When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

  “Will I marry you?” She shook her head, both floored and also unsurprised, because wasn’t this where things led? Love didn’t exist for love’s sake, after all. The object of love was to create something more than just two people standing together with hearts in their eyes. “You can’t be—”

  “I am certain. I want to marry you, Sarah. I’d marry you tomorrow.”

  “I need to think,” she finally said, dizzy at the speed with which they were now moving after months when she’d almost convinced herself she wouldn’t have to pick one of her two worlds. “My family…”

  “When they see how much I love you, they will accept it.” He said it with a man’s unequivocal certainty.

  “They…it’s not so easy.”

  “Try. Please try. I’ve told my family about you. They can’t wait to meet you.” His enthusiasm was so contagious she could almost catch it.

  “My mother will kill me,” she whispered.

  “It’s never as bad as we think it will be. That’s what my father says.”

  Sarah thought about Stemma. It could be so much worse than they thought it would be. But she resisted the urge to say it.

  “Please, Sarah. I don’t need much in life. A little house one day. Some children running around. Whatever it will be, my love, we will be safe and together.”

  And Sarah rested her cheek against his chest and tried to believe it.

  * * *

  The next evening, as Sarah climbed the steps to their third-floor apartment just before their weekly Sabbath meal, she decided she would have a calm conversation with her parents. She had prayed the whole winter that she would see Milos and feel differently, that their love would have gone. Sarah stood in the cool, dank hall, staring at the doorknob, unable to turn it. Their love hadn’t gone. She had to explain it to her parents in a way they would come to understand and accept.

  But when she walked inside the apartment, instead of her mother at the stove, her cheeks flushed with soup steam, and her father in his chair, stretching his wrists—both her parents stood in the entry, a united wall of fury that matched the teakettle blaring on the stove.

  “Are you carrying on with a not-Jewish boy, Sarah?” Her mother grabbed Sarah’s hands, her turquoise eyes frenzied with rage. “Tell me your thea Elpis imagined it when she went to fetch Leon at the sea yesterday and saw you embracing a blond fisherman.”

  “Thea Elpis didn’t imagine it,” Sarah finally whispered, frozen still.

  “Sarah!” was her father’s thunderous eruption. He took her by the shoulders. “No, no, no. No! You will end it.”

  “I tried, Baba. I tried. Please, just listen. His name is Milos. He is a fisherman from Lefkada, a wonderful person. When he left for the winter, I tried to forget him, but I couldn’t.” Tears spilled from her eyes. “Please—”

  “No, please. Forget please! There is only, I will never see him again, Baba. There is only, I made a terrible mistake and will never upset you again, Mama.”

  Sarah knew it with a sick certainty—the familiar stubborn position her father’s features had assumed was the same position now arranging on her own. She shook her head slowly and dreadfully, a conviction rising in her, that her heart was presenting her no other option but to follow its compass. “I can’t, Baba. Please. Please try to understand. I cannot not be with him.”

  “Then you will leave.” It released from her father like a gust of wind, the kind that knocks off your hat and seems to rattle the wind too at the revelation of its sudden might.

  “Leave?” The words ran a jagged knife across her throat.

  “Yes, leave. You will leave now, Sarah.” Her mother crossed her arms over her chest so she almost appeared like a stranger standing there, incompatible with the mother who had placed warm compresses on Sarah’s forehead when she was ill and buzzed around every hour, every day, her whole being attended to their family. “And you won’t be our daughter anymore.”

  Sarah shook as she crossed the room to where Benjamin sat weeping on the floor, stroking his bunny rabbit, Penelope, through the wooden slats of her cage. Askew on Benjamin’s head was the round red hat of his Purim costume. Their father had made it to accompany the tan shorts suit of a Greek freedom fighter he’d painstakingly sewn. Benjamin had loved assuming the dress of a freedom fighter, loved imagining he was someone brave and strong. He’d donned the hat often at home ever since.

  “No, Sarah.” He dove to Sarah’s leg, clinging to it like a toddler. “Sarah, you can’t leave. Please don’t leave, Sarah.”

  “I have to leave now,” she got out with gasps between words. “Just for a little while.” Where was she even going? she wondered. Milos lived in a room with several other fishermen across town, and they weren’t even married yet, besides. Would they go to Lefkada? That seemed the natural conclusion. They could go to Lefkada and stay with Milos’s parents, and Milos could fish there instead and work in the granite quarry too, and eventually, when her parents reconciled themselves to the new facts presented, life would peacefully rearrange. She would go, just for a little while. Sarah beat back the dread that arose, that her decision would splinter them all forever, with each spinning like a Hanukkah dreidel toward their own separate graves.

  So dramatic, Sarah—to go right to death from all of this.

  Sarah opened the dresser. She tried to see her clothes, her items, to pack some of them, but she was crying too hard to make them out.

  Benjamin was shrieking now, pulling on her leg, trying to drag her to their bed adorned in the patchwork quilt their mother had stitched while she was pregnant with him. Sarah could recall her mother in the act of it—her belly slowly burgeoning as the quilt came to life.

  Her chest suddenly seized, a crushing sensation, like the ceiling had collapsed and pinned her beneath it. She couldn’t go. She couldn’t leave her family.

  But then she thought of Milos, and his arms around her, and how somehow the one plus one of them equaled something more than two.

  She stuffed a few things into her bag and forced herself to hug Benjamin goodbye. “My special little brother, I’m going to Lefkada, just for a little while.” She crouched down, feeling his small back in her hands, all the tiny bones whose cricks she had memorized from a lifetime sleeping beside him. He stopped sobbing and stared up at her in eerie quiet.

  “Baba once told me ancient Ithaca is Lefkada now.”

  Sarah tuned out usually, when her father and Benjamin discussed Greek mythology. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Say hello for me then, to the home of Odysseus. Maybe one day I will go too.”

  “I’ll be back, and we’ll go together,” she choked out, and squeezed him tighter. Then somehow she mustered the strength to extricate herself.

  Benjamin wiped his eyes, his chest still heaving. “Please don’t leave, Sarah,” he whispered. “Please don’t go.”

  Through her cascading tears, Sarah blew her little brother a kiss, but Benjamin was shaking too hard to blow her one back.

  Her parents stood by the door, immobile in their prior positions. Sarah crossed the room to them but then didn’t know what to do when they stood there so still, already out of reach. “Please, Mama. Please, Baba. I love you so. I’m so sorry for disappointing you. But I can’t help how I feel. Please don’t make me go.” Nothing in response but the persistent shriek of the teakettle.

  Finally, Sarah gathered her bag and gazed around her home, at her parents’ wedding ketubah framed above their table, taunting her with the thousands of years of Jewish lineage from which she was now threatening to break. “I’ll see you soon. Please…”

  Her parents looked off, anywhere but at her.

  Benjamin ran to the door, stopping right before Sarah, his face smothered in tears. “I love you,” he sobbed, and this time he blew her a kiss.

  “I love you dearly,” she managed, and blew him another one back.

  She knew if she didn’t leave now, she never would. She took one aching look back at her family. “I�
�ll see you all soon,” she said again, and wasn’t sure if the promise was for her or for them. Then with a force of strength that seemed to come from outside her, Sarah opened the door and stepped out. The door clicked behind her.

  She knew it even then—she would always remember the click behind her.

  Sarah was a babbling mess when she surprised Milos at his guesthouse by the church. After he’d delivered some optimistic platitudes, Sarah endured a sleepless night on a cot in the room of the proprietress’s daughter. The next morning, at the rooster’s first cry, she went to Milos, who greeted her happy as a clam. He didn’t have to give up his family for her. His family were nice, lovely Greek Orthodox. Apparently they didn’t care if Sarah had three heads or prayed to idols. All Milos had to do was give up fishing season in Corfu. Well, Lefkada had plenty of fish.

  His face shone as he packed his few things and bid goodbye to his fellow fishermen. Sarah loved him to the ends of the earth, but perhaps she already resented him. They took the ferry to Igoumenitsa. As a drizzle pelted them on the bow, Sarah thought of what Benjamin had once told her. On the Sabbath, the Jews rest, but the sea never does. It’s always a new sea.

  She watched the waves crisscross each other, heading out to new places. Her leaving Corfu—it was irrevocable. Even her Jewishness had seeped out of her somehow, she realized with dull horror. Today was the Sabbath, and Sarah was violating it with the ferry ride, not one bit at rest. She knew these things, and yet she tried to brush the knowing away.

  From Igoumenitsa, Milos’s cousin picked them up and drove them to the main town on Lefkada. In the back of his cousin’s truck, Milos clasped her hand. “I swear, it will be wonderful, my love.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Joey

  Corfu

  2004

  “What do you think?” asked Joey.

  “What do you think, Joey mou?” asked Demetris.

  Joey exhaled, fluffing up the bangs she’d tragically allowed a local hairdresser to snip. “Like, you see the right eye. The light is hitting there, so I’ve shaded the other half, but the left eye looks more real. More potent. But still off, a bit. What I really want is to merge evil eye geometric intensity into human form.” This summer, she’d been playing with a more geometric style and studying the greats of geometric abstraction, like Kandinsky.

  She thought about telling Demetris that Leo was her inspiration, that his eyes had woken this in her, but she held back, not ready to reveal it to Demetris before she’d even revealed it to Leo. That piece felt fragile somehow. Maybe she felt fragile, ever since Leo’s bombshell about dropping out of school for a yachting career.

  Demetris brushed his fingers across the bottom part of the canvas, where Joey had begun to outline Leo’s right forearm. Joey could tell he was waiting for her to say more.

  “I think it’s an interesting start,” she said.

  “But…”

  “But I want to capture more.” She closed her eyes and thought about everything that had been simmering in Leo, of which she hadn’t been aware. “Fire, and also peace. But can I possibly show both?”

  Joey wavered, a stage of the creation process with which she wasn’t very intimate. She often felt that she’d emerged from the womb with an artistic compass. People always marveled at her clear talent, passion, and dedication. Maybe it wasn’t humble for Joey to say, but she was just really good at art.

  “Why am I in doubt now, Demetris? I’m not usually in doubt.”

  Demetris just smiled. “Joey, people resent doubt. Have you noticed that? Doubt! You go right in the corner and get out immediately. Am I right?”

  Joey smiled a little. “Maybe.”

  “When doubt comes, what you do is you switch to ink.”

  “Ink? I’m only still sketching.”

  “You see? You think ink is an unforgiving medium. You see how you regard ink!”

  Joey gripped her canvas. She didn’t want to expose it yet to ink.

  “You have a doubt, paidi mou? It’s all good. Some artists have analyzed so much what comes naturally. Some artists think all it takes is a little more pain and suffering.”

  “I don’t want to suffer,” said Joey. “Art is fun. Art is light.” She felt her body release something in response to those words.

  “You realize sometimes things are put so easily down on paper? The Masters. We refer to them again. They let themselves play a lot. People think, Enough play. But it’s the mind that tells you that, because life is a game. Life is the biggest game of all, Joey. Tell me, have we played a lot here?”

  “We always play here.”

  “So you don’t need the tricks. There is nothing to measure. Because once we have played, things come automatically. And you can achieve your intention immediately with one stroke. This pen.” He held it up. “Do you know how it performs?”

  Joey nodded.

  “Okay, so we use ink.” He slapped the pen into her hands. “And we will Be the Explorer.” That was another Demetris-ism. “As if nothing is known about art or drawing and, for some reason you have this ability to put things on paper. Tell me, paidi mou. What makes an artist most attractive to people?”

  “Hmm. Passion. That’s a big one. Patience. Letting our art show us where to go, instead of forcing it to take a certain form…”

  “Yes, exactly. Artists who are more attractive are the ones who find a consortium with the medium they are using. They let the medium do its thing. They don’t push it. No, go there! No, do this!”

  “I’ve never heard a pen speak before.” Joey smiled.

  “Oh, the pen speaks, paidi mou. The pen speaks, the pen sings, the pen loves. You just have to move into the brain in your hand to feel it.”

  Joey hovered the pen over Leo’s right eye. “Demetris…”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think I’m going to make it as an artist?”

  Joey held her breath, wanting so badly for him to say that he believed she could achieve anything. She didn’t need fame or fortune; that wasn’t what she was asking. But when she imagined her life, her art was at its core. She just wished there was some sort of guarantee that she’d make enough money to live simply upon, to enable an eternal string of these kinds of moments, where her passion jiggled and jangled.

  “You know what I think, paidi mou? I think you’re doing basically okay, and you don’t even know it.”

  “I’m doing okay?” Did he not get that, in American lexicon, okay was about a C-plus?

  Demetris plucked a sesame peanut from a doily-covered dish. “Tell me, who do you love most in this world?”

  “Is that a trick question?”

  “It’s a question, Joey mou. Don’t analyze.”

  “Leo,” she said softly. “I love Leo the most.”

  “Wrong answer,” said Demetris.

  Joey didn’t understand.

  “You love Joey the most. The answer must be that you love Joey the most. Then it doesn’t matter if you make it as an artist. Because when you love Joey the most, and you play, life is just wonderful.

  “Life is simply grand, Joey mou.”

  * * *

  Joey was in a Demetris hangover.

  She dropped her canvas at home that Tuesday afternoon. She said hello to the statue of Bea, studying her own canvas but not painting it. In the throes of pre-show chaos, the living room was dotted in various incarnations of the menstrual flow. Leo now referred to their apartment as the Womb. He said the paintings were scarring to any man who might at any point in time wish to bed a woman.

  Joey changed into a floaty white tank top, white capri pants, and her new espadrilles. Then she appraised herself in the mirror and decided to add a funky necklace. She selected one with chunky, wooden, emerald-green beads and fastened it around her neck. She went into the living room.

  “Bye, Mom! Leo and I are going out for a picnic at the Old Fortress. I’ll sleep at the Winns’ tonight. You know it’s our one-year anniversary?”

  “Oh yeah? Wow,
one year. That’s a beautiful milestone. Have fun, sweetheart. You know what, JoJo? Have too much fun!”

  Lily was an angel sprawled on the couch with zero trace of her earlier tantrum when Joey had taken her to the supermarket.

  In a spurt of love, Joey picked up her sister and whooshed her around in a circle, kissing her on her soft cheek before setting her back down. “Tomorrow let’s build another sandcastle, Lil, how about it?”

  Lily removed the pacifier from her mouth. “Castle!” She clapped her hands.

  “Yes, castle! Maybe we can even drag Mom along with us again.” Joey laughed.

  “I’m in. It will do me some good to get a break from the Womb.” Bea winked. “You thought I didn’t know? Say hello to Leo for me.”

  Joey giggled. “Will do. Love you, Mom. Love you, Lily Pad.”

  “Love you, Oey.”

  The city was bathed in pink when they stepped out onto the cobblestones after aperitifs at Leo’s place. “Guess what? We’re going to Salto after all, Jones,” Leo said with a giant smile, like he’d been bursting with that surprise.

  Salto was Taverna Salto, with the famous chef Joey had read about in a magazine and mentioned offhand to Leo weeks before. They’d booked in a reservation but then decided last week to cancel. It wasn’t prudent for such a splurge with neither of them earning money in the summers and Leo saving all of his for his yachting business plan.

  “We’re not doing the picnic?” She’d been content with their low-key plan. “I like gyros.”

  “Then we’ll do them another night. I want tonight to be special. It’s my treat. Are you happy?”

  Joey could tell Leo really wanted her to be happy, and she was, with either plan. “Ooh, really happy!” She kissed his cheek. She considered broaching if the money aspect was really fine but then decided to avoid the topic. “This is such a nice surprise!”

  “Do you want to change into comfy shoes? It’s a pretty far walk.”

  “No, I’m fine. Oh, I’m so excited!”

  They arrived at Taverna Salto. Joey soaked it all in—the string quartet, the crisp linen table settings, the enchanting garden vibe, the hideaway location.