The Clover House

by Henriette Lazaridis Power

  “See how this works?” he says, drawing the cork from a bottle of white. “You tell me what’s on your mind and it makes you feel better. Don’t you feel better?”

  Jonah believes emotions are simple like that, as if you could just pour them out from giant transparent beakers. Except he forgets that the wrong combination—or the right one—can make everything explode.

  “I feel better.”

  We make love later, fueled by the rest of the white and by an extra bottle of good champagne we never got to on my thirty-fifth birthday. I’m determined not to let thoughts of my mother drag me into a darkness that could take days to lighten. Jonah delights in my aggression. I can see it in his eyes—his pleasure and almost pride in my suggestions, my requests. It would be so easy to turn in on myself. I could lie there with my back to him, looking out over the rail of our loft at the almost-bare room below and the curtainless windows glowing from the streetlight. But I force myself to think of who I am now—my pure self, floating free of ties or heritage. And as that person, I slide my leg over him and push up against him the way he likes, knowing that the momentum of the sex will protect me.

  When I climb down from the loft the next morning, Jonah is eating a bowl of cereal on the couch, his wool socks sticking up loose on his feet as if he has been padding around in them for miles. I can see a patch of pale skin where the cushions are pushing his T-shirt up.

  “Nude descending a staircase,” he says, smiling through a mouthful of Cheerios.

  “Except I have your shirt on.”

  “Not from my angle you don’t.”

  I put an extra flounce in my step and get the coffee from the freezer.

  “What are you going to do about your uncle?”

  “I checked for flights. I can’t make the funeral.”

  “What about the other stuff?”

  “I’m still not sure I should go.”

  “You already told Aliki.” He says the word with heavy consonants, American sounds that come from the front of his mouth.

  “She can store the stuff for me. I can look through it another time.”

  I run the coffee grinder.

  “Maybe I should go with you.”

  “What?”

  “You know,” he says. “Go over, meet the relatives. Impress the relatives,” he says, setting his bowl in the sink and jumping up to sit on the counter.

  “I am not going to deal with a family crisis by adding another family crisis to my life.”

  “You saying I would be a crisis?”

  “Jonah, I can’t just march you in there.”

  “Why not?”

  I give him a long look and then start spooning out the grounds. He takes my hand and runs his thumb over the three small diamonds in my ring. His grandmother’s ring, which his parents let him give me.

  “Cal,” he says.

  I glance at him. “Because I’m pretty sure you’d march right back out,” I say, answering his question.

  “And you don’t want me to.” It’s a statement, but I know he’s not sure of the answer.

  “No, Joe. I don’t want you to.” He likes it when I call him that.

  I knock the spoon against the counter to shake the coffee dust off and throw it into the drawer. I fill the filter, switch the maker on, and kiss him on the cheek. I go into the shower, where I run the water hot.

  I stand under the shower until I can see my skin turning red in blotches. Jonah comes in to brush his teeth and grab a sweatshirt from the back of the door. I can see his silhouette through the shower curtain. I suppose he can see mine and he knows that I am just standing there, neither washing my hair nor soaping.

  “You want to talk later?” he says. He reaches through the curtain and touches the back of his hand to my face. The water soaks his sleeve. The cotton will ice up when he gets outside.

  “Put a dry shirt on,” I tell him. “You’ll be cold.”

  “I can skip the game if you want.”

  “I’m fine, Joe.”

  “Okay.” He sticks his head in and kisses my shoulder.

  After a moment, he opens the bathroom door one more time.

  “Back around one. Sooner if no one else is crazy enough to show up.”

  “Okay.”

  He closes the door, and the cloud of steam in the tiny room sways in the draft.

  I am glad he is gone and hope his rugby friends will defy the savage cold and the wind that will be howling across the Esplanade. I need a few hours to clear my head.

  The champagne wasn’t just for my birthday two weeks ago. It was for the proposal Jonah made that night sometime after the first glass. He sent me up to the loft for something, and when I turned around, he was down below with his college guitar, singing Gershwin. When he got to the part about not being the man some girls think of as handsome and how to his heart I carried the key, I couldn’t keep from crying anymore.

  At first I said no. I told him I liked our life together just the way it was. He pressed me and tried not to look devastated, and then he tried devastation after all, in case that would change my mind. And it did change my mind. Because I want to deserve that kind of love. I let him put the ring on me, and I’ve kept it on, but I’m always sliding it right to the end of my finger, just to see what it feels like. We both pretend that everything is fine, but I know Jonah wants more from me. I see it in every glance, every question about the future. Every time I pull him toward me, I have that sense that he wants to disappear into me, or wants me to disappear into him.

  I’ve put Jonah in an impossible position. I won’t tell him the full truth about my mother, and so I make it inevitable that his reaction fails to match my needs, no matter how thoughtful he tries to be. And he does try. But all he knows is that I hated the ranch house I grew up in and was relieved when, soon after my father died, my mother sold the place and went back to Greece.

  Doorjambs dented by the toes of shoes; sheetrock with holes punched through; hollow doors caved in: These are the marks of a childhood I prefer not to discuss, a violence between my parents whose emotional force far outweighed even these physical manifestations. Though perhaps worst of all was the overhanging atmosphere of forgetfulness, as if I had grown up in the land of Homer’s Lotus-Eaters and no one could quite remember what was needed to take care of a daughter. They never hit each other, and they never hit me. But they lashed out again and again at the walls that confined them in their marriage, my family.

  How could Jonah understand this when his own childhood was so different? Two boys and two girls, Jonah the first, parented by two loving and quiet parents—a Noah’s Ark of stable familial organization. In the pictures arrayed on his parents’ bookshelves, towheaded children beam into the bright Cohasset sun, holding pails and shovels or pulling each other in a wagon. Once, his father caught me looking at these images and wrapped me in a silent hug. I don’t know what he knew; I hadn’t said anything to Jonah.

  I step out of the shower and dry myself quickly, goose bumps rising on my thighs and arms. I tug on jeans and Jonah’s Boston College sweatshirt, so big on me that it nearly reaches my knees. I fold my hair up in the towel and pour myself some coffee, a muddy brew scorched from sitting there too long. But I drink it anyway to keep my headache from pushing forward into my temples. I should be drinking water instead.

  I slump down on the couch so the draft won’t strike the damp towel on my head, and I hold the coffee in both hands. I remember another birthday, my sixteenth. A handful of friends invited for a nice dinner in Boston, everyone being dropped off at the house and drinking Cokes that my father serves while we wait for my mother to be ready. And finally she emerges. My friends’ mothers are dressed for chores: corduroys and rubber boots, and sweaters whose sleeves they push up, ready to help with anything. My mother is dressed for admiration, in beige pleated trousers and a silky white blouse with slightly padded shoulders. Not really a tall woman, she towers in platform heels over the other mothers. At first I am proud, but when we are ready
to go, my friends vie for spots in my mother’s Saab. From the passenger window in my father’s car, I watch my friends leaning forward, preening, as my mother compliments them on their outfits. At the restaurant, everyone fusses over the white-chocolate cake my mother has ordered for me, and the waiters all love her. Back home, when my last friend has gone, she touches my cheek and gives me a wistful smile.

  “I hope you had a good time, Calliope.”

  “I did, Mom,” I say, suddenly anxious to reassure her. “It was the best. Really.”

  Even now my brain follows the old channels. Even now I almost don’t remember the fight between my parents that came as I was looking over my friends’ gifts. Arms grabbed, shoes thrown, a bag packed—maybe for show but maybe not—and shouting about careless gestures and deliberate betrayals.

  It’s a bit after one o’clock when I hear Jonah at the door. I close my eyes and slide lower on the couch. Sleep is easier to explain than brooding.

  “Man—” he starts to say, and then he catches himself. I hear him slipping out of his jacket, setting his boots down on the mat, his runny nose quietly sniffling. He sits on the edge of the couch, where I am lying with my knees drawn up. When he kisses me, I start at the cold of his lips.

  “Hey,” he says.

  There is ice in his hair. I slip off a tiny piece and hold it up for him to see.

  “You’re frozen.”

  “Make me warm.”

  “Hey!” I gasp as he slides his hands beneath my sweatshirt.

  “Come on, you Greek goddess,” he says. “Thaw this icy Celt.”

  Every now and then he calls me that, and I don’t have the heart to tell him I hate it. The words make me think of women with heavy makeup and piled-high hair, wearing bracelets on their upper arms—sexiness that’s not at all seductive.

  “Here,” I say, and feel under his clothes for the parts of him that are warm and slightly damp with sweat.

  Monday morning I make the slow drive along the Charles River to a bend where the school campus is anchored by a new sports center I helped to raise the funds for. The buildings are grand but inviting, thanks to rows of green-tinted windows at ground level. Near the eastern corner of the hockey rink, a list of donor names is etched into the granite. Names I put there by knowing exactly how much money people have and knowing exactly how nice I need to be to them. As I pass the corner now on my way to the colonial house where my office is, I think of the time Bill Judson asked me if I was one of the Wolfeboro Browns. “No,” I told him, “but see if you can get me invited.” He doubled his gift. Whenever he sees me at an event, he lets me know he’s still working on that invitation. He takes both my hands in his and gently tugs me over to his wife, or his racquetball partner, or his grandson who is a senior now, and he repeats my joke, which was never very funny to begin with. I’m sure he knows this, but he is too kind to stop the routine.

  I’m the first one in, as usual. Lucy and Katherine come in from the suburbs, and Daniel drops his daughter off at the front gate by some arrangement that allows her to sever all ties daily before she sets foot on campus and then meet her father gladly to go home. I pull the door shut to my tiny office and sit for a minute in my coat, feeling the heat build up beneath my wool turtleneck. I think of Nestor sitting at the enormous desk he positioned just inside the doors to his garden. As a child, I would stand at his elbow, the sun warming my back, while he showed me things from his collections: a fossil, a rock, one of those vials of sand. By the time I got to Greece in the summer, he would have already darkened to a deep tan from a spring full of hiking. Where I stood, I could see the pale spots behind his ears.

  Nestor never came to the beach with us. Sometimes he was away on one of his trips, and sometimes he spent the days at his desk, reading from his many history books in order to be prepared for the school year. He would laugh and say he had finally grown into his Homeric namesake, the old man advising the young. I would see him in the afternoons, when my hair was thickened with salt. My mother would leave me at the door, where brother and sister would give each other quick pecks on the cheek before parting. If they had real conversations, I never heard them. When I was old enough, I would go to Nestor’s house by myself, Aliki coming with me for a time until she began to go off with her own friends. He was always the same. His kindness never varied as we moved from tinkering with small gadgets and souvenirs to listening to music or looking through his photo albums or his movies that captured my relatives in rickety motion.

  I used to ask him to repeat the stories of their childhood that I knew so well from my mother’s winter recitations. The one about the cow that chased his sisters Thalia and Sophia into the hayloft. Or, my favorite, the one about the time they all flooded the basement of the grand city house. I would prompt him, reminding him of how he and my mother had stood on the balcony of the house the night the war began, watching Italian tracer bullets write sparkling lines in the darkness. My grandmother Urania had grabbed them, terrified they would be shot, while they had been dazzled by the colors. He usually let me tell this story, as if it were my own to tell. Once, though, he stopped me, saying, no, the war started in daylight, with bombs dropping, not tracer bullets. He showed me a newspaper clipping from his collection. There it was, the official account, beneath a headline of block capitals, proving the accuracy of his memory.

  As I become aware of the sweat rising beneath my coat, I remember what he told me during what turned out to be my last visit. I was back in Greece again, thanks to a discount flight and the good pay from my newly acquired private-school job. I had changed my mind at the last minute about the man I was supposed to be there with, so I was alone, seeking a brief respite from my errors in Nestor’s familiar space. We were looking through old photographs and I asked him to identify some unknown relative for me. He gave me a name I can’t remember now, then stopped himself and placed his hand on mine. “There are things you need to know, Calliope,” he said. “But not now.” I sit up suddenly and shake my coat off. What was it he wanted me to know, and why did I have to wait—until he died—to find it out?

  There’s a tap on the door and Lucy sticks her head in.

  “Morning,” she says, and does a double take when she sees my expression. “What’s up? Did Bart Wilcox make another one of his inappropriate comments?”

  I compose my face. “Nope. You just caught me cooking the books,” I say with a big smile.

  She shakes her head in amusement. They think I’m a card here at the office.

  I wait until she’s gone and let myself fall back into the chair, still thinking of what Nestor said to me that day five years ago. I left Patras suddenly that time, shot out of the city by cruel things my mother said. If Nestor had told me then what he wanted me to know, I wonder if I would have gone back to see him again. I wonder if I would have learned something that would have made it easier for me to return. But now I’m just making it someone else’s responsibility. Isn’t it my fault that I haven’t seen my family in years? Wasn’t it my decision that very same summer to walk away—not only from my mother but from Greece, and even from family members who had done nothing to hurt me?

  After work, I park the car in front of our building and run upstairs to drop my stuff off before I head out to meet Jonah.

  The answering machine is flashing. I stab at the button and walk away while the computer voice tells me there’s one message. The only people who call our landline are Jonah’s parents and my mother. Still, it catches me by surprise to hear my mother’s melancholy tone on the machine. I come back into the room, red lipstick in midair, and listen. My jaw is tightening.

  “Calliope. Your uncle’s funeral was today.” She makes it sound as if I deliberately stayed away instead of not having enough advance notice to make the trip. “Everyone was there. Everyone who is still alive, anyhow. Aliki told me she called you. But there’s no need to come. I can make arrangements for Nestor’s things to be given away or …” She trails off, her tone signaling disdain. “Call
me so I can tell you what you need for the power of attorney. I don’t know why Aliki called you. She should have stayed out of this. There’s no need to make you come. All right?” She pauses, as if waiting for a reply. “Geia,” she says. To my health.

  “That’s nice,” I mutter to the apartment.

  I replay the message. It’s a virtuoso performance. Guilt, sympathy, scorn, and ingratitude all rolled into twenty-six seconds. Nestor’s words ring in my head: “There are things you need to know. But not now.” Something new is going on with my mother, and I need to find out what. I finish my lipstick, grab my shoulder bag, and lock the door behind me, ready to tell Jonah I’m definitely going to Greece.

  I step into the deep entrance of The Sevens and stomp my feet free of snow before tugging on the heavy wooden door. Even for a bar, The Sevens is dark. People don’t go there to be seen; they go to shout and laugh and drink. That’s what our crowd is doing when I find them in prime position beneath a television showing the Bruins game. Jonah is standing squarely on both feet, smiling, ignoring the game. Ted is telling him a rugby story, miming the action with his hands. All around Jonah, everyone is moving, gesturing, swaying, but Jonah is still. I feel a tiny gasp of recognition and relief when I see him and hope it doesn’t show.

  I wind carefully around the cluster of darts players, nod to Ben at the tap, and swing through the crowd to take hold of Jonah’s arm.

  “Hey,” he shouts, turning. People have started yelling at a fight in the Bruins game. It’s too noisy to say much, so I kiss him.

  I look for Marcus, whose first day at his new job we are celebrating.

  “Still employed?” I ask, straining over the subsiding voices.

  “Yup.”

  “But tomorrow they’ll bust him for insider trading,” Jonah says.

  “So soon,” I say. “Such a shame.”

  “He’s been giving out stock tips all night.”

  Marcus rolls his eyes, tolerant. He has a new haircut for the occasion, an extreme short-back-and-sides. I run my hand up the back of his neck, feeling the nap of his dark buzzed hair.