by Heather Ross
The den in Yia Yia’s house in the suburb of Woodbridge, Virginia, was—and is—dark and clean. On one wall there is a sliding glass door that, if opened, leads into a manicured backyard dotted with small flowering trees and a chain-link fence that marks the beginnings of other people ’s lawns and properties. My sister and I had never lived in a suburb, where the houses were only shown from the front, but we had seen them on television and we thought that they were happy places. Especially odd to me was that you could stand in your backyard and look right into the backsides of other homes, which was the side where you hid the parts of your life that you didn’t want passersby to see, like broken things waiting to be fixed, and laundry. It didn’t make sense to me that you would want to hide these things from the strangers who drove by but that you would let your neighbors see them so clearly. We could see straight into kitchens where heavyset ladies with thick arms and legs worked long, unsmiling hours in sleeveless shirts and bare feet and sometimes in their robes and curlers, or sat at their kitchen tables with their brows resting in their propped-up hands, worrying over a piece of mail or children who had not come home on time. It seemed uncivilized to us, even though the homes and lawns were manicured and their inhabitants respectable. In Vermont, we had acres—no, miles—because when we walked from our house to the river or into the woods, we could never know at what point we had left our own property, because there were no chain-link fences and because it didn’t matter. We were surrounded by other large or forgotten properties and forests that didn’t seem to belong to anybody, and we were just walking through them anyway. When we did stumble upon a driveway or a house, we turned away from it because we understood that it was private.
But in Woodbridge, you always knew whose property you stood on. You could see clearly where your grass met someone else’s grass, and it was impossible not to compare and judge the differences between them and everything else in sight. I watched my grandparents’ neighbors trim their lawns and shrubs against the chain-link fencing that marked their property line with what seemed like a special attention.
Yia Yia saw our one-room schoolhouse once, when she and Grandpa came to collect my sister and me for a visit. My grandfather was polite and warm toward my mother, whose family he had admired, and he hid his disapproval of our living situation admirably. I loved him for a lot of reasons, but especially for that. They stayed just long enough to look around the single room that was our kitchen, our living room, and our mother’s bedroom. My grandmother asked if we’d had breakfast, and my mother told her that we had each had some yogurt. Then, in a matter of minutes, we were sitting together on the long, clean bench seat in the back of their monstrous lemon-colored Cadillac on our way to Woodbridge. I don’t remember saying goodbye to our mother, and from the inside of the car, we could not see her standing in the doorway, waving to us, but we knew that she was there and that she was alone now and wouldn’t see us again for weeks. “Yogurt,” spat my grandmother, to my grandfather but also loudly enough for us to hear clearly over the roar of the air conditioner, not thirty feet from the driveway, “is no breakfast.” He was silent, the back of his head not even nodding in response.
We stopped just once, when it was dark, at a motel where Yia Yia took off our clothes and scrubbed us clean in water almost too hot to stand, holding our heads underneath the faucet to rinse the shampoo from our hair with powerful, gnarled hands that looked as though they belonged to a woman twice her age and twice her size. Our skin was pink and raw when she finally let us step out to be powdered, coated with her adored Jean Naté, and dressed in clean, new pajamas, purchased at her beloved PX. Whatever clothing we were wearing or had brought with us would disappear while we slept, and by the time we had come back to Vermont, we would have new clothing, matching except for color and size—I was already five or six inches taller and much rounder than my twin sister—and new shoes. Then she sat each of us down and told us to sit on our hands and look straight ahead as she combed our thick, tangled hair. When it was smooth, she pulled a knitting needle from her bag and drew a line with its tip from the middle of our foreheads to the nape of our necks to make a perfect part, then braided each side. She took her scissors and trimmed our bangs, which my mother had cut haphazardly with dull shears without much attention to evenness and which always looked like a smile with missing teeth, and, finally, she cut the bottom of each braid so that their tips were thick and flat, like the bristles on a vegetable brush. Then she tucked us into a double hotel bed and turned off the light, and I lay in the dark wondering at the smell of my hair and my skin and missing the cats that usually came into our beds at home.
My sister loved the structure, the sense of being cared for in such a way and protected, the new pajamas and the evenly cut bangs. She knew more certainly than I did that we were, in our daily lives, missing out on something and that children needed more constant grooming and caring for than what we were given. I was less sure. My sister and I were different in many ways, including how we looked. I took after my mother’s family, who were all very fair and blue-eyed and didn’t like to admit they were wrong or weak. My sister looked a lot like our father’s mother, who was from Greece. This similarity was a source of special pride for my grandmother, who thought of Christie as the daughter that she didn’t have but had always hoped for. Christie also had a hot temper and loved people and things with a frighteningly passionate attachment. When her collection of stuffed animals outgrew her bed, she started sleeping on the floor rather than ban any of them. She tried very hard to hide her favoritism toward her favorite toy, a stuffed mouse, especially around mine, a stuffed elephant. She was sensitive to situations that seemed dangerous, quick to hold the adults in our life responsible for creating them, and appreciative of the respite that visits to Woodbridge afforded us. In turn, my grandmother favored my sister in the ways that grandparents are able to do, unapologetically, blatantly.
Yia Yia had been what my mother called a war bride, married at sixteen to my grandfather, who had joined the army at fifteen and gone to Greece as an American soldier. She told us horrifying stories of her childhood in occupied Greece, stories of starvation and death and always ending with the hand of God reaching down to punish those who had been most cruel. “We had no food to eat so my mother give me all her gold jewelry to take to the wealthy family in town, to trade with them for the flour and sugar, but they trick me and what did I know? I was only a little girl, just barely older than you are now. They gave me sacks of marble dust and so we were starving, but now the jewelry is gone, too, and I cried for my mother and my brothers and sisters.” There would be a pause here, an opportunity for the listener to react, and then she would start again with her eyebrows suddenly meeting in the middle and her eyes widened: “But then, after the war ended, the whole family was walking down the street together in their fine clothes, and a bus came fast down the street and ranned over them, the whole family, and smashed them all to DEATH!” Here she would add a forceful hand movement, clapping one palm against the other or down onto the table, and pause, hands landing on her thighs and throwing herself back in her chair before her story’s moral was revealed. “Now you tell me there is no God!” She made it hard to disagree.
This God of hers, however, seemed more interested in revenge than in keeping terrible things from happening in the first place. Yia Yia kept an especially bloody crucifix on her bedroom wall and explained to us why it was important for us to thank Jesus, because we had killed him, and God was angry about that. She tried to teach us about her religion, but her English wasn’t very good and her stories were too frightening, and eventually God, in my mind, began to resemble Lex Luthor, and I knew that it was probably time to stop listening.
Yia Yia read tea leaves, but mostly to satisfy her own curiosity rather than as a service. She would not tell guests that she was peering into their future as she slid the teacups in front of them, which often caught them by surprise since they neither requested nor drank tea. When they would leave her k
itchen, she would tell us what she had seen. “Poor Mrs. Buchko,” she would report to us. “Her daughter, she will never marry, because she moved to the city and now is a Bad Girl.” The tea leaves never seemed to deliver good news, and most disappointments that would befall her guests had one thing in common: They could be blamed on a Bad Girl.
Yia Yia had kept her handmade wedding dress and showed it to us once, not letting us touch it, but pointing to it, wrapped in thick clear plastic and stowed on a high shelf in the hall closet. Then she turned to my sister and said in her thick accent, “Someday, Christine, you will be married and you will wear my dress.” My sister was silent.
“What about me?” I asked, because that’s what you are in the habit of saying when you are a twin and one of your set is offered something—anything—by anyone. She broke into a knowing smile, as though we were exchanging knock-knock jokes and I had just delivered the question that would prompt her punch line, which she delivered to my sister triumphantly. “Heather won’t be able to wear my dress; she will be too fat.”
Our grandfather doted on us, showing us an affection that nobody else, not his three grown sons or grandson, had ever known from him, their soldier father. When he came home, we would run to the door, and he would pick us up and love us. We had never lived in a house with a man who came home every day at the same time, but we had seen them on television enough to know what to do. In the evenings we would both curl up with him, one under each arm, in a giant green leather chair and watch Gilligan’s Island and have whatever we liked to eat. He loved us exactly the same, the way our mother did.
But Grandpa would be at work by the time we woke up in the morning, and we would be alone with Yia Yia, who seemed to always be cleaning and cooking. She would serve us a heavy breakfast in her small, immaculate kitchen and then announce that it was time for us to move downstairs, into the den. The idea of playing inside when it was perfectly nice outside seemed strange to me, even when I was just four or five, because summers in Vermont were so fleeting and wonderful, you wouldn’t waste a moment of them indoors, where you would be trapped for months on end come winter. Yia Yia, on the other hand, felt that outdoors was where you went when you needed to hang laundry or walk to the car or take a photo in your matching dresses on her front stoop, which was framed by enormous, structurally insignificant Gothic columns. She also believed that childhood was not so much about playing as about learning how to be good at being an adult. We were to spend our waking hours on the floor of the den, where a large waterproof plastic mat would be laid down and the curtains drawn to protect the color of her precious wall-to-wall carpeting, practicing our homemaking skills.
This, she explained, would be how we would win good husbands, with our knitted afghans and scarves and ability to mend shirts and hem pants. In my case especially, this was my only hope. My sister was beautiful, with dark hair and shiny skin. She looked Greek, even as a child. We were twins, and I was taller, but she had been shaving her legs for two years before I needed to wear a shirt, much less a bra. I was too tall and too thick and too messy and apparently unavoidably destined for obesity, but Yia Yia had indicated that all of that could be overlooked if I could make a man happy with my skills as a homemaker. I threw myself into the task, relieved to finally receive some clear instruction on the mystery of how to make somebody—anybody—love me, and believing without question everything she told me.
She brought us an old, large stuffed bear, bigger than either of us, and taught us to knit hats and scarves for it and to crochet afghans made from granny squares to lay over it. It did not sit up on its own, so we laid it on its back on our plastic mat and tended to it like a giant, silent baby, which is what I came to imagine a husband to be, not ever having lived in a house that had one. I endeavored to knit a scarf that was long enough to reach her across-the-street neighbors’ front door but ran out of yarn when it was about twelve feet long and was devastated when Yia Yia claimed to find a small slipped stitch. “It is no good. It will fall apart like garbage,” she said, pushing it back into my hands and pointing at it with a shaking finger, commanding me to “take it all out and do it again.” My sister had no patience for these lessons and abandoned me to care for our pretend husband alone in favor of the sofa and the remote-controlled television and constant supply of snacks that Yia Yia brought us. She wasn’t worried; she would be thin and beautiful and very popular at the Greek festivals that Yia Yia promised to take us to when we were older (this actually turned out to be true; as adults, Christie and I went to a Greek festival, where a small troupe of dancers circled her as part of their performance, as though she were a deity). But I was taking things even more seriously after this setback.
I moved on to crochet, which seemed to me to be more sculptural and free-form, its mistakes less obvious. I made dozens, maybe hundreds, of granny squares and sewed them together into an ugly poncho. I collected needles and hooks in every size. I learned to shorten and lengthen a pair of pants with an invisible, flexible stitch, sitting next to Yia Yia on the sofa, my face so close to her elbow that I can still smell her perfume when I hand-sew a hem. I presented to her knitted slippers, made with a pattern that I had designed myself (she never used patterns; only lazy people needed patterns), and handkerchiefs made from scraps of fabric and embroidered with my initials, their edges rolled and stitched carefully, but with a child’s hand and patience. Every finished project was brought to her in her kitchen, as she ironed or cooked while watching her soap operas, which kept her head happily nodding in disapproval most of the morning, but nothing I made ever met her approval or made her smile.
I left Woodbridge with plastic bags full of cheap synthetic yarns, needles, hooks, and pins, my determination to become a good wife stronger than ever. We spent that winter in the schoolhouse surrounded by yarn and fabric, some of it from Yia Yia and her PX and some of it from my mother, who could also knit and sew and embroider. She came from a family of artists and craftspeople, collectors of textiles and artwork, fashionable, worldly upper-class women who could design and make complicated and beautiful things with their hands in their leisure. We knitted up every bit of yarn that we had and then unraveled what we didn’t love and knitted with it again. Then we took apart old moth-eaten sweaters and dirty scarves and the odd, pointy slippers that Yia Yia sent us every winter that were neither pretty nor warm enough for our house, and knitted and crocheted sweaters and blankets for the cats, the mice, and the imaginary family of house gnomes who lived under our potbelly woodstove. We made slippers and hats for Mouse and Elephant to keep them warm on nights when there wasn’t room for them under our blankets. We moved on to more elaborate costumes and little shrouds in which to wrap the small mammals and birds that our cats hunted and brought into our house to die, building dioramas from shoeboxes to display them in dramatic poses, held by the magic of rigor mortis, and in costume in a variety of scenes. Greek tragedies and Romeo and Juliet were favorites. It was days of snowbound fun, at least until our mother realized, led by the stench of many small deaths coming from our room, that we were storing dead animals—and their wardrobes and accessories—like Barbie dolls under our beds and threw them all out.
Our tomcat brought home an injured blue jay that seemed to prefer our warm house to his winter nest and settled into a wide perch at the top of one of our windows. I thought I recognized him as the same blue jay that I had seen days before, collecting the bits of fox fur from the barbed wire fence that bordered the pasture across our road to build his nest. We were desperate for him to love us, to stay with us and let us feed him from our hands and perch on our shoulders. We knitted him a bright red scarf out of wool embroidery thread, using toothpicks with beads stuck onto the ends for needles. When it was finally finished and painstakingly cast off, late one night at the foot of our mother’s bed, we sat together in the dark plotting how we would tie it around his tiny neck—surely he would love it once he realized how much warmer he was with it on—but when we woke up, he was gone. My mothe
r had been waiting for the injuries from his capture to heal before she let him go.
“But we made this for him,” I said, “and we were going to give it to him today!”
“We can leave it outside for him, and he’ll see it and take it to his nest and use it as a blanket, I’m sure of it,” was her response.
We climbed into our winter clothing with our small, thick mittens and pushed open our heavy wooden door. We found a low branch and hung the scarf from it, loosely because birds don’t have thumbs to untie things with, and we went back inside, where we sat pressed against the window, watching for our blue jay. Surely he would find it. Night came and we went to bed, but when we woke up we ran to the window and saw that it was gone. Our mother assured us that he must have come for it, and we agreed, as we could see no footprints in the snow underneath it, but when the snow melted in the spring, I found it in the muddy grass beneath the tree where it had hung and I buried it there, digging a hole in the still partly frozen ground with a stick, so that Christie would not stop believing that there was a blue jay somewhere wearing a red scarf, or using it to wrap up his babies, and who was our true friend.
When we eventually left the schoolhouse, we went to live with our father in Virginia. Yia Yia was only an hour away, and she wanted us to stay with her and Grandpa every weekend. On that first Friday afternoon, Yia Yia pulled us into her home as though she were saving us, scrubbed us again as thoroughly and roughly as if we were rusted metal, cut our hair as short as it had ever been, hung small gold chains with crosses around our necks, and drove us to Tyson Corners to have our ears pierced without first consulting us or either of our parents. My sister would not let the teenager with the chewing gum in her mouth hold the piercing gun up to the side of her head unless I went first. I didn’t want pierced ears or the little gold beads on sharp posts that I had been pushed to choose, but Christie sort of did, even if the means terrified her, so I closed my eyes and pretended that I had barely felt it. Later that night we argued over something—we only fought when we were around adults who loved us unevenly—and when she pulled my hair she tore one of the little gold studs out. I could not keep the injured lobe clean enough to avoid infection and, after weeks of trying, gave up on having pierced ears altogether, with total indifference.