Let Me Explain You

by Annie Liontas

  Marina started by holding up the heart-shaped kidney, darker red than blood. There was a shallow cut running down the middle. “Delicious, but the Americans don’t like it whole, so I sneak it into recipes.” Yes, Stavroula had seen Marina do that.

  Marina handed her a knife and an apron. “The last rule is: Don’t Let Anyone Tell You How to Cut Your Meat.”

  Stavroula’s arms were crossed.

  “Pork is the big special tonight. You don’t do it, no one’s eating.”

  “Marina will do it.”

  Marina picked up her own knife from the stand. “I do mine, you do yours.”

  Stavroula was squeamish about cutting into an animal. Pig, especially. But also, she wanted to. She poked its skin with the tip of the blade. It felt like a thick layer of butter. Marina kept going, expecting Stavroula to catch up. Stavroula held her breath and pushed with the knife. It was like entering a fleshy door.

  Marina sliced, Stavroula followed. Marina pulled off the pieces meant for lard, and so did Stavroula. Marina cleaved at the hock, and so did Stavroula. It was heavy, but Stavroula used her body to move it to the wheelbarrow. Little by little, the huge shape broke off into little shapes that Stavroula could recognize. Pork chops, ribs. Stavroula was panting from piecing away the animal. Her neck was slick. But there was something satisfying, the pig untucked from its bones. After a while, it was not pig.

  “Don’t get cocky,” Marina grunted, “or you get sloppy.” They kept going.

  Stavroula looked and saw that she was keeping up. Just about. They were both accessorized with flicks of pig skin and gore. She did not need to pay attention to Marina. Her knife knew where to go. It found depressions on its own, moved into natural grooves.

  “You know what, sophomore? Only a real cook butchers like that.”

  “I just followed you.”

  Marina swung the cleaver and sank it into the tree. “Admit what you are, finish them both.”

  CHAPTER 19

  * * *

  Rob beat her to the last chicken nugget. She wrestled it from his fist with her mouth; apparently he did not like a tongue driving into his clenched fingers. He slapped her away. She squeezed his nostrils with her fingernails so that he had no choice but to spit out the chewed-up nugget. He threw the last swallow of soda at her, getting it in her hair, and she rubbed her face dry on his knee. People getting into and out of their cars were staring, which was what she wanted. She was more panting than laughing, but laughing, too. Rob was aggressive the way a man is when he doesn’t really want to hurt you, only leave an impression.

  They were hanging in the parking lot of the Wawa about half a mile from the diner, Rob now leaning on the bumper of his car, Litza standing far enough away where he couldn’t grab her. They had not gone looking for her father. Not like Rob had any real thought about going searching for Stavros Stavros Mavrakis—what he was after was something else, which was exactly why Litza had called him up. When they met here, he asked if she was hungry because he was starving, and instead of giving him the opportunity to take her to a nice place—and instead of giving him the opportunity to suggest someplace disappointing—she insisted on McDonald’s. The McDonald’s where, as an adolescent, she met Dina in secret. The McDonald’s that her father had never once stepped foot in. He condemned what they were eating as junk food, not really being able to appreciate that, for once, he was using an appropriate phrase. What she and Rob had been doing for the last hour was getting high, not too high, in this Wawa parking lot and scarfing the kind of junk food that could not be ordered at her father’s diner.

  A thirty-five-year-old cop walked by, belt jingling, hand on his firearm like he might revert to using it. Rob pulled his hat over his eyes, casting a purplish shadow over his face. She knew he had nothing to hide and just wanted the cop to think he did. Litza said, “Hey, Leo.” The cop entered the Wawa without answering. Rob was surprised she knew him.

  “You tell him about your daddy?” Rob sneered, threatened by the possibility that she might be interested in the officer, clearly not realizing that the officer scored a 099.9 in her book. Venereal disease, Unspecified, and it was the Unspecified that freaked her out the most, not to mention that he was married with one on the way, and that kind of man she did not respect and did not give it up to.

  “Leo? No. He’s still mad at me.”

  “For what?”

  She bit Rob’s knee, and he kicked her in the stomach, lightly. Enough to catch her breath. She sucked her teeth. “You never kick a fucking woman in the stomach.”

  Rob snorted. But then he saw that she was serious, and he changed up and was calling her yo-baby, which she wanted to roll her eyes at but didn’t because that would have quickly unraveled the evening. No man wanted to get corrected when he was sniveling for forgiveness. What she knew about men was, they were in love with the way they laid out sorry.

  She was here, refusing to do a damn thing about her father’s disappearance.

  Now that the streetlights were coming on, the parking lot was flooding with a weak yellow. She came closer to him, nicely. He was half sitting, half leaning on the trunk of his car. She put her hands on the metal bumper between his legs. It was perfect that Leo came out of the Wawa right then with his coffee and soft pretzel, saw them, got into his cruiser but didn’t pull away. She eased between Rob’s knees, which she could tell he liked, because his whole body was paying attention. She brought her lips to his ear but didn’t do anything yet. He squeezed her hips with his thighs, telling her what she was in for. She had played this game before, with men who really had been giving her fair warning, so she knew she could answer in a number of persuasive ways that would make Rob—blah, blah, blah, blah.

  She whispered, “You know I can’t get pregnant, right?”

  She pulled back in time to see the look pass over his face, one that changed him into a little boy. His eyes were saying, Shit, really? 628.2? His eyes were reading her eyes, mouth, hair. She had picked him tonight because he was low risk. What harm could he do after what she’d been through this week? But also maybe she knew that Rob would offer comfort at a time when she couldn’t ask for it and no one in her life would offer, anyway. She regretted it immediately, that look on his face. She shot him a look that said his pity was pathetic, which caused him to change his expression, too. He said, “Awesome.”

  But still, he had her by the wrist and was massaging it lightly between his fingers in a way that was tender and bothered her. This kid was only nineteen, what did he know? No nineteen-year-old anywhere is barren. Barren was not how she felt; how she felt was capable of giving birth to a storm. The doctors were wrong about her. When her body was ready, it would give her a child. She would be a loving mother, make her child strong like her. Being a mother was what Litza was meant to be.

  It was a shame that the moment was slipping from them. Not that she couldn’t get Rob started up again, easily, in fact he was already getting himself worked up, but she was no longer in the mood. It wouldn’t help, getting lost in a new body for a little while when that body was going to hold her like she was damaged. Unless, without realizing it, that was why she had called him?

  “I have to go look for my dad,” she said. That was not what she was going to do.

  Rob straightened. “Your dad’s really missing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit, I thought you were making it up to get out of work for a few days. I was like, ‘Me, too, my dad’s missing, too.’ ” He laughed.

  “It’s not funny,” she said. She knew he didn’t think it was.

  He dragged his foot over some pebbles. “He just, like, vanished?”

  “He wrote a goodbye letter.”

  Rob was quiet. She knew he was thinking E950, E951, E953, E955.4, E956, E957—all the ways her father might have killed himself. But the truth was that she and her father, in this one respect, were too much alike. They were both stubborn, and they wouldn’t give anybody the satisfaction.

  Rob was ru
bbing the hood of his car, unsure what to say.

  “He’d never hurt himself, he only hurts other people,” she said.

  Yes, that was it, that was the way to understand his disappearance.

  The disappearance, like his email, was meant to shame her. When he was the one who should be ashamed, because he was a liar and he had never been there for any of them—truthfully, none of them—and all of a sudden he wanted some kind of golden martyrdom named Fatherhood? All of a sudden he wanted to go away and have his life immortalized as worthy? I have seen you make scramble of the lives of Litza and also her mother, Dina; when he was the one who made the scramble, had started it, anyway, and once you started a scramble, how could you stop it? Marina had said it herself: you can fix anything in the kitchen but eggs. This disappearance, like that email, was arrogantly trying to rewrite history—and thereby erase what brought her to today, what she fought through and succumbed to, and that meant leaving her with all responsibility for her life when in fact she had been given an inheritance. The things he had given her, he could not take away. Her very life was evidence of what he had caused. The fact that she was here, still kicking the world in the teeth, was all her own creation.

  Rob asked her, “What did he do?”

  This question, so direct and plaintive, freaked her out. It made her want to tell him to mind his own fucking business, but—Rob was not asking out of pity, that wasn’t the look on his face, he was asking because she had led him to this asking; he was asking because he saw it was hard for her to erase the look on her face without breaking, which meant that what she was saying was true or at least what she perceived to be the truth; he was asking if she wanted to talk because it was the right thing to do, at a time when you’ve shared food with someone, and maybe before sex, even if the food and sex are nutritionally equivalent to junk food.

  Stavroula, if she were here, which she wasn’t, would have thought Litza incapable of answering honestly. She would have thought her too weak. But Stavroula misjudged her.

  Litza could tell Rob at least one thing he did.

  When Litza was twelve years old, Stavros came after her. She shoved her weight against the closed door, but he rammed through with his shoulder. He banged his head against the door frame, so intent he was to get in. He got in. The skin around his mouth was wet, expanding, as if it belonged to a whale. But then it got tight like a fist. She told herself not to be afraid, but this was her father and she knew his anger before she knew anything else about him.

  Litza could not get away from his body. She went the only way she knew, which was down; her legs buckled beneath her, and she slid down the wall. He was shouting in her face, little flecks of spit. His mustache was like an angry black animal.

  Where did Stavroula go? Deeper into the clothes hanging in their shared closet.

  On Litza’s upper arm, his middle and ring fingers digging in like rodents. He said, “You want to tell everyone how bad a father you have? You think that low-life will save you?” The pink ribbon of his lip curled beneath his wet mustache. “Let me explain you something: I should have left you there, to live like an eel.”

  She did not answer. He stood to full height.

  “I save you. I save you.” He kicked at her foot, not too hard, and her shoe swung back. He kicked again, harder, and she pulled her leg close to her body. She reminded herself of a snail.

  He turned to Stavroula. “Pack her bag. She goes today.”

  It was out, finally, this thing they all knew he was capable of; he almost surprised himself to hear it. Litza, however, had been expecting this for a long time—since she got here. This thing that had been determined, since their return to this country, every hour of every day. This threat that made her and her sister into who they were, as different as they were.

  If he would not fight for them, who would? If he could let them go, who would take them in?

  But she did not think—had never thought—that he would make Stavroula do it.

  Stavroula did not move. She was swallowing, again and again. There were many questions trying to get out, but it was also as if the questions were bees and Stavroula was protecting them both by keeping her mouth closed. Maybe Litza was not alone? Maybe Stavroula would be with her, sit with her? She would say to their father, She’s not going anywhere. We’re sisters, we go together. Together, they would get real loud, louder than him, because they were two and he was one.

  Stavroula knew, didn’t she, why Litza had to be loyal to Dina? No, not even that—why she had to be loyal to herself? Stavroula pretended not to see her, but she did, actually, didn’t she? She saw who Litza was, deep down, because, really, could they be all that different?

  Their father had gone quiet waiting on Stavroula. He propped himself against the wall with his left hand. His right, swinging against his body as if it were weak. She knew it wasn’t. She looked up at the arm pressing against the wall. It was as wide as her face, wasn’t it?

  “Your sister, the eel,” he said, almost slurring, “she is putting my two feet in one shoe. She betrays her family.”

  The three of them, they knew it was true.

  His breathing picked up. “The police come. She did that. She and Dina got the police on your Mother. The woman who raise you.”

  Stavroula was not moving. Was she thinking about how the police had come to Mother with legal papers that called her a bad mother? How Lady State had asked the two daughters questions about how they were treated and, concluded, looking around the house, This is a nice big dream your parents have? Or was she remembering what Litza was remembering? The two of them sitting on a park swing, singing eeska deeska bella. They had lost their Greek, the language had become nonsense to them, but it was OK—the words eeska deeska bella they held on to. They kicked, swung, sang their nonsense. They pushed off the earth as if it were a sure thing. They swung together, like this, their faces cast up to the sky, their feet touching down at the same time.

  Stavroula pulled out a duffel bag and unzipped it, put nothing in it.

  “They will come for you next, Stavroula,” their father said, his voice rising. “They take first one child, then the next. That’s how this country deal with accusations like this.”

  Stavroula dropped a shirt into the bag. The sleeves hung over. She was being slow, not careful.

  Litza got to her feet. “He doesn’t care about us. Only himself.”

  Her father reeled, so far back she thought he had lost his balance. His hands came up as if he were going to grab on to her, rather than the wall, to steady himself. He did not steady himself. He took a sharp breath no thicker than a cracker, and he spit into her face.

  She shut her eyes. And then she pushed him, made her nails into claws, but he was laughing. She yelled for the police, for the neighbors. Dina, the police, they would get him, they would get him.

  “They get me? For what? For what?” She stopped thrashing. The look on his face, mean. Like he could crush her, and would. “What they get me for? Explain me, what you think happen?” He looked at Stavroula. “You see something happen here?”

  Litza’s ears pricked for Stavroula’s voice.

  “Something happen here?” he said.

  “No,” Stavroula, from inside the closet.

  “Ela, what you see here?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s right,” he said to Litza. “Nothing here except a waste of life.”

  Litza opened her mouth—

  “Scream your face off, then I don’t have to look you no more.”

  She screamed at the wall long after he left. She screamed through him saying to Mother, That one? She is the biggest mistake of all. She screamed until she heard him say to Dina over the phone, Take her out of my life.

  Then she was quiet and faced Stavroula, still cowering in the closet. For the remainder of her life she would never feel bad for Stavroula, but in this one moment she did. Because Stavroula did not yet understand what kind of man their father was.

 
PART II

  STAVROS STAVROS MAVRAKIS

  * * *

  Stavros Stavros “Steve” Mavrakis is survive by women, many women, but also: his beloved diners and many customers. In the place of flowers, please bring stories to share so that he will not be forgot.

  Most people will say that what they remember about Stavros, or Steve, is that he is a kind man who works hard to make only one life for his children: the best. What he will most be remember by is how he creates this new life in America out of nothing. He is preceded to heaven by his brothers Stavros Yannis, Stavros Nikos, Stavros Markos, Stavros Petros, and his two parents, Katerina Mavrakis and Stavros Constantine Mavrakis.

  Stavros Stavros Mavrakis, born in 1959 on his home island of Crete on a farm near Iraklion, was number eight of twelve sons.

  Seven years older than the youngest, seven years younger than the eldest—regretfully, Stavros Stavros’s birth was mostly nothing. The day after, Katerina attached him to her nipple and returned to the fields. Heavy rains threatened the vines; gray rot had already begun to creep over those closest to the ground. So many fungal spores settled on the grapes. Katerina only had to put her hand out to know that it was alive, with its thick eyebrows and coarse leg hair. And like the Greek women who had lived through the war, there was nothing gentle about this fungus.

  In 1950 the Rockefeller Foundation concluded that Cretans had a potential need for everything, and no one knew that better than the Cretans. Greek soil had been cleared of Turks, Italians, and Germans, but occupation and civil war had made the land arid. Families that could grow only rocks stripped the bark off trees for boiling; children sucked on olive stones long after the meat was gone. This was not the glorified fight of World War Two, when Cretans ran out of their kitchens with knives and walking sticks to club parachuting Germans to death. This was not the Andartiko of the Second World War, which took triumphantly to the mountains. This was not the Resistance, which abducted the Butcher of Crete, General Heinrich Kreipe. This was cruel, shameful, emasculating hunger. And Katerina knew, as late as 1959, that if they lost the grapes, they lost everything. A new child, even a son, was not worth all that.