As I walk into class, it occurs to me how yoga studios are everywhere in California. You can’t walk into a Target without seeing a literal shrine to stretchy pants. That’s just the culture.
I’m back middle, and I put my water bottle at least a foot away from my mat on one side and my folded extra towel at least a foot away on my other side.
If I don’t do this, people encroach on my space and I can smell them the minute the room starts to heat up.
Class starts, and after a few minutes that involve some breathing exercises and a few almost-face-plants, I glance up into the mirror to see that, thanks to Annabelle’s patient guidance, I am standing like everyone else. Then I notice the sweat that has pooled across the front of my sweatpants and down my legs and realize that I look like I’ve pissed myself.
Awesome.
Guess that’s why everyone is wearing tight black pants.
I close my eyes and then squint through them to look around.
I am now the only guy in this class. Apparently, the others were visiting yogis looking for a place to practice (as you do). Hence the presence of the guy balancing on his dick (not really) and the other equally impressive tall guy with muscles as big as my face.
After a while, we’re invited to practice our favorite poses or work on something we’re trying to master.
I don’t have a favorite pose, and I’m trying to master everything. Actually, anything.
So I end up choosing child’s pose but lay my cheek on my towel and turn my head to watch everyone else.
There’s a blond white girl to my right named Stephanie doing a perfect handstand, and two black girls, twins a little older than me, directly in front of me taking turns spotting each other as they complete some complicated pose that I will never be able to do. From eavesdropping on their conversation, I know that the one with the braids is Nicole and the one wearing the army-green tank top is Tara. They said on the first day of class that they wanted to open a yoga studio together. A Latina girl named Damaris usually sits in the center of her mat with earbuds in before every class. Iris lies on her back, staring up at the ceiling, taking deep breaths, and three girls—Tiffany, Bri, and Catherine—are the only people in the room interrupting the silence. Then there’s an old white lady named Carol, who looks like her body might float off the ground at any moment. Like Yoda. She just has that look of someone who knows what they’re doing. So maybe this teacher training is something she’s doing for fun. Then Annabelle. Then me. And that’s it.
Even with my one-foot buffer on each side, the flying sweat is incredible. And I never expected that to be a thing. I never expected to want space because I was afraid of other people’s sweat landing on my face. Because if anyone moves too exuberantly, it happens, and you get used to it, but it’s not any less gross.
The room is an actual swamp, and 100 degrees is probably exactly what hell is like. But every so often I hear the door open down the hall and a crowd of guys running to the drinking fountains like a heard of wildebeests, and I know I made the right choice, even though my current situation is definitely an example of my bad luck.
Yia Yia was always worried about bad luck. More specifically, my bad luck.
She read my cards a lot, which for some reason really irritated my dad, so she did it when he was out of the house.
And it wasn’t like Harry Potter, where she saw the Grim and predicted my death or anything. But whatever the cards turned up didn’t please her. She’d look at them, then look at me like I wasn’t even trying to attract good luck. I never got the specifics of her findings, but I could tell that whatever she’d discovered was not ideal. She always wanted to read my cards and get glimpses into my future, but I think she also had this weird belief that no one should know too much about their own future.
The vague predictions she did give were always the same.
She saw something in front of me. Some vague, gigantic, unrecognizable shape, and the cards always pointed to change. Something she thought would alter the course of my life.
So it became an obsession with her. Trying to see what was ahead so she could protect me from it.
She was trying to spare me from any more pain. But now I’ve lost her too.
And I wondered what she’d say to me right now if I told her what was going on with Evey.
Probably that I should have listened to her and stayed away from the Paros family.
But even with Yia Yia’s dire warning hanging over my head, there would have been no way for me to avoid the Paros family completely. Evey goes to my school. Her parents are the biggest contributors to the church. Maria Paros, Evey’s mom, is on every Greek scholarship committee the Hellenic Association has. Therefore, when Yia Yia said avoid them, what she meant was avoid them as much as possible.
Because Stavros screwed us all.
So there’s that.
And I’m not sure how much of this I believe. Curses are literally words that a person says to another person. If we were so concerned about that, we might swear less in traffic. If words in general held any power at all, then my mom would still be alive. And my Yia Yia would still be alive because she would have stopped smoking when I asked her to.
But you need more than words to protect people. At least, Yia Yia thought so.
She used to tuck matis into my clothes when I was little. My first worry beads were a chain of tiny Greek eyeballs. Which sounds totally grotesque here but is totally normal in Greece. And even though my Yia Yia was very much a churchgoing woman, she still believed in curses and luck and the unbelievable power of old Greek women.
Strictly speaking, matis weren’t a Greek Orthodox thing originally. They’re all over, actually, and really popular in the Mediterranean and West Asia. And like I said, they’ve been co-opted, and there’s no denying that they have a distinct pagan feel. Still, I’ve never actually been into a Greek house that didn’t have a big blue eye hanging somewhere.
We should just be praying for protection, right? Not hanging up an eyeball to ward off bad luck. There’s a prayer called the xematiasma that Yia Yia used to do, but it’s really long, so first she’d have to check and see if it was necessary.
She’d fill a cup with a little bit of water and another bowl with a little bit of oil and she’d say, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—for Leonidas.” And then she’d make the sign of the cross over the water three times. Then she’d say, “Jesus Christ arise and scatter all evil work,” and she’d pour one drop of the olive oil into the water. She’d repeat this two more times. The way it’s supposed to work is that if the drops of oil stick together into one big blob, it means the person you’re trying to pray for has the evil eye. If the oil remains in the water as three separate drops, then they’re okay.