The New Yorker Fi by Doris Lessing July 7, 1997
「Look at him,」 says Helen. 「I don』t say anything, and I go on looking.」
「What does he do then?」 asks Mary, gazing at Helen as she so often does, as if Helen had the secret of something or other.
「Then he gives in,」 says Helen, and laughs. The laugh, as always, takes Mary captive, and this time it seems to reverberate right through her, and Heleo be remembering something delicious, for she sits smiling.
Helen is the Greek wife of Tom, who is English. He saw her in a taverna in Naxos, where she was waiting on him and oher fn tourists as if she were doing them a favor, and he fell in love and persuaded her to return to England with him. irely fn ground to her, because she has relatives in the large Greek and Cypriot unity in Camden Town, and she visited them one summer. Mary is the English wife of Demetrios, and she was with a girlfriend on holiday in ándros when the handsome waiter in the café overlooking the sea fell in love with her. He, too, has relatives in London. Now he is a waiter in a Greek restaurant called the Argonauts; aends to have his owaurant soon. He will call it Dmitri』s, because Dmitri is what Mary calls him. Meanwhile they live in two rooms over the grocery owned by Helen』s Tom.
The two women spend ms together, gossiping or shopping, but now Helen has a baby and they often go to Primrose Hill and sit on a bench with the pram pushed into some shade. There are other wives, Greek and Cypriot, and some ms it is quite a little female unity, but Helen and Mary are reized as special friends. Some evenings the two couples make a foursome in one of the pubs, cafés, or restaurants, and on these evenings Mary often gratulates herself that she made all the right choices that brought her away from b Croydon, to be here among people who laugh easily, or start singing, and who might end an evening with impromptu dang, even oables. She might not have goo Greece that summer, might have said no to Demetrios when her parents put pressure on.
On this day Mary goes home excited aless and sits in front of her looking glass and examines herself. She oftehis. She is plump, pretty, with ruddy cheeks, black curls, and a lot of well-placed dimples, and Dmitri calls her his little blackberry. But she has gray eyes, and he says that if it weren』t for those cool English eyes he could believe she has Greek blood. His black eyes easily smolder, or burn, or reproach. Mary leans her forearms among the little bottles of st, the lipsticks, the eye paint, and tries out expressions. She puts a long unsmiling unblinking stare on her fad frightens herself with it. She shuts her eyes, so as to see that stare on Helen』s face, but fails, because Helen only smiles. Mary admires Helen. That is putting it mildly. Because of something Dmitri said, Mary actually went to the library and found a book called 「Greek Myths for Children,」 and there she read that a Helen ohousands of years ago, was a beauty, aarted a war because of her. In Greece parents called their little girls Helen, as if the name were just Betty or Joan. Helen told Mary that Mary was the Mother of God, but Mary said she wasn』t really intion.
And why should Mary want to try out Helen』s silent staring orios? That is the trouble. Mary is full of an unfortable dissatisfa with life and with herself and this is like an accusation against her husband. She does wonder why she feels like this but has decided that she i