Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [88]
Any scuba diving allowed? Any transubstantiation in one direction or the other? Can you at least just go down and say hi?
Once again, Lena finished reading it, took out a piece of paper, and wrote him back. As she wrote to him, he didn’t seem to her so much a corporeal presence, a confusingly desirable and disappointing man, but as a kindred consciousness floating out there alongside hers.
I put on Valia’s housedress today. The one with the pink and purple squares. You probably remember it; she wore it all the time.
I don’t know why I did it. Maybe because there’s a cold, gloomy rain outside. It’s not a good fit, exactly, but it’s made me strangely happy. I feel like it’s still got some Oia sunshine in it, as well as Valia’s indomitable energy. You know I’ve always been superstitious about clothing. Now I don’t want to take it off. I’m going to wear it to teach figure painting today.
Under the part in her letter about the housedress, Lena took out her colored pencils and made a drawing of Valia wearing it along with her absurd pink plastic house shoes. She placed Valia in the loosely sketched doorway of her house with one hand on her hip.
Lena became completely absorbed in the drawing, remembering and articulating every subtlety of Valia’s fierce morning stance and her sleepy, wrinkly expression. There had been a running rivalry between Valia and her best friend, Rena Dounas, Kostos’s grandmother, over which of them woke up earlier and made the first appearance in the morning.
“I have been up for hours!” Lena wrote as the caption.
Kostos’s response came quickly.
I am torn between laughter and awe when I look at—or even think of—the extraordinary picture you made. It is sitting on my desk. You capture the seventy-year relationship between our two grandmothers in one image.
Why, you must be an artist.
You’ll see I’ve enclosed my own slight creation, not to be compared to yours. It’s a deck hinge, in case you weren’t able to identify it immediately.
I was in Oia this past weekend, and made a fish dinner for my grandparents. My grandfather took ambivalent note of my cooking skills and studied my hands with disapprobation. He has a deep respect for men with rough hands, and I could see he thought I was going soft.
So I went back to the forge for old time’s sake, and perhaps to restore myself a little in his eyes or mine. The forge is hardly used anymore. Bapi has been retired for ten years. It took me senseless hours to get it going, and senseless more to make the small, shabby thing here enclosed. But I took my blackened hands to the office with pride this morning.
You may not have much urgent use for a deck hinge. And it’s not a very good one, to boot. But short of enclosing an excellent fish dinner, which I didn’t think would travel well, it’s the best thing I could make for now.
In ten days’ time, Lena realized she was getting and sending a letter almost every day.
Thank you for the deck hinge. From the moment I get my first fishing vessel, it will be in constant use.
Honestly, Lena didn’t know what she had been doing with her life before the letters started. They filled her mind and the hours of her day almost completely.
Kostos, she decided, had more hours in his day than she had, probably at least five or six more. His letters were longer, more interesting, and cleverer than hers, and somehow he also managed to hold an important job and have a life.
Lena was teaching a total of four classes a week and spending time with no one but Eudoxia for an hour once a week. She’d had no desire to go into the studio and paint since October.
But more and more she was adding little drawings and designs to her letters. She made a sketch of her grandfather’s famous white-tasseled shoes. She drew a picture of a fishing boat, the kind that docked in Ammoudi, with an inset drawing of a magnified deck hinge. She made a watercolor of an olive tree and let it dry by the window before she folded