The Matchmakers of Oakleigh

Chapter 1: I. Name Day

The Papadakis family had eighty-seven members in its group chat, four competing theories about how to roast a lamb, and exactly one rule that everybody followed: nobody leaves Yiayia's name day lunch without being fed, interrogated, and told that they were too thin. It was the eighth of June in Oakleigh, the Greek heart of Melbourne, and the back garden of the old weatherboard house on Hanover Street had been transformed for the occasion. Three long trestle tables ran down the lawn under a canopy of lemon trees. There were fifty-one people, six kinds of salad, a lamb on a spit that had been turning since dawn, and a very small, very upright woman in black at the head of the table, ninety-one years old, who ruled the proceedings with a wooden spoon. Eleni Papadakis, twenty-nine, a wedding photographer who photographed other people's happiness for a living and was therefore considered by her family to be tragically wasting her own, sat at the far end of the third table with a glass of wine and the fixed smile of a woman waiting for the guillotine. Across the table sat her cousin Nikos. He was thirty-one, a sports physiotherapist, six foot two, a gentle, lanky man with a perpetually startled expression and the beginnings of a bald patch he refused to acknowledge. He was wearing the same smile. They had been conducting a silent conversation for twenty minutes, in the secret language of cousins who had grown up in the same cramped backyard, and it went, roughly: It's going to happen. I know. It's going to happen today. I know. It happened at four o'clock, during the baklava. "I have an announcement," said Theia Voula, rising to her feet with a wine glass in one hand and a gleam in her eye that had not been seen since the Papadakis wedding of 1998. She was Eleni's mother. She was fifty-eight, formidable, and built along the lines of a very small battleship. "I have found," she said, "a lovely boy." Eleni closed her eyes. "His name is Panagiotis. He is an accountant. His mother is from Kalamata. He is thirty-three, with his own apartment, and he does not smoke." Voula beamed at her daughter. "He is coming for coffee on Thursday." "Mama," said Eleni, through her teeth, "I'm not..." "I," said a second, ringing voice from the opposite end of the table, "have also found someone." Eleni's eyes snapped open. Across the lemon-scented lawn, Theia Fotini was getting slowly to her feet. She was Nikos's mother, fifty-seven, an elegant, silver-haired, dangerous woman with a silk scarf and an expression of the most serene malice. The two women had been sisters-in-law for thirty-five years. They had been rivals for thirty-four of them. "A girl," said Fotini, with great dignity. "Christina. A dental hygienist. From Brighton. Her father owns four dry cleaners. She speaks fluent Greek." A pause. A glance, across the lawn, at Voula. "She is very pretty." The whole lawn had gone quiet. Fifty people had stopped chewing. And at the head of the table, in her wooden chair, Yiayia Kalliope Papadakis tapped her spoon, once, on the edge of her glass. "Sit," she said, in Greek. "Both of you. It is my name day. Let the children eat." The two mothers sat. Nobody breathed. And Eleni, for the first time in ten minutes, let her eyes drift down the table, past the platters of lamb and the bowls of tzatziki and the glasses of Retsina, to the two empty places at the very end, where two late arrivals, invited by Yiayia herself, were just now slipping in under the lemon trees with their arms full of flowers. She looked, and her heart did something she did not approve of. The first was a lean, easy, sunburned man in a faded blue T-shirt, with black hair that stuck up at the back and a face that creased into a wide, lopsided grin when somebody handed him a plate. Sam Tran, thirty-one, an electrician, who had been her cousin's best friend since the age of eleven, and who had, for twenty years, been a fixture at every Papadakis family event, like a piece of well-loved furniture. He was laughing at something. He had a laugh that started in his chest and rolled out slowly, like a wave. The second, beside him, was a small, dark-eyed woman in a yellow sundress, with a mass of curls tied up in a scarf and a bunch of white lilies in her arms. Yasmin Karam, thirty, a midwife, Eleni's best friend since the first week of university, a fiercely kind, dryly funny, tireless person who had once delivered a baby in the back of a taxi and still described it as "a bit of a Tuesday." Across the lawn, Eleni saw her cousin Nikos, who had also turned his head, with a forkful of baklava halfway to his mouth, and was staring, with an expression of dawning, helpless, stricken wonder, at Yasmin. She looked back at Sam. And Sam, at that moment, glanced up, and saw her looking, and gave her a small, shy, crooked wave. Oh, no, thought Eleni.