One and Only Sunday

by Alex A King

  She longs for that mythical someplace, where she can wear colors that aren't black.

  7

  Helena

  The funeral happens. She refuses to participate. Participation is confirmation, and Margarita prefers not to believe. St George's bells cry for someone else's son, not hers.

  The wailing women fall on top of another man's casket.

  Home again, where—for some reason unknown to her—people have gathered to eat.

  The condolences that roll out of their mouths afterward are a mistake—they have the wrong woman.

  She refuses the koliva. Let the others choke down the honey-sweetened wheat grains. "May God forgive him," they say as they spoon the traditional funeral food into their mouths. "May God forgive him."

  Why does God need to forgive a saint?

  People kiss her marble cheeks. Those smooth slopes of skin are wet from so many lips. Is it hot in here? Is it cold? Her brain can't decide. She shivers inside her black dress with its wilted lace collar.

  "Excuse me." She pushes her way out of the room, collecting condolences as she goes. They stick to her back, follow her into the bathroom. Even after the door is locked, and she's sitting in the tub with a towel over her head, she hears apologies hailing against the door.

  Why are they all so sorry? Their solemn faces will evaporate the moment they step out her front door. By the time they've eaten their fill, and returned to their homes, Stavros Boutos will be forgotten.

  If they think of him it at all, it will be to give thanks to God that He did not take their sons.

  At first she doesn't hear the knock. It's small, timid. The second and third are bolder, made by a persistent hand.

  "Come in," she says from under the towel. Someone steps in, slides the small bolt closed behind them. Then suddenly she's not alone in the tub. Her husband curls himself around her, becomes her protective shell.

  Between them they shed so many tears it is a wonder they do not drown.

  8

  Kiki

  Soula is a woman with a lot of good ideas. This one arrives late afternoon, while the sisters sit on Kiki's small balcony. Agria is arching its back, stretching after its siesta. But the evening's cooler air hasn't arrived yet, so it's a long, luxurious waking.

  "We should go on your honeymoon. You will feel better after a trip to Paris."

  Okay, so not one of Soula's best ideas.

  "I don't think so," Kiki says.

  "Okay." She dims, then brightens. "We could go together."

  "I don't feel like going to Paris. Besides, I'm in mourning. And so are you."

  "The only mourning I'm doing is on your behalf. Can I go on your honeymoon?"

  "Alone?"

  Soula shrugs one slim shoulder. It's pale—for her—but then summer hasn't turned on all its tanning lamps yet. "No. I will take someone."

  "Who?"

  "I don't know. Who would you take?"

  "Stavros."

  Soula gives her a meaningful look. Sisters know things other people don't. "I mean who would you really take to Paris, the city of love? I know you are not a nun."

  "There hasn't been anyone in ages."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  * * *

  Their parents weren't the only ones with an agreement. But the one between Kiki and Stavros was flexible, invisible to everyone but them.

  Over ouzo, they hammered out the terms. Took five minutes.

  "Whoever you want, as long as no one knows," Stavros said.

  "Whoever you want, as long as no one knows," she agreed.

  "And after, what do you want, Kiki?"

  "After we're married?"

  "Yeah."

  She shrugged. "I'll be the best wife I can be. You?"

  Time stretched. It took an eternity for him to pour another glass. "Whoever I want, as long as nobody knows."

  * * *

  Kiki dated, but she dated smart. Only men with one leg in Agria and their other leg in another town, another country. That way they weren't going to stick around and cause problems.

  Problems, meaning a hunger for something long-term.

  Some would say that made Kiki as wild as Stavros.

  And others would say, if they held degrees in armchair psychology, that Kiki was looking for a way out of town, out of her engagement.

  People say lots of things. Sometimes they're true.

  * * *

  Soula asks, "What about Stavros, did he have someone?"

  Kiki gives her the are-you-kidding-me? look.

  "I meant one woman, not all the women. Someone special."

  "Who knows? We never talked about it. We never talked about anything."

  "Do you think that would have changed after you married?"

  "Probably not."

  They sit in silence for a while, watching their piece of the village come back to life. Slowly, the neighbors begin their evening scuttle.

  "This is a blessing."

  "Soula …"

  Her sister shakes her head, long, sleek strands whipping her shoulders. "Trust me, it is a blessing. Stavros was shit, and now you don't have to be Kyria Shit."

  Wow, now there's a revelation. She never saw that coming. All these years, it seemed like Soula was okay with Stavros, the way you're okay with one boob being slightly bigger than the other.

  "Why do you hate him so much?"

  Soula gets up, leans her elbows on the balcony's metal balustrade. Evading the truth. Not her sister's way at all. Usually Soula delivers truth like a hammer. Smack! in the face of the person who needs the reality check.

  "All these years, he could have stopped the wedding. Our mother, she doesn't listen. Complaining to her is like throwing words into the wind. But Thea Helena would have listened to Stavros if he'd said, 'No.' But he did not say no, did he?"

  "I don't know."

  "Yes, you do. He never told her, 'No.' And you know why?"

  "Why?"

  "Because Stavros was a mounaki. He wanted women and a wife from a good family to make his business look good. He was greedy."

  (Mouni: slang for the female anatomy; it's that word, you know, the one that begins with C and rhymes with hunt. A mounaki is a teeny tiny … uh … mouni.)

  It's true and Kiki knows it—has known it for years. But did she want to believe it? No. Who wants to believe they're marrying a jerk?

  Nobody. When a marriage is arranged, you get who you get, and hope for the best.

  "I knew what he was, Soula."

  "Did you? Then why go through with it?"

  Kiki joins her sister at the balustrade. "Because I'm monumentally stupid?"

  Soula grins. "You really are."

  "I know."

  It's a flimsy piece of fiction, because they both know she's anything but stupid. Still, it's less lame than the truth: Kiki never met a man she liked better. There's never been a man worth the inevitable fight with her mother or the punch in her reputation's throat.

  And people here look for any excuse to deliver that punch.

  Things would be different, Kiki knows, if there was a man worth the fight.

  9

  Helena

  She refuses to see that woman.

  Why should Margarita have a child—two children!—while she has none?

  Margarita comes to her with apologies spilling from her mouth, from her eyes. Helena does not want her apologies. They are worthless and hollow. A woman with all her children still living cannot know true sorrow—only its shadow. A shadow is not tangible; you cannot hold it in your heart the way you hold naked grief.

  "What do you want from me?" she says, tongue numb and thick against her teeth.

  Eyes wide, surprised. "I do not want anything from you. I am here to give whatever you need."

  Helena scoffs at her foolishness. "Are you a necromancer? Can you snatch Stavros away from death?"

  "Helena …"

  She cannot abide the pity in the other woman's eyes. It is if she is seeing
her lifelong friend for the first time. Black is not her color, she thinks. But then whose color is black if its purpose is for mourning the dead? Black suits the young, the passionate, those who know nothing of loss. On middle-aged and elderly women it is a sign their season has long passed.

  "How are your daughters, Margarita," she says bitterly. "Are they well?"

  "Soula is fine. Kiki is—"

  Helena leaps on what. "What is Kiki? Is she grieving? You cannot tell me she is sad Stavros is dead. We both know she did not want to marry him."

  "Of course she did." Margarita's tears spill into a black handkerchief. "Our whole family loved Stavros like he was one of ours."

  "One of yours? One of yours? He was never one of yours! He was mine!"

  "Helena, please."

  "Go." Quiet. The calm before the storm.

  The other woman doesn't go. She stands her ground, that fool. "No. You need me."

  Helena leans in close enough to smell her perfume. Something with too many flowers. What is it Margarita wears? She can't recall. She smells powdery, flowery, funereal. "I need nothing from you. Go."

  "I am staying."

  "Go."

  Silence.

  "Go!"

  Nothing. Mother of Christ, she cannot stand all the sympathy in Margarita's eyes. It disgusts her. Who is she that she needs sympathy?

  "Go," she screams. "I do not want to see you!"

  Margarita fades away.

  Good, good.

  * * *

  Stavros had many friends. Now they come, dispense apologies, and then they go. But one sticks.

  Akili comes all the time to visit. Like her, he cannot let Stavros go. And why should they? What harm is there in holding the dead close so they can never fully leave?

  Like her Stavros, Akili is a beautiful boy. As children, Stavros was spaghetti and his friend was a loukoumada (a honey-drenched donut), but the army rolled them together and baked two fit men.

  When he comes it is to sit with her in the afternoons before Kristos returns from work. He watches as she makes careful stitches on a circle of white fabric. Today it is a leaf she makes—one of the last, then this tablecloth will be complete.

  It was for Kiki and Stavros, but now it is for nobody but herself.

  She will never use it. Instead, it is destined to join all the other things in Stavros's room that she cannot bear to touch.

  "The police spoke with me the other day," Akili says gently.

  "When?"

  "The day after … after they found him."

  "Oh? What did they say?"

  "Nothing. Only questions."

  "Questions! They ask the wrong people."

  "They asked about Kiki."

  Helena lifts her eyes away from the silk leaf. "What about Kiki?"

  "They asked if maybe she had a reason to be angry at Stavros."

  It is a careful woman who speaks her next words. "What do you think—does she?"

  "A reason, maybe. A good reason? No."

  "What reason is that, that not so good reason?"

  Her son's best friend scans the other neighborhood yards for signs of eavesdroppers. Then his gaze settle back on the needlepoint in her hands.

  "Maybe she heard stories about Stavros. Lies, but maybe she mistook them for truth."

  "What stories?"

  "Stories. Every good-looking man has stories."

  "About women?"

  "Some of them."

  "But they are not true."

  He glances up at a pair of Romani women shuffling along the street, wandering from yard to yard. "No, not true."

  "Stavros was a good boy. And you are a good boy, too. I am glad you come."

  He lifts her hand away from the white cotton circle, holds it in his "Stavros will never be dead to me."

  She squeezes her hand. "Or to me.

  10

  Kiki

  Greeks never forget the dead. Ever.

  How can they when they're almost drowning in memorial services?

  Three days. Nine days. Forty days. Three months. Six months. One year. And every year after, if the family wishes. A Greek Orthodox priest is a busy man, constantly reminding the living that the dead are still dead.

  Three days after Stavros's funeral, everyone's back at his grave, listening to the priest repeat himself.

  Good times. Lots of blame and resentment whizzing through the air.

  Stavros is dead, Kiki is alive.

  Doesn't seem fair to Team Stavros. Why does she get to stand there in her knee-length black dress and those reasonable heels, when Stavros is stuck in his wedding suit forever?

  * * *

  Team Kiki has its own complaints.

  "Why is Helena looking at you like that?" Yiayia prods Kiki with her elbow. "What did you do?"

  "Nothing."

  "Nothing," Margarita repeats, though her face is busy ignoring her family.

  "Nothing." Baba pats Kiki's hand. "My Kiki is a good girl. What could she possibly have done?"

  He's the perfect counterweight to her mother. She's cut from a tiny piece of cloth, and he almost needs to stoop his way under lintels. She's dark-haired, dark-eyed, he's fair-haired with hazel eyes. He takes life as he finds it, but when she finds life she assumes it's lying.

  "Nothing," Kiki repeats.

  "Something," Yiayia continues. "Because they are shooting things at you with their eyes."

  It's true. Stavros was shot only the once, but it's a wonder Kiki's still breathing with all the holes they're punching in her.

  Not Theo Kristos, though. He just looks sorry, eyes cast at the ground, shoulders slumped. One hand rests on his wife's waist, but it brings comfort to neither of them.

  "You did pinch Stavros's nose," Soula tells their grandmother.

  "I was doing everyone a favor," Yiayia says. "If he was alive, we could have avoided all this."

  Her family is three-ring circus: Soula, Mama, Yiayia. Baba's the quiet one, the man who knows when and how to leave a room. Which leaves Kiki to the monkeys, the clowns, the lions.

  Stavros's family isn't a circus. They always came to the Andreou home for their serving of entertainment. The adults would form a pack and toss their combined three kids into the streets to play.

  Mostly this meant Soula would pelt Stavros with uncomfortable questions about his burgeoning manhood.

  * * *

  "Is it big?" she asked one summer evening, while they hung out on the big stone steps by the high school's basketball courts.

  Stavros dribbled the ball. "Is what big?"

  "You know," Soula said slyly.

  "Oh. That. It's huge."

  "Prove it."

  "Prove it how?"

  "Show us." She elbowed Kiki. And when Kiki muttered, "Oh, Jesus," Soula said, "Don't you want to know what you're getting before you buy it? What if it's defective?"

  "It's not defective." He unzipped and showed Soula the goods she wanted to inspect.

  Kiki didn't look, did she? She didn't want to marry Stavros and she didn't want to see his dick. Although seeing it was inevitable, at some point, she supposed.

  "Well," Soula declared with all the authority of someone who'd seen a few, "you are not done growing yet, anyway."

  * * *

  Kiki sank into the dirt (well, concrete) then and she's sinking into the dirt now. Doesn't matter that she's standing on grass, the soil below wants her. All she can think about are all the times she tried throwing her life into reverse, going back to the day when the Boutos-Andreou deal was struck, and rolling another outcome. But Margarita refused to hear a word of it.

  * * *

  "I don't want to marry Stavros," she had said one afternoon, while her mother was stringing clothes across the yard. Election day. Which meant only their green clothes saw soap and water that morning, because their family was a PASOK (the Panhellenic Socialist Movement; PASOK is an acronym that only works in its native Greek) family, and the color of Greece's left wing was green. Soula waltzed
past in a red dress and won a slap behind the head from their mother and orders to march back into the house and find something green, lest the rest of town think they supported KKE, Greece's communist party.

  (Greeks wear their political affiliations proudly, and condemn those who vote the other way with sullen looks and snide remarks about how their mothers lie down with donkeys.)

  "Of course you want to marry Stavros. You just don't know it yet."

  "I am sure she knows it, Mama," Soula said.

  "You. In the house. Now."

  (Yeah, Soula went back inside, but she kept the red dress and shimmied out the back door to see a boy about some cigarettes.)

  "I really don't want to marry Stavros. I'm sure of it."

  "You are fourteen. What do you know about anything?"

  "I know I don't want to marry Stavros."

  Mama tacked a green shirt onto the line. "Okay, you do not have to marry Stavros," she said, voice frolicking through a meadow with ponies and cotton candy.

  "Really?"

  Snap went the steel trap. "No."

  Kiki stormed towards the steps, flipping her mother off inside her head.

  "I saw that," Mama called out.

  Sometimes, Kiki thought at the time, Mama was like one of those spiders whose whole head is made of eyes.

  (Okay, so only eight eyes, but that's a lot of eyes.)

  Kiki took a stab at the rewind button regularly after that, always with the same outcome.

  "You have to marry him, Kiki. Otherwise how will it look? What will it do to my friendship with Helena, eh? You only think of yourself."

  Or, "Ha-ha-ha. You are a very funny girl, Kiki. No."

  Or, "Did anyone hear that? I thought I heard someone whispering, but look, there is no-one here. It must be the ghost of a very silly girl who has no idea about life and what she wants."