“I’m so sorry, Grandmama,” Joey said, her eyes blurring with unexpected tears.
“It’s all right, my darling.” Her grandmother ran a fingertip over the Lucky Charm smudge. It wasn’t on the Batis part, at least. “We won’t speak of this photograph again. What shall we talk about? Not these awful things.”
“My birthday party.” Joey started talking fast, eager to change the subject and to brighten her grandmother’s mood. “It’s going to be ceramics. And Mom’s not going to lead it. We got a professional. We’re going to glaze and everything. You’ll come, won’t you? And Grandfather?”
“That’s nice,” said her grandmother. She put the picture back in the empty tissue box. She put the box under her arm. “Of course, we’ll come. I’ll be right back.”
Joey never saw that picture again.
But a year later, when she was ten and in Corfu that first summer, she stood outside the Romaniote synagogue, waiting for her father. An old lady wove through throngs of people. A tour group in knee-length shorts and white orthopedic shoes. A man shouting, “Spyro, ya Spyro.” Another man dragging his daughter’s pink wheely suitcase.
But the old lady went straight to Joey.
“Open your hand, child.”
Joey yanked back her palm, but the lady crept her strong, bent fingers around Joey’s and pried them open anyhow. Inside she placed an evil eye charm.
“You know what it is, child.”
Joey backed away as spittle flew into her face. She suddenly longed to get back to Leo and their beautiful terrace where the sun dappled through the cypress trees.
The lady said, “It’s to ward off the evil eye. Today is Tuesday, yes? The worst day of the week. The most unlucky. You must keep this with you. Then you will have good luck. You understand? You be safe. Poo, poo, poo.” She spit three times. Joey was too stunned to duck.
Her father emerged, oblivious to the old lady not a foot away. “You missed a nice visit. It’s something special, the synagogue. They restored it after the war, when it was bombed.” He shoved his hands in his chino pockets. “They’re thinking to do a memorial for all the Jews murdered in—”
“That’s nice.” Joey brushed spit that was not hers from her lip. She watched the old lady shuffle away, her ankles pooling skin folds over her scuffed black shoes. The old lady didn’t give anyone else the evil eye charm.
Just her. Just Joey.
Chapter Nine
Joey
Corfu
2004
Joey lugged her canvas to Demetris. Her art teacher owned and operated a fruit stall for extra income, but his true love and talent was painting, which happened to be Joey’s favorite medium too. He’d been teaching her to paint since she was ten, since she’d told Bea she wanted a painting teacher who wasn’t her mother and Bea had gotten a recommendation from a colleague. Demetris had gone to Paris in his twenties and begun to make a significant name for himself, but he’d soon returned to Corfu because, as he put it, Corfu was where his sunshine was. Bea always said that Demetris could have made it big, in sort of a disapproving way, but Joey respected how he’d followed his happiness.
Demetris listened when Joey said she didn’t feel like oils, when she asked, could she paint only in yellow today? He taught her to feel fruit with her eyes closed, to feel its energy, and he taught her the same with the pencil.
“Use the brain that is in your hand,” he always said in those early years, loosening her death grip. “Your head is the servant. Your hand is the master.”
Demetris lived in a historic burnt-orange building on the main thrust of Liston, the area boasting posh cafés, with a series of arches replicating the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. Demetris’s third-floor apartment had one small window that overlooked the platia, the grassy expanse between Liston and the Old Fortress, in the part of town most emblematic of the island’s French and Venetian influences. His apartment was adorned in the black-and-white paintings of townspeople for which he was renowned across the island and mainland Greece.
Joey moved aside two empty espresso cups in the corner that got little sun. She plunked down the canvas.
“Hi, Demetris!”
“Yia sou to you too, Joey mou.” Demetris wore baggy Dad-style blue jeans, although he was not one, and black work boots.
“I’m so glad to see you. Yia sou!” Joey kissed both his cheeks.
He looked amused. “Demetris is glad to see you too.” For some reason, he sometimes spoke in third person. That was part of Demetris’s charm.
“How are you?” she asked. “How is Bella?”
“No complaints.” He smiled and turned his attention to the canvas. “What have you brought to me?” This was quintessential Demetris—down to business fast.
“Well, I think I’m onto something with these eyes. But obviously I want your opinion.” Joey watched him as he studied the canvas. “I want them to be bigger. Sort of evil eyes, but sort of real eyes. Out of scale on a human head. There’s something in them, don’t you agree?” She scrutinized an iris. “But I don’t know. Something’s off.”
Demetris’s face didn’t flicker. “Joey mou, you come to Demetris for a reason, no?”
“Yes.”
“You trust Demetris, no?”
“Yes.”
“Please, put the canvas on the floor.” She obeyed. “Ella, take a pencil.”
She groaned. “I know where you’re going with this. It’s like when I was ten.”
He cocked his head at her. “You did some of your best work when you were ten.”
* * *
“Close your eyes,” said Demetris.
“This is strange,” said Joey.
“Accept the strangeness.”
Yes, they were not strangers to strange. When she was younger, Demetris liked to play games to train her perspective. He’d hand her string and a scissors. He’d draw a line on the wall. On his own living room wall! (Bella will kill you, she’d say. I’ll paint it a new color, he’d shrug.) He would make her stand ten feet away. Cut the string to the size of that line. She would cut too short. Go back, do it again. She would cut it far too long. Back. If this game was good enough for Da Vinci, it is good enough for Joey Abrams.
Now Demetris pried the pencil from her hand and reinstated it beneath her fingers. “Loosen up, paidi mou. You don’t have to create now. The pressure is off. You just have to see what will be on the page. Eyes closed, Joey.”
She closed them. She imagined sliding into the sea, down beneath the surface, and resting way below. This was one of Demetris’s tricks to get out of her head.
“I want you to draw a mountain. Do you see it?” Joey didn’t see it. Down, down, down, deeper in the ocean.
“Relax your eyes, Joey. Focus on the sound of the pencil. That’s the only thing in your world. It’s a lovely sound. How lucky we are to live in a world with pencils.” Demetris hummed some tune that was presumably the Ode to the Pencil.
“Do you see the mountain?” asked Demetris again.
“Yes.” Slowly one appeared. The mountains of Corfu.
“Good. Start adding things you see in your picture. Don’t skip, Joey. It’s a continuous line.” Now his voice became more distant. She smelled espresso brewing. Her pencil moved. “Start creating a horizon. Something in order to put the sea under the mountains. So forget what is on your page. It doesn’t matter. Just make a horizon. Bravo, Joey. Bravo.” The voice was nearer now. Hoarse. “Accept whatever comes, eh, Joey? Now, slowly, you realize on your right side there is something. Yes. Yes. Draw that.”
Joey saw a pig on the side. Her hand drew squiggly ears.
After some time, Demetris said, “Now open your eyes. Leave the pencil. So what happened?”
Joey blinked open her eyes to a tangle of indecipherable lines. “I drew a mess.”
“That’s a mess.” Demetris motioned to her canvas. In punctuation, he stepped on it with his boot. She gasped. “There. That’s better.”
“Why did you do that?
” Joey felt the prickly onset of tears. There was an unmistakable boot smudge by the left iris. “I worked so hard on that eye!”
“Yes. You did. Sometimes you try to control too much. You know what I think? I think this mark my boot made is very interesting.” Joey took a deep breath. She knew that arguing with Demetris would be futile. They’d go back and forth, each with sentences that would better fit into other conversations. Anyway, as irritating as the fact was, Demetris was usually right. And he stretched her as an artist like no teacher ever had.
Demetris put the canvas on the table. He slid the pencil in her left hand. She always drew with her right.
She gave him a look. She didn’t want to draw with her left hand. “It will turn out terribly.”
“And maybe it won’t, Joey mou. Have you considered that? Maybe it will turn out to be the greatest thing you’ve ever made.”
* * *
The terrace glittered with lights strung on the railing and votives on the table. Joey stacked dessert plates scraped clean of their pantespani sponge cake. Zorba the Greek played from the stereo in one of the apartments; Joey couldn’t tell which. They never locked the terrace doors, just floated in and out of rooms, the maze of the top floor.
Rand lifted Jefferson the Cat onto his lap and said into his fur, “Bonjour, my boy.”
“I’m going in to paint. I still can’t get this nipple right. It’s pointing oddly to the right.” Bea wandered to the door. Then she glanced back, as if they might chime in with thoughts on nipple placement.
“I’ll be in in a bit, sweetheart,” said Scott.
“I’m just getting started,” said Maisy. She stood and swayed, her martini sloshing over its glass. “Who’s going to dance with me?”
“Not I.” Rand stubbed out his cigar. “I gotta call my broker.”
“Scott, you’ve got your dancing shoes on.” Maisy set her martini down and clapped her hands in glee. “I know it. Come on. I’ll put on music for the syrtaki.”
Joey’s father stumbled up and waved his arms in the air. He had long, slim arms that never tanned, like glow sticks in the night. Joey didn’t think she’d ever seen her father dance. He must have had a second glass of wine. He was doing a half Roger Rabbit, half Irish jig. He was an atrocious dancer, especially in comparison with Maisy, who in her younger years had danced for the New York City Ballet.
Joey sipped her wine and watched the silhouettes of Maisy and her father. She stared at the bouquet of sunflowers in a chipped green jug on the table.
Then it hit her. Then she remembered.
* * *
It was vivid like it had happened the night before. But it hadn’t.
Joey had been eleven—too old to call out for her parents when she was having a nightmare. But she’d had the nightmare again about the camps that were not camps. In the nightmare, she’d been sleeping on straw with other human scarecrows, and you couldn’t escape because outside in the dark was an electrical fence that would shock you. There’d been evil men shouting and then the shouting had closed in. Boots pounding dirt. Closer and closer.
Joey sprang up in bed, panting. She watched the shadows play on the old soldier’s brick barrack walls and registered that she was in Corfu. But then she gasped because still she could hear the footsteps, and her heart jangled in her chest to their beat.
Sleeping was terrifying. You had no control where it took you.
In Joey’s fifth-grade class, just a few months prior, an older boy had given a presentation about his family’s trip to Auschwitz. Before that, Joey had known about Auschwitz in only a tangential way. Her grandfather’s numbers were from Auschwitz. There was a horrible room full of human hair there. Her grandmother had a picture of suitcases there.
But this boy had shown pictures of barracks and impossibly emaciated people and things called gas chambers. Where people were gassed. He’d told about an evil man who sent people right to live, left to die. He’d talked about families wrenched apart, experiments on twin girls, death. Murder. Basically everyone was murdered for a thing they couldn’t change. For being Jewish. Even if you converted, it didn’t matter. Jewish blood condemned you.
Joey was Jewish.
Joey had always despised scary movies. In kindergarten, her teacher had called her mom in for a conference because Joey refused to watch the movies at rest hour. Her mom had protested that the teacher was showing scary movies. The infamous line the teacher had said in response was, “Petey the Dog?”
But this wasn’t about scary movies. Her whole way home from school after the slide show, Joey had thought of just one thing. “They gassed them like nothing,” her grandfather had once said at the dinner table. “My family.” Joey had already finished dinner so she’d been playing with a yo-yo in the corner and hadn’t seen his face. She’d had only a vague thought: I wonder who farted on Grandfather’s family. But then her yo-yo had yo’d, and the question had vanished.
The day of the slide show, Joey had returned early from school to her father in the kitchen, reading a brief at the kitchen counter.
He’d said, “How was your day, baby?”
She’d whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me people murder us for being Jewish?”
And her father had held her and said it was a very long time ago, but that hadn’t made her feel better.
The images from the slide show had refused to leave Joey’s head. She’d asked her grandfather one night on his porch, “Will it happen again?”
“Absolutely not,” he’d said.
“But you can’t promise,” she’d said.
Her big, strong grandfather had just looked at his black leather shoes.
She’d gotten him.
Now Joey palmed her forehead of sweat. She was eleven, ostensibly grown up, somewhat assuaged by her solid Corfu surroundings but easily swayed back to that camp in a dark, distant Poland, some cruel commandant’s footsteps closing in. When her breathing slowed from its rapid heaves, Joey crept to the main room. She smelled the fumes of paint from a drying canvas. She heard voices on the terrace.
“Mom,” she called. “Dad.” She reached for the curtains. Shadows. Cicadas. Laughter. She slid open the screen door, on the verge of calling for her parents again, and then she felt hands atop her shoulders.
All she remembered was lying back in bed with her ratty stuffed bear Nacho Chip, whose nose she’d long since chewed off. Her father’s face hung over her. He said, “It’s okay, baby.”
She wasn’t speaking. It was excruciating—having a scream inside you couldn’t get out.
He said, “Let’s get these nightmares out of you, okay?”
Yes. She wanted the nightmares out. All of them.
He said, “Let’s count some sheep.” Joey closed her eyes and counted the sheep her father described. The fluffy one. The scrawny one. The fat one. The one with lots of fleas. They counted millions of sheep, it seemed. She felt her eyelids flutter.
Her father said, “Now I want you to imagine a field of sunflowers, okay? Remember, like we saw last summer on the way to Kassiopi?”
Joey remembered. She’d run alongside a row of them, and her father had taken her picture and framed it for his desk.
“There are sunflowers in every direction,” said her father. “The sky is really blue, and you’re running in the sunflowers, and you’re so happy. That’s all you remember about tonight. Your mom and dad love you. We love you so much. Nothing else is real. Do you see the sunflowers, baby?”
Joey didn’t speak. She did see them. But the sky wasn’t blue, and she didn’t feel the happiness he was describing. She felt Nacho Chip’s cold nose poke her arm.
Her father said, “Good job, baby.”
Then he said, “Good night, Joey. I love you more than you can imagine.”
He said, and she remembered it now, “You didn’t see anything.”
* * *
Joey didn’t know if she’d ever witnessed sunrise in the summer. Sunrise, period. She stepped onto the terrace where
her father was drinking a blue smoothie. Before them rose Corfu Town in the peek-a-boo of morning, the sky shredded in orange.
“Hey, sweetheart.” Her father laced up his sneakers. “Want to come running with me?” Joey shook her head. “Everything okay?” He was wearing the T-shirt she’d made for her parents’ tenth anniversary, with a picture of them in their twenties, looking happy and slightly red in the face, squinting at the sun.
Was everything okay? Well, yes, life was wonderful, but still, sometimes Joey’s mind dove into the crevices. Demetris called her a Sensitive Person. Life is harder for a Sensitive Person, paidi mou. But life is more beautiful for a Sensitive Person.
Joey wished she were not a Sensitive Person. That she was more like Bea, who only heard the good things people said. Your painting is beautiful, but why is there a green blob on the right half and do you think the lines of the butt should create more of a Victorian shape, and maybe you want to reconsider the facial structure, the jaw is a bit square. All Bea heard was, Your painting is beautiful.
Joey, on the other hand, heard the criticisms. Demetris said, Your life will be difficult if you can’t believe a compliment, paidi mou. But she couldn’t change who she was.
“Yes, of course, Dad. Everything’s good.” She didn’t ask, Who was on the terrace that night when I was eleven? What exactly did I not see? “Did you and Maisy dance late?”
“Dance?”
“Yeah, you were still dancing when I went to bed.”
“Were we now?” Her father grabbed his wrists to the right and stretched his hips left. “Well, that’s funny. I’m a terrible dancer.”
“No arguments here,” said Joey, immediately flinching at how unnecessarily mean she’d sounded.
The look on her father’s face was almost tragic in its hurt. The thing was, he was a great dad. He came to her plays, even the one where she played cowgirl number four, with exactly one line. He came to her swim meets with a video camera, even though she gave him a look every time he panned in as she mounted the starting block.
When We Were Young Page 7
