Sometimes I would allow him to leave in one piece, imagining his joining the army or marrying his girlfriend and moving someplace warm and sunny, like Peru or Ethiopia. The important thing was that he leave this room and never come back. I’d get rid of him and then move on to the next person, and the one after that, until it was just me, rocking and jerking in private.
Two months into the semester, my roommate broke up with his girlfriend. “And I’m going to spend every day and night sitting right here in this room until I figure out where I went wrong.” He dabbed his moist eyes with the sleeve of his flannel shirt. “You and me, little buddy. It’s just you and me and Jethro Tull from here on out. Say, what’s with your head? The old tumor acting up again?”
“College is the best thing that can ever happen to you,” my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking. I’m unsure of the scientific aspects, but for some reason, my nervous habits faded about the same time I took up with cigarettes. Maybe it was coincidental or perhaps the tics retreated in the face of an adversary that, despite its health risks, is much more socially acceptable than crying out in tiny voices. Were I not smoking, I’d probably be on some sort of medication that would cost the same amount of money but deny me the accoutrements: the lighters I can thoughtlessly open and close, the ashtrays that provide me with a legitimate reason to leave my chair, and the cigarettes that calm me down while giving me something to do with my hands and mouth. It’s as if I had been born to smoke, and until I realized it, my limbs were left to search for some alternative. Everything’s fine as long as I know there’s a cigarette in my immediate future. The people who ask me not to smoke in their cars have no idea what they’re in for.
“Remember when you used to roll your eyes?” my sisters ask. “Remember the time you shook your head so hard, your glasses fell into the barbeque pit?”
At their mention I sometimes attempt to revisit my former tics and habits. Returning to my apartment late at night, I’ll dare myself to press my nose against the doorknob or roll my eyes to achieve that once-satisfying ache. Maybe I’ll start counting the napkins sandwiched in their plastic holder, but the exercise lacks its old urgency and I soon lose interest. I would no sooner rock in bed than play “Up, Up, and Away” sixty times straight on my record player. I could easily listen to something else an equal number of times while seated in a rocking chair, but the earlier, bedridden method fails to comfort me, as I’ve forgotten the code, the twitching trick needed to decipher the lyrics to that particular song. I remember only that at one time the story involved the citizens of Raleigh, North Carolina, being herded into a test balloon of my own design and making. It was rigged to explode once it reached the city limits, but the passengers were unaware of that fact. The sun shone on their faces as they lifted their heads toward the bright blue sky, giddy with excitement.
“Beautiful balloon!” they all said, gripping the handrails and climbing the staircase to their fiery destiny. “Wouldn’t you like to ride?”
“Sorry, folks,” I’d say, pressing my nose against the surface of my ticket booth. “But I’ve got other duties.”
get your ya-ya’s out!
It was for many years my family’s habit to drive from North Carolina to western New York State to visit the relatives we had left behind. After spending ten days with my mother’s family in Binghamton, we would drive the half hour to Cortland and spend an afternoon with my father’s mother, the woman we adressed as Ya Ya.
Ya Ya owned a newsstand/candy store, a long narrow room fitted with magazine racks and the high, wall-mounted chairs the townspeople occupied while receiving their shoe-shines. She lived above the store in the apartment my father had grown up in.
“A shithole,” my mother said, and even at the age of seven, I thought, Yes, she’s right. This is a shithole.
My mother’s parents also lived in an apartment, but theirs had been arranged with an eye toward comfort, complete with a bathroom door and two television sets. I spent my time at Ya Ya’s wondering what this place might have been before someone got the cruel idea to rent it out as an apartment. The dark, stifling hallway had been miscast in the role of a kitchen, and the bathroom looked suspiciously like a closet. Clothespinned bedspreads separated the bedroom from the living room, where the dining table was tightly wedged between the sofa and refrigerator. Surely, there were other places to live, perhaps a tent or maybe an abandoned muffler shop, someplace, anyplace, cheerier than this.
I recall one visit when she carried on about her recently deceased pet, a common goldfish she kept in a murky jar up on the apartment’s only window ledge. Ya Ya had returned from work and, finding the jar empty, decided that the fish had consciously thrown itself out the window.
“He no happy no more and think to have a suicide,” she said.
“Commit,” my mother said. “He committed suicide.” She threw her cigarette butt out the window and stared down into the littered alley below. “You don’t have a suicide, it has you.”
“Okay,” Ya Ya said. “But why he have the suicide? Is pretty, the fish. Why he want to take he life away?”
“You’re asking why?” My mother lowered her sunglasses. “Open your eyes and take a lucky guess.” She emptied the jar into the sink. “This place is a dump.”
“What Sharon means,” my father said, “is that a fish is incapable of thinking in those terms. They have tiny little kaphalis and don’t get depressed.”
When speaking to his mother, my father used his loudest voice, drifting in and out of pidgin Greek. “The psari didn’t know any better. It wasn’t your fault, Matera, it was a lathos.”
“He have the suicide and now I sad sometime.” Ya Ya stared into the distance and sighed. I imagine she had spoken to the fish, had loved it the best she knew how, but her affection, like her cooking, was devoid of anything one might think of as normal. She regarded her grandchildren as if we were savings bonds, something certain to multiply in value through the majesty of arithmetic. Ya Ya and her husband had produced one child, who in turn had yielded five, a wealth of hearty field hands destined to return to the village, where we might crush olives or stucco windmills or whatever it was they did in her hometown. She was always pushing up our sleeves to examine our muscles, frowning at the sight of our girlish, uncallused hands. Whereas our other grandparents asked what grade we were in or which was our favorite ashtray, Ya Ya never expressed any interest in that sort of thing. Childhood was something you endured until you were old enough to work, and money was the only thing that mattered. She would sooner iron a stack of dollar bills than open any of the magazines or newspapers that lined the walls of her store. She didn’t know who the president was, much less the central characters in any of her bestselling comic books.
“I no know the jug head,” she’d say, spit-shining the keys on her cash register.
“Maybe he come here one day, but I no know it.”
It was difficult to imagine her raising a child of her own, and chilling to realize that she had. As a baby my father had been confined to a grim corner of the newsstand, where he crawled on a carpet of newspapers, teething on nickels. He never had a bed, much less his own room, and considered himself lucky when the visitors left and he had the couch to himself. Our dog had it better than that.
“Louie,” she would say, patting the hair on my father’s knuckles, “Louie and the girl.”
“The girl” was what she called my mother. My parents had been married twelve years, and Ya Ya still couldn’t bring herself to call her daughter-in-law by name. My father had made the mistake of marrying an outsider, and it was my mother’s lot to suffer the consequences. She had somehow tricked him, sunk in her claws, and dragged him away from his people. It would have been all right for him to remain at home for the rest of his life, massaging worry beads and drinking bitter coffee, but to marry a woman with two distinct eyebrows was unpardonable.
“Tell the girl she can sit down now,”
Ya Ya would say to my father, pointing to a stool on the far side of the room.
“Tell the gnome I won’t be staying that long,” my mother would respond. “Her cave’s a little on the dingy side, and I think I might have an allergy to her mustache.”
We would pass the afternoon at Ya Ya’s table, eating stringy boiled meat served with spinach pie. The food tasted as though it had been cooked weeks beforehand and left to age in a musty trunk. Her meals had been marinated in something dank and foreign and were cooked not in pots and pans, but in the same blackened kettles used by witches. Once we’d been served, she performed an epic version of grace. Delivered in both Greek and broken English, it involved tears and excessive hand-wringing and came off sounding less like a prayer than a spell.
“Enough of the chanting,” my mother would say, pushing away her plate. “Tell her I’ll disappear as soon as my kids are fed.” More often than not, my mother left the table and waited outside in the car until we had finished our meal.
“The girl go away now,” Ya Ya would say, raising her glass of ginger ale. “Okay then, we eat.”
Our visits concluded with an all-you-could-grab assault on the store. “You can each take one thing,” my father said. My sisters and I carried bags and pillowcases, clearing the shelves of comic books. We stuffed our socks and pockets with candy and popcorn for the twelve-hour ride back home, overpowering the car with the scent of newsprint and Ya Ya’s spooky love.
My mother was pregnant with her sixth child when we received the news that Ya Ya had been hit by a truck. She’d stood wide-eyed in the center of the street, staring down an advancing eighteen-wheeler driven by someone bearing a remarkable resemblance to my mother. That was the way I pictured it. The truth was considerably less dramatic. It seems she had been bumped by a pickup as it backed into a parking space. The impact was next to nothing, but she’d broken her hip in the fall.
“That’s a shame,” my mother said, admiring her newly frosted hair in the bathroom mirror. “I guess now they’ll have to shoot her.”
My father flew to Cortland and returned announcing that once she recovered, Ya Ya would be moving in with us. “We’ll move a few of the girls downstairs to the basement, and Ya Ya can take the bedroom across the hall from your mother and me, won’t that be fun!” He tried his best to make it sound madcap and adventurous, but the poor man wasn’t fooling anybody, least of all my mother.
“What’s wrong with a nursing home?” she asked. “That’s what normal people do. Better yet, you could lease her out to a petting zoo. Smuggle her aboard a tanker and ship her back to the old country, why don’t you. Hire her a full-time baby-sitter, enlist her in the goddamned Peace Corps, buy her a camper and teach her to drive — all I know is that she’s not moving in here, do you understand me? There’s no way I’ll have her moping around my house, buddy, no way in hell.”
We had lived in our house for two years and it still smelled new until Ya Ya moved in with her blankets and trunks and mildewed, overstuffed chairs that carried the unmistakable scent of her old apartment. Overnight our home smelled like the cloakroom at the Greek Orthodox church.
“It’s the incense,” my mother said. “Tell her she’s not allowed to burn any more of that stinking myrrh in her bed-room.”
“Tell the girl to give me back the matches,” Ya Ya said.
For a town its size, Raleigh was home to a surprising number of Greeks whose social life revolved around the Holy Trinity Orthodox Church. Our father dropped us off each Sunday on his way to the putting green and picked us up an hour or two after the service had ended. “She’ll make friends there,” he predicted. “They’ll love her down at the church.”
There were quite a few oldsters at the Holy Trinity, widows like Ya Ya who dressed in black and supported themselves on canes and walkers. Still, it was difficult to imagine Ya Ya’s having friends. She didn’t drive, didn’t write letters or use the telephone, and never mentioned anyone back in Cortland, where she’d had umpteen years to make friends. What made my father think she might change all of a sudden?
“She could, I don’t know, go to the movies with Mrs. Dombalis,” he said.
“Right,” my mother agreed. “Then they can wolf down a few steaks at the Peddler before heading over to the discotheque. Face it, baby, it’s just not going to happen.”
Her first Sunday in our church, Ya Ya stopped the service when she tossed aside her cane and crawled up the aisle on her hands and knees. The priest saw her coming, and we watched as he nervously shifted his eyes, taking one step back, then another and another. The man was pinned against the altar when Ya Ya finally caught up with him, caressing and ultimately kissing his shoes.
Someone needed to step forward and take charge of the situation, but my mother was at home asleep and my father was at the golf course. That left my sisters and me, and we wanted no part of it. Members of the congregation turned their heads, searching for the next of kin, and we followed suit.
“Beats me,” we said. “I’ve never seen her before in my life. Maybe she’s with the Stravides.”
Over time we learned to anticipate this kind of behavior. My mother would take Ya Ya to the department store for new underwear, and we’d watch from behind the racks as she wandered out of the dressing room in her bra and knee-length bloomers. Once in the parking lot she would stoop to collect empty cans and Styrofoam cups, stray bits of card-board, and scraps of paper, happily tossing it all out the window once the car reached a manicured residential street. She wasn’t senile or vindictive, she just had her own way of doing things and couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. What was wrong with kneading bread dough on the kitchen floor? Who says a newborn baby shouldn’t sleep with a colossal wooden cross wedged inside the crib? Why not treat your waist-length hair with olive oil? What stains on the sofa? I don’t know what you’re talking about.
“That might play back on Mount Olympus,” my mother would say. “But in my house we don’t wash our stockings in the toilet.”
Ya Ya accepted the women in my family as another of life’s little disappointments. Girls were to be tolerated, but every boy was a king, meant to be pampered and stuffed full of sour balls. She was overcome with joy when my mother gave birth to her final child, a boy Ya Ya wanted to name Hercules.
“Poulaki mu,” she would say, pressing a fifty-cent piece in my hand. “Poulaki mu krisom.” This was her standard pet name, which roughly translates to “my dearest little golden bird in a nest.” “You go get the baby now and we feed him some candy.”
My brother and I came to view our Ya Ya as a primitive version of an ATM machine. She was always good for a dollar or two, and because we were boys, all we had to do was open her car door or inform her the incense had just set fire to one of her embroidered cushions. I’d learned never to accompany her in public, but aside from that, Ya Ya and I had no problem. I saw her as a benign ghost, silent and invisible until you needed a little spending money. One could always change the channel while Ya Ya was watching TV; there was no need to even ask. She could go from the State of the Union Address to a Bullwinkle cartoon without ever noticing the difference. You might sit with her in the living room, but never were you forced to fetch her snacks or acknowledge her in any way. That was our mother’s job, not ours. Every now and then she’d leave the yard and the neighbors would call saying, “Did you know your grandmother is over here picking things out of our front lawn?”
We’d hand the phone to our mother. “They’re probably just dandelions,” she’d sigh, drying her hands on her skirt. “Don’t worry, we won’t charge you for the labor.”
“You’d think we never fed her,” my mother would complain once my father returned from work. “She’s out there gathering nuts and eating sunflower seeds out of the Shirks’ bird feeder. It’s embarrassing.”
Ya Ya would wander off and return with an apronful of greens, which she would boil to a paste. “That’s all right,” we’d say, covering our plates at the sight of her
advancing kettle. “I’m sure they’re delicious but I’m saving room for those toadstools you found beneath the Steigerwalds’ dog-house.”
The longer she lived with us, the more distant my mother became. As children we had worshiped her as a great beauty, but the strain of six children and a mother-in-law had begun to take its toll. The glass of wine with dinner was now preceded and followed by a series of cocktails that tended to fortify her rage. Rather than joining us at the table, she took to eating perched on a stool in the breakfast nook, wearing dark glasses and grinding out her cigarettes on the edge of her plate. Ya Ya had been diagnosed with diabetes, and it was my mother’s thankless job to prepare a special diet and cart her around town for her numerous doctor’s appointments. It was my mother who practiced injecting insulin into oranges and doled out the pills. She was the one forced to hide the peanut butter and confiscate the candy hidden in Ya Ya’s dresser drawers — all this for a woman who still refused to call her by name. My father would return home at the end of the day and listen to bitter complaints delivered in two harsh languages. My mother offered to sell the baby, to take a part-time job picking tobacco — anything to raise enough money for a nursing home — but even the cat understood that my father could not place his mother in an institution.
It was against his religion. Greeks just didn’t do things like that. They were too cheap — that’s what has always kept their families together. The whole notion of the nursing home was something dreamed up by people like my mother; American women with sunglasses, always searching for their tanning lotion or cigarette lighters. He couldn’t evict his mother, but neither could he care for her. The conflict divided our family into two distinct camps. My mother and sisters scraped bread dough off their heels in one corner, while my brother, father, and I jangled our change in the other. The children formed a committee, meeting in the driveway to discuss our parents’ certain divorce. It was reported by scouts positioned outside the bedroom that my mother had thrown what sounded like an ashtray. A reconnaissance unit was sent and returned carrying a battered clock radio and the real estate section of the newspaper, the margins penciled with our mother’s trademark series of stars and checks. How many bedrooms did the apartment have? Who would she take with her when she left? If we went with our father and Ya Ya, we could be assured of our privacy — but what did it matter, when our mother’s attention was what we lived for?
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