Let Me Explain You

  I wish to go differently in death.

  Dear God: Make the life of Stavros Stavros Mavrakis over easy.

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  Litza parked at the 7-Eleven, as usual, so Father Panayiotis wouldn’t see her coming. She stamped out a cigarette and entered the church through the cafeteria doors. Without people in the room, her heels made the floor sound much harder than it was. The floor sounded like Stavroula. Nobody saw her cross into the cathedral, which was bright—chandeliers, the windows splintering into stained-glass scenes. Her favorite was a mountain cracked open so you could see the body of Jesus lying beneath it.

  Litza was doing everything her father was asking of her. But he was never going to know. He could die today, he could call up choking on his own bones, and she wouldn’t tell him.

  She crossed herself and popped a Perc. Out of respect, she looked away from the saints, all of them brushed with actual gold because everything precious, even God, is made from gold. She felt like God did listen to her, sometimes, that was why she came, but in the rushed way you listen when you have somebody else on the line, or how a customer representative listens when she knows she’s got many more nearly identical calls to take. Still; He listened. This was what she needed, all the saints staring down thinking only of her. She was not made of gold, but she was trying to be a better person. Couldn’t Stavroula see she was trying?

  Above, Mary held baby Jesus and blessed everything. Mary, the clueless bitch, lucky to have her baby.

  Having children was a little test that she had given to her body and to the universe, and they had both failed. Here was another thing stripped away, another thing God did not want her to have. It wasn’t her ex-husband that was the problem—it was her. She had gone to the doctor and he said, yes, unfortunately it looked like 628.2, yes, there could be trouble conceiving. It might be genetic. Stavroula, for all her condescension, she could be 628.2, too. Imagine—they might suffer from the same condition. Stavroula could be exactly like Litza, only not know it.

  Even when she had run away from all of them—Dina, too—and was getting into some serious trouble, Litza had believed she’d make it right by one day having a child of her own. The decades she had spent on her own. The shitholes she lived in, she eventually realized, were on the inside. She wanted to show them—her family, who never came looking for her—that she had survived despite them all, and not only survived but thrived—because look at this beautiful baby girl.

  Litza, you need God in your life.

  Litza rolled a candle between her fingers, not so much that she’d put out the flame. The flame seemed very sure of itself. It knew it was a source of pain as well as life.

  Once, when they were new to this country, she and Stavroula had sat in a Catholic church together. They were told to go and kiss the feet of Jesus and had come back laughing, because it was strange to be in a place where the appropriate gesture of faith was kissing a dead man’s plastic feet. That day, they accepted shame together. If only she had a daughter, she wouldn’t need a sister. Her sister, who could only guess at what Litza was. Her sister could kiss her Greek ass.

  She squeezed the top of the candle, where the wax was hottest. It burned until she did it enough times that the wax protected her. The buttery wax hardened into a new, clean skin that immediately began to crack. She brought her finger back to the flame and held it there. Her fingertip reddened but she did not take it away.

  What the letter really said was, you are a nothing, a loser, a woman, a no one. He used up his final words with words he had used all her life. And he was right, because she could not even do the one thing that all women could.

  Yes, she destroyed the bakery case. It was like shattering a crystal. No, an angel. She wreaked destruction on a Sunday, and no one saw her coming. She came the day after the honeymoon, when all should have been calm and her husband was napping with a pillow stuffed beneath his ear. Yes, her father warned, the fiancé is a loser, had turned into one the way that sometimes turns into always; he had lived through it with Dina and he didn’t want that kind of life for her: she could walk away from the wedding today and no big deal. Yes, he walked her down the aisle. Yes, she was a stunning bride, with baby’s breath in her hair and a waist tight as a knot. Yes, cousins came from Greece that she had never even met, all of them to celebrate her, and, yes, there was both a band and a DJ, and they threw dollar bills at her feet and her father’s as they danced; and, yes, her father rented a van and took the cousins to the Saratoga horse races to show them a good time, and yes, he paid for their hair to be styled on the morning of the reception. Yes, it was a wedding of abundance, an abundance she had never known. Yes, Stavroula gave a toast that promised a fruitful marriage borne of friendship. After only one week, Litza left her husband. Her father was right about the man she had chosen to spend her life with: he was not worthy of her.

  She took shards of the bakery case with her. She put them in her pockets, slicing two of her fingers.

  Yes, she came for destruction on a Sunday.

  She sat at the counter, she ordered black coffee. She felt the hot liquid go all the way down. How could it scald what was already scalded? But it did. She slid her hands down the cold metal bars of the stool—she felt like she was lifting the heavy bottom half of her own body—and she rammed the stool into the delicate cake case. Everything shattered. Her father was there instantly, making wh-wh-wh sounds—after all he had given her—and he was not even separating her from the stool like she expected. The icing stuck like Spackle to the floor, his arms. She dragged the stool out behind her. Yes, she could see it in her backseat, yes, she bled, yes, she knew all the while what she was allowing herself to become. She drove to Stavroula’s place of business, and nobody saw. She held the stool over her sister’s car for a long, long time—no one, no one, to save her from herself—she came down with all of her strength. Her sister’s window blowing out; the scream she had been holding in forever. Yes, she needed God in her life. Yes, she had problems. But who was the one who broke their promises?

  The cathedral was blazing sunlight. She was doing that with just her thoughts and feelings. Litza pressed a palm to her arm. It was wax. Her legs were wax. Her nails were not nails. Her fingers could break off one by one if she wanted to. Her heart, animal fat.

  Her legs lifted off the wooden pew. Her feet went first, her feet tipped toward the sky. Jesus was inviting her up to be his personal best, and all the icons could watch. These were not angel wings, she was more like a moth, easily torn and shredded. Really, she didn’t need wings to get where she was going, heat was making her rise. Mary’s eyes tracked her ascent. Mary’s eyes moved in the paint and said, I have, you want. Litza slapped at the domed ceiling. She went eye to eye with the saints, whose tongues did not sit like pudding in their mouths.

  She looked down. Her body was dripping, hitting the floor, and curling into rind. The candle dropped for a very long time, extinguished itself.

  She fell down to the blue carpet that loomed beneath like an ocean. She dropped headfirst. No one to grab her arm, no one to turn her upright. If her father had been in the sky with her, he would have watched her pierce the clouds, then the water. He would have kept going. But he was not even there to do that.

  Litza ran down the aisle. Her heels sank into the carpet, but she got to the doors before anyone saw her. She hit the weak sunshine, still warm but shaking, and lit a cigarette.

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  Marina stood at the chopping block in the black slippers Stavroula had always known her to wear. The wisps of hair at her neck were matted with sweat. The three assistants around her worked hard to keep up. She was cutting carrots. The carrots were huge, the size of a child’s forearms. Marina did not do wimpy carrots. Stavroula dropped the brown bag at her elbow.

  “More medicine already? Pretty soon I will be eating medicine breakfast, noon, and with coffee.” But she smiled when she looked into the bag. Inside were two vials
, plus a cupcake, which was forbidden by Marina’s doctor.

  Stavroula accepted the knife from Marina and remembered that a knife was not a knife when it was also a hand—one of the very first lessons that Marina taught her. She ran the blade against the carrot. Orange disks whirled onto the board. She felt the tension in her body release whenever the blade sank. These clusters of cells would be broken down so that other cells could live. One of Marina’s 107 lessons.

  “You’re busy,” Stavroula said. She hoped it did not come out a question.

  Marina ran her hands along a line of peppers, removing seeds from their sockets. “You wait. Marina is going to take her own little nervous break, then we will see where Stavros disappears to.”

  What did Stavroula expect? They weren’t ones to talk family problems, so. When Mom Mom died, Marina gave fifteen-year-old Stavroula a new recipe to try and a honey bun; the next week, Stavroula returned with a recipe of her own. That’s how Marina coached her to deal with loss, absence. There was something to it, of course. And it was, in part, why Stavroula loved Marina like no one else. The more Stavroula chopped, the more it began to feel like her father was fine. She made a pile of the orange carrots and swept the greens off the board. It was nice, this kind of grunt job—something she didn’t do that often anymore. She wiped her knife on a clean towel, one that had no smell. Habit.

  Then, uncharacteristically, Marina came out with, “You are worried about your father?”

  Stavroula shook her head. Kept cutting. Could cut forever.

  “You are troubled by something?”

  “Everything’s good.”

  Marina went back to the peppers. But she gave some errands to the assistant closest to her, so they could be alone at their station.

  “Koukla, have I ever told you the story of the milk jug?” Marina asked. “A story of my childhood.”

  “You had a childhood?”

  Marina smirked.

  Stavroula once heard Marina say of Greece, “For a woman, it’s nothing except a country full of dirty plates. That’s why I got out before they could marry me off.” She heard Marina tell of the pappas’s near-perfect run: “Fifteen sons and then a Marina—fat little girl, always riling up the chained skylos.” And she knew how fat Marina, spring after spring, snuck into the neighbor’s hut to hold the baby rabbits, even though they hadn’t yet latched to the mother; as a result, the neighbor flung the babies onto the roof, where they were food for birds. Did this deter Marina from touching the baby rabbits? It did not. This was all that Stavroula knew of Marina’s childhood. Marina’s stories rarely had anything to do with Marina.

  “When Marina was three or four, she dropped a jug. A big glass milk jug. The bottom cracked, all the milk poured out. Her father, the beloved pappas, was not pleased because there was not very much milk in the village, the village goats were sick with a vengeful bug. It had taken days just for this little bit of milk sap, which had taken the pappas lots of friendly talks with herders. The pappas was angry. So what does Marina do?”

  Stavroula’s eyes moved to Marina’s chin, which was covered in soft hairs. “What does Marina do?”

  “I pick up the jug, which is perfectly perfect except for the hole at the bottom. I say, ‘No worries, it’s only broken at the bottom.’ ” Marina laughed now, just as little Marina must have made them laugh then, even during a national depression.

  Stavroula knew where this was going. “What’s the lesson?” Number 108.

  “The lesson? No lesson. Except in this scenario, you, koukla, are holding the milk jug. You walk around wanting to believe that you are whole when actually you are pieces.”

  Stavroula said, “I’m not the broken one.” Litza was broken. Her father, with his letter and demands, was broken. Stavroula knew what broken looked like, because that was everyone around her.

  Marina dried her hands on Stavroula’s clean towel, and pepper seeds clung to the cloth. “I think maybe I have spent a lot of time teaching you how to be strong and not enough how to be open.”

  Stavroula picked up the knife again. She went slowly through the nearest carrot, cutting thin slices. They both knew there was nothing soft about Marina. How can you teach what you don’t know? Besides, Stavroula wasn’t interested in vulnerability. Vulnerable couldn’t command a kitchen. Vulnerable was always the quietest voice in a room. Or, at least, the first one silenced.

  Marina swept Stavroula’s carrots into a pot using her bare arm. After some time she said, her back to Stavroula, “Your friend stop by today.”

  “What friend?”

  “Your friend, a woman. I went out myself to meet her.” Marina turned, holding a bowl, wiping it slowly, slowly with the towel at her waist. “She slips off her shoes while she eats. This is your friend?”

  “We work together.” Stavroula’s heart was pounding, making her feel very young. The chopping helped, she stayed with the chopping. She was not a child, she was a chef. Even in Marina’s kitchen. She told herself so. “How long did she stay?”

  “Not long.” Marina put the bowl down. Marina standing there, not cooking, not moving, which did not happen in this kitchen. The assistants toiled around them, pretending to hear nothing. Marina took a folded yellow paper from her pocket.

  When Stavroula was a teenager, Marina refused to serve a gay couple, saying, I know what goes in a mouth like that, and it’s not my food. About two lesbians who often came to the diner she said, It must all be mush, like cake with no egg. She wouldn’t have cooked for these people if it weren’t for Stavros making her.

  Stavroula said, “She asked about Dad?”

  “What else? Your friend expressed concern, and I tell her it is too early to worry.” Pause. “So she is not worried about him. Instead, she worries about you.”

  The knife, that was the thing Stavroula had to hold on to. Her eyes down on the carrots. “What did she say?”

  Marina unfolded the yellow paper. Flicks of water dampened the page.

  Once, Stavroula summoned enough courage to ask Marina why she had a problem with these people. What was she afraid of? Not afraid, Stavroula. Only, it makes me uncomfortable.

  Marina, seeing Stavroula’s face, made a sound like chick-chick. She waved her hand, and the kitchen emptied. All the orders that had to be filled, and it was just them. And the July menu. Marina patted the yellow paper twice as if it were a misbehaving child. “Your friend has decided to leave this for you because she thinks you aren’t going back to work for a long time.”

  July had annotated the menu, in light pencil, with notes like They really are the best, and If you ever tell anyone about the whole chicken, I’ll tell them about sausage. But also, These spices sound right, but they’re not—they miss entirely. And, I lied when I said I liked this dish. It looked like, in the course of only a few days, July had tried everything.

  Marina said, “Where did you come from, with this menu?”

  That was exactly what she said when Stavroula cut her hair—Where did you come from, with this hair?

  Stavroula kept chopping the carrots. The carrots would never run out. But her eyes were full of tears, her vision was orange threaded with silver. She held on to the tears, would not let them fall. She was trying to conceal herself from Marina, and she was trying to make herself known. She was fifteen all over again, shaking and hoping no one and everyone could tell. Marina, the person Stavroula had admired since she was a little girl, Marina, the person she loved most. The reason she has hidden all this time. There wasn’t a word in her father’s letter that Marina agreed with, except for what it had to say about Stavroula.

  All Stavroula needed to say: This is who I am, thea. If I am who I am on the outside, I am who I am on the inside. But she couldn’t. Thirty-one years old, and this was her answer:

  A slip of the knife.

  Blood on her finger, dribbling over the other fingers and onto the cutting board. Blood on the carrots. Who knew how many, they’d all have to be thrown out. That was Stavroula’s first t
hought. The second was, You did this, but then whatever insistence there was in Marina’s face faded. She was stricken, panicked. She pulled the towel from her waist and thrust it onto Stavroula’s hand. She was clumsy, wrapping it around the injury.

  Stavroula said, “I got it, I got it.”

  Marina fiddled with a first aid kit. Doubtful she had ever opened one before. Shocking that she knew where it was stored. “You keep that tight.”

  Stavroula wiped her face on the towel wrapped around her hand. It smelled like garlic, like her birthdays with Marina. Inside, the finger pulsed. There must be a lot of blood coming out. She had seen the slit the knife made, like a cat eye, an almond.

  Marina brought Stavroula to the sink, and they ran water over the finger. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said. Funny, the way Marina was fussing. Stavroula had never seen anything like it.

  “You feel like it’s coming off, the finger?”

  Stavroula laughed through the heavy crying. “No, it’s not coming off.”

  They figured out a bandage together. Not stitches, after all. Stavroula wound a piece of medical tape tightly around the gauze. Her finger felt safe hugged in like that, but blood was soaking through. She’d need to change it soon.

  “Are you crying because your sister is always angry and your father selfish, or do we blame the carrots?” She said, “Or do we blame the broken jug. Or do we blame Marina?”

  Stavroula said, “Carrots.” She met Marina’s gaze for the first time in minutes. Marina’s eyes, the slick exposed skin of onion. All this time, she realized, Marina had been rubbing her arm, massaging it as if to make sure the blood knew where it belonged.

  Stavroula could not take it, losing the one person whose love had felt as everlasting as bread. There was no reason to fear her father’s letter, except this.