Identical

IV
27

Dita Kronon sheds her wet clothes and heaps them on the floor, where Tula, the maid, will deal with them in the morning. After grabbing a short pool robe from her closet, Dita crashes on her bed and clicks the TV remote. She told Greta she might slide by for a drink at 10:30, but she’s shredded now that she’s down from the ’lude, and Cass will be here by midnight.

It’s been a long day already. She nearly did a dance when the rain sent all those shrieking greaseballs back to where they came from. Her parents are all the time telling her to embrace her heritage, but she has been explaining to them since she was about twelve that she is an American. Period. She’s called Dita because that was as much of Aphrodite as she could pronounce at the age of two, but she’s clung to it, rather than be known by a name so foreign and weird.

Hal, naturally, loves all of the Greek stuff, but he was born over there and still speaks the language. He’s into all the rigmarole at church, the pained figures on the walls and the incense and chanting and the priest shoveling out the so-called Holy Gifts to everybody in the room from the same fucking spoon, all of which to her feels like a really bad Halloween party. But Hal is a dork, who sometimes seems to embarrass her parents simply by breathing. Dita loves him anyway. Whenever she gets ready to marry somebody, she might look for a man a little like Hal, at least somebody as devoted and kind.

But she won’t marry anyone right now, which she’s been explaining to Cass for weeks. She’s gotten herself into a bad thing with Cass. She met him Memorial Day weekend at the club, where he was working as a lifeguard for pocket money, while he waited for the police academy to start.

‘Watch this,’ she told Greta, as soon as she found out who he was. The whole concept was to see the look on his face when she told him her name. She’s gone out with plenty of guys, even done a few, purely on a bet or because it will make a good story. She was wearing a two-piece her parents had forbidden her to put on at the club under any circumstances, and she motored over to where Cass could see her, and smiled up to the chair while she squinted in the sun. And of course, as soon as it was his turn to climb down, he came over. He was good-looking, you had to give him that, very hunky, all that great Greek hair. That was one thing she liked about being Greek. The hair. And the food. That, too.

Cass is a good person, for sure, nicer, smarter, funnier than she expected. And it always thrills her when a guy falls as hard as he has, even though it also seems to paralyze something inside her. Cass truly gets a lot about her. He understands what she’s doing at Jessup, how deeply she connects with her clients, these beat-up kids who everybody wants to act normal after there hasn’t been a single normal fucking thing in their lives. But Cass seems like he’s on this big mission with her, as if he’s such a prize that she’ll like herself better, just because. And with all his good intentions, Cass is becoming a pest.

She is pondering all of this, when, like a ghost, Mrs. Gianis steps out of Dita’s bathroom. Her heart turns to a fist for a second, while she assures herself that she’s not tripping. Dita grabs her robe around her and pulls herself up on an elbow.

“What the fuck?”

“I came in from the rain and the washrooms downstairs were occupied.”

“That was four hours ago.”

“Once I was here, I realized that I should take the chance to speak to you, Dita.”

Dita is the only person in the house who can lock her door. Her mother found one of those tarnished old brass skeleton keys and gave it to Dita when she was thirteen, telling her to turn the key every night. That was a very, very fucked-up period around here, which nobody ever speaks about, and which Dita does her best not to recall. Every now and then, especially when nightmares wake her, memories float back at her, shapes in the darkness and the sensation of weight upon her and the suffocating aroma of her father’s cologne, and the severe look from her dimwit mother when she handed Dita the key, as if it were all Dita’s fault. But her room as a result has always been Dita’s sanctuary. Once she turns the key, neither of her parents will do any more than timidly knock, which is why she loves to ball Cass-and several before him-right here. And also why Lidia’s presence is so wrong.

“Well, I was fucking standing outside for about six hours.”

“We need to talk privately. Like two adults. And I was afraid, Dita, if I asked you to do that, you would never agree.”

She is right about that, for sure. Dita has more need of a third tit than a heart-to-heart with Mrs. Gianis.

“So you broke into my bedroom instead? I think you better go.”

“I need to talk to you about Cassian.” In her silly floor-length muumuu, Mrs. Gianis has crept close to Dita’s bed. Her long fingers are webbed in front of her heart, in an aspect of prayer.

“Sorry, Lidia. That’s none of your business.” The Gianises are old-world and Dita knows calling Mrs. Gianis by her first name will seem impudent.

“I need to ask you, Dita, to stop seeing him.”

“Ditto. MYOB.”

“Dita-”

“Look, Lidia, right now I’m just fucking your son, so don’t worry about it.”

Mrs. Gianis slaps her. Hard. Dita’s cheek erupts in pain, almost as if it’s been skinned. The old woman has advanced on Dita so quickly she barely has had time to react, and in the process of drawing back, or maybe in recoil from the blow, she’s whacked the back of her skull against the mahogany headboard. In the meantime, Lidia has retreated at least twenty feet, obviously shocked at herself, and is suddenly crying, an act that seems as unlikely as if a stone statue were standing here shedding tears.

“Oh my God,” she keeps saying. Lidia had been doing her in-charge thing, her favorite routine, but now the old lady has lost it and grown frantic. She presses a hand to her forehead, like it will hold in her brain.

“I am pleading with you to act like an adult, Dita. To listen to me.”

Dita tenderly touches her cheek and tells Mrs. Gianis to fuck herself.

“You cannot marry Cass. Or, God forbid, have his child.”

“‘God forbid’? Is that this old crap? The Gianises against the Kronons? You and your feuds. My father always says your family are like hillbillies.”

“He never said that.”

“I’ll call him down here.”

“He would not speak about me or my family that way.”

“‘Just a bunch of sheep-fucking hillbillies.’ That’s a quote.”

“Dita, Cassian is your father’ s child.”

“Bullshit.”

Lidia reacts as intensely and unpredictably as before, throwing her hands wide in rage and striking a pane of the French door. The resonant thump of bone against the glass sets off a cascade of remarkable sounds, a shriek from Lidia, and a pop like a muffled gunshot as the window breaks, followed by the wind-chime tinkling of the shards showering onto the concrete balcony outside. Lidia is looking down in amazement as blood bubbles from the back of her wrist. That sight, which Dita hates, as well as what Lidia has said-that her father, Captain Wanderdick, fucked her, too-is dizzying to Dita. It seems to unravel the loose knot that holds the different parts of her together. She needs to scream and she does.

“Get out!” Her head is starting to hurt as much as her cheek. “Get the fuck out of here! Or I’m calling the police.”

Crazed and overwrought, Lidia moves one way, then the other, dashes to the bathroom and reappears with her arm wrapped in a towel. She starts to speak, but Dita grabs the phone beside her to dial the cops.

Crying fiercely, Mrs. Gianis struggles with the door. A little star of blood has already reached the outer layer of the towel swaddling Lidia’s forearm. Finally Dita tells her to turn the key.

Once Dita hears the front door slam, she dials the phone in her hand. It keeps ringing until she gets Cass’s answering machine, on which she leaves a message.

“You better get your ass over here. Your fucking mother just beat the crap out of me, and I’m totally going to call the police.” Dita is astonished to find herself crying, perhaps only over the indignity. One thing is for sure-she is done with Cass and his lunatic family. She touches the back of her head. The fucking bump is starting to swell.