“Sure,” she says and gestures the way.
The bathwater is still in the tub, and I imagine bringing it to a slow simmer on the stove. I stay in there as long as I can, hoping he’ll be gone when I go back out. But he is not. He is right there in the kitchen, holding the ever-fatter baby. He is laughing and biting Manny’s leg, and saying “Tha se faw! Tha se faw!” My stomach sinks. I offer to hold the baby so he can go do his thing.
“Oh no,” he says. “I’m staying for the lesson today.”
“Well,” I say. “Why don’t we bake the baby then? He looks about big enough for the roasting pan.” They both laugh and smile at their son. I reach over and grab Manny’s foot and tug on it.
“I love this,” she says. “It feels like one big Greek family.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s just like this.”
STEWED ROOSTER
“Rooster is tough and stringy, but when stewed long enough with fresh tomatoes and onions it becomes delicious and savory.”
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 onion, cut into thin slices
1 fresh rooster, plucked, gutted, and cut into pieces
3 ripe tomatoes, pureed
Salt and pepper to taste
2 teaspoons dried Greek oregano
2 cups hilopites, a small square-shaped noodle, or other small noodle
Mizithra cheese
Heat the olive oil in a large pot. Add the onions and sauté until they become soft. Add the rooster and cook until it is browned. Next, add the pureed tomatoes, 3 cups of water, salt and pepper, and oregano, and bring to a boil. Immediately reduce the heat and simmer the rooster until the meat becomes tender and falls off the bone, approximately two hours. Remove the rooster to a serving bowl and keep warm.
Add 4 cups of water to the pot and bring to a boil. Add the hilopites and cook until they are tender and have absorbed all of the liquid.
Generously sprinkle the hilopites with grated mizithra cheese and serve alongside the stewed rooster. Given enough time to stew, even a rooster can become tender.
The Family Tree
Gus was reading the newspaper and enjoying his coffee at the breakfast table. It was a good morning. He put the newspaper down and listened to his voice mail again. “Beeeeeep! Constantino. I don’t have any more of the icy hot patches that I like. They don’t have them here. Make sure you have some when I arrive. How is the baby? Good-bye.” His mother was definitely warming up.
He smiled broadly when Callie came downstairs with Manny. He took the baby from her arms and snuggled him close, inhaling his fragrant scalp.
“Good morning, Daddy!” Callie stroked Gus’s hair as she passed him on the way to the coffeepot.
“Good morning, yourself. It’s a great day!” Gus kissed Manny’s nose. “Hey Manoli! Want to go watch the windsurfers at the Berkeley Marina?”
“I had another really great idea.” Callie paused.
“Oh yeah? What is it?” Gus kissed Manny’s cheek before handing him back to Callie. “I just need to run to the post office before I do anything else.”
“Well . . . you know Manny is getting older now, and I know you think it’s gross, but I think it’s time to plant his placenta.”
He stared at the screen of his phone, scrolling through to find a good picture of Manny to send to his mother. “You’re right. I do think that’s gross.”
“Gus, can you put down the phone for a second and talk to me, please?”
“Oh fine.” Gus turned off the phone. He had already gone along with the hippie water-tub home birth witnessed by a whole coven of her friends. Wasn’t that enough? Did he really have to go along with this too? “Isn’t it going to be smelly and slimy after all this time?”
“Well, it’s been frozen.”
He had seen the bloody, lumpy placenta after Callie had given birth, and he didn’t feel the need to see it again. “I don’t know. I need to go buy some icy hot patches.”
“Icy hot patches? Gus, we’re talking about a precious organ that nurtured our son while he was in my womb!”
As Callie’s voice escalated, he could tell he wasn’t going to be able to get out of the placenta planting. He sighed and put the phone in his pocket.
“What did you have in mind?”
“I love the idea of planting it under an apple tree in our backyard.”
Gus stiffened at the words apple tree.
“Every year it bears fruit it’ll remind us of when I was pregnant, and how wonderful it was when Manny was born.”
Gus looked at Callie. He knew there was no dissuading her from the idea. “Okay. But no apple tree. Pick some other tree.”
“But Gus, apples are like, the quintessential American fruit! We could make apple pie! They’re so crunchy and sweet, and think how much fun it would be to pick the apples right off the tree and eat them.”
“Please pick another kind of fruit.” Gus didn’t want to explain to Callie why he hated apples. It had started out a good morning, and he didn’t want to think about apple trees or that day all those years ago when the ripe apples had filled the air with the heavy scent of fruit and rot.
Hanging low from the gray branches, the golden orbs tempted bugs, birds, squirrels, and even raccoons to feed on their sweet flesh. Gus was twelve, and he’d been sent out to pick the ripe fruit from the tree before the creatures could damage them beyond use, and to collect from the ground any overripe fruit that he had missed from his previous harvest. He would have rather been playing baseball or chasing friends down the wide streets of their Oakland neighborhood on his bike. His parents came from farming families, and every piece of fruit was important to them, as if each apple had a quarter taped to the stem. He figured they were free, so who cared?
He got sick of apples anyway. His mother would put one in his lunch bag every day, and peeled and quartered them for the family after dinner every night, passing the pieces to them skewered on the pointy blade of her knife. She tried to make her Greek version of apple pie—milopita—with filo dough from the dusty old Greek store in the bad part of town. His father would take her there to shop where she would pick out ingredients for the milopita, and jars of preserved quince, baby citrus, blocks of feta, bastroma, and halvah. While she shopped, his father would sneak off to the porn store next door and look at the pictures of naked blond women with big breasts and parted lips. Once his father had tried to sneak a magazine into the car in a brown paper bag. Gus had found it and gazed at the pictures while riding in the backseat of the car on the way home, his skin prickling with discomfort and excitement.
Picking apples was old country, and he was sick of the old country. He didn’t want to hear about how everything tasted better there, and how they were forced to come to Ameriki to make a rich life for him. If they were rich, they wouldn’t care about wasting some apples, and he wouldn’t have to pick them before they rotted. Just that morning his parents had been fighting about sending money home. His mother wanted to send her family one hundred dollers, but his father said it was too much and they should send forty dollars. They always fought. He made a promise to himself that he’d never get married, or if he did that he wouldn’t have an arranged marriage like his parents. He’d choose all by himself, an Amerikana like the pretty ones in his father’s magazines, buxom and agreeable.
After he had finished his math homework that afternoon, he went out the back door into the yard, stopping briefly to grab his baseball bat, planning to go find his cousin Jimmy for a game of ball once he’d finished with the apples. It was sunny outside, even though it was late in the afternoon, and he could hear the buzz of bees collecting pollen in the flowers planted below the apple tree. There were dozens and dozens of apples, all golden ripe and ready for him to pick, high in the branches of the tree. On the ground were another dozen brown apples, rotting into the earth and covered with tiny black bugs, feeding. He would need at least three bags to collect them all: two for the good fruit and one for the decaying apples. He would have
to hide the rotten fruit deep in the garbage can outside of the house so his parents wouldn’t see how much fruit he’d let go bad because he didn’t pick it in time. He put down his baseball bat next to the tree, feeling sorry for himself because he’d never get a chance to play ball that afternoon.
From the open kitchen window he could hear the voices of his parents. They were arguing again. He shrugged his shoulders against the inevitable bickering and made toward the kitchen to get the bags. He assumed they were fighting about the hundred dollars again and rolled his eyes. He imagined the same old refrain, “Prepe na stelome lefta! We have to send money!” Every other phrase out of his mother’s mouth started with “prepe,” a word with the combined heft of “we should, we have to,” and “if we don’t we’ll be shamed.” His mother always did things the right way, the Greek way, and she insisted that the family do the same, that they not lose sight of their heritage, customs, and social rules. But most importantly, they must never shame the family.
As he mounted the stairs by the open window, he heard his mother crying. This was unusual as she prided herself on being right, and being right narrowed down the possibilities for feeling remorse or sadness. His father was speaking quietly now, and he froze near the back steps to hear what was being said that could make his mother cry.
“ . . . sick of your cold ways . . . she’s nothing like you . . . ice in your veins . . . you should have kept the church out of our bedroom . . .”
“You’re perverted. . . dirty magazines and putanas calling here . . . I should have never . . .” his mother hissed.
“You should have never!” his father thundered.
Gus shifted his weight as he stood there, trying to make sense of what he was hearing.
“Never! I should have never run off with you!”
“I wish! I wish! There were so many other girls in the horyo, but none of them would come to Ameriki. Stupid village girls. Only you were greedy enough to come.”
“Greedy? I came for love. Like a stupid, stupid girl! I refused the proxinio my parents arranged for me—with a good groom too, richer than you. I insisted on you! Ha! I married for love. I ran off with you in the middle of the night, and now look what you are doing to me!”
His mother had told him a story about how his parents had been match-married a thousand times. She said the village matchmaker had come to her father’s house on a beautiful spring day to request her for a very important groom, one that had lots of land and money. She said it was a prestigious match for her, and she had elevated her family’s standing in the village by marrying him. She said that her father had approved the match and had toasted the marriage with ouzo and rifle shots in the air. She had repeated this story over and over again. She told of the other village girls that were so jealous of her match that they turned their backs when she walked by. She said they were married in the village church built by the hands of her grandfather and his brothers with rocks from the surrounding mountains and stained glass and gold brought from Athena. It was all a lie? Gus rubbed his ears and shook his head in confusion. What else had she lied about?
“You ran off with me because you wanted to leave the village and were greedy for Ameriki. You never loved me. She loves me!”
“Don’t talk about her in my house! Don’t talk about her in my house!”
“Your house! Your house! Your garden! Your apple tree! You never say ‘My husband’! Only your house, your car, your money!” His father spit on the kitchen floor and burst out of the back door, blindly pushing past Gus. Gus heard his mother scream out, “If you leave now, don’t come back!”
His father stormed toward the garage, passing by the apple tree with all of its abundant fruit. His mother was still screaming in the kitchen and now crying, “Wait, come back, come back!” He noticed his father was wearing his Sunday suit and good brown shoes even though it was Wednesday. As he marched determinedly toward the garage and the waiting car, he suddenly slipped on a rotting apple. The slimy flesh of the fruit smeared under the thin leather soles of his shoes, and he rose feet first into the air before landing on his back next to the apple tree.
Gus watched his father lie there for a moment with his chest rising and falling under the plaid suit jacket. Then his father rose, picked up Gus’s baseball bat and started swinging at the apple tree. As he pounded the tree, the fruit began to rain down on the ground, crushing the flowers below and setting the bees into a startled flight. The apples landed with force, some rolling away and others bursting their skins on the hard ground.
Gus stood silently and listened to the wails of his mother and the thunk of his baseball bat hitting the apple tree and knew that this moment would not come again. It was a singular moment that would not be repeated or retold. It would be replaced with a new story by his mother. The story would start and end with the word prepe. He vowed never to pick another apple again.
Gus pulled himself out of his reverie and repeated, “Please just pick another kind of fruit.”
Babies R Us
That day in Callie’s kitchen making papoutsakia keeps coming back to me—the look of excitement in her eyes when she finally mastered béchamel, the warmth of her sauce against my lips, that feeling of belonging, holding Manny close to me, nuzzling against his soft round cheeks, and the warmth emanating from that kitchen. I want that feeling again. I’m tired of waking up in my little cottage alone. But I know I have to resist her if I want God to make me pregnant, and there are still a few days left before I can take the pregnancy test. I have to distract myself.
Sometimes I get up and go, not knowing where I’m headed. Sometimes it’s the farmers’ market or the specialty butcher shop. Sometimes it’s the baby store. Parking in front of Babies R Us is always exhilarating because I know that when I step on that welcome mat, the front doors will slide open for me as if by magic. The doors say, we know, we just know, that you’ll be a mother one day. As I lift one foot to cross over that magical threshold, it’s as if my whole identity changes. No one there knows me. They don’t know about my life, my weaknesses. All they know is that I am there to shop for baby things, and that maybe, probably, I am expecting a baby of my own, and maybe I am. As I cross that invisible line, I transform from a lonely single shopper to expectant mama.
Sometimes I wear a maternity outfit when I go. It makes the trip so much more special. Maybe just some jeans with a maternity panel, and a long top with a modest scoop neckline in a pretty pastel, like pink or baby blue. I have one of each. On the days when I feel that a little boy might be on his way to me I wear baby blue, and on the days I just know a little girl is coming, oh a little girl, I wear sweet, sweet pink. I get misty just thinking about it.
I could be pregnant with twins, fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. This thought puts me into a tizzy because I don’t have a pink and blue shirt. Only one or the other, so I wear both, one right on top of the other. That seems right because the twins would be cuddled up one right on top of the other inside of my belly until it was time for them to come out. I pull on some good sensible shoes because carrying twins is a lot of weight. As I fasten the Velcro straps, I smile and sigh as I realize that in no time I may not even be able to bend over to put on my shoes, and make a mental note to buy some slide-on shoes. I splash some water on my face, tuck Doll into my diaper bag, and head to Babies R Us. I am going to need two of everything.
I love taking Doll with me. It’s so much more fun to shop when you have company. She fits perfectly in the diaper bag. It’s big enough for her to sit down and still be able to see out the top. It’s sunny and bright out, with the slightest breeze. Doll is snuggled comfortably in the bag, with a pink rattle in one hand and a blue pacifier in the other. With each step we take closer to the store, my maternity blouses catch in the breeze a bit and float around my body, as if they caught some life force. With each step Doll winks her eyes over and over again in excitement, and the sound of the rattle is sweeter than a blue jay singing.
We cross the dividing l
ine between only me, and me and my growing family. Inside the store the lights are very bright and make the linoleum floors shine. It is dazzling. Stuffed animals of every size and shape are stacked against the walls. Thousands of tiny outfits hang on display racks. Frilly little dresses and patent-leather Mary Jane shoes for girls. Rough-and-tumble overalls and baseball caps for boys. As I walk through the aisles toward the newborn/infant section, I notice people sneaking glances at me and smiling. Yes, that is right. I have a secret. A secret is growing inside of me and will blossom into fresh, soft babies. I love the way people look so happy and interested in you when you are being acknowledged as a pregnant woman. I can’t blame them. What could be more miraculous than creating life? It is the closest thing that we can do to what God does. And only women can do it.
Even when Arnold Schwarzenegger became pregnant in that old movie Junior, he became more and more like a woman, and less like a man. He became soft and emotional, but fiercely protective when someone wanted to take his baby away. I loved it when he turned to the camera and said, “My body, my choice.”
But really it isn’t our choice in the beginning. In the beginning it is God’s choice. Only he decides whether to plant the seed of a soul in your womb. Women do all kinds of things to get pregnant these days: inject the urine of menopausal strangers, spend the equivalent of a down payment on a home to have a doctor mix their eggs with some sperm in a cup, or have surgery to untie tubes that they tied for some other man. Even I tried the sperm bank, but that doesn’t count. Because no matter what you do, it still comes down to God. You can do all those things and more, and if He doesn’t see fit to bless you, it doesn’t matter. You can hop on one foot under a full moon in the sign of Gemini, and sprinkle your feet with unicorn poop and it won’t matter. Trying isn’t what gets you pregnant; it’s believing. I still believe that prayer is the best strategy for getting pregnant. You don’t need money or a man for that. You need only to believe.
The Feasting Virgin Page 8