“Anja, this baklava is simply the best I’ve tasted. I’ll have to hire you to make some for the anniversary party Clarence and I are having next month.” Joyce Sewicky was gushing. She was futilely trying to distract Nonna from counting trump cards.
“No problem, sweetie.” Here it comes. “You know, truth be told, several Greek men proposed to me after sampling my baking. If memory serves me right, two came from the baklava alone,” Nonna said.
I had heard this claim a hundred times. Outside the window, Mr. Kovack stood up and readjusted his shorts over his backside. That place—where the sun don’t shine—had started to see daylight. Mr. Kovack appeared sweaty and fatigued, and his face stuck out like a pimento against the olive green of his shrubbery.
“Nonna,” I said. “How would you like to put your baklava to the test?”
“What, dear?” Nonna placed her final card on the table.
“Your baklava. If it is as good as you say it is, bringing men to their knees and all, I have another proposal to add to your list.”
“That’s game,” Joyce Sewicky announced. “Anja and Gladys, you beat us again.”
Nonna turned, acknowledged victory, then she looked at me. “Okay, Miss BJ, what is this all about?”
“It’s a bet, over our card game.”
By now Grandma Lena was becoming quite interested. The stakes were always high when my grandmothers opposed each other. Nonna and Gladys shifted around to sit at our card table.
I spoke so all the women present could hear me. “The loser of our game has to take that plate of baklava over to Mr. Kovack as a peace offering and invite him to our poetry reading tomorrow night.”
“Oh, for the love of heaven. He wronged us. I’m not going to waste my bak—”
“If you don’t think your baking can sway a man’s heart. . .” I baited her.
Thirteen women, amusement on their faces, waited anxiously for Nonna and Grandma Lena to agree to the challenge.
“Oh, it’s up to Anja. It’s her baklava,” Lena said.
“All right, but we are still reading Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath tomorrow evening. We are not changing our agenda for that man.”
“You’re pretty sure of the power of your baking.” Gladys Metz winked at me as she shuffled the cards.
“Deal, woman. We have to teach this youngster a lesson.”
It took five hands, but Lena and I, the underdogs, pulled off the incredible—a win by thirty points. Grandma Lena played with the focus and strategy of a chess master. It did not hurt her strategy that I had aces around in one hand, and she had a run in another. Nonna was not happy. We had not bettered their score all summer. I did not gloat, but I did place the stack of teetering desserts next to Nonna.
“Oh, go on.” Nonna pushed me aside and walked nobly out the side door to the property line. Fifteen pairs of eyes followed the course of her stride. We were not subtle about it either. Mr. Kovack rose from his gardening and waved weakly to us. A piece of sweaty hair escaped his scalp to measure the direction of the breeze. Through the open window, we listened.
“George, the girls and I had this extra plate of baklava. We wanted you to have it. You have been working so hard out here. We thought it would make a nice treat.” I caught a flirtatiousness in Nonna’s voice that I had never heard before. I began to suspect that her brazen delivery, not her baked goods, had solicited the marriage proposals.
“It’s my special recipe. Go ahead. Try one.” A serpent was loose in the garden—or at least Eve.
“Uh, thank you, Anja. That’s very kind.” Mr. Kovack nervously removed his gardening gloves and accepted the gift. He lifted a sweet to his mouth with an air of caution, but immediately a syrupy smile crossed his lips.
“My grandmother was Greek. I haven’t had baklava like this in years.”
“Enjoy, George. Bring the plate back when you are done.”
Nonna started back toward the house, but stopped. “Oh, we are having our July Poetry on the Porch event tomorrow night. You are welcome to join us. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. You’ll come won’t you, George?”
Mr. Kovack looked from the plate to Nonna. His mouth was full. “I, uh, will.”
“We’ll see you about seven-thirty.”
I whooped from the window as the crowd dispersed. Grandma Lena continued to stare out the window. “That old bird never ceases to amaze me.”
“Mr. Kovack?”
“No, honey, your Nonna.”
♦ 24 ♦
2000
AS SOON AS I PULLED my car in front of the barn, I knew I was in trouble. Dad and Sam were presiding over a pile of lumber that had not been present when I had left that morning. What is that heap doing in my backyard?
“Dad?”
He spun around. “Barbara Jean. We were just getting started. Want to help us? That’s not really a question. I am going to need your help.” My father kissed me on the cheek. His scent of limes and the ocean was a combination of his aftershave lotion and his sunblock.
I looked from my son to my father. “Do I have a choice? What is this?”
“Grandpa is building me a playhouse with a sliding board and swings.”
I moaned. Sam was transported from the bored child I had seen a week ago, but it was no excuse for my father to presume to build him a magical playland without my permission. I felt the old rage ignite within me. I was ten years old again, and Dad was asserting dominion over the household by changing the TV channel from the cartoon I was watching to the Redskins game.
“Dad, I need to speak to you. Alone, please. Let’s go into the kitchen. Sam, stay in the yard where I can see you, and don’t handle any of that wood.”
The hinge of the kitchen screen door shrieked with our entrance.
“Barbara Jean. I know what you are going to say—”
“You don’t know anything, Dad. Why would you build a swing set here? It’s like you think Sam and I are moving to Pennsylvania.”
“Aren’t you? You and Bryce have split up, admit it. I want to hear it from you.”
“Dad. It’s none of your concern. But if it were true, it doesn’t automatically mean I want to live here. I have a business in Michigan, my clientele. Even if I am staying here, you don’t have the right to recreate Disney World in my backyard.”
“Disney World is an overstatement, don’t you think?” Richard Foley, the father, crossed his arms in front of him. “Barbara Jean, you are going to have to face up to the fact that you no longer have sole control over Sam’s life, so lighten up with me. He’s going home to Bryce in a few weeks. This is what you can expect. Bryce is going to show him a good time in a place that Sam used to call home.” His voice softened. “I’ve seen the kindergarten registration papers. I know you are sending him to school here. Now, doesn’t it make sense to make this house into a place he wants to return to?”
“So this was all a big lesson for me in separation. Is that it?”
Dad opened the screen door. Another whine from the hinges.
“It’s certainly not a lesson I wanted for you. When you are ready to talk, I brought some information from Father Carris on annulment procedures, though I am sure your local priest would be happy to assist you.”
The door shut, but I continued to talk through the screen. “Dad, how did you know we were getting a divorce? And about Sam going back for the summer?”
“Bryce called me in Richmond.”
I winced. “Is that why you came here?”
“Don’t be angry at him. He did it out of concern. He is worried about you, and he wanted you to have some support.”
I rolled my eyes (again—the inner ten-year-old). “Yeah, if you believe that…”
“He knew you wouldn’t tell me yourself. And he was right.”
I stared at my dad. I was prepared for any answer but that one. How could I argue with the truth?
This summer was supposed to teach me how to separate myself from my husband. I could handle Bryce’s nonchalance but no
t his concern.
I watched Dad as he took inventory of his supplies. He was right. I was losing my son and my sovereignty over him. I should be realistic about it and talk to Bryce. But Bryce had not asserted himself as a parent in so long. What would change now? I could make the appropriate lists. Daily vitamins, eating vegetables before sweets, bed by eight, no video games on weekdays. In the end, they ensured nothing except my desire to regulate Bryce. And those days were over.
Sam was floating away from me. His summers in Michigan would shape him much in the same ways my summers in Pennsylvania had shaped me. Sam would have his own stories. And I would probably never hear the important tales, the ones of transformation. Just as I never told my parents the full story of my own hot-weather pursuits.
Some summers I had returned home to Virginia with a buzz, anxious to tell anybody about everything, but most years I would return quiet and introspective and changed. The last summer had been like that. Those weeks after Travis and Margot left their wake of family hostility, I turned to art as transference for all my abandoned emotion. I took an old sketchbook to the lake, and with my toes submerged in its shallow pools, I smudged out landscapes, heavily textured with my angst.
When I returned to Richmond, my mother took one look at the sketches and called the school guidance counselor. “I don’t care if Typing I is part of the college track, I want my daughter enrolled in an art class next semester.”
And so began the melancholy years of high school.
My father had been befuddled by the transformation. “Are you sure you want to give up basketball? You loved basketball. And chorus? What about that?” I had been adamant in my new solitary pleasures. Sculpting, painting, photography. Boyfriends came and went. Dad didn’t like the haircut of one, the clothing of another.
“Is that boy wearing eyeshadow?”
He would always blame that last summer in Pennsylvania for the downward spiral of his little girl. Perhaps that was why it had been the last. “Barbara Jean, it’s time you had a summer job.”
The Dairy Queen, while monetarily rewarding, did not alter my course. During my senior year, my dad caught me trying to sneak away to D.C. to go clubbing. I was wearing only a black bra and an orange vinyl miniskirt. At the time, I was seventeen and had already been accepted to Tyler School of Art, part of Temple University, in Philadelphia.
While King Richard (my pet name for him in those years) had the discretion of withholding my college tuition, to do so would have jeopardized the last remaining dream he had for me. Instead of meting out punishment, he made me pledge to take at least one business course a year, and to reject any blue-haired boys if they proposed marriage. With a medal of St. Thérése, he sent me, his only child, back to Pennsylvania with his prayers.
When I called two years later with news of my latest beau, King Richard had a flash of hope. Bryce had so many of the outer qualifications of a good husband that my dad didn’t even care about getting to know his heart. He couldn’t see, as I saw it now, that I was settling for his vision of a family provider. But I didn’t care. Bryce gave me something I hadn’t had in years—the approval of my father.
Now the disappointment was back. I saw this sadness in my father’s shoulders as he sawed the wood into manageable pieces. I knew he felt unnecessarily responsible for my predicament. Mom was no longer there to share the burden. By building this swing set, his first solo attempt at parenting, he was attempting to re-father me, teach me the truths about separating from one’s offspring. Or maybe he was just trying to get closer, by planting part of himself in the earth where I was.
♦ 25 ♦
1983
FROM THE SIDE WINDOW in my bedroom, we could see only the side yard and the corresponding chunk of the backyard. Karen situated herself to wait for Travis as he made each pass of the back lawn. She sat up when she heard the crescendo of the lawn mower. Travis was only in clear view for about ten seconds in each row, but Karen was convinced that during those ten seconds he would suddenly decide to remove his shirt. Such a move would be a subliminal message, she told me, but she didn’t say what that message was.
Bored with her little game, I leaned back on my bed and pretended to read the new Seventeen. The meager July issue was always lame. I was waiting for the thick back-to-school fashion bible, the August issue, packed with more clothes than I could ever hope to buy. Karen was paging through Tiger Beat when Travis was not in view. Karen had turned fourteen last April, while I still had two weeks to go until my birthday. We were only three months apart in age, but she made it seem like all of adult development occurred in those three months. I didn’t bother to point out to Karen that I had been menstruating half a year longer than she had. Chronological age still had dominion over physical signs of maturity.
Karen, and those her age, had what she termed lustful desires, which I would not understand until I turned fourteen. Only then would I comprehend the tremendous pull that Scott Baio and Rick Springfield had on her. She had wallpapered her whole room with pictures of those two, and she confessed that she kissed every one of those pictures before she went to sleep each night. When I was in her bedroom, I looked closely at the photos, checking for lip stains or dried saliva. I tried to feel tinges of lustful desire, but I could muster only mild disgust.
My bedroom on Mulberry Street had been my mother’s bedroom when she was a girl. It had old flowered wallpaper and a matching bedspread that Nonna had made out of sheets. The lamp, topped with a ruffled shade, featured a pink ballerina base. Mom had never taken dancing lessons, but she had always wanted them.
The curtains hung long. Those summer sheers parted playfully if a lake breeze turned from its usual course. A wind like that was usually an indication of a summer storm. Sometimes I worried that a person out for a stroll would be able to see through the curtains while I was changing. I dressed in the dark most nights, and, as an added precaution, under the covers. Beneath the bed frame, I had squirreled away my romance novels and magazines. That was the only part that resembled my bedroom at home.
Karen didn’t understand that this bedroom was not evidence of my true character. She babbled about redecorating possibilities.
“Put up some posters at least.”
At home in Virginia, I had plenty of posters: purple posters of unicorns and sad clowns and a Monet calendar from the National Gallery. I also had a brass daybed that was piled high with pillows, a new stereo with cassette player, a mauve beanbag chair, and taffy yellow walls (with absolutely no spittle on them).
I never cared that Karen thought she was a step above me. She could think whatever she wanted. What did matter was that she still believed she was in love with Travis and the growing possibility that I, too, shared her emotion. I did try to articulate my feelings once when I was with her, but she said something like “Ew! Gross. He’s your cousin.” Against which my “Nuh-uh, Karen, not really” sounded weak—especially since I was also questioning how weird I was to harbor an attraction to Travis. I dropped the whole discussion but still found myself peering furtively out of my window when Travis drove by on the John Deere. I hoped he would keep his subliminal, shirtless messages to himself.
Travis was doing better these days. His grandpa had stabilized, and though the deathwatch was fixed, it was not vigilant. Margot asked not to be notified at every turn. She was resigned, for the sake of her son, to allow her father to die alone and confused. I did not bother Travis for details.
While we were waiting for Travis to cut the side lawn, Mr. Kovack appeared and started his own lawn mower, an ancient push cutter with a motor that sounded like an afterthought. The timbre of dueling engines reverberated through the neighborhood. I stood up and closed my windows partway and drew the curtains closed.
“Why did you do that?” Karen asked.
“Who wants to see Mr. Kovack. He’s a pig anyway.”
“I thought everything was cool. He came to your grandmas’ poetry reading didn’t he?”
“Yeah, he came.
I wanted my grandmas to make peace with him, but it doesn’t mean I like the guy. He’s still slime,” I said.
“Come on,” Karen said. “You can kind of see the guy’s point can’t you? Living beside two queer women. They’re your grandmas. You have to accept them. But even you have to admit, the Bible says that the stuff they do is a sin. It’s just wrong.”
“What did you say?” I asked, not knowing if I had heard her correctly.
“Don’t get all defensive on me. I didn’t write the Bible—God did or his disciples did it for him,” she said flipping another page in her magazine.
“Huh?”
“Check it out. It’s probably in that part about ‘Man should leave his parents and cleave to a woman’ or something like that. You should know—they read it at weddings. And I am sure there is another part where it says the really sinful parts. Everybody knows being gay is wrong.”
I was hot. I had never contradicted anything Karen had said. I even shielded her when I thought that she could not handle certain truths. She knew nothing. She was probably just repeating something she heard her parents saying. Karen Sewicky was a pampered princess without any notion of how to develop theories and ideas for herself. I wanted to explain it all to her, how my grandmothers had a noble love for each other and this community, how Karen and her mother had been welcome guests in their home, and how I was a better person for growing up with their guidance. I thought Karen lacked the conscience necessary to hear these words, but in reality, I lacked the courage to say them. I did what I knew. I redirected my anger, turning her bigotry into something greater.
“Wrong? That’s not what’s wrong. Wrong is you thinking you have a chance with Travis. He told me he thinks of you as a spoiled brat bitch with too much free time and a daddy with just enough money to make him overlook your faults.”
“W-when did he tell you all of this?” I could see the tears forming in Karen’s eyes as she spoke.
“When he and I watched the fireworks together from the roof of the barn.”
“You didn’t. You said—” Karen made all the connections in her mind, and the story finally fit. Her mouth opened in horror. It was the last insult of the day.
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