Work Text:
1.
Tanya can’t stop giggling. Every time she muffles her highest shrieks in Donna’s armpit, Rosie rolls up on an elbow, pops the sunglasses down over her nose and says, “Hello… Tanya. It’s me. Ignacio,” in her deepest voice, and Donna screams with laughter, doubling her face into Tanya’s stomach, kicking her feet until a shoe flies off and hits the thin wall and someone from next door yells, “Keep it down, would you?!” and Donna yells back “We’re the Dynamos, you asshole!” and Tanya, inhaling gulps of air and gesturing helplessly with both hands, manages to squeak, “WE are the talent in this establishment!”—at which Rosie snorts, throws her head back, and with a yelp, rolls off the bed in a scramble of blanket-snatching that takes them all down with her.
2.
Donna’s collarbone aches from the persistent weight of Tanya’s chin, and her arm is going numb in tingles below the elbow, but she squeezes it hard around Tanya’s hunched, bony spine, making useless shushing noises. Now and then she turns her head a little, pressing a kiss into Tanya’s hair. They can hear Rosie let herself in, the thump of her bag on the floor of the flat’s expansive, polished hallway.
With the shortest reach of any of them—the arms she used to flop around in the extra fabric of Donna’s flared sleeves until she’d revved up enough static to halo Tanya’s hair before a gig, Tanya batting at her and aerosoling madly, Rosie whooping and shedding sequins—she enfolds them both. Pressing her face into Tanya’s dripping one, nose to wet nose, she says, “He was only a first husband.”
Tanya sniffs out a soggy “hah!” and pulls Rosie down into the familiar, cumbersome mess of their six knees and six hip bones and six smooshed elbows. “I hope you picked up that mascara I wanted on your way over,” she says, closing her eyes. Six minutes later she’s asleep.
3.
It’s early: the sky’s just lightening, indigo to grey. Donna’s sitting at the edge of the tiny room’s only bed, practically in the windowsill. Rosie blinks awake under a curtain of Tanya’s hair, smacks wisps of it out of her mouth. Puts out a hand to wrap Donna’s ankle.
“Our worrier,” Rosie teases her, barely awake.
“I can’t believe I’m the one ending this,” Donna whispers, straining at the arms she’s wrapped around her own knees. Her face works for several minutes at something she can’t say. She presses her chest into her thighs, her face into the palms of her hands. When she runs her fingers hard through her hair her whole chest tilts up in an exasperated inhalation and her shirt’s thin cotton gathers above her breasts, pools there when she squares her shoulders again, pulling the fabric clear of her waist.
Rosie shifts awkwardly onto one hip and elbow, Tanya’s sleeping weight rolling into her back on the soft mattress. Gently, she loosens her fingers from Donna’s ankle and slides her palm across her friend’s bare waist. All tension, Donna freezes a second, like a hiccup, before her stomach finally softens, lifting and catching and then letting go, warm and soft with its feather-down hairs. “I’m not mad at you,” Rosie says. “I’ll come visit you, after my cooking class.” Donna shakes her head sharply, mutters something, but lets the sleepy anchor of Rosie’s arm pull her back onto the bed; spoons against her and presses her palm hard against the back of Rosie’s hand; pushes their two hands up between her ribs until they press against her sternum. Rosie’s breath, suddenly shallow, hitches as the inside of her wrist slides over Donna’s nipple and Donna arches, the tiniest ripple, against her.
That’s when Tanya mutters, “Gerroff my hair,” rolls over and, all limbs, stretches, pushing Rosie flat into Donna’s back. With some highly toned Tanya instinct, she’s barely through a vocal yawn before her voice drops into something low and amused and with an “Oh, good morning, then,” she’s draping herself flush along Rosie, teasing nails already at her thigh.
Rosie lets out an overwhelmed, high-pitched sound and Donna actually chuckles. “Tanya,” she calls over her shoulder, “are you mad at me?”
“Darling,” drawls their mezzo, “how can I feel bluuue, when somewhere in this crowd there’s you?”
4.
Donna sleeps every night like she’s in a fight with something. The villa smells of fresh paint, gleams in every ounce of light like something pearly and alive just lifted from the sea, but Donna barely owns three sticks of furniture and the stone floor is cold once the sun goes down. Rosie and Tanya, seeing the clamp of Donna’s jaw, the wild sunburst in her eyes that first morning as she sketches out a dolphin mosaic she’ll put in the courtyard once the rubble from digging the goat shed into the cliff wall has been cleared, meet each other’s eyes. That’s that, then.
Rosie uses her terrible Greek to get back to the mainland for groceries and to phone her boss and Tanya’s second husband’s answering machine. Tanya, with teeth-gritting determination, pushes Donna down for nap after nap, holds to her chest this squirming, screaming child creature, all sweaty fluff of blonde curls, furrowed forehead, Donna’s eyes in a tiny, angry face. Rosie’s better with Sophie: tells her singsong stories; strokes her back; hums to her, draws wondering looks by holding her glasses to the sun so that the light winks off the gold bits at the temples. But it’s Tanya who, while Rosie snores gently, face planted in the sleeve of the bathrobe she fell asleep in, one leg dangling off the bed, elbows Donna back into her pillow, harrumphs monosyllables at her, sits on her til she stays put, and walks Sophie over the terraces half the night. Later, Tanya’s memory of that spring is blurry: moonlight on twinkling water; Sophie’s baby hand against her neck, potato-sack weight straining her biceps while she talks and talks about the Dynamos. Early songs and regrettable costume choices, but mostly the business end—how she’d kept the books and rented the van, replaced the drum machine, super glued pair after pair of platform boots when the heels went out.
In the mornings Tanya rolls into the bed as Donna’s bouncing out of it, all sweaty curls and fists like her kid, wedging her bare feet into torn canvas shoes, hot black coffee in one hand and a trowel in the other, paint already on her forehead or caught, since yesterday, in the sun-bleached hair on her forearms. Passing through the room on a dusty afternoon with a chair under one arm, she squeezes Tanya’s foot, presses her thumb for a moment into the sore muscles under the arch. Tanya flutters her toes and hums something. Donna tweaks her heel and goes out.
5.
“I just—I hate it, you know, I love Sophie, she’s my love, I hate fighting with her. I just don’t understand her. I didn’t want a wedding, at her age. I didn’t want a hen party. Where does my kid get that?”
Rosie’s kneeling so she can pour out the last of the bottle over the glasses on the bedside table, tilting and squinting at them as the mattress lists. Tanya claps an arm over Rosie’s calves to steady her, then lifts the champagne deftly to safer hands, swapping a full glass in for Donna’s drained one. “I wanted all of those things,” she declares. “Three times. And I’d take them again!”
Donna smacks Tanya’s arm. “You’re the bad influence! You’re a terrible aunt. But you never took them so—“ she furrows her whole face—“seriously! … did you?” Suddenly wide-eyed, she smooshes a badly-aimed palm against Tanya’s cheek. “Did you? I would’ve come to the last one, but he—” she cackles a laugh, subdues it, and cackles it out again. “Honestly, Tanya, he sounded terrible.”
Tanya tosses her hair, leaving a little scarlet lipstick on Donna’s palm. “He was.”
Rosie’s nodding carefully, burrowing back into Donna’s bright pillows, holding her glass with both hands. “I met him once. Not worth our girl.” She tucks her toes under Donna’s leg. “I suppose it isn’t sporting to lay odds on the length of my goddaughter’s marriage the night before the wedding, though.”
Donna grins around a long sip. “I’m afraid the house can’t put up the funds.” Suddenly she’s sitting up, pivoting, swatting her friends’ legs. “Let’s go up on the roof!”
“And put on my shoes again?” Tanya flattens herself into the blankets in protest.
Donna flops next to her. “Fine. But Rosie, turn that lamp off. You’ll see the stars through the window, at least.”
She props her face on Tanya’s absurdly streamlined calf, balancing her glass with elaborate concentration, then forgetting and letting it tilt as the fine blue light, those clusters of high-wattage summer stars, re-outline and re-shade their contours, softening their faces and voices and forms into shadows that meld with the bed’s. “I’m glad you’re both here,” she says to the blue. Bits of the shadow reach out to pat at her, to hold her hand. Three chests rise and fall in the dark, the synchronous breathing of women who have sung together for nearly thirty years.