a name.

  And a name can tell a million stories all on its own.

  But even the matter of DNAs and all that doesn’t push away the clamping sensation on my heart—because Theio Prodromos . . . I rub a hand over my chest, as though the physical ache of his death is still pressing its weight down on me. For as bullish as my dad always was, my uncle was a gentle soul. A kind soul. The only reason we traveled to Greece every summer was to visit Prodromos, my dad’s younger brother. It was my theio who taught me to ride my bike the summer between kindergarten and first grade. It was my theio who woke Katya and Dimitri and me up in the middle of the night, sneaking us out of his house so he could buy us Nutella and strawberry crepes while we buried our feet in the sand and watched the waves crash onto the shore.

  I longed for those summers spent in Greece, no matter how they often made me feel inadequate, because I always knew a friendly face waited on the other side.

  And then there was Nick, of course.

  “Mina,” Theio Prodromos once said to me in his accented, stilted English, “if you stare at him any harder, the boy will disappear.”

  If only my uncle could see me now that I’ve kissed Nick and he didn’t disappear.

  I throw a quick glance at the clock perched on the nightstand. God, I’ve been reading for three hours. My parents will be home soon from dinner with friends, which means I’ll need to make myself scarce before my dad can start in on me the way he’s done since I returned to the birthing nest.

  “One more.”

  The last one.

  It’s dat
ed to the fifth of May, 2006. The day after prom. “Oh, girl,” I mutter to myself, “don’t even go there.”

  But like on prom night itself, I can’t stop myself.

  Dear GSN,

  Why can’t we pay to forget the bad memories? Why is it that we can rarely remember the good—like the time Yiayia bought my very first audiobook tape, right before she passed away? I still have it and I’ll never let it go. It showed me that I love books, even if I don’t like to read. I had to stop and think about that for a second, to find that good memory. But the bad ones scar us forever . . . like Baba blaming me for Katya doing bad in her English class yesterday. He yelled a lot and he told me I was dumb and he thanked God that I wasn’t really his.

  I remember every second of standing there and trying not to cry. I remember when he said I’d be lucky if a man wanted to marry me because I’d probably have kids as stupid as I am.

  He was angry and drinking and I’m sure he didn’t mean it but . . . it hurt. A lot.

  Probably didn’t help that no one asked me to the dance. I thought, maybe, someone might. A few of the guys left notes in the girls’ lockers asking them, and I checked mine every morning and every afternoon before I went home, but no notes.

  Aleka told me boys my age are stupid, and I think she’s right. So I went into business. Put up flyers all over the school that said I was doing girls’ hair for the dance. I charged $15. Pretty good if you ask me, because I had TWELVE girls sign up!!! I went to Effie’s house and even though it’s not that big in there, she collected the money and I borrowed her mom’s stuff. The girls and their moms came, and even though none of them are my friends, I’m glad I could make them feel beautiful. Everyone deserves to feel pretty. One day, I know I’ll feel that way too.