Identical

III
23

Lidia Gianis walks the contours of Zeus’s sloping lawn with care. She has not attended this picnic in more than twenty-five years, having sworn never to return. In Lidia’s life, there are few vows she does not adhere to. She believes in will-ee thelesee in Greek. Spirit. Will cannot turn snow to rain, or roll back the sea, but it can keep you from being simply steamrollered by fate.

Now and then Lidia reaches out to Teri for support because she has chosen a pair of wedged espadrilles. That is more heel than she is accustomed to, since Mickey, two inches shorter to start, does not care to feel as if he were a child being led around by the hand. But she approached this gathering intending to look her best, which has proven a vain effort in the breathy Midwestern heat that has left her flushed, and damp with sweat. Preparing this morning, she examined herself solemnly as she applied her makeup. Not an old lady yet, she decided, but further on the way than she would prefer. The sturdy and abundant body of her girlhood was surrendered in the course of three pregnancies, especially the last one with the twins, and her wide figure is better concealed beneath a floor-length shift. The coils of black hair, pushed back from the brow by a discreet band to create a leonine rush, are now overgrown by wires of gray that she regards like weeds. What she practiced in the mirror was the piercing black-eyed look, clever and determined, by which she knows herself.

Now, treading carefully, she carries her head high on her long neck, even though her upper body is weakened by a seasick feeling of high anxiety. The nausea reminds her just a little of the mornings during her first two pregnancies with Helen and Cleo. With the boys, she was healthy as a horse-except for the fact that she thought of killing herself every day.

“My brother does it right,” says Teri, “but I sometimes think, when I watch him gliding around like a swan, that his pride will kill him.” Teri adores Zeus, even while she mocks his excesses. He sports the same white suit he dons every year, preening as he greets his guests. It sometimes seems that Teri and she have been talking about Zeus their entire lives-the adolescent kisses Lidia and he shared, his marriage, his children, his feud with Mickey, his titanic success. If you asked, each woman would claim the other one raises the subject.

There are some friendships that pass into permanency due solely to an early start. Choosing today, Lidia might not welcome the company of a woman so profane and odd. But Teri is central in her life, like a stout tree you watched grow from a slender stick in the ground, a physical marker of the mystery of time. These days, Teri and she seldom meet face-to-face. The Gianises moved to Nearing a few years ago, when Mickey opened a second grocery there. And Teri refuses to visit Lidia’s home, rather than tolerate Mickey’s inevitable rages about Zeus. Instead, the two women babble to each other on the telephone at the start of every day, often for as long as an hour. A few minutes afterward, neither can recall what they discussed, except on the frequent occasions when one has slammed down the handset due to a comment too unkind to be tolerated. It falls to the offender to call back first, most often the next day, at which point the disagreement goes entirely unmentioned. In a relationship so old, rebukes are pointless. Years ago, Lidia stopped asking Teri to curb her vocabulary, instead bringing up her children to understand that no one else on earth was allowed to talk like Nouna Teri. And decades have passed since Lidia last encouraged Teri to accept one of the many men who courted her. Teri prefers to believe she is too much for any male. ‘I don’t want one,’ she will tell you to this day. ‘Cold feet in bed when you don’t need them and a cold dick when you do.’

Suddenly, there is a commotion. People surge forward and Paul’s name is on the air, accompanied by laughter. Lidia leaves Teri behind, until she sees her son struggling back to his feet, laughing with a girl who looks somewhat like Sofia Michalis. The young woman is holding Paul’s elbow as she hands him an empty paper plate. Paul’s focus on her is intense-as the song says, eyes only for her. Watching, Lidia feels a surge of hope. Georgia Lazopoulos is an empty vessel, entirely incompatible with the huge hopes she holds for both her sons. Paul probably would have proposed to Georgia long ago if Lidia had been at all encouraging. Even Father Nik, who is as dumb as his daughter, has begun to figure out that Lidia is the problem and has been increasingly cold to her. But she is unconcerned. It has been her longtime belief that these boys, conceived and carried in agony, must in some recompense from God be destined for greatness.

As she returns to Teri, Lidia feels her stomach suddenly lurch into spin cycle. Zeus is coming their way.

“Lidia, agapetae mou”-‘my dear’-he says and throws his arms wide in triumph. The vast history between them reveals itself in not so much as a flicker in his broad expression. She tolerates only a quick kiss on her cheek, but he grips her tightly for one second-he is still hale and strong-then turns to wave over Hermione, who not surprisingly has already headed this way to insert herself between Lidia and her husband. “Look who is here,” he says in English. Hermione does not bother with a welcoming word, and merely extends her hand, beset with a diamond-circled Rolex that cost more than the house Lidia lives in. “We enjoy seeing Cassian,” says Hermione, “ena kala paidee”-‘a nice boy,’ almost as if Cass were a child who’d come over to play. Hermione is beautiful but dull. She is slender-why are rich women so often thin as wafers? — with her hair expensively colored the shade of weak tea and swept up in a beehive. She has mastered an elegant smile, but they both know she has never cared for Lidia, who is far smarter than Hermione, and once enjoyed a troubling emotional proximity to her husband.

“You have stayed away too long,” Zeus tells Lidia, “and I cannot imagine why.”

That is too much. She manages no more than a stiff smile and turns heel, with Teri trailing after her. Zeus’s sister grabs Lidia’s arm again after another ten yards.

“A lease on a grocery store? Lidia, really. It’s twenty years.”

“I had stopped coming before that,” Lidia responds, but curbs herself there. Sometimes, when she is alone in the house, and Zeus appears on the living room TV, which she has left on for company, she will slip into the room and marvel. He has grown to be so smooth-the younger man made no secrets about what he wanted. Now his ambitions are concealed like a dagger in a jeweled sheath. Back then, there was no denying her attraction to Zeus. He was her best friend’s older brother, big and good-looking and full of something she found irresistible-Zeus believed that greatness was his fate. Because of that, he was the only man she ever met who felt like a true match for her and her belief that her spirit should fill the world. She has always hoped, most secretly, that her sons have some of the same quality.

When Lidia was sixteen, her fascination with Zeus-and his with her-brought them to an evening that even now she recalls as one of the most fateful of her life. In those days, boys and girls would slip off from the Social Club at St. D’s to the choir room to kiss. Everybody tried it, pairing off almost at random. Zeus was nineteen by then, a little old for Social Club, and Lidia realized eventually he was there only for her. Each week, they stayed in the choir room longer. People were beginning to joke. And then one night he put her hand in his lap. ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked. He pulled it from his trousers. She stared, horrified but wildly pleased. ‘Touch it,’ he said, ‘please.’ She did, and he touched her, unleashing a tide of pleasure that felt at first as if it would stop her heart. But she would not allow the last step. ‘I must be married,’ she told him.

‘Then I will marry you,’ he answered. It seemed like comedy. She actually laughed, but Zeus was ardent. ‘No, I mean this. Truly. Let us go now to speak to your father.’

Zeus took her hand and pulled her toward the door, almost before she was dressed again. Her father was in the front room of their apartment in a sleeveless undervest. He had been drinking beer and listening on a large console radio to baseball, a game for which, although an immigrant, he had developed a great fascination. As she stood, hand in hand with Zeus, she could still feel what had gushed from her wetting the inside of her thigh.

‘I wish to marry Lidia,’ said Zeus.

Her father looked at Zeus coldly and then snorted as he turned back to the radio.

‘No daughter of mine will marry into a family of hoodlums.’ Lidia, he said, came from honorable people, farmers in Greece who made their way here honestly, selling produce. The Kronons at home were sheep rustlers and blacksmiths, which was another word for thieves. These days, Nikos, Zeus’s father, translated for the mafiosi when they shook down the Greek restaurant owners, reiterating the Italians’ threats, which were often carried out, to break windows or sabotage the plumbing.

The next night she met Zeus under the streetlight in front of her house.

‘Marry me anyway,’ he said. He had made a plan to run off. But she could not go against her father. She had cried most of the day, but she knew which man had to command her loyalties.

She went back inside, and for years after barely spoke to Zeus. To avoid humiliating him, she told no one about his proposal, including Teri, who would have been enraged that Lidia’s father had said such things about the Kronons to her brother’s face. The moment receded as if it had never occurred. Zeus enlisted in the army the week after Pearl Harbor, nearly dying at one point in a military hospital, but he returned, married to Hermione, with Hal, a babe in arms. Lidia by then had wed Mickey, the son of her mother’s best friend, before he left for the service in 1942. Mickey was nice-looking, and worked hard, and wanted to be a good husband, which she knew even at sixteen was not likely to be true of Zeus. Mickey lived by a narrower compass, but that didn’t matter because she took it for granted, when she kissed Zeus good-bye under that streetlight, that she would never feel the same way about anyone else.

Mickey was an uncomplicated person, but he was everything he promised to be. Then he took sick. He had rheumatic fever as a child and the mitral valve in his heart did not close properly. In her mind’s eye, Lidia saw the blood spurting past the structure, as if it were a finger in a dike. There was no way for the doctors to operate. Mickey took medicine, but he declined. By 1955, he could no longer go to the produce market and remained at home. Soon he was in his bed, drowning in his own body. Lidia tried her best to believe he wouldn’t die.

Teri arranged a job for Lidia in Zeus’s office. Zeus knew her, knew how bright she was, and his business was erupting like a volcano, with shopping centers spreading around the Tri-Cities like a lava flow. And Lidia’s family needed money. As for what had once happened between them, it was a lifetime ago. She did not imagine that she would be attractive to Zeus any longer. She was becoming matronly, and he was, in his sister’s own words, “Sir Lance-a-lot,” a nightly visitor to the bars on Street of Dreams, from which he frequently extracted some little trinket half his age whom he bedded in one of the swank hotels nearby.

Yet Zeus was wooing Lidia from the first moment he saw her there.

‘Your father spoiled not only your life,’ he told her the first time he was alone with her. ‘He ruined mine.’

Sometimes, he came up behind her chair, when no one else was around, and sang a Greek folk song, “S’agapo,” ‘I love you,’ in a whisper. If there was not time for the entire tune, he sang one of the lyrics:

Your window which is closed

Your window which is shut

Open, open one panel of it.

She answered with a hundred remonstrations. That is the past. Our lives are what they are. I am married, Zeus. She avoided his office if she could, and if not, told her colleagues to call her there in five minutes. He tried each time to take her in his arms as she wriggled free.

Along with most of her coworkers, she attended this party twenty-six years ago, the first of the Labor Day picnics. Zeus had bought the house only eighteen months before and offered her a tour. Another couple was with them, but when her eyes adjusted to the change from the brilliant sun, the other two had been waylaid, perhaps at Zeus’s instruction. He had been drinking, as had she. Finding they were alone, he drove her into one of the servants’ bedrooms right off the kitchen. It was a small room with narrow windows like a prison cell and a simple chenille spread on the twin bed. She did not cry out, because the consequences of that, for her life and his, for her job, were beyond quick calculation. But she resisted fiercely, holding him off. ‘No. Zeus. This is craziness. Zeus, I am saying no.’ But he continued bearing down on her. ‘Please,’ he kept saying. ‘Please.’ It was as if what had begun in the choir room had taken place only a minute before. Familiarity with his physical presence had never left her, and her body, largely unused in this way for years, rose to him, no matter what she wanted. But she stopped saying no and fighting him off only after he had entered her and she had begun to weep in hopelessness and shame. She dressed and left the room without a word.

Out on the lawn he found her again. ‘I am so sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I will marry you,’ he said, ‘I will still marry you,’ as if two decades, two marriages, had not intervened. At that moment, she learned everything about Zeus she needed to know. Not that he was a liar, although she did not think for a second that he would leave this mansion, and his son and his wife. But rather, that he believed what he was saying. Like someone in Galaxy magazine, Zeus wanted to live six or seven different lives at the same time. She knew then that Zeus probably would not have married her either when she was sixteen. His greatness, if you could call it that, was that he did not accept human limits.

She turned away, still with no idea what to do. There was no one to tell, not her husband, who quite likely would die on the spot, nor even Terisia, who was loyal and old-fashioned enough to side with her brother: What else was the man to think, after all his overtures, when you snuck with him into the house? It had not happened, Lidia decided. That was the only way to live her life.

It was more than three months before she accepted that she was pregnant. She hoped at first that she would miscarry. Her faith was of her own construction, but as a mother, she would not even contemplate forcing a child from her womb. Finally, when she realized she would be showing soon, she laid down in Mickey’s bed and wrapped him in her arms. ‘We are going to have a baby,’ she said. ‘Soon I will have to quit work.’ She did not know then or now what Mickey believed. In every marriage there are subjects that are unapproachable. Even then, sick as he was, he could, every few months, get up like a whale breaking the surface for a moment to spurt, declaring afterward each time that it would have been a fine way to go. But Lidia’s impression at that moment was that Mickey was simply too sick to care. He knew he was dying, that his wife, the mother of his daughters, was loyal in her care for him and would be beside him when he passed. Eventually, his great joy at the birth of his sons, who could carry forth his name, was the final antidote to questions.

In 1958, the year after the boys came, U Hospital had purchased a heart-lung machine, one of the first, and Dr. Silverstein told Mickey they could save his life. It was a miracle, of course. It was like watching a man stand up out of his own grave.

His grocery was open soon after. Seven years later, the lease came up for renewal. They had always known the terms were favorable, but believed that Old Man Kariatis just wanted someone he would never have to chase around for rent. But Mickey’s lawyer discovered that Kariatis was a straw man; he had sold long before to ZP. Mickey’s rent was barely half what Zeus was charging on the adjoining properties. Zeus’s generosity drove Mickey into a fury. She never dared ask why, although she was certain what inference her husband was drawing.

Yet to this day, she never believed Zeus suspected the boys’ paternity. The story of Mickey’s episodic potency was well circulated at St. D’s. Zeus merely meant to do Lidia a favor as a shabby recompense for his behavior.

As for Mickey, his rage at even the mention of Zeus’s name was the only disruption. Whatever had occurred was otherwise a piece of the discarded past, part of Mickey’s illness, which they saw now as a distant sea, remote and unthreatening when considered from the cliff known as good health.

And then she heard that Cass was romancing Dita. She waited for the relationship to pass, but it was clear that Cass was smitten. The jeweler, Angelikos, has told Lidia that in the last two weeks Cass has been in to look at rings. She has sat up nights in despair. How could it be that the damage of a single moment can spill through time to endanger another generation?

Lidia would tear out her tongue before confessing anything to either of her sons. Nor can she approach Zeus. There is no telling what the man’s grandiosity would impel him to do, but Zeus’s actions were certain to show no regard for Mickey. Teri is a possibility, but she might doubt Lidia after all this time, especially knowing how deeply Lidia disapproves of Dita. Worse, Teri might feel obliged to involve her brother. The best alternative is to go directly to Dita. If she will not promise to give up Cass, then Lidia will have to try Teri next.

Close to 6 p.m., just as the picnic is scheduled to conclude, the skies open. The guests run in all directions, but many, hoping to wait out the worst of the pelting downpour, crowd through the rear door of Zeus’s house, which is open so the guests can use the bathrooms nearby. Knowing this, Lidia has already planned to hide inside. She has told Cass that Teri will drive her home and said just the opposite to Teri. But now, as dozens crowd into Zeus’s rear hall, she takes advantage of the confusion to slide past the velvet rope looped between two brass stanchions that closes off the upper stories. Dita’s room is the first door she opens on the second floor, with a collection of paper dolls pasted to the walls, bizarre decorations Lidia thinks for a girl of twenty-four. She finds a magazine and takes a seat in Dita’s bathroom on the commode, then stands for a second to consider herself in the mirror, summoning again her dark-eyed look of imperial strength. She believes in will.