Some sperm die along the way, their fast push wearing them out too quickly. Others are weak and disabled by some disorder of their genetics and never have a chance to make the long trek. And some, like the old tortoise, advance slowly and surely toward the finish line.
Perhaps there is a weak signal transmitted, or it is all random chance which swimmers reach the prize, or some common mystery that determines the outcome. But at some fateful moment, sperm meets egg and the first penetration begins. But it is their heads that lead the way and not their tails, their heads that hold the key to melt the hard exterior of the egg. Or perhaps it is the egg that decides when to melt and let one in. In any case, it is the first taste of power that the egg experiences as the sperm cluster around her, surrounding her, and her first taste of fear. She picks just one to merge with and then the others are shut out forever, her hard shell reinforced. It is those other immigrants that eventually die alone in a foreign land, that forever carry sadness and lost hope.
Tumbling, merging, multiplying, the two opposites that become one expanding whole begin a long journey together through unknown terrain to find a place to nest. Along the way they must make few mistakes and surrender to the instinctual processes of biology, trusting that they will end at a beginning and thus begin an ending. Seven days and seven nights transpire until they find fertile ground, a vast network of bloody nutrients, spongy vessels within which to burrow and grow. As they nose their way into the perfect spot, their efforts release the transforming enzymes that help them to break ground and spring deep roots into their resting spot, their nest. The symbiotic nature of their host allows them to thrive and relax, and somewhere along the way they become one, someone. A soul.
Xeni Leaves the Building
I wake up the next morning with a terrible pulsating headache. I am lying on the couch in the living room with a pillow under my head and a blanket covering my fully clothed body. I have no idea how I got there and only vaguely remember passing out somewhere in the hallway in my frantic rush to get out of the front door and back home and away from my horny hosts. I suppose I should be grateful that they didn’t leave me there on the floor, but feel uneasy imagining how I got to the couch. Did Gus pick me up in his hairy arms and carry me? I shudder. I doubt that Callie is strong enough to get me to the couch by herself. I comfort myself with the thought that maybe I got to the couch on my own, but can’t exactly remember everything that happened the night before. But why would I choose to sleep on the couch where it happened?
I rub my neck and head and say a little prayer under my breath, “Please Lord, forgive me for drinking too much wine. I wanted to leave as soon as the debauchery began. Why’d you make me pass out anyway?” But the more I think about what happened the night before in the living room the madder I get. “And why did you let them do that while I was here?” I know I’m not supposed to be mad at God, but I’d be much happier if I could’ve made it home last night. I could have gotten between my clean white sheets, snuggled Doll next to me, said a little prayer of forgiveness, and woken up at home this morning instead of in Cyclops’s lair, having to face his lascivious wife who says she loves me and then does dirty things to him right in front of me.
I yank off the blanket and sit up. Moving too fast makes my head hurt. It is still early. I can’t hear anyone moving around so I grab my coat and head for the door. I vow never to come back.
An Empty House
The house held still that morning, as if holding its breath. One Greek mother had left in defeat. A Greek virgin had left in a storm. The combined energy of their emotions was enough to blow any house off of its foundation. Tightening its grip on the bolts that held it firmly onto the earth, the house shuddered, willing its foundation to hold. The stilts it balanced on trembled—imperceptively to humans, but the constant rumbles were unnerving to the structure.
On the outside, the house looked fine. It stood upright at correct angles. The windows gleamed with reflected sunlight. The paint, though a few years old, still presented a neat and attractive façade. The cracks were beneath the house in the dirt on which it stood. And despite the sunny outward appearance, on the inside the house felt chilled, as if the heart and soul of it had departed for some other place, and what was left were the muted wanderings of ghosts.
Gus walked from room to room looking for his mother, knowing that she was gone. He imagined her body in an airplane 30,000 feet above the Earth, transporting her to another life, another time zone. With a feeble smile, he imagined her giving the flight attendants a hard time because the food was cold or her pillow lumpy. But the truth of the matter was that when his mother was away, Gus felt cold and lonely, as if her fiery temper and blazing eyes, the things that most infuriated him, also kept him warm. When she left to go back home, she took the blazing heart of Greece with her. He was left all alone in xenitia, the land of strangers.
Gus pressed “play” on the stereo and a mournful tune began, the drumbeat slow and steady, the bouzouki somber. “Mi me stelnis Mana, stin Ameriki.” Words he’d heard over and over growing up, when his mother would sadly sing, “Don’t send me, Mother, to Ameriki.” He imagined the multiplicity of immigrants who’d sat alone in a small room nursing an ouzo and their heartache, singing those words. Gus stretched out his arms and began to dance the zeibekiko, the soulful dance of Greek men, the physical expression of pain and survival, loss, and enduring spirit.
• • •
Upstairs, Callie lay curled up in the massive bed, unable to get warm. She pulled the comforter up closer to her chin, and then the throw blanket, and then piled all the pillows up over her shivering body. Her nipples felt like hard stones and she hugged herself, rocking, trying to find a way to soften. She knew without looking that Xeni had left the house, was gone, maybe forever. And she knew that she’d betrayed Gus.
Clutching at whatever warmth she could, Callie knew that she’d sacrificed everything in one night.
Melting
Everything is wrong. My face is wrong. My body is wrong. My desires are wrong. I’ve spent the last four months in a house with a family that is not my own. They will never be mine. They are a family. They are loyal to each other even when they are fighting or unhappy. Maybe that is what a family is. But I don’t want to fight. I want peace, and I pray to God that one day I will find it.
The kitchen is empty. I’ve been stocking their refrigerator and neglecting my own. There is nothing, nothing to cook, and I need to cook. Ripping the kitchen apart, I find almost nothing to work with. A cube of butter, some oil, a bag of chocolate chips, some nuts. Dumping the chocolate chips into a glass bowl, I stick it into the microwave. No. That’s too easy. I pull a pot out of the cupboard, and a metal bowl. I fill the pot with an inch of water and put it on the stove to simmer. While the water heats, I arrange the chocolate chips in a concentric pattern within the circumference of the silver bowl in ever-expanding circles. Round and round. Placing the pointed tips at just the right angle requires enormous concentration. If I place one incorrectly, it will tumble into the center, and I have to put my fingers into the sharp bed of chocolate tacks to extract it. And if I think about Callie, I have to press my fingers into the points. I work on this until the water starts to bubble, and then I stand over the fire gently stirring the brown nibs until they lose all shape and melt into a warm, amorphous mass.
At the Table
Gus sat at one end of the table and ate the stack of souvlakia that he’d picked up at Simply Greek that afternoon. He’d bought enough of the skewers of meat to last him a few days. As he tore a chunk of meat off of the skewer with his teeth, he stole a glance at Callie, who sat huddled at the other end of the table eating a huge bowl of macaroni and cheese. Since Xeni had left, Callie had refused to make any more Greek food and had fallen into eating only Americana comfort food, meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy, chicken with dumplings, and pie—every kind of pie Gus had ever heard of and more. “Who makes buttermilk pie?” he asked her one afternoon as she st
ood over her mixing bowl adding ingredients. She had given him an exasperated look and had kept mixing.
Gus couldn’t understand why Xeni had left and never come back. She was his koumbara now, Manny’s godmother, and she wouldn’t return his phone calls. Callie refused to talk about it. He rubbed his forehead. He had gone from having three willful, vocal women at the table to this new reality of sitting in silence literally overnight. He wished he could remember what had happened after he dropped his mother off at the airport, but it was a blank hole in his memory. All the ouzo and retsina had burned the events of the evening out of his mind. Whatever happened had changed everything, and Gus missed all the willfulness, the home cooking, and the ruckus at the table.
The Inside
Chocolate when melting loses its form, but you can mold it into whatever shape you want, as long as you keep the temperature at the right level, and keep water out of it. If you add even one drop of water, the tempered chocolate seizes and is ruined. So steam, condensation, and sweat are all enemies of chocolate. I spend my time with chocolate in the kitchen and learn everything I can about it. I seldom leave the house except to buy more chocolate and some groceries to keep me going. And I stay away from people whenever possible.
Once I master tempering chocolate, then I learn to mold it, control it. Truffles are easy to make, as are solid chocolates. The filled chocolates are harder. I never knew that enrobing something in chocolate required such skill. My stomach is growing from all of the chocolate I have eaten, and sometimes growls and kicks in a way that makes me wonder if there is such a thing as too much chocolate.
I don’t think about anyone anymore. I am safe here in my kitchen, filling chocolate molds with fondant centers flavored with strawberries, walnuts, and bergamot. After I tap the filled chocolates out of the molds and line them up on a platter, I guess at what they each contain. It’s not unlike the childhood habit I had of pushing my fingernail through the bottom of each chocolate in the box reserved for company. Only then, if I didn’t like the filling, I’d leave it in the box. The bottom of the chocolate would be crushed, allowing the filling to ooze out, but the top looked perfect. I need to know what is inside. I dissect each piece using my fingernails and teeth, my tongue and lips, devouring the outside layer to get to the filling inside, the mystery and surprise of life.
There are those moments when I involuntarily remember a moment or my body shakes from allowing some words to slip back into my heart. I see blue eyes floating above the flames on the stove at times. But dipping your fingers into melting chocolate quickly erases all other thoughts.
Surrender
“Callie!” She heard Gus speak her name for the first time in weeks.
“What?” Callie yelled from the opposite side of the house.
“What are we doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to go see a movie?”
“No. Do you want to go to the park?”
“No.”
Callie looked out the bedroom window and then back to the bed. Each time she did laundry she laid all of her clothes out on the bed as if she were packing for a trip. Then she’d sit and stare at the piles and wonder.
Gus suddenly opened the door to the bedroom. Callie startled at the unexpected intrusion and guiltily began to gather her clothes.
“Hey, Cal. I think I need to go on a fishing trip or something with the guys. You okay with that?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. I’ll be fine.” Callie pulled drawers open and stacked the clothes inside.
“Okay, I think I’ll go. See what it feels like to be back out there.”
“Yeah. Okay. Just let me know when you’re going.”
“I will,” Gus promised.
“What are you fishing for?” Callie asked.
“I don’t know. I just want to eat some great fish by the water and drink a cold beer, like I used to.”
“Sounds good.” Callie closed her drawer. “I think I might want to do something different too.”
The Outside
The chocolate has made me enormous. I cannot hide the fact that I have become a huge woman in the last eight months. I clothe myself with long, flowing dresses and oversized shirts. But when I take off my clothes at night I can’t help but stare in the mirror at my body. My legs and arms have remained the same, but my stomach has bulged out farther than I would think possible. Maybe I’m imagining it. My eyes are playing tricks on me. I close my eyes and use my hands to touch the outline of my belly. I refuse to admit that I look—I look almost pregnant. And what kind of joke is that, God? But it can’t be. I cannot be pregnant. That doctor told me so. And no matter how hard I try to forget the words hysterical pregnancy, they are burned into my skin with the ink of humiliation.
I wish that I could see myself from the outside, instead of always through my insides. I see myself through a haze of self-pity and disgust. All I can see clearly is chocolate. And so it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it, to go into the kitchen, melt several pounds of chocolate, and slather it onto my belly, and then stand in front of the open freezer door until the chocolate cools and hardens. It makes perfect sense that I would be able to lift the cast of my stomach away from my skin and take a good look at it. What doesn’t make any sense at all is what I see: a baby belly.
Greek Festival
As Gus drove down Lincoln Avenue toward The Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Ascension, he was once again dazzled by the church’s copper dome as it stood solidly in the center of spring. All around it evidence of faith sprouted. A new parking structure for 220 vehicles, with a roof turned platea—an 18,000-square-foot plaza of additional space to celebrate Hellenic culture—and a glass elevator from which worshippers and revelers could view the splendor of the San Francisco Bay spanned by the Bay Bridge and fiery Golden Gate. And its crowning achievement, the new glass-domed Koimisis chapel celebrating the bodily ascension of the Virgin Mary to heaven. Unfinished, it stood resolutely awaiting interior adornment, with cement walls and stained-glass windows washed with sunlight from the elevated glass dome. The vault of the dome seemed to create a meeting place that lifted one up into the heavens and seemed to bring God closer to Earth to view the happenings.
Gus imagined that if God was watching that day, he’d see thousands of people streaming onto the grounds to indulge in Greek culture; to dance to live music on two stages; to eat lamb freshly roasted on the spit; to drink beer, ouzo, and Greek coffee; and to stuff themselves with loukoumathes until they burst from the yeasty fried dough drizzled with honey, cinnamon, and walnuts. The Oakland Greek Festival was a weekend of indulgence, a celebration of earthly delights, in the center of which stood the cool-aired church, silent and embracing, and now the Koimisis chapel, a symbol of transformation, a place where one motherly human voyaged from one state of being to another.
Challenging the peacefulness of the chapel, speakers blared the sound of the bouzouki and drums, and the accented lyrics of Greek American singers. Each year costumed church youth danced traditional steps from the homeland, but devoid of the suffering that gave the old-timer-immigrant gyrations depth and soul. It was good to move on, and also sad. The letting go of sadness can be a trial in itself, the forgetting of the beauty and nobility of struggle and the devolution of culture into fragmented memories and piecemeal re-creation. The ache of those that remember how it was and the blissful forgetting of the future. Until it all comes full circle again and one generation remembers that something is lost, and begins to study its history as a foreign language, dance steps full of longing for what is lost. What is re-created is something new again, bearing little resemblance to the past. And once again we seek a way to voyage between homelands.
Gus parked his car in the new parking structure, gladly paying fifteen dollars to avoid pushing Manny’s stroller up the steep hill of Lincoln Avenue to the festival. He glanced at Callie, who sat quietly in the passenger seat with a familiar preoccupied expression on her face. Gus’s heart beat in rhythm with t
he music filtering through the cement and rebar of the parking structure. They were three floors below the live band, and Gus felt as if his feet were already on the rooftop platea weaving through the crowd hand in hand with other Greeks in a rite of bodily remembrance. He could smell the souvlakia crisping over hot coals and the burbling oil of the loukoumathes pots. His stomach tightened and he realized that he wasn’t breathing.
He missed his mother. He missed Greece. He missed everything that was aggravating about growing up a child of immigrants. He had cleaned his life of the vigilance of diaspora and had left very little of the past intact. The festival was a joyous and painful reminder of all that he’d lost in the transplantation. The music called to his body, bypassing his mind and all the tangles there. With his heart beating faster, he opened the car door and leapt out, suddenly needing to be up in the sunlight holding the hand of another Greek in dance.
He looked over at Callie in the passenger seat as she checked her eyeliner in the visor mirror and fluffed her hair. “Hey, Callie. Can you hurry it up? They’re gonna sell out of the lamb if we don’t get up there quick.” Gus couldn’t tell Callie what he was really feeling, a separation from her and the life they’d fallen into. Callie, with her blazing red hair and fair skin. Callie who had tried so hard but would never be Greek. It wasn’t fair to ever think she could be, Gus thought. He watched her apply more makeup and could hear his mother’s voice in his head. “Vameni san putana.” Gus pushed the cruel comparison to a painted whore from his mind and tried again. “Hey, Cal. What’s the hold-up?”
The Feasting Virgin Page 24