by Cat Cora
I blasted out of that shower, out of that bathroom, and ran down the hall to the back bedroom. My little suitcase was lying on the floor, and my first thought was that I should put on my swimsuit and run down the street to the home of a friend I’d made in the neighborhood, Scott. His family had a swimming pool. It was ruinously hot in the summer in east Texas, and I hadn’t stopped to put on my shoes. My feet burned on the pavement. I could hear the cries and splashing of kids in the pool before I let myself in through the back gate. After a while AH had the audacity to show up and join the swim party, acting as if nothing had happened. I didn’t speak to him, I didn’t look at him, I didn’t talk to him.
Eventually the sun slid behind the trees and all the kids were called in to dinner. Scott let me borrow a towel. I wrapped it around myself and scampered back to AH’s house. My mom waited for me on the front porch. She had probably been standing there for a good hour. As I ran up, she knelt down and opened her arms, which pitched me into immediate and full-blown hysteria. I sobbed until I thought I would throw up. My father obviously had told my mother what he’d witnessed and asked her to deal with it, and as a nurse practitioner specializing in psychiatric disorders she was not unfamiliar with this kind of thing. She was calm and nurturing. She rubbed my back and kept asking what happened. To save myself, to protect myself and my sanity, I said, “It only happened once, Mommy. This was the only time.”
Which was a lie. It had happened many times.
The truth would come out, but not for thirty-five years, six months before my dad passed away. As betrayed as I felt that day, I could never be truly angry at him. He was and would always be my hero. Decades later I would find out what a part of me had always suspected, that he simply couldn’t handle what he had seen. He wasn’t disgusted by me, as I had always thought, but rather shocked, confused, and embarrassed. Perhaps AH and I were playing doctor or experimenting. It was the seventies. Who knew what kids were up to then? Parents weren’t involved in their kids’ lives the way we are now. They lacked information. They lacked the tools of communication. But finally I would hear the words that gave me the strength to begin to heal: “Cathy, I wish I had protected you. I’m so sorry, baby.”
But that day, I felt utterly alone. After my mom tried to soothe it away, I walked through the screen door, through the living room, in my bathing suit, clutching the towel around me, the soles of my feet burned. As I passed, the adults just said, “Hey,” as if it were any lazy summer afternoon.
When I examine what drives me, this childhood trauma floats to the surface. I’ve learned that while I’m blessed with people in my life whom I love and who love me, I walk through this world alone, that I’m the only one responsible for taking care of myself. On that day so long ago, this thought began to take form: my parents can’t protect me, my brothers can’t protect me, and my friends can’t, either. I put on my own armor.
I refuse to give AH any credit for the good things in my life. But one of the reasons I am able to be fearless, to work hard and stay determined over weeks, months, and years, is my refusal to be done in by shame and guilt. After it was behind me, in the weeks and months that followed the day my dad stumbled into that room and stopped it, an attitude rose up in me: “Just watch what I’m going to do now.”
two
In grade school I developed an affection for tea parties. My mom patiently brewed decaf tea and helped me assemble the mixture for the cookies. I’d make them myself, pressing the thick, chilly dough through a cookie press that I’d discovered in one of the kitchen drawers. The press had interchangeable disks—shamrocks, stars, and hearts—and I’d make cookies in all the shapes. Then I’d put on my dress and gloves and set the table with my plastic tea service and small yellow cookies and see who I could con into sitting in one of my little-kid chairs.
I graduated from tea parties to an Easy-Bake Oven and decided I needed to expand my customer base beyond my family. I resolved to hold bake sales on the weekend, and was quite the marketer. I’d ride my bike around the neighborhood announcing my sale, then start production, one vanilla cake with chocolate frosting after the next. I set my price at five cents a cake. My sole customer was a boy from the neighborhood, Mark, who showed up with a pocketful of nickels. He put a nickel on my table and I slid him a piece of cake on a paper plate. He ate the cake, and then put down another nickel, and I slid him another. He may have been my only customer, but he was a very satisfied one.
I would one day discover the principles of opening your own restaurant were pretty much the same: take care to create an excellent, consistent menu and treat your customers well.
My parents loved and cooked fusion food long before anyone had ever heard of it: Greek and southern.
My dad was born two months after his family arrived in Greenville, Mississippi, from Skopelos, Greece. A small, verdant island in the northern Aegean, it was founded, according to Greek mythology, by Staphylus, one of the sons of Dionysus, god of wine and the grape harvest. From my dad’s side of the family came recipes for my favorite dish—now and forever—kota kapama, chicken cooked slowly in onions, garlic, cinnamon, and tomato paste. Served with buttery long macaroni, or over rice or orzo, this dish is the ultimate comfort food, at once savory and sophisticated and homey. My dad’s family also brought horiatiki, tomato, cucumber, and feta salad, with a tangy vinaigrette made with red wine vinegar and fresh olive oil; a hearty spanakopita, a flaky savory pastry made with loads of fresh spinach, dill, and fresh parsley; moussaka, baked eggplant with meat and béchamel sauce made with kefalotyri, a salty goat cheese beloved in Greece; and galaktoboureko, a dessert made with delicate layers of phyllo dough and creamy vanilla custard, and topped with a hot lemon sauce—it’s like crème brûlée baked in its own pastry crust.
Glistening dark-purple kalamatas were the preferred olive, feta the preferred cheese. You couldn’t buy these ingredients in Mississippi in the late 1960s. You couldn’t buy Greek olive oil. My dad had them shipped from Chicago.
My mom was an air force brat who grew up on bases across the country, in Tokyo, and in Honolulu. She cooked sweet-and-sour pork, lasagna, enchiladas, and beef stroganoff. She loved to steam artichokes, and following a classic southern impulse, added homemade mustard and bourbon to her pork roasts. Out of her kitchen on Swan Lake Drive came grits and feta, spring onion, fennel and potato soup, and southern-style greens finished with Greek olive oil.
To get our pure, undiluted southern fix we visited Aunt Inez and Uncle George, my dad’s half brother. They lived in Greenville, a hundred miles due northwest from Jackson. Uncle George was a furniture salesman, and as far as I could tell, Aunt Inez spent her days raising her kids, smoking, and cooking—in that order. I loved visiting them because Greenville felt like the deep, mysterious South in a way Jackson—the state’s largest city and its capital, with its nationally ranked colleges and universities, museums, recording studios, and fine-dining restaurants—never quite did. Greenville is in the Mississippi Delta, what some people call “the most southern place on earth.” Aunt Inez would create a real southern spread: creamed corn, mounds of fried chicken, and turnip greens. Even though her cooking was as Deep South as you could get, she had absorbed a few Greek influences from being married to George. Her biscuits and feta was top-notch.
We made the hundred-plus-mile drive several times a year, up Highway 49, through Yazoo City and Indianola, or up Highway 61 and the heart of the Delta. My dad drove the blue, wood-paneled station wagon, my mother in the passenger seat, me in the backseat in the middle between Mike and Chris. We passed miles of cotton fields and the cottonseed oil processing plants that smelled like freshly baked bread. “Let’s stop at the bakery!” I’d say when I was small, certain that what I was smelling was a tray of biscuits fresh from the oven. My dad tried to explain that it was only the odor of cottonseed oil, but I refused to believe him. “Let’s stop for some bread!” I’d say, stubborn like I was.
In Greenville, Aunt Inez would greet us with a plate o
f hot tamales. She bought them around the corner from an African American man who’d sold them from a stand for fifty years. He steamed them right there, wrapped them in newspaper, and tied the package with twine. I remember the warmth of the tamale in my hand, the softness of the masa (corn dough), the spicy pork or beef inside.
After Dad popped a few tamales into his mouth, he and Uncle George would grab their cane fishing poles and vanish, leaving my mom and Aunt Inez to deal with my brothers and me and our three cousins: Sharon, Brenda, and Pete. Our moms tossed us out of the house, and we would entertain ourselves running around until we fell down. Then we would climb one of the ancient magnolia trees whose thick branches reached over the street behind their house and throw seed pods, big as hand grenades, at passing cars. Once we found an empty red purse in the back of Brenda’s closet and set about tricking passing motorists. We tied the purse to a fishing reel and slung it out into the middle of the road, the clear fishing line invisible. You can bet every car that came along stopped to check it out. We hid in the underbrush, watching as the driver climbed out of his car, and just as he reached down to pick up the purse, whoever’s turn it was to hold the rod would reel in the purse. We’d scoop up the purse and then run away, cackling like maniacs.
In the home kitchens of my youth everyone cooked from scratch. No one used cake mixes, Hamburger Helper, or even Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. My mom, busy as she was with her full-time nursing job, made her own pizza dough and piecrusts. Her mother, Grandmom Alma, turned out beautiful cheesecakes and pies until she was well into her nineties. When we would visit Alma in Texas, she spent the day before our departure making deviled ham and date bars dusted with powdered sugar for our trip home. Neither my mom nor my grandmom believed in fast food, which was the definition of good money after bad. They were ahead of their time, both absolutely confident that they could easily whip up something better tasting, more nourishing, and less expensive.
Historically, in Jackson, the Greeks were the restaurant people. Along with the Italians they brought fine dining to the area. By the end of the sixties, all but two of the fine-dining establishments in Jackson were owned by Greeks. The Elite was owned by the Zoboukas, and the Dennery clan owned and ran Dennery’s. The Mayflower was opened in 1935 by the Kountouris and Gouras families, and is still owned by a Kountouris. It’s the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Jackson, famous for its spicy, garlicky Comeback Sauce that keeps you coming back for more.
When the Karagiozoses came through Ellis Island in the 1930s, the name was shortened to Cora. Grandpa Pete Cora settled in Greenville in 1935 and opened a little place called The Coney Island Cafe, a name he chose because he thought it sounded American.
There was another important Pete in my family, Peter J. Costas, otherwise known as Godfather Pete, whom everyone called Taki, and who owned a white-tablecloth restaurant called the Continental. Godfather Pete was one of my father’s great friends. Before the Continental, he’d owned the popular Shamrock Drive-Inn, where he introduced the concept of the take-out slice of pizza to Jackson and my parents to each other. My dad managed the place and had a reputation for flirting with the nursing students who frequented it. Before my mom, he dated a girl in the class behind her—William Faulkner’s niece, Avis.
The Continental was magical, with its big red leather booths, the clinking of the silverware and china, the whoosh of people racing around with purpose, the smell of fish seared in a pan, steak tossed on the grill, the garlicky bread smell of pizza baking. People could smoke in restaurants back then, and a glamorous cloud of cigarette smoke hung over the dining room. The menu was what was then called continental. Spaghetti and meatballs, shrimp scampi, crab Louie, and London broil.
My parents, a schoolteacher and a nurse, didn’t make much money, so they were frugal. The Continental was for special occasions only, the most common one being their wedding anniversary. They always brought my brothers and me along, reasoning that if they were going to have to fork out money for a babysitter anyway, they may as well pay for us to enjoy a good meal.
My dad liked to walk me back into the kitchen, where he would set me on the counter. I would swing my legs and the cooks would ask, “What do you want to eat, baby?” I was no prodigy of haute cuisine. I wanted fried chicken or a hamburger, but my dad would coax me into expanding my palate. “You can have a hamburger anytime!” he’d say (not entirely true). “Order shrimp, order steak!”
My dad wasn’t merely urging me to expand my palate. He and my mom believed that enjoying a wide variety of food was part of being a cultivated person. Even though we didn’t have much money, it was important to them that my brothers and I learn to appreciate culture. They saved up for season tickets for the symphony one year, and another time we drove to New Orleans to see the King Tut exhibit. My parents were always interested in furthering our aesthetic education, as long as it was within driving distance.
As children, we have no point of comparison for our parents. All I knew was that my mom was always there for her family, no more devoted to her nurse job than any other grown-up with a job. Only much later would I learn the degree to which she was devoted to her profession. My mom was a model of hard work. I sensed her intelligence, stamina, and great reserve of energy. I knew that she never missed a day of work, and didn’t believe in burnout. She believed in rest, but she also found nursing to be invigorating. One of the post–master’s certificates she eventually earned qualified her to teach the same courses she’d just aced to new nursing students. Once someone asked her why she took on this job and she said, “We needed someone to teach that curriculum, I was interested, so I just put my head down and did it.” Her final degree count is a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees from the University of Mississippi School of Nursing, a master’s from Mississippi University for Women, and eventually, a doctorate from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
If my mom showed me what it was like to live with passion for your chosen profession, my dad gave me a taste of being a citizen of the world. I knew we were “half Greek” because of Dad, and that knowledge made him more glamorous than the other dads in the neighborhood. Often, perhaps once a month, during some strange time of the day—very late at night or early in the morning—I would hear him talking on the phone to his family in Greece. He would be speaking loudly, in another language, and nothing struck me as more exotic.
He owned a huge atlas and we’d sit down at the kitchen table and he showed me where the Karagiozoses lived, on a little island called Skopelos. I loved that big, full-colored atlas. I can still see the irregular outline of Europe. France was spring green. Greece, just east of pale yellow Italy, was dusky purple.
If there was one thing I loved more than food, it was stories that would carry me to somewhere far away from Swan Lake Drive. Among my peers I felt alone in my perception that loving literature was a way of loving the larger world. I had big plans, and these plans made me something of an outcast. I had a secret list of goals and dreams. I would live in New York, travel to Paris.
My dad indulged my curiosity, even when it cost him. I liked to make things with junk I came across in the storage room. Once I made a sculpture of a woman out of plaster with one of my dad’s drill bits. Any other child would have received a good whuppin’. That was a thirty-dollar drill bit. He was dismayed at my ingenuity but also impressed, and I think maybe he felt the cost had been worth it.
three
The same year I started high school my mom went back to school. She once said that whenever she reached a crossroads in life, she would add either a baby to the family or another degree. In this case, the crossroads was having three children in high school and needing more income. When she’d gone back to school before, I’d been in grammar school, and she’d been able to attend the local Jackson medical center affiliated with the University of Mississippi, but they didn’t offer a nursing doctorate. The nearest place she could matriculate was at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, a good three-and-a-ha
lf-hour drive one way, so she couldn’t commute. Instead, she planned to move to Birmingham, where she would live in the dorm just like any other student.
I was anxious about who was going to take care of us. In the morning I would wake up with a nervous stomach and plunge into my day as quickly as possible so as not to dwell on it, a habit I’ve carried into adulthood. It was one thing for a mother not to be home if she had a job, but to not be home because she decided to become a college student again? Whose mother did such a thing?
I had no idea then that all of her additional degrees were directly tied to the family income. Money was always tight and somehow just kept getting tighter. My brothers and I received one present at Christmas, one on our birthday, and a new outfit for Easter. Those gifts were the canaries in the coal mine of our family economy; the more lavish the present, the better my parents were doing.
We spent months making our Christmas lists, always from the big J. C. Penney catalog that arrived in the late spring. We knew that we would get one “big” present, which was usually our second or third choice, so we agonized over our decision, trying to figure out where on the list to put the thing we wanted most. Some years, right after Thanksgiving, my parents sat us down and said, “Kids, this isn’t going to be a big Christmas.” We knew they meant it. My parents always meant what they said. They saw no reason to spare us the truth, as hard as it may have been for them.
In our stockings, we always got some candy and an orange. Every year I hoped the orange was a ball, but it was always an orange. What we lacked in presents we made up for in tradition. Regardless of our finances, my parents always went the extra mile to make the holiday special. We decorated our tree while drinking hot cocoa and listening to Christmas music. We baked cookies and went caroling, and I always wound up feeling as if I had had plenty of Christmas.