Forever in Blue (31 page)

And all the way down the hill as the sun rose, carelessly extending itself into the privacy of her night, she tried to remember the word.

Was it one word? Two words? A phrase? It was five syllables, she thought. It was, wasn’t it? She tried to remember each of them, chanting them over and over as a mantra all the way down the hill.

First thing inside the house she wrote it down with a pencil on a piece of lined paper in her grandmother’s kitchen.

She wrote it out phonetically. What else could she do? She didn’t know the Greek alphabet well enough to try the right way. She was unsure of how to represent the vowel sounds.

Why did he say it like that? Like he knew exactly what he was talking about and like she would understand?

Arg. He always left her with a problem.

“Do you know what this means?” she asked her grandmother when she came down the stairs, sticking the piece of paper two inches from Valia’s nose. Lena wasn’t quite as private as she used to be.

Valia scrunched up her already wrinkly eyes. “Vhat is this supposed to be?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m hoping you can tell me. It’s Greek.”

Grandma was nonplussed. “You call this Greek?”

Lena breathed impatiently. “Grandma, can you try?”

Valia made a martyrish fuss over finding her glasses. She squinted at the paper some more. “Lena, love, how do I know vhat this means?” she said finally.

While her friends got out of bed and dressed and took over the kitchen, making omelets out of everything edible in the room, Lena sat at the table in the middle of the action with her nose in the Greek-English dictionary.

“What are you doing?” Tibby finally asked.

“I’ll tell you when I know,” she said.

They put on bikinis and sundresses and packed straw bags and Lena followed them down to the beach with her face still in the dictionary. She tripped over a cobblestone and skinned her knee like a baby. Like a baby, she felt she might cry.

“What is with you?” Carmen asked.

“She’ll tell us when she knows,” Tibby said with a note of protection in her voice.

Lena was so preoccupied she got a sunburn on her back. She kept diligently at her dictionary when her friends went to get ice cream. She tried every spelling. Every grouping of letters until at last, with the sun at the top of the sky, she figured it out. Or at least, she believed she did.

“” was what Kostos had said. It meant “Someday.”

And so she did understand.

On the sixth day in Santorini, Lena tracked Effie down by phone at their aunt and uncle’s house in Athens.

“Effie, it’s me,” she said. She made her voice gentle. She knew Effie was afraid to talk to her.

“Did you find them?” Effie practically exploded.

“No.”

“You didn’t?”

“No.”

“Oh, no.” She heard Effie turn instantly snuffling and teary. As mad as she’d been, Lena realized she didn’t want Effie to feel this way. “Oh, no,” Effie said again.

“I know.”

“Since you called, I thought maybe you found them,” Effie said, sniffling. She probably believed Lena would be too angry to call otherwise.

“I called because I wanted to tell you…it’s okay.” Lena wasn’t sure what she was going to say until it was out.

Effie blew her nose loudly.

“It’s going to be okay,” Lena said again. “Okay? I know you didn’t mean for it to happen. I know you tried your hardest to find them.”

Effie shuddered a sob.

“It’s okay, Ef. I love you.”

For the longest time Effie was crying too hard to say anything back, so Lena waited patiently until she was done.

On the seventh day in Santorini, they swam for hours in the Caldera, floating with their bellies pointing to the sky. It seemed to Carmen they were putting off having to touch their feet to the earth again. The earth turned and time passed and then they would have to think about what it meant. But the hour did come, as all hours do.

“I don’t think we can stay here much longer,” Lena said, sitting on the sand and watching the sun go. She was the one who had to say it.

Carmen looked at her shriveled fingertips. She pressed them to her mouth.

They had been so busy with their Pants-finding attempts the first few days, but after that, bit by bit, they’d talked about the Pants less, expected less, done a little less. They’d relaxed into their long aimless stretches of talking and eating and thinking and walking and wondering about things together.

Although the overarching fact of the matter was sad, there had not been a moment since Carmen had arrived here that she’d suffered. It felt too good to be together. There was too much joy in it, so long needed and so long overdue.

Rather, Carmen had felt an ever-growing awe at the wisdom of the Pants for knowing how to bring them together. For knowing that absence is sometimes more powerful than presence.

“I wish we could stay here forever,” Carmen said.

“I do too,” Bee said.

They didn’t want to leave without the Pants, Carmen knew. The Pants were here, in a way. Even if they were lost, they were all around them.

“I think we might have lost the Pants a while ago,” Tibby said, pressing her hands into the sand, her face abstracted. “I mean, I think we lost the idea of them. They came to us to keep us together, and I think we were using them to help us stay apart.”

Carmen thought about this. “Right. It was like we had the Pants, so it was okay if we didn’t see each other.”

“I think that’s true,” Lena said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“We counted on them too much,” Bee said. “Or maybe we counted on them in the wrong way.”

Without thinking, they moved around to form a loose circle, like they did at Gilda’s. Today there were no Pants, just them.

“They taught us how to be separate people, but we learned a little too well,” Carmen said.

“We should have put them away during the school year,” Tibby suggested.

“But our lives are different now,” Lena said. “It used to be we were apart for summers. Now we’re apart all the time. Regular life used to be together. Now regular life is apart. It’s impossible to know how to use them.”

Carmen felt like she might cry. “Maybe it’s too big a job to keep us together anymore.”

Bee grabbed Carmen’s raisiny fingers for a second before letting them go. “It can’t be,” she said. “But we can’t expect the Pants do all the work, either.”

“We’re all in different places now,” Carmen said, voicing her deepest fears. “Maybe our time is over.”

“No,” Lena said. “I don’t believe that. You don’t believe that, Carma, do you?”

Carmen was sitting there not wanting to believe it. And then, out of the blue, she had an idea that released her.

“I think I know what it is,” she said. “We aren’t in Bethesda anymore and we aren’t in high school. We aren’t really in our families and we aren’t in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren’t us. If we think they are, then we’re lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren’t any place or any time.”

She thought of their Pants. She pictured them blowing off the laundry line and into the air, floating and soaring until they silently merged into sky and sea.

“That’s the thing. We are everywhere.”

On our last day in Greece we took a long walk and ended up on a stony precipice overlooking the water. We sat with our legs dangling into space, part of the air. The sky was cloudless and the sea was perfectly calm.

I looked at my friends, brown, barefoot, freckled, rumpled, mismatched, happy, all of us in each other’s clothes. Tibby had Lena’s white pants rolled up to her ankles, Carmen had Tibby’s paisley T-shirt, Lena wore my straw cowboy hat, and I tied up my hair in Carmen’s pink scarf.

The sky and the sea were so still and so constant that although we squinted and stared to find the line between them, the place that separated sea and sky, time and space, liquid and air, we could not see it.

I thought of what Carmen had said about us. We aren’t in any one place or any one time. We are everywhere, here and there, past and future, together and apart.

And so for a long time we sat and watched in silence because the seam was invisible and the color was eternity.

And I thought about the color and I realized what blue it was. It was the soft and changeable, essential blue of a well-worn pair of pants.

Pants = Love

It’s ten years later and the Sisterhood has grown up.

Read on for an excerpt from Sisterhood Everlasting.

Once upon a time there were four pregnant women who met in an aerobics gym. I’m not joking; that’s how this story begins. These large, fit, sweatband-sporting women bore four daughters, all born in and around the month of September. These girls started out as babies together and grew to be girls and then women. A sisterhood, if you will.

As I look back on them—on us—I realize that though we aren’t related by blood, we are like four siblings. The Septembers, as we called ourselves, are governed by the laws of birth order, even though we are all basically the same age.

Lena is the oldest. She is responsible, rule-abiding, selfless whenever required, steady as a metronome, and not always a thrill a minute, to tell you the truth. She knows how to take care of you. She knows how to be an adult, and she knows how to be serious. She doesn’t always know how not to be serious.

I admit that I, Carmen, am a classic youngest child—compounded by the fact that I am also an only child. There’s no end to my self-centeredness when I get going. I can be bratty and tempestuous, but I am loyal above all. I am loyal to who we are and what we have. I am worshipful of my sisters and worshipful of our sisterhood. I am not cool: you heard it here first. I feel like a mascot sometimes—the guy in the giant-headed fuzzy animal getup at football games, melting away inside his suit. When it comes to us, I’ll throw anything in.

Bee is our true middle child—free as a butterfly. She loves you, but she doesn’t care what you think. She’s not afraid; she’s got the rest of us holding that down. She’s free to compete, free to kick ass, free to fail and laugh about it. She can be reckless. She’s got less to lose; it’s been a long time since she had a mother. She’s such a force you forget she gets injured. You’ll see her stagger and realize she needs help long before she does. Your heart goes out to her. She doesn’t know how to feel her own pain, but she can feel yours.

Tibby is our younger middle child, our sly observer. She’s the quiet kid in the big Irish family who only wears hand-me-downs. She can be cynical, instantly judgmental, and devastating in her cleverness. She can also, as an old friend memorably put it, “change her mind.” She has a gift for exposing the lies—the lies we tell other people, the lies we tell ourselves. All of this is a casing around an exquisitely sensitive heart. She doesn’t turn her wit against us, almost ever. She entertains us with it, and uses it in her scripts and short films. If only anybody would produce any of them. Sometimes Tibby’s wit sweetens into wisdom. I think that’s what she gives us.

There was a significant epoch in our lives when we organized our friendship around a pair of pants we shared. Really, pants. We called them the Traveling Pants, and according to our mythology, they had the power to keep us together when we were apart.

Our pants were lost in Greece almost exactly ten years ago. How have we fared at keeping together since we lost them, you ask? That is a question.

Growing up is hard on a friendship. There’s no revelation in that. I remember my mom once told me that a good family is built for leaving, because that is what children must do. And I’ve wondered many times, is that also what a good friendship is supposed to be built for? Because ours isn’t. We have no idea how to cope with the leaving. And I’m probably the worst of all. If you need a picture, picture this: me putting my hands over my eyes, pretending the leaving isn’t happening, waiting for us all to be together again.

Once, when she was thirteen, Carmen remembered turnings to Tibby with her CosmoGirl magazine in one hand and her eye pencil in the other and declaring that she could never, ever get sick of doing makeovers.

Well, it turned out she could. Sitting in the makeup chair in early October in a trailer parked on the corner of Bleecker Street and the Bowery in the East Village of Manhattan, getting her hair blown out for the seven millionth time by a girl named Rita and the foundation sponged onto her face for the eight millionth time by a girl named Genevieve, Carmen knew it was just another mile on the hedonic treadmill. You could get sick of anything.

It was true. She’d read an article in Time magazine about it. “You could even get sick of chocolate,” she’d told her mother on the phone the night before.

Her mother had made a doubting sound.

“That’s what I read anyway.”

Being an actress on a TV show, even a moderately good and successful TV show, involved a few minutes of acting for every few hours you spent in the makeup chair. And even when you were done with the makeup—temporarily, of course; you were never done with the makeup—there was still a whole lot of sitting around drinking lattes. That was the dirty secret of the entertainment industry: it was boring.

Granted, Carmen didn’t have the biggest part in the show. She was Special Investigator Lara Brennan on Criminal Court. She showed up at least briefly at a crime scene in almost every episode and sometimes got to appear as a witness on the stand.

“Eyes up,” Genevieve said, coming in with a mascara wand. It was rare that Carmen needed a prompt. She knew exactly which way to turn her eyes for each portion of the mascara application. If she didn’t stay ahead of it, Carmen feared she’d end up like one of the many dolls she’d mangled as a child with her constant brutal efforts at grooming.

Carmen studied her hair in the mirror. She’d never thought she’d get sick of that either. She squinted down the highlights. They were a little brassy, a little bright this time. She would have liked to go darker, but the director wanted her light. Probably because her character’s surname was Brennan and not Garcia.