Let Me Explain You

by Annie Liontas

  “You want to go to the beach today?”

  “I don’t like the beach.”

  “Me neither,” he said, “but girls always want to go for tans.”

  “You just end up dirty.” She scrunched her nose. “Sand everywhere.”

  Stavros Stavros grew excited. “Nai,” he said, “that is exactly the problem.” He rubbed a leaf between his thumb and forefinger and it warmed. He wanted her to stay, he realized. To get to know her, if they were going to be married. “Want to get a frappe?”

  The only vehicle available was his father’s farm tractor, manufactured from motorcycle parts with a bench seat for transporting animals and manure. He changed into blue jeans and they walked. Stavros Stavros escorted her through the market; he got good deals and told her so. They passed the kafenia, which she could not enter, but everyone acknowledged Stavros Stavros and called to him from inside the shops, and he made sure Dina saw. When they arrived at the taverna, it was dusk and the clouds matched the pink water. They sat in a corner, where they could look out at the shore without having to step on the beach. Stavros Stavros ordered two iced coffees, sweet and frothy. When the owner wasn’t looking, he called for the doughnut boy, and through the open window they traded half a drachma for a sugared doughnut the size of a wheelbarrow wheel.

  “I can’t wait to get out of this place,” Stavros Stavros said. “Away from my parents.”

  “Me neither.”

  He looked out at the tourists beginning to cover themselves up. “America must be nice. So much going on.”

  “Not really.”

  “What are you talking about?” His elbows tipped him forward.

  “It’s nothing special.”

  “Nothing special?”

  Dina jostled her straw. She did not look at him. “Not for me.”

  “With me, things will be better.”

  She did not react at all. He wasn’t sure she had heard him. He saw she had left him half the doughnut and said, “Go ahead, finish it. I’ve had hundreds.”

  The next night, they strolled through the kentro, guided by large glowing bulbs that hung from poles. Power would be cut by midnight, but until then, gerakos strummed their instruments, sang without shame to single women the same age as their granddaughters. Stavros Stavros wanted to sing, too, but he was nervous in front of Dina. He was grateful to sip from the bottle of ouzo he had swiped from Onus.

  “Want to go pick some fruit? I know an old blind farmer who can’t tell if he’s growing cantaloupe or rocks.” He led her away from the lights, the singing men. They walked through the darkness without speaking, only the slosh of alcohol and the hoot of night-callers. When they reached a rusty wire fence, Stavros Stavros offered his hand. Dina hesitated, and he dropped it.

  “I’m not marrying you,” she said. “I’m just here to get away from my parents.”

  Stavros Stavros was surprised. Until that moment, he had not quite decided if he was going through with the arrangement. But hearing this, it made him determined to change her mind. She would be marrying him. He offered his hand again. “Nai, OK.”

  Dina let him partly lift, partly push her over the fence. He was lucky enough to cup her kolo when she went over. He pulled himself up, looking strong.

  “I’m not staying in Crete. I’m going to Nepal,” she said. “I’m going to meet Angelos.”

  He dusted his hands. He did not know what Nepal was. “Angelos?”

  “My cousin.”

  He nodded and offered his elbow, which she took. She also took a long drink. He took one, too. He liked the way the ouzo made the moonlight into something liquid. Something he could run through a strainer. He liked that he knew the way to the peponi patch. He liked that he had an American girl with him that he could change into wanting him.

  “When my father bought the tickets, I knew I’d be coming only so I could leave.”

  The ouzo was making her friendly, honest. She told Stavros Stavros how she was going to hike the hippie trail to Istanbul, through Syria and Jordan, Iran and Pakistan, not stopping until she arrived at Freak Street in Kathmandu. Angelos had told her about the cheap hotels, the stalls selling enlightenment, the prayer flags that stretched across the city like clotheslines. In Nepal, even garbage smells of sweet incense, Angelos said. He would be waiting for her.

  “This is your cousin?” he asked.

  She nodded. “He was my best friend in America.”

  Stavros Stavros wasn’t sure what questions to ask. He would never chase any of his cousins through Asia. But it did not really matter. Her parents would make him her chaperone, and he wasn’t going to let her get anywhere near a Freak Street. These were girly dreams, the kind that would be replaced by her sixteenth birthday.

  They reached the patch. He knocked a peponi against a rock until it cracked in half. “I also wanted to run away when I was young,” Stavros Stavros said, scooping out the slippery seeds with an old spoon he kept hidden in a nearby tree. “I wanted to live in the caves of Malta.”

  “I don’t want to be in a cave,” Dina said. “I’ve been in a cave my whole life. I want to be with people. I want to be enlightened.”

  He picked up the fruit, took a bite. His face disappeared in the peponi. His chin came back dripping. He held the fruit out to her. She took as large a bite as he had. Then he loosened some of the flesh with the spoon so they could get at it with their fingers.

  “Forget Nepal. You should go to California.” He smiled at the idea of it. California.

  “California is boring. It’s like America’s version of Greece.”

  “No, California is beautiful. We can go together if you want,” Stavros Stavros said, “after you get back from India.”

  Stavros Stavros was eager to show Dina how American Greece was. He wanted her to see that he and his friends could big-party-party. Same as New York. Since the early seventies, kids had been growing their hair, listening to rock and roll through US military radio stations and local ones that were not supposed to exist. But he also wanted to show her how Greek Greece was, how proud. He took Dina to a bouzouki joint.

  “You will love this place,” he kept saying.

  Yannis Fafoutakis greeted his cousin and bought drinks, until a tourist caught his eye.

  Stavros Stavros was feeling great. A second good time, arranged by him. He could tell she was loving this. They were getting lots of attention. He was a popular guy on the island with some people. Her lazy eye, it was kind of cute now. It was like a little practical joke between them.

  “You have LSD?” Dina shouted against the music. “Hashish?”

  “Sure,” Stavros Stavros lied. He kept dancing. He was a pretty good dancer.

  He was naïve about drugs. There wasn’t much in circulation unless you were from the mainland, a musician, or a member of the US military. When he rebelled, when any of his friends rebelled, it was with movies, alcohol, music. Drugs were too Europe, and Greece was many years away from being Europe.

  “Can we get some?” she said.

  Stavros Stavros passed Dina his glass. “We can do that later.”

  “Why not now?”

  He watched her hips. Proud hips, hips that nodded yes to your questions. Her ass, her waist, her tits, they all moved like they had done this a hundred, thousand times before. A nose to match his, in some ways bigger than his. More sure of itself, maybe, in America, a country of unsure noses. Her hair was gluey with sweat, and there were dark circles beneath her eyes. But right now, all he saw were those Greek hips.

  “You don’t want to dance more?”

  She shrugged. “I want to have fun.”

  “OK,” Stavros Stavros said. “Let’s go have fun.”

  He brought her up to Yannis Fafoutakis’s place. Yannis lived with his grandmother, but she was asleep and could sleep through tanks. There weren’t many places to sit. A single chair. A bed. They sat on the bed.

  “You ever hear Dionysion Stavropoulos?” Stavros Stavros asked.

  “No.�
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  He lit up. “Ela, how does a Greek not know the hero of Greece? You’ve never heard ‘Dirty Bread’?”

  “I listen to Led Zeppelin.”

  “Me too. This is better.” He played the album for her.

  He put his arm around her shoulders. He sang into her ear. He wanted a chance to see her nipples, just one. He liked nipples. He liked to touch them. He didn’t know how to do much more. Really, he had only fucked one German tourist, and if he were honest about it, she had fucked him. Some of his friends, the ones with bad girls, put their penises between the girls’ thighs, just above the knees, and rubbed themselves into goodnight-goodnight. Sex was not a possibility for Greek girls. Dina had to be a virgin the night they married.

  Dina got up, opened Yannis’s dresser. She pulled out a scarf and tied it around her neck. “What do you think?”

  His buzz and his interest in her body made him grin like a big cat. “Better on you than that anteater.” He wished he had said something funnier until he saw she, too, was smiling. No one else on the island had made her smile—not her parents, not his brothers, not her cousin, not the malakas on the corner. Him.

  “Hey, look. Ela.” She pulled out a thin strip of wax paper. She unfolded it. It was marijuana.

  Stavros Stavros came over to inspect. He nodded as if he approved of the quality, but really he was shocked. “What are you going to do?” He almost added “with it” because he wasn’t exactly sure how you did marijuana.

  She laughed. “What do you think.”

  Stavros Stavros watched Dina pick up a can from Yannis’s floor. She bent the can in the middle, poked a couple holes, turned it so the marijuana could sit atop the holes. “Got a light?”

  Stavros Stavros watched her suck smoke out of the drink hole. She passed him the can. He was clumsy holding it, she had to show him how. He took too big a hit trying to make up for his clumsiness. He coughed harder than he had ever coughed before. She laughed every time he tried to talk, because it made him choke. She poured them rum sodas. He drank his like water. He kept clearing his throat. She took another hit. He tried to get hold of himself, change the music, get serious. He leaned in to kiss her. He ended up coughing too close to her face. The coughing made him nauseous. He went to the bathroom, stared himself down in the mirror.

  “You all right?” she called. She asked it from a faraway place, like America.

  “Nai,” he said, but he wasn’t. He promised himself he’d never touch the stuff again.

  Three dates, all of his spending money, not even a kiss good night.

  The engagement was announced on Dina’s sixteenth birthday.

  The church was scrubbed. The day was set, changed, set again. Money for the wedding and the pappas and the food and the wine and the band, but also money to build another bedroom for the distant cousins and aunts and uncles who would come to the ceremony. Money for the cousins’ boat ride, their clothes, their haircuts. Stavros Stavros didn’t complain. He spent freely. He wanted everyone to see what he was about to make of himself.

  The pappas visited Stavros Stavros twice before the wedding. First at Takis’s, during midday. Except for the pulse of cicadas that drowned out the napping men’s snores, it was quiet. The pappas asked Stavros Stavros how he felt about entering into the heavenly, holy vow of marriage by saying, “You know Greek women grow new teeth after they marry, don’t you? A sharper set, ones that will whittle your little pizzle to nothing.”

  “That what Presbytera Maria did to yours?”

  The pappas chuckled. “Re, it isn’t so bad for me because I started with more than enough. Not so with you.”

  There was no beating him. The pappas was well versed in scripture, art, the ancient civilizations, and shit-talking. The pappas gestured for more ouzo with his pinky. “What is it you like about this girl?”

  Stavros Stavros dipped a crust of hardened bread into the ouzo, the way the pappas liked. “She comes from a decent family. She wants to have kids.”

  “Mm-hmm, and you have a pleasant time together?”

  “We have an all right time.”

  “Just not too pleasant.”

  Stavros Stavros grinned. “No, Father.”

  “Too bad. There are ways to have pleasant times without nosy priests finding out.”

  “Don’t worry,” Stavros Stavros boasted, “when I get her to America, she’ll have such a good time even the president will hear about it.”

  “America.”

  Stavros Stavros nodded. “No nosy old priests there. At least none to spy on me.”

  “Tell me, Mavrakis”—the pappas leaned in, ouzo shining from the corners of his mouth—“what kinds of things would you keep from the priests?”

  Stavros Stavros, unnerved, examined the mugs. They had browned over the years like the teeth of the men who drank from them; they could get only so clean. “Nothing,” he said.

  “You have worries about this girl?”

  Before Stavros Stavros could answer, a rustling came from the corner of the room. The men were waking. Soon they would demand sweet boiled coffee, toast. The pappas stood. “We’ll talk again, Mavrakis. I’ll have to ask around about your America.”

  Stavros Stavros did not know how to tell the pappas that Dina was strange. OK, she was American. OK, maybe he didn’t understand American girls. Sometimes they were nice, fun, happy to climb fences and talk about California, interested in his music, wanting to dance close for everyone to see. Other times they cried over nothing, got angry at their innocent fiancés, then demanded to go to disco. While Greek girls got fixed up, put on earrings, American girls didn’t even shower regularly. When he told Dina he liked her hair to be nice for his friends, she went into the kitchen and sawed off large chunks with a meat cleaver. He watched her raid her grandmother’s medicine cabinet.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Medicine.”

  “You’re sick?”

  She cackled. “Can’t you tell?” She found some pills, swallowed them without water. Stavros Stavros felt something hard, like a drachma, going down his own throat.

  It’s not like he could back out of the marriage—it would be a disgrace to his family name. He just wanted Dina to know that, when they got to New York, party time was over. Not that he didn’t like to have a good time, he liked to have a better time than any of his eleven brothers, but once they were married, they would need to go after things that mattered.

  “Work, succeeding, a house, a business, children to carry on the Mavrakis name,” he said. “That’s what matters.”

  She smirked. “Why?”

  Stavros Stavros was stunned. “What do you mean? What else is there?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What else matters?”

  There was a pause. “I don’t know.”

  That, to him, proved two things. First, she was too young to know what was important. Second, he could show her what mattered. She’d love him even more for it.

  “The only thing in the world that matters to me, to anybody,” he clarified, “is respect.”

  She said nothing. He took that as a good sign.

  “You’ll see,” he told her. “It will be a good feeling when your family sees they were wrong. It will make up for all the bad feelings that you had on the way.”

  The second time the pappas came to see Stavros Stavros, he was working behind Onus’s counter. It was late, the place empty. Pools of light swam in puddles of drink. Stavros Stavros flipped the chairs upside down so that they could rest, because tomorrow morning meant another day of sweaty thighs, flatulence. He lined up a row of near-empty bottles. In their bellies waited drips of clear tsikoudia. His job was to catch them.

  The pappas removed the wooden slat that closed the front door and entered without knocking. He caught Stavros Stavros with his middle finger deep in a bottle’s mouth. “You practicing for your wedding night?” he asked.

  Stavros Stavros let go of the bottle. It made a relieved popping sound. />
  “Better keep practicing. If you do it that way, Mavrakis, she might retaliate.”

  Stavros Stavros wished he could laugh about it, but he knew the pappas could see the shame roasting his ears. He would make Dina hide behind a pomegranate tree whenever they passed the pappas or his father on the street, that was how prudish he was.

  The pappas took off his hat and placed it on the counter, his thick damp black hair uncurling. Without the clerical garb, he looked like an uncle come to visit. “How about some of those fat green elitses Onus likes to keep to himself?”

  Stavros Stavros dragged out a stool and climbed up. He reached behind the jarred tomatoes. The pappas did not request bread or cheese, he liked the purity of the fruit. The pappas bit into an olive, his three fingers wrapped around its slick body. “They cannot have olives like these in America.”

  Stavros Stavros popped an olive into his mouth, pushed it to his cheek. He liked the way the juices squeezed out of the flesh. The pappas was right, this kind of ripe was pure Crete.

  “What is it about America that makes you willing to give up your home?”

  Stavros Stavros said, “Everything will be different there.”

  “You will be a foreigner there. Do you know that? Are you ready for that?”

  “I’m a foreigner here.”

  The pappas tucked two olives into his cheeks. Without force, because he knew how young men resented a priest’s opinion in moments like these, he suggested, “Why not stay in Greece for a year or two? That way, if you ever need it, help is nearby.”

  “I can handle my wife, don’t worry about that.”

  “Of course you can,” the pappas answered, “all Greeks can handle their wives. Greeks were born for that. All I’m saying is that America will still be America. Whenever you want her, she will be waiting just on the other side of the water.”

  “The whole point is to get off this island.”

  “I know,” the pappas said. “That is what concerns me.”

  Stavros Stavros said nothing.

  “Have you thought about the possibility that you will get there and have to come back?”

  “I won’t be back, you can bank on that.”