The Feasting Virgin

by Georgia Kolias

  Gus carted his boxes of sweets to the register in the stroller, and Callie lingered behind, gazing into the box at all the happy babies. She noticed that each baby had a name engraved in gold lettering on the box: Dark Night. Milk Honey. Strawberry Ruby. Pomegranate Dream. Sweet Regret.

  “Gus, do you have the festival program?” Callie asked. But Gus couldn’t hear her because someone was introducing a guest speaker who would be demonstrating cooking techniques. She called louder, “Hey Gus! The program?”

  “Hang on, Cal, I’m paying here.”

  Callie tapped her foot, waiting for Gus to finish so he could give her the program. She scanned nearby tables to see if anyone else had a program. All around her people were drinking thick Greek coffee and eating desserts. Their faces looked tired from the excitement of the festival and either anticipatory as they lifted their sweets to their mouths, or groaning as they emptied their plates. At several tables she could see people lifting little chocolate babies up to their mouths and taking greedy bites. Callie didn’t see any programs, which seemed to her ridiculous. How could there be so many people and no programs? She clutched the chocolates closer to her chest and gave Manny a little bounce to keep him happy. He’d begun to make his trademark yell, the one that showed great interest or excitement. Callie tried to show him the chocolates and bounce him more vigorously, but nothing would calm him down. He strained against her, pointing his arm forward relentlessly. “Aaaaaaaaaaa!”

  “What is it, honey? What’s so exciting?” Callie looked in the direction of his arm, followed the fingertip pointing through the crowded room, past the people, the signs, the sweets, and toward one thing. Callie stood stunned as she looked to the left of the cooking demonstration booth near the entrance of the room. There was Xeni. She had her back to Callie as she watched the demonstration, but Callie was positive it was her.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaa!” Manny yelled. “Aaaaaaaaaaaa!”

  Nearby festivalgoers started to turn their heads toward them. “Aaaaaaaaaaaa!” Callie watched in stunned silence as a ripple effect moved through the large room, until more and more people turned to stare at her and Manny. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” It seemed to Callie that the entire room had stopped to turn their heads toward her, had stopped talking, until all that could be heard was Manny screaming, “Aaaaaaaaaaaa!” and the voice of the flustered cooking demonstrator, who had stopped stirring her pot to see what the commotion was about. Everyone had turned their heads to stare at them except for the one person who mattered, the one person who seemed to be still as a statue. Callie herself was frozen, as if she’d been caught doing something naughty.

  “Hey, hey. Shhhhhh. Shhhhhhh. Manoli! Keep it down, buddy.” Gus gave Callie a dirty look as he maneuvered the dessert-heavy stroller and a cup of Greek coffee through the crowded tables. “What’s going on, kid?” Gus’s voice seemed loud in the now quiet room, and he tried to be inconspicuous as he unsuccessfully attempted to shush Manny. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” “Okay, let’s get outside! Come on, Callie. Look alive!”

  Callie replied in a whispered monotone, “I can’t, Gus. I have to stay here.”

  “Well, give me the baby, and you can stay.”

  “I can’t leave the baby. That’s the thing, Gus.”

  “Well, I’m leaving then.”

  “Really?” Callie whispered, and a tear escaped her eye and trickled down her cheek.

  Meanwhile the cooking demonstrator’s pot had boiled over, and Callie caught her breath as the last person in the room finally turned to look. Her dark, downcast eyes took one quick glimpse. Then she slowly got up from her seat near the door and walked out, her long dress flapping behind her. And in the space of a moment Callie felt a surge of happiness spill over her and then a hot flush of dismay as she watched Xeni disappear once again. “Hey, is that who I think it is?” Gus pointed at Xeni’s retreating back. Manny’s cries reached a crescendo before slowing down to a muffled sound, and the diners returned to consuming their delectable treats. Callie stood rooted, her feet sinking into the marble floor of the Kafenion. “Yes, I think so.”

  “Well, did she see us?”

  Wiping the tear from her cheek, Callie replied, “Yes, I’m pretty sure she saw us.”

  “Well, what’s her problem anyway? She’s the one that took off without any notice. We didn’t do anything to her.”

  “Gus. Do you remember that last night that we saw Xeni?”

  “Not really. We had dinner and a lot to drink.”

  “I remember it. Every detail. I have to go find her.”

  I Am the Mother of My Imagination

  She can’t see me. She can’t see me like this. She’ll know that I’m crazy, hysterical. She’ll know that the doctor was right. I am a crazy woman. My body has betrayed me, mimicking pregnancy, bloating into a huge mass, a bowl of dough risen to monstrous proportions, and overflowing. I should punch it down, punch it down. But I can’t. I feel something moving inside. The yeast resurrecting, the curling spine of a crust of bread. Even if this is some hysterical fake pregnancy, I can’t hurt my belly, finally big and round, stretched into the shape of a full moon rising and luminous with shiny trails. My belly is a horizon, the night sky shattered by silver lightning and billowing clouds. Thunder and rain hover over me in my darkness and I descend down deep into the loneliest of hells. Except that . . .

  There is something there. My imagination or the imagination of another’s. I can’t crush that, and I can’t find out what it is if it means I will lose it. I will stay in this impregnated state forever, keeping my hands full of smooth skin and bumpy shifts of my imagined baby’s bottom, just below my breasts. I am happy in this hell, my insanity. As my hands reach to caress every part of my expanded belly, I am filled with a wondrous, delirious joy. Could it be that my dream has finally come true? Has God given me my virgin birth? I am filled with child. From my groin to my heart, I can feel her, stretching her body, becoming more fully realized and conscious in her every pulsating moment.

  I believe her to be real. I cannot doubt her fictive existence anymore. I treasure her imposition on my sanity, her invasion of my body. All other thoughts have fallen away. I care for no others. You hear me, God? I care for no others! There is no need to punish me any further. I am pure. Make this dream real, my hallucinations lucid, my mirage embodied. I will not go astray. I have shown you that. I have stayed away, and I will stay away if you just make this virgin birth of earthly substance and not just the hysterical productions of a woman bent on escaping love.

  What is love, anyway? Love is a sacrifice. It is not all pleasure and release. Love is Sisyphean. You have to love your boulder to push it every day. Otherwise it will crush you. The way I’ve been crushed. I was flattened into a dry, black track, always underfoot, and never rising. Maybe I’m not making sense, but I know, God, that there are all kinds of love. Love that hurts like a branding iron searing your flesh. Love that makes you into a crazy monster. Love that makes you go dull and numb, living every day in a haze. There is love that makes you feel trapped, your feet cemented to the ocean floor. Your body swaying side to side as bubbles escape your blue lips, floating up toward the sun along with long swaths of lanky hair releasing from your scalp, eyes upturned and flooding the ocean with salty tears.

  Love. I never had too much of it. But I do now. I love this imaginary child of mine. I am happy to stay insane with her in our own little underworld, watery and crimson. My heart beats blood through my veins, rushing love into her heart, my lungs fill with air oxygenating her soul. I will care and feed her with my flesh, my placenta growing old. I will be a woman of one hundred and five, with belly outstretched. I will never give her up, and I will happily push this boulder. No one will notice me. I will become invisible to them, as all crazy people do. I don’t mean the crazy people on the street that scare you. I mean the crazy people that carry on their everyday lives, looking normal enough on the surface while inside they seethe with lack. Except that I am not seething with lack anymore as I once w
as. I now roil with a voracious strength. I will protect my child with my teeth, nails, and growl, protect this state of duality until I die.

  I have found comfort in this physical confusion. I have vomited up all of the bile that I held within me. I have rocked myself nauseous and come up empty. My rib cage has expanded, and the bars have lifted. My feet are bigger, more firmly planted on the Earth. As my belly has incrementally grown, my physical body has learned to claim space in the world I never knew I deserved. I am superhuman and unworldly. I carry the spirit of Christ in my womb, no longer shattered and broken. I carry a miracle in my womb. Like red wine that transforms into blood and bread that is of Christ’s flesh. My imagination and desire have transformed into a delirious incubation of all that is pure and without shame. I am the mother of my imagination.

  Gus Needs His Mother

  Gus stood behind the stroller full of sugary treats, throwing his hands up into the air, watching Callie and Manny disappear through the crowd and out of the dining hall following Xeni’s trail. Giving up on Callie for the moment, he sat down with his demitasse cup of coffee and galaktoboureko and opened up a copy of the Hellenic Journal.

  Setting it back down again, he surveyed the room teaming with Greeks and non-Greeks. At the next table was a family sitting down for a break. The parents both wore festival volunteer nametags, and the children wore Greek dance costumes. The father was obviously Greek, with his dark hair and eyes and swarthy forearms, ordering his children to sit still and behave, while the wife was blond and demure. She looked weak-limbed to Gus. She must be an Amerikanitha, thought Gus. Here she is working the festival. She probably converted to Orthodoxy. She did everything to fit in with her husband’s culture. At another table Gus spied on a family with both Greek parents, speaking to each other in a familiar Greek shorthand. Farther on he noticed a non-Greek family laughing as their two young sons pushed each other off their chairs. Everywhere Gus looked he saw harmony, except at his own table. He saw himself alone, his child and the mother of his child running off after Xeni and leaving him to eat his galaktoboureko in silence amidst the crowd. Gus felt Callie’s absence acutely, and he realized that it hadn’t started that day. It had started many months ago. Maybe she’d never really been there, Gus thought. Maybe we made a mistake. Or maybe we were trying to fix our parents’ mistakes.

  Gus sucked down his coffee, swirled the grounds around the insides of the cup and turned it upside down. While the coffee grounds dried, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed the phone number of the one person who had never really left him. He nervously drummed his fingers on the table as the phone rang, or beeped really, as it does in Greece.

  “Neh?”

  “Mana? Can you help me read the flitzani?”

  “Pou esai, pedi mou?” Mrs. Horiatis replied accusingly. “You know what time it is?”

  “I’m sorry, Mana. I forgot about the time difference. I’m at the Greek Festival, Mana. And I need to know my future.”

  “How would I know your future? You’re a grown man, remember?”

  “I’m sorry, Mana. I’m confused. I want to do the right thing. I don’t know. I love Manolaki. And I love you. Please help me read the cup.”

  “Okay. Is it dry?”

  “Maybe it needs a few more minutes. Mana, are you sorry Patera left?” Gus heard his mother exhale a deep sigh on the other end of the phone line.

  “Sorry? He left me. It was hard. And then it got easier. And there was no more fighting. No more jealousy. He was gone, me tin allie. She can keep him.”

  “I was sad when he left.”

  “Of course you were. He was your father. Every child wants a father.”

  “So Mana. If that is true, how can I leave Callie? What about Manolaki?”

  Gus’s mother paused. “You don’t have to leave Manolaki. But if you are unhappy with the Amerikanitha, then you should leave her and take Manoli with you.”

  “I can’t do that, Mana.”

  “Then share custody and start a new family. With a Greek girl this time.”

  Gus exhaled. “I think the coffee is dry now, Mana.”

  “Okay. Turn it over.”

  Gus turned the cup right side up and prepared to receive his fate. Inside the small cup was a dark ridge of coffee grounds. It traveled along the upper edge of the cup and then suddenly dropped. The white gorge on the porcelain cup was wide and then the dark ridge started again. To the right of that stood a small figure with four legs. And on the opposite side was a large cross formed of wavering lines surrounded by a light haze of coffee.

  “How does it look?”

  “Forget it. This is a stupid idea. I don’t believe in all this anyway.”

  “Constantino. What does it look like?”

  As Gus described the cup to his mother, she made little sounds, a gasp, as if what he was describing to her was an affirmation of her suspicions. Each time she made a sound, Gus paused and asked her, “What does that mean?” and each time she’d shush him and tell him to keep describing the cup, that she’d tell him at the end.

  “And that’s it.”

  “What is at the bottom on the cup?” his mother asked.

  “The bottom?”

  “Yes, ayori mou. The bottom.”

  “It is clear. All white.”

  “Thank goodness,” Mrs. Horiatis exclaimed.

  “What does it mean, Mana?”

  “You have been traveling on a dark journey. You have been afraid to fall from the cliff. You don’t know it, but the worst is over. Whatever was supposed to happen already happened. But now it will be easier. There is a faithful donkey that will help you for the rest of your journey.”

  “What journey, Mana?”

  “This journey with the Amerikanitha. Something already happened that will decide the fate of the situation.”

  “It already happened?”

  “Stop talking, Constantino, and listen to me. There is a donkey to help you on your journey, and this will lead you to lighter times. He is leading you to the cross. That is always good. Unless . . . is it an upright cross, or to the side?”

  “It’s kind of to the side.”

  “Is it more like a t or an x?” asked Mrs. Horiatis.

  “It’s kind of in between a t and x.”

  “Hmm . . .”

  “Hmm, what?” said Gus growing impatient.

  “Well, if it is like a t, then you are traveling toward God and protection. But if it is like an x, then is has something to do with Xeni. Either way it is good because it is all light, and before it was dark.”

  “Mana. What good can come from Xeni?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Mana. Don’t start. I’m not going to marry Xeni.”

  “Xeni is the godmother of your son. You can’t marry her. But maybe she can help you in some way with this situation. The donkey brings you to her.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It is not for us to understand. All we can do is try to follow God’s will.”

  “She is here.”

  “Where?”

  “She is here at the Greek Festival. Callie went running off to look for her. We saw her across the room.”

  “Go find her.”

  “Why Mana?”

  “She holds your fate,” his mother said. And even though Gus had no idea what that meant, he knew it was true.

  “Efharisto, Mana. I’ll call you later, endaxi?”

  “Okay. Sto kalo, pedi mou. And Constantino?”

  “Yes, Mana?”

  “I love you no matter what happens.” It was just what he needed to hear.

  “I love you too, Mana,” and with that he hung up the phone, packed his provisions, and loaded the stroller. Having a sudden thought, Gus looked at the stroller laden with Greek food and Manny’s things and asked, “Are you my donkey?”

  GREEK COFFEE

  (multiply recipe for each cup of coffee)

  “Turn the cup right side up and prepare to receive your fate.”<
br />
  1 demitasse cup of water

  1 teaspoon finely ground Greek coffee

  Sugar to taste:

  1/2 teaspoon sugar for bitter coffee (pikroh)

  1 teaspoon sugar for medium sweetness (metrio)

  2 teaspoons sugar for sweet coffee (yliko)

  FOR COFFEE:

  Pour the water into a small briki pot. Add the coffee and sugar and stir until they are incorporated. Let the coffee simmer until it starts to form bubbles around the edges and begins to rise up the sides of the briki. Quickly lift the briki from the flames before it boils over and pour into a demitasse cup from a height. A large bubble (to mati) brings good luck.

  FOR YOUR FATE:

  Stop drinking the coffee before reaching the bottom of the cup where the grounds have settled. Swirl the grounds around the sides of the cup and place the cup upside down on a napkin in your saucer and allow to dry.

  Find a Greek woman trained in reading the cup to learn your fortune.

  Dome within a Dome

  The church has always been a sanctuary for me when it is empty like this. Even on festival days, you can find the church solitary and waiting. Entering the narthex with the mosaic icons flanking each wall, I go to the left, lighting a candle under the icon of the Virgin and placing it in the top tray of sand under the icon. I always place it in the upper right-hand corner and light it for the same thing: a healthy baby. And that my mother rests in peace. She isn’t dead yet. But one day she will be, and I hope that she finds more happiness in eternity than she did in this life. It seems like the men around us were always disappointing us, except for God and Jesus.