One and Only Sunday
A Women of Greece Novel
Alex A. King
Citizen A Press
Contents
Untitled
Copyright
Also by Alex A. King
Dedication
1. Kiki—Age 12
2. Kiki—Age 28
3. Kiki
4. Helena
5. Leo
6. Kiki
7. Helena
8. Kiki
9. Helena
10. Kiki
11. Helena
12. Kiki
13. Helena
14. Leo
15. Kiki
16. Helena
17. Kiki
18. Helena
19. Leo
20. Kiki
21. Kiki
22. Helena
23. Kiki
24. Helena
25. Leo
26. Kiki
27. Leo
28. Kiki
29. Leo
30. Kiki
31. Leo
32. Kiki
33. Leo
34. Helena
35. Leo
36. Kiki
37. Helena
38. Leo
39. Kiki
40. Leo
41. Kiki
42. Leo
43. Helena
44. Leo
45. Kiki
46. Leo
47. Kiki
48. Leo
49. Kiki
50. Helena
51. Leo
52. Helena
53. Kiki
54. Leo
55. Kiki
56. Helena
57. A small aside
58. Leo
59. Kiki
60. Leo
61. Kiki
62. Leo
63. Helena
64. Leo
65. Kiki
66. Leo
67. Kiki
68. Kiki
69. Leo
70. Kiki
71. Leo
72. Kiki
73. Leo
74. Kiki
75. Leo
76. Kiki
77. Leo
78. Helena
79. Kiki
80. Helena
81. Leo
82. Helena
83. Kiki
84. Leo
85. Kiki
86. Leo
87. Kiki
88. Kiki
89. Leo
90. Kiki
91. Leo
92. Kiki
93. Kiki
94. Helena
95. Kiki
96. Helena
97. Kiki
98. Leo
99. Kiki
100. Kiki
101. Kiki
102. Kiki
103. Kiki
104. Leo
105. Kiki
106. Kiki
107. Leo
108. Kiki
109. Leo
110. Helena
111. Leo
112. Kiki
113. Kiki
114. Drina—the final word
Freedom the Impossible Preview
About the Author
Copyright © 2014 Alex A. King
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Created with Vellum
Also by Alex A. King
Seven Days of Friday (Women of Greece, #1)
Freedom the Impossible (Women of Greece, #3)
Light is the Shadow (Women of Greece, #4)
Paint: A Short Love Story
Lambs (As Alex King)
For my mother, who survived Greece.
And for B & C, always.
1
Kiki—Age 12
The old woman was in a coma, again—a long one, this time. Twelve-year-old Kiki Andreou shoved the spoon into her grandmother's mouth. It was heavy with pink roe paste that smelled like the day-before-yesterday's catch.
"My Virgin Mary! Your mother is trying to kill me," her grandmother said, rocketing out of the bed she'd been in for weeks.
"She's not trying to kill you," Kiki told her. Except, she kind of was, wasn't she? Attempted murder was her mother and grandmother's thing.
"Why else would she feed me taramasalata? It is not fit for Albanian dogs!" Then she bolted back to the bed, jerked the sheets up around her neck. "Shh." She stared sightlessly up at the white ceiling. "Your mother is coming."
Sure enough, a moment later, Margarita Andreou stuck her cosmetics-painted face around the corner. Her dark matte lipstick did the talking.
In the 90s, matte lipstick did a lot of talking.
"Yes, yes, I am trying to kill your grandmother. We could use the spare room." Not a word from the woman in the bed. "Kyriaki," her mother continued, "we are having coffee with the Boutos family tomorrow—all of us. Except Yiayia. Her we will leave behind. Wear something nice, and be good for once, eh?"
Then she was gone.
"I told you so—yes?" Yiayia said, sounding far more satisfied than a walking dead woman should sound. "When they took her from me in the hospital after she was born, I believe they swapped her for a Turk."
* * *
The two families met the next afternoon. Lousy weather, but that didn't stop them sitting outside, under the taverna's blue and white umbrellas on Agria's promenade. The gulf was a waving, choppy grey, not its usual blue-green glass. Stubborn people, the Greeks. It was summer, and summer meant sitting outside, whether they liked it or not.
Kiki was already tired of hearing her parents and their best friends complain. When they started talking politics, she got tired of that, too. She ignored them right up to the part where they began talking about weddings.
Specifically, her sister Soula's to the Boutos's son, Stavros. He was Soula's age, a year older than Kiki.
"Hey, Soula," she called out to her sister, who was three tables down, chatting to a group of German tourists. Very sociable girl. Dark-haired and dark-eyed like Kiki, but cut from a slightly more vivid bolt of fabric. "Mama and Baba are marrying you off."
"To who?"
"Stavros."
"Boutos?"
"Yes."
Stavros Boutos. A skinny kid who somehow managed to wrangle his way out of this social gathering.
(Like many Greek sons, Stavros was a Mama's boy. He didn't want to come? Okay, no problem.)
Soula's laugh fizzed all over the taverna. "They cannot do that, I'm a lesbian."
Helena Bouto's face went blank. "Margarita, your family is from Lesbos? All this time, I did not know. How long have we been friends?"
Forever, more or less. The two women bounced on the same knees as babies, made the same mischief after they transitioned from walking to running. They were koumbaras (maid/matron of honor) at each others weddings. As adults, they knelt and swore the same allegiance to the gods of too-much-makeup.
"No." Mama's mouth puckered. Her disapproval, Kiki thought, looked a lot like a goat's butt. "My family is not from Lesbos."
"But … Oh."
Everybody looked at Kiki. Even at twelve, she knew this wasn't going anyplace good.
"Lucky we have two daughters," Mama said.
"Is she a lesbian, too?"
Mama looked at Kiki with steel in her eyes—knives, mostly. "I do not know. Kiki, are you a lesbian, too?"
The girl named after the day of rest blinked. "Yes."
Mama smacked her around the head. Not hard. Just enough
to toggle her switch. "How about now? Are you still a lesbian?"
Kiki said, "No."
"Good. Then you can marry Stavros."
Kiki Bouto—no S. Greek men often scored an S on the end of their last names, probably to make up for losing that second X chromosome.
Overcompensating, Soula would say.
Whatever. She didn't want to be a Bouto. Andreou was a good last name. Nobody had an S.
Very fair.
* * *
Sunday. The day of rest. The day God flopped facedown on His new grass and muttered something about how being the parent of everything was exhausting.
See also: Popular Greek names.
Kyriaki was the second daughter, so they hung her mother's mother's name around her neck. Soula was the lucky one. Her name, in its full form, meant immortality, and—in a slightly ironic twist—came from her father's mother, a woman who died before she and her namesake had a chance to meet.
For the record, Soula was not a lesbian. She only played one when her mother tried to marry her off to unappealing family friends.
Not that there's anything wrong with being a lesbian; Agria had its own, except people there tended to call them wives.
* * *
By the time Kiki was thirteen she thought she was pretty smart and very grown up.
"If I have to marry Stavros, I'm going to date lots of other boys first."
When she declared this solemnly to her mother, Mama said, “I do not think so! If you are a smart girl, do not talk to boys. They will pretend to like you, but they are only after one thing.”
She went to her father. “What are boys after?”
“Your dowry and my sanity,” he told her.
Insanity didn't seem so bad. Mental instability ran in the family.
Exhibit one: Yiayia and her frequent (and frequently convenient) comas.
Exhibit two: The great-uncle dangling from her father's branch of the family tree, the one who tied a brick around his neck and jumped into an overflowing bath tub. He cracked his skull on the faucet and spent the rest of his life working in Amsterdam as Candy Box. Crazy made Candy Box rich.
Kiki went to her sister for the real scoop about marriage and boys and what they wanted.
“What's a dowry?” she asked Soula.
“It's when your parents pay some guy to have sex with you.”
“Grown-ups call it marriage,” the older Andreou girl said confidently.
“But what if you have sex before you're married?”
“Your parents have to pay more money.”
That sounded to Kiki like sex before marriage really paid off for a guy.
Soula knew everything—even more than Kiki—including the best place to play Spin the Bottle. One steaming afternoon, they carried an empty retsina bottle Soula scored from the Great Market (Great, in this instance, meant dingy, dusty, and run by a man who knew how to squeeze blood out of rocks, and allegedly demanded ten drachma from a couple of kids who wanted an empty box for their kitten) to an alcove behind the high school, large enough to hide several teenagers and a bottle.
Stavros trotted to the school alongside the Andreou girls. He was a zero to Soula, built like a pencil, with pants that refused to stay on his hips. He was a zero to Kiki, too, which bothered her. Shouldn't her future husband be a number greater than nothing?
Soula muttered something about how Stavros was like a brother, which made this whole thing feel too much like a Virginia Andrews novel, in her estimation.
"Did that woman ever meet a story she couldn't shove incest into? No," Soula said, with all the authority of her fourteen years.
Their fourth was Leonidas Karas. The Karas boy was fifteen, and rumor had it he'd been shaving since thirteen. One of those triple threats (tall, dark, handsome in a cut-from-stone kind of way), girls all over town (and way, way out of town) liked him. They liked him ever harder when he showed promise on the school's basketball courts. He gave Kiki a tingly feeling that made her want to do bad things like kissing and holding hands.
“They say he's got hair around it,” Soula whispered to Kiki behind her hand.
“Around what?”
“You know--it.” She pointed at her crotch.
Kiki nodded like she was worldly, then parroted what their mother had told her once. “That's so you don't put your mouth on it.”
Soula giggled in her cloud of Love's Baby Soft perfume. “They want you to put your mouth on it! And they will say anything to get it. Yiayia told me so, and it's true.”
"How do you know?"
Her sister shrugged. "I just do."
Kiki's hands shook as she spun the bottle. She didn't want to put her mouth on it. Like the dowry thing, it didn't seem very fair to girls. What did girls get?
As luck would have it, the bottle spun out of control, rolling into the bushes.
“Your turn,” she told Soula, partly relieved and mostly disappointed.
“I'm only here to supervise,” she said, waving her hand. “I've got a boyfriend. Maybe two.”
Kiki spun again. The bottle slowed. And then stopped. Right between Leonidas and Stavros.
Tie.
“Choose,” Soula told her. “It's ladies' choice.”
Kiki's gaze shifted from one to the other and back again. Stavros, her future husband, or Leo, the boy who made her think a road trip to hell might be fun. Because good Greek girls don't take fun road trips to hell with their husbands.
“I can't,” she stammered.
Soula's arms curled around her shoulder, and she leaned in close. "You do not have to choose Stavros just because you are to be married. Now is for living."
Smart girl, her sister.
Kiki went into the bushes with Stavros anyway, because Mama had a way of sitting her non-corporeal self on one shoulder, flicking Kiki's ear whenever she strayed off her Mama-designated path.
“Come on,” he said. “Let me show you my disappearing finger trick. Girls love it.”
What girls? They were supposed to get married. “Do you want to hold my hand?” she asked.
“Later,” he said, pulling up her denim skirt.
It was a good trick, one she wanted to share with Leo.
“Let me show you my disappearing finger trick,” she said when it was Leo's turn.
Big bad Leo looked worried, but he unzipped his jeans anyway. "There's nowhere for your finger to go."
"Trust me, you'll love it. Turn around."
Good guy Leo, he turned around. What was he talking about? Of course there was someplace for her finger to go.
Kiki showed him her new trick.
"You're crazy," he screamed. Jeans still unzipped, he bolted.
2
Kiki—Age 28
There is a special place in hell for people who enforce childhood promises on adults, and Margarita Andreou is on her way there in a pale blue dress with a modest neckline.
It's Kiki's wedding day, but does Kiki want to get married?
That's a big fat Greek NO.
"Today I hate you," Kiki tells her mother's reflection in the tall, oval mirror.
"Of course you do," Margarita says casually. "And I hate my mother, too. Why do you think I am always trying to kill her? When I am old and feeble, you will try to kill me. That is how it is in our family."
Kiki glances over at Soula, who is shimmying into her bridesmaid's dress. Mama's choice—of course. Kiki isn't the kind of woman to inflict that shade of green on anyone she loves. Still, Soula being Soula, she forces the dress to suit her. She's old school glamorous is Soula, with that black-blue hair (salon-bought) and red lipstick. The kind of woman who—when she lights up a rare cigarette—makes a person forget lung cancer isn't cool.
"What about Soula? She's not trying to kill you."
"She took her turn when she was born, that ungrateful girl. There I was, giving her life, and what does she do? She almost kills us both."
; "I don't want to do this," Kiki says. "My hair … I'm Medusa."
Soula jumps in. "Mama, look into Kiki's eyes. Let's see if she can turn you to stone."
"You are almost thirty, what else can you do? Work?" Very convenient, the way her mother sidesteps Soula's offer.
Lipstick skates over Kiki's lips. A daring shade of her-lips-but-dimmer. Not her choice, but on this day, what is? Despite her objections, she's a good little Mama-bot, isn't she? "I work now. And marriage isn't a job."
"Of course marriage is a job—a thankless job. You are a teacher." Usually it's Margarita's hands that punctuate her sentences. Today, it's a hairbrush, in between smoothing invisible stragglers from her own neat French twist. Wave, wave, goes the brush. "That is not work, that is torture. Why you want to raise other people's children?"
Kiki wants to shake the stupidity out of her head. Only on Mama's planet is a teacher not a real job. Kiki teaches junior high and high school English (the two schools are mixed in together, in the same building), and when she's not physically present, work is swallowing her free time. If teaching is not work, then why is it so much, well, work?
Mama doesn't understand. She chose family over a career, and now that her daughters are grown, her marbles are rolling all over the floor. Nothing to do except keep trying to off Yiayia and sell her daughters to family friends.
Now it's time for Kiki to stuff herself into that awful dress. Stand her next to the wedding cake, nobody will be able to discern which is cake and which is woman, unless they get a good look at her sad, sad eyes.
Jesus, this stinks. Everything from the dress to the groom. Inside her head she screams for help.
"I really don't want to do this."
"So don't do it," Soula tells her, voice husky from a long night of wine and laughter. Last night—Kiki's last unmarried night—they partied like her world was ending.
Which—in her estimation—it kind of is.
The older Andreou sister wins a slap around the ears from their mother.
"She has to do it," Mama's fuchsia-colored mouth says. "Otherwise the family will be shamed. Do you want the family to be shamed? I do not think so!"