When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

  But then she quit acting. She quit the swim team. She needed to get serious, to fill her schedule with advanced art courses. He still came to all her shows, proclaiming everything she made “Beautiful! Beautiful!” Although he’d once added jokingly, “All those squiggly lines look the same to me.”

  Lately he’d been urging Joey to take the LSATs, saying things like, “You know, Joey, in our family, Mom is not the breadwinner. She makes beautiful things, but that’s not what allows us to eat.”

  Now her father said a quiet, “Okay.” He started off the terrace.

  It was the sunflowers. The stupid sunflowers made her say it.

  “Dad,” she whispered. “I’m sorry for saying that thing before, about your dancing.”

  Her dad turned. He put a hand to his brow to deflect the sun’s first sting. “It’s fine, Joey. It’s fine.”

  Chapter Ten

  Sarah

  Corfu

  1942

  In the month after Sarah saw the dreamy fisherman, she took often to the port under thin rationales. She was eager to retrieve lamb for her mother from the butcher by the sea, eager to collect pails of water from the well in the synagogue courtyard. And suddenly she was weaving an indirect route past the port toward the place of her employ—the apartment of a widowed gentleman on Solomou Street, for whom Sarah laundered clothes and then ironed them, even his handkerchiefs and socks.

  Sarah hadn’t shared her fisherman sighting with anyone, not even Rachel, although she’d wholeheartedly apologized to her best friend, reassuring her that of course it was wonderful she and Solomon had a burgeoning romance.

  The High Holidays passed, and a new year begun, as all the while Sarah ruminated upon her own burgeoning something. But so far, her eyes hadn’t latched upon him again.

  She told herself it was a good thing, as she walked along the sea with Benjamin in early October, on their typical Sabbath stroll. That boy wasn’t Jewish, and she didn’t know him besides. Maybe he had a voice like a girl and a stench of fishy fish, besides. But Sarah wasn’t much convincing herself because, after family lunch, she’d donned her finest blue shirtdress and brushed her hair with the hundred strokes that was Rachel’s professed beauty secret.

  Now the sunshine baked Sarah’s arms, freckled from the frolic of a carefree summer concluded. As Sarah’s stomach groaned with the weight of her mother’s veal sofrito and fasolia green beans, Benjamin paused beside a light post. He set his book upon the rail and wiped his hands against his black trousers. Then he peered down at the tiny ripples of cerulean sea and eventually squinted out at the distant lumps of forested mountains and land.

  “Sarah, on the Sabbath we rest, but the sea never does. It’s always moving to new places.”

  “That’s true.” Sarah watched the sea and its gentle waves, and wondered where they were off to. She’d never been outside of Corfu, whereas the sea had such exotic stories to tell. “It’s a very wise thing to say.”

  Sarah went to pat Benjamin’s hand, but before she could do so, a cluster of boys around Benjamin’s age ran past. One of them, a tall boy with a face sharp like a fox, sang, “There goes Benjamin Batis with his flaming-red hair and his lovely, little dress.” The other boys pealed with laughter, trouncing along the shoreline.

  In a flash, Sarah’s feet took off. When she caught up with the fox boy, she grabbed him by his sleeve.

  “Hey!” he protested. “You’ll rip it.”

  “Rip it! I have a mind to rip it right off! Don’t you ever speak to my brother like that again. Don’t you ever! Do you hear?” Sarah tightened her grip on his sleeve and was assuaged when the boy’s face paled, sufficiently spooked.

  “Signomi, signomi. I didn’t mean—”

  “You did mean. Next time you pass my brother, you don’t even look in his direction, you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  The fox boy swiveled his head, like Sarah was going to punch him or something. Not so brave after all, fox boy, eh? “Good.” Sarah released her grip. “Go.”

  But the fox boy and his friends didn’t move, frozen as a column of Italian soldiers marched by with their long rifles and circular hard hats. Sarah recognized one, a kind general for whom she’d helped bargain for strawberries in the market because she knew Italian and he didn’t know Greek.

  Once the soldiers had passed, Sarah shouted again, “Go!” and this time the bullies darted away without laughter in their wake.

  Sarah returned to a pensive Benjamin, staring off at the sea. She fingered one of the curls that wrapped around his ear.

  “Do I look like a girl, Sarah?” Benjamin asked.

  “You don’t,” she said firmly. She could just murder those boys. She really could.

  “My pants are baggy. Like a dress, must be.”

  “They don’t look like a dress. But perhaps we’ll have Baba make them tighter. You need to eat more!”

  She smiled, but Benjamin didn’t smile back. “Why do they say things like that to me?”

  “Oh.” A heron craned its long neck from its perch on the branch of an olive tree, like it too was curious at how Sarah was going to explain this. She thought about how she’d reacted to Rachel weeks ago, how her anger at her friend had stemmed from jealousy. “You know, maybe those boys are a little scared inside, or sad, and then being mean to people is a way to distract from how they feel. But it’s not the brave way.”

  Benjamin nodded, and Sarah was relieved when his face settled back into innocence. As she smoothed down her hair rumpled by a whip of wind, her eyes caught a glimpse of the fisherman.

  Her heart went immediately berserk, and she stumbled back, drinking him in. This time he wore black slacks with a white-collared shirt and was transferring fish from his nets into baskets. He was tall, Sarah decided, taller and thinner than her father at least, who served as her barometer thus far for all things male. Sarah fanned her face and decided this was how people died, from too much excitement heaped upon their organs. She’d thought herself gutsy the past weeks, stalking about for him, but now she understood, she didn’t have it in her to approach him. She would hasten home for the close of the Sabbath and sink to the floor as her father strummed his bouzouki and forget she’d ever set eyes on the fisherman.

  As Sarah steered Benjamin back toward town, a shout emanated from the seaside. “Are you going to leave again without saying hello? It’s not a very polite thing to do.”

  Sarah gazed around. There was no one else. He pointed at her.

  Sarah took Benjamin’s hand and walked over. “I am the most polite girl you will ever meet.”

  The fisherman smiled. She was his in that smile. It was blankets and ice cream and meadows, all in that smile.

  “You weren’t so polite when you didn’t say hello last time. A month ago now, was it?” He set down his net of fish and raked a hand through sea-sprayed hair.

  “You saw me?” Her heels faltered on the unsteady pebble beach, and the boy grabbed her arm to keep her from falling. His touch sent electricity down her bones.

  “How could I miss you?” he asked.

  Sarah sifted in herself for something clever to say in return. She’d never had a conversation like this before, never known what it would be like to stand in the spotlight of a boy’s affection.

  “My name is Milos.” The fisherman stuck out his hand to Benjamin. His eyes were a stillness of sea green, like the spots in the sea beyond the darker blue, and Sarah could understand now what her father meant, how easy it could be to fall inside someone’s eyes.

  “Benjamin.” Her brother shook Milos’s hand solemnly.

  “And you are?”

  Sarah thrust her shoulders back, projecting a confidence she didn’t feel. “Sarah Batis.”

  “Sarah.” Her name sounded delightful on his tongue. She was in so much trouble.

  “We have to get home now.” She stepped away but then burrowed her heel back into the pebbles because her feet were shouting that they didn’t want to move.r />
  “What was that before, though? Those boys?”

  “Sarah told them to stop,” Benjamin said. “They were making fun of my red hair.”

  “Your red hair?” Milos’s eyes didn’t stray from Sarah’s as he said, “But why ever would they make fun of that? Why, I happen to think red is the nicest shade of hair that exists.”

  * * *

  They bid goodbye to Milos and walked up from the port, with Benjamin blessedly oblivious to the import of the meeting. He chattered on about Robinson Crusoe, speculating on whether pirates lurked in their own Ionian Sea. Sarah made some mmmm noises and finally gazed back to see Milos standing where they’d left him, staring after her.

  “I think I left my shawl. Let me just go back to see.”

  “Okay.” Benjamin plopped on a bench, and his book sprang open.

  Sarah walked the white gravelly path back to Milos. The sun was doing its spectacular sleepy dance, with two fiery stripes emanating from it on the diagonal, like wings.

  “Hello,” said Milos.

  She stopped in front of him. “Hello. I thought I might have forgotten my shawl.”

  He looked around, indulging her excuse. “Don’t see it.”

  “Yes. Well then, I’ll—”

  “Meet me tomorrow. Won’t you, I mean?” He smiled, and his dimple flashed, the shadow of it covering briefly the mole on his left cheek. She was beginning to take inventory of his features and qualities, and that was not a good thing.

  “Meet you? I don’t know a thing about you.”

  “What do you want to know? I’m from Lefkada.” Sarah filed it away—the island seventy-some miles to their south. “I came here to try my luck for the season. See if your fish are any better.”

  She laughed. “And?”

  He shrugged. “Fish are fish are fish. But maybe I’ve just been waiting for my good-luck charm.” She blushed and looked off at Mouse Island. “I’ll tell you anything you would like to know if you meet me tomorrow.”

  Sarah twined her fingers into her dress. “I have to work.”

  “After work then.”

  You’re not Jewish, she wanted to say. But her mouth wouldn’t expel it. Instead she said, “Where?”

  “The Frourio, how about?” The Old Fortress was a Venetian landmark from Byzantine times but not far enough in Sarah’s opinion from the Evraiki and prying neighborly eyes. “Let’s meet at four o’clock on the bridge, and we can picnic on the channel.”

  “How about the meadow uphill from the bridge?” She went there sometimes with Rachel, where it was less traveled.

  “That suits me, if it suits you.”

  “It suits me, I think.”

  “You think?”

  Sarah blushed. “I’m bad at this. I’ve never…I’ve never really done it before.”

  “Talked to a boy?” He smiled, and then his smile faded, as smiles inevitably did. Sarah immediately wondered what she could say to make him do it again.

  “Talked to a boy like you.”

  She hoped he wouldn’t tease her more and was gratified when he said, “Come to the Frourio with me so we can talk more.”

  And Sarah couldn’t quite believe it when she heard herself say, “Okay.”

  * * *

  Sarah walked slowly back to Benjamin. Without looking back, she could feel Milos’s eyes bore into her back.

  Benjamin closed his book. “Did you find your shawl?”

  “Oh. No, I must have left it at home.”

  Her father’s oft-repeated words rang in her ears. All you have in the world is your good name. So be a person who always tells the truth. Just like your grandmother. You are wonderful and honest just like her. Sarah was named for his mother, who died in childbirth delivering his baby sister and whom Sarah apparently resembled from her vivid red hair and long fingers, down to her stellar negotiation skills.

  Sarah would always remember it—the day she became a bad person. The first of her lies. It wouldn’t be her last.

  * * *

  After their picnic at the Frourio, Sarah and Milos were inseparable. But as friends, Sarah told herself firmly on a daily and hourly basis, when her mind piped up to remind her what trouble she was starting.

  They had to sneak around, of course. As Sarah told Milos from the start, her parents would disown her for even carrying on a friendship with a boy who was not Jewish. But they would walk along the sea, on a remote stretch far from the Evraiki, and then Sarah would cry no and run off, and Milos would go fishing, and then she’d be there waiting for him, after all.

  The winter was coming. Milos would be returning to Lefkada. They couldn’t be, and yet.

  The day before Milos was to leave, Sarah offered to pick up metsovone cheese for her father’s birthday celebration. Metsovone was a hard, smoked cheese from the mountains of mainland Greece, delicious on the grill and a delicacy of rare appearance in the Batis home. But her father adored it so Sarah’s mother gave her ten drachmas to spend for the special occasion. Sarah retrieved the metsovone and then met Milos at the port as he roped up his kaiki. They wandered westward even more, farther from the Evraiki, which was their unspoken practice.

  Finally, they plopped beneath an olive tree. Sarah watched a lizard scamper across the parched grass as a few peasant girls in their colorful wares hitched their donkeys to a nearby rail.

  “They look sad, don’t you think?” Sarah asked.

  “The girls?”

  “No, the donkeys.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Look at him.” She pointed to a particularly droopy one, his ears doing some sad slap against his neck. He was smaller than the others, a baby it appeared, with chunky, unsteady legs. Sarah was struck by a wish he was doing baby things, like resting and playing, rather than working to transport these peasant girls on the Sabbath. “He probably doesn’t even have a name, that’s how little he matters in this world.”

  “So give him one.”

  “A name? But what does it matter if I give him a name? He’ll never know.”

  “Oh, I think he’ll know.” Milos put his hand gently on hers. It was the first time he’d ever touched her, the first time she’d let herself be touched, and it sent a wave of pleasure crashing over her.

  “Okay, then I name him Spyro Moustakas.”

  Milos laughed. “Spyro because he is a Corfiot donkey?”

  Sarah was still acutely aware of their hands touching, unable to find the will to tell him to move his away. “Yes, he is blond. So clearly not Jewish. Therefore, he must be named after the island’s patron saint.”

  “Logically sound,” agreed Milos. “And Moustakas because…?”

  “Because he looks a little bit like my father, and my father has a mustache.” Sarah was satisfied. “Yes. It suits him, Spyro Moustakas, doesn’t it?”

  “I wish I could meet your father,” said Milos. “To be certain.”

  “I wish you could too.” And for a while they held hands, watching Spyro Moustakas buckle his legs and settle to the ground, by all appearances content with his newly christened name.

  “I love you, Sarah, for how much you care. Not just about people. Now I discover you care about donkeys too.”

  As the words assimilated, the first time he’d said them, Sarah’s heart thundered in her chest. Milos wore his pale-green shirt marred post-fishing by blue-black squid ink stains, that Sarah nonetheless loved because it acted as a big arrow sign to his eyes. In Milos’s eyes, she could forget there were things like Germans deporting Jews on the mainland and rules about who you could love. She recognized the crossroads they were at, and that she couldn’t dismiss the love feelings growing in her too. They weren’t just friends. The friend label had been a bandage her mind had invented.

  Sarah retracted her hand from their clasp and stared down at the grass. “I don’t mean to hurt you, but it’s just impossible, you and me.”

  “Nothing is impossible if you want it enough. That’s what my father says.”

 
; Sarah knew about Milos’s father, who worked in the granite quarry, and his mother, who prepared food at the winery and whose oven-baked swordfish and stuffed aubergines Milos salivated over after such a time away. Sarah knew about their house with chickens roaming outside that Milos killed on a stump, and his married older brother and newborn baby sister, and his island’s chalky white mountains and unspoiled string of beaches with cliff-backed coves where they could swim together without seeing another soul for miles.

  Sarah debated between having an honest conversation about their future or instead chattering on about something stupid, like the cheese she could see poking out of her knapsack. The sight of the cheese made her realize she was very hungry, in fact.

  “Shall we have a tiny bit of metsovone?” She unwrapped it from the brown paper and broke off a crumbly piece, handing half of the piece to Milos. “Just a little, because it’s for my father.”

  Guilt immediately assaulted her, over subtracting even a little bit of her father’s birthday joy. Sarah quickly put her little piece back with the big wedge and wrapped it all in its paper. She placed the cheese in her knapsack and reclined against the olive tree. “Hey, tell me about your novel again. It’s a story at sea, right?”

  “Yes!” Milos reliably loved this topic. “A boat’s going to get lost. It will be a gritty survival tale.”

  “How does the protagonist survive again?”

  “Ah,” said Milos. “A lady’s blouse is used to collect rainwater.”

  “Brilliant,” said Sarah.

  “Well, I don’t know if I would put me at the brilliant stage. It’s only funny ideas.”

  “You will make it happen. Of that I have no doubt.”

  “I should like to. You know, one day, when the Germans leave Paris, we should go there!”

  “Really?” It sounded completely fantastic, like the end of the world. Until Sarah met Milos, her dream had been singular and small—marry a Romaniote man with a trade and bear him children. But Milos fanned out cards offering dangerous, cosmopolitan, alternative hands.