The Secret Sister by Fotini Tsalikoglou, Mary Kritoeff Page A

And that’s what I did, Jonathan, and twelve years later the new Frosso was born, my daughter. Your mama, Jonathan, your beautiful, accursed mama, your dead mama, Jonathan. One day, when she had become a young girl, she put on a miniskirt that barely covered her underwear, the whole house shone with youth and innocence, she put on her first pair of tights, black silk, that she’d bought from the Saks boutique, and a blouse which was open at the chest, it was March and spring was awakening in the Big Apple, your mother was thirteen years old and her chest had begun to awaken and not fit into her old clothes, and I saw Menelaos, your grandpa, in the dining room, I saw the gleam in his eye as he stood before his daughter so resplendent, ‘Frosso,’ he said, and as God, as the Devil’s my witness, as either of the two is my witness, or both of them in one, I caught in the air that the name ‘Frosso’ didn’t refer to his daughter, but to his dead first wife, my sister, and that his voice was filled with lust and sexual yearning, Jonathan, a father for his daughter, Jonathan, and we’ll all burn together, Jonathan, it was the same voice that I had heard twenty-six years earlier on Ergasias Street in New Ionia, telling my sister: ‘Frosso, I’m going to make you my wife.’ He felt it too and it upset him no end, and from then on he began to work late more and more and to stay at home less and less. He was growing old fast, I knew I wouldn’t have him for much longer. And your mother, who knew nothing, it was as if she knew everything. When we went to Athens, she didn’t even want to hear about coming with us. ‘I’ll stay here.’ She was the same age Amalia is now. When we came back, it was as if years had gone by, even though we’d only been away barely a month. You had to be told all these things.”
    â€œLet’s go home, Grandma, the sun’s gone down, let’s go home.”
    â€œ
My sweet Jonathan!
”
    It was you I was thinking of, Amalia, the whole time Grandma was talking, I kept thinking how you must never find out.
    â€œ
How naïve can you be, Jonathan? Did it never occur to you that there were no secrets? We all knew. We all pretended not to know what we knew.”
    But I . . . Amalia, I . . . I . . .
    â€œ
You?
”
    I love you, Amalia.
    â€œ
You’re attracted to death, why don’t you relax in your seat, you still have a few more hours of traveling ahead of you, look at how calmly your fellow passengers are enjoying their flight, there, there now, just shut out my memory.
”
    Everything was changing, Amalia. Grandpa was no longer with us. We were growing up, we graduated high school, you were studying music at college and I was trying to find myself, making plans I never went through with. At home, Bellino had given his place to Demosthenes, whom you had found as a newborn one day near the river. Unlike Bellino, he would sit at your feet for hours, purring. The white couch was worn; dust and damp covered the old stains. The smell of alcohol had faded. Mother hadn’t stopped drinking, she’d just switched from whiskey to vodka.
    One day, Grandma moved out.
She
did it: Lale Andersen. Without asking us, without thinking it over, she just decided that Grandma wouldn’t be living with us anymore. Her new address was the Serenity nursing home in Upper Manhattan.
    â€œThey’ll take better care of her there,” she told us.
    Anthoula also left. We didn’t need her anymore, she said, and sent her off to some relatives of hers in Astoria. She didn’t care what we thought. One evening, just like that, without warning, when we came home, Grandma was gone.
    â€œStarting today, your grandma doesn’t live here anymore,” she announced.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I asked.
    You went straight to the piano and began to play.
    â€œ
I couldn’t bear to listen,