Let Me Explain You

  “What do you think foreigners do? We clean dishes. You think you can get better work so soon? You barely know English.”

  “I know English,” he answered. “More than you, Mihalis.”

  The old goat snorted. “You, Mavrakis, you want what you want whenever you want it. How do you expect to pay rent now?”

  “Rent?”

  “Three fifty a month.”

  Stavros launched to his feet. He was shouting. “You want to charge three hundred fifty dollars a month? I didn’t come here just to make you a rich man.”

  “This is no free ride. You want to live, you pay.”

  Mihalis was not smiling but he looked victorious, and Stavros realized that this was how he planned to get back the three thousand drachmas his mother had extorted. Stavros stormed into the bedroom. He began to shove their belongings into suitcases. All he had were a few shirts and pants, two kinds of shoes (one smelling of bacon), an electric razor, and half a bottle of Old Spice. He packed Dina’s clothes.

  His father-in-law opened the door without knocking because, as they both knew, it was his right as the head of the household not to be shut out of any room. “When you pay for them,” he said, “you get to take them with you.” Mihalis yanked Dina’s suitcase away.

  Stavros followed. “What do you think you’re doing?” he cried. He lunged for the luggage but was too late. Mihalis threw it into the bathtub and turned on the shower. The dresses, some of them still attached to price tags, were soaked. Mihalis was panting. “You want them, take them.”

  Stavros reached into the tub and flung whatever his hand touched. A pair of sagging panty hose hit Mihalis’s oversize nose with a smack. If a man had been staying in his house and treating him like this, Stavros would have slaughtered him with a spoon. But this old goat just stood there, breathing his offense.

  The moment Stavros got into the driver’s seat, he felt calmer, in control. The starter resisted until he kneed the ignition, and then it turned over. Whatever he wanted, the Vega would do it. It was the only thing in the world that truly belonged to him. From the front, the 1970 Chevrolet Vega could almost pass as a Camaro. The bottom was rimmed with rust, which the previous owner had covered with latex paint; it flaked off in little sheets anytime someone brushed up against the side; it wept off in the rain. But the Vega responded to him, it answered to only him. If he decided to stop, it stopped. If he wanted to accelerate, like he did now, with Mihalis shouting into his windshield, it would do that, too.

  Stavros pulled up to the sandwich shop where Dina worked. He was still seething, but when he saw Charlie—the owner and one of the few Americans Stavros knew by name—he made himself into someone relaxed and easy to talk to. He did not want the man to think badly of him.

  “I am speaking to her just for one minute, please,” he called from across the room.

  Charlie was sitting in a booth, a stack of bills spread out in front of him. He waved Stavros over. “Have a soda.”

  Stavros did not take off his jacket, his sleeve still wet. Wanting to convey profound thanks for hospitality, which most Americans did not express, he sipped his soda through a straw. That was how it was served to him, so that is how he drank, but he despised it. He did not understand why straws were so popular in America. It was like trying to enjoy a nice cool drink through a piece of garbage. At home, he demanded glass.

  Charlie paged through his checkbook. Thin gray hairs hung over his face. “You’re just in time to pick her up.”

  “I think she is working into ten tonight?”

  “Oh, no. She’s fired.”

  Stavros clenched his jaw. He knew “fired” from the last job. Here they were without a place of their own to live, him pushing his ass to find work, and she was playing. While he had to clean up after people who had half his brains.

  “To explain please, Charlie.”

  “She’s a kook. She scares the customers.”

  Stavros stood and dropped some coins on the table. “I’m sorry, Mr. Charlie.”

  “Keep your money,” Charlie said. “With a wife like her, you’ll need it.”

  “No, because I pay my debts.”

  Dina was leaning against a Dumpster, smoking a cigarette. She could have been waiting on the curb, but she chose to be close to filth. He had come here to tell Dina that her father was a blood thief, but now he was going to have to face garbage.

  She spotted him. “You hungry?”

  “No, I’m not hungry.”

  Dina shrugged. “We ordered pizza.”

  She never pronounced it like he did, peesa, which made him sour in this situation.

  “You had a good job, re, and you threw it away with the trash.”

  Dina flicked the butt of her half-smoked cigarette at his feet. “You threw away a good job, too.” So her father had told her.

  “I won’t be anybody’s slave. You, Dina, only want to have a good time instead of working.”

  “I never wanted a job. That was you and my father.”

  “Six months. That’s all I asked you for. Then you can stay home every day.”

  Dina muttered something he couldn’t catch.

  “What you say to me?” he stormed, but she refused to answer. He followed her to the car. When she opened the passenger door, he shut it on her. “You don’t get in my car until you answer me.” Dina turned on him. Never before had Stavros felt such hatred from anyone. Her stare made him feel insignificant, and who was she or any woman to make him feel like that?

  “Gamoto,” he swore. “This woman is more trouble than children.”

  This did not faze her.

  He forced her into the backseat, pushed her in when she tried to climb up to the front. He started the car to ignore her screaming. He drove. She kicked his chair. In the rearview mirror, she looked wild—all except for her eyes, which were zeroing in on him with such hate, both of them. Fuck your mother in her mouth, she shouted. Fuck the Virgin Mother, you gay Jew, you cunt hair. You chief of assholes with the testicles of a faggot. You malaka and your little dick. You fucking peasant.

  Stavros threw his elbow back and caught her in the mouth. He hadn’t meant to, but oh it was satisfying to feel his bone smash against Dina’s face. She sank into the seat, clutching her chin. For a moment, all he could hear was his ragged breathing and the erratic thumping of the vehicle. He thought about pulling over. Then she bit his ear.

  Stavros grabbed his ear in pain and the car swerved. She had broken the skin, and his fingers came back with blood. It alarmed him, then he was furious. “You camel,” he shouted, and in that moment he was absolved. Any woman who acted like a man he would treat like a man. He lunged with his arm, trying to grab her, but she pressed her body against the side of the car, out of reach.

  Pushing his finger into the bite marks, Stavros realized he had been played for a fool. Everyone was in on it—his mother, Dina, Mihalis, the pappas, and especially that faggot Yannis Fafoutakis. Yannis, the gambler, the liar, the snake who had swindled him without ever taking his bet. And Stavros, like a vlaka, had made it easy for them: he had agreed to marry this girl.

  Now Stavros cursed Yannis, cursed Yannis’s mother, cursed the goats that were screwing Yannis’s mother. “Yannis Fafoutakis,” he shouted. “If I ever see your ugly face again, I will crush your withered hairless balls. I will fuck your sister from behind.” He spat at the sky. A bit of saliva stuck to the windshield.

  Stavros woke before Dina. Rent was due, and he did not want to have to admit that there was no money. Especially because Dina—since the biting—was like a lamb to him, a lamb who ignores you more than cowers but always remembers who carries the knife. He folded up the last of his last bills, singles, drove fifteen minutes to a diner. She could go ahead and think he was coming home with pluses in his pockets, which she would take and turn into minuses.

  He missed his kafenia, missed his mezedes, missed eating warm foods in the company of aggressively friendly countrymen. And now that he was jobless, where else w
as there to go?

  Stavros sat at a booth. He opened the menu so that people could think he was reading it. Funny, how there was always a book to get through before you ordered at a restaurant here, rather than someone shouting out that A is your option, or it is C because the chickens haven’t laid enough eggs yet for B. One thing he did love about America, though, you could get pancakes anytime. For Americans, pancakes were common as toast. You could have pancakes with eggs, pancakes with breakfast meats, pancakes with milk shakes or ice cream. He got his with fruit on it. He made sure to smother each bite in blueberries and syrup. He chewed each one like it was his favorite.

  Too soon, the pancake as big as a face was gone. Around him, people were having as many as they pleased. He could sit here longer—the day was still a huge stack of pancakes to get through, the sun a pat of butter just starting to melt—but that would mean spending his last nickels on diner coffee. Americans and their coffee, so sour it could have come from the sweat in his shoe. No, he would need to find someplace that brewed coffee he could chew through. Stavros dug into his pocket, pulled out money to pay for his pancakes, and stopped.

  At the counter, a waiter was cutting a nice wide slice of galaktoboureko. Stavros watched him carefully lay it out onto a white plate. “Excuse,” Stavros called to his waitress. “Can I have this, please?”

  The waitress brought his portion to him without a word, which was what he wanted. He did not ask how much, he did not know if he had enough. All he knew was that the moon-tinted custard had spread itself out like a smile, and the top crust was so shiny in its syrup it was like a joke the whole place could enjoy. He had not seen one so pretty since Greece.

  Oh, the galaktoboureko, it was two o’clock on a Greek afternoon with the pappas, it was twenty years ago running through the fields with his arms stretched as wide as grapevines, it was sugar if the past were made of sugar, it was semolina-sweet with teardrops of lemon. The first bite was not too sweet, and it made him cry. He did not expect it, he could not help it. The galaktoboureko tasted like his mother’s fingers. It smelled like her apron. It was exactly like the galaktoboureko she used to make, it was the twin of her galaktoboureko, and it made him wish for home. It made him want to burrow his head into his mother’s thigh like he did when he was a small boy, to make the bucking sounds of a ram until she relented and threw her arms around him and smeared butter on his neck and snuck him a little taste with her own fingers in a way that her other sons could not see. It gave him back memories he did not know he had. Any minute, he expected his brothers to come and fight him for the prize. Any minute, he expected the pappas to join him and steal precious forkfuls of the dessert, only so that he could turn around and order them another.

  But no, Stavros was alone. He was in a booth, in Xenitia, in a country where galaktoboureko was nothing more than syllables and cream.

  Stavros wiped his tears with a diner napkin softer than any pillow. What he was doing without realizing it was making galaktoboureko into something foreign: from now on when he thought of galaktoboureko, as a father or an old man, he would not just remember galaktoboureko in Greece. He would have to remember galaktoboureko in America. He would have to think about galaktoboureko on a white plate at this diner. It would not just be his favorite dessert from his childhood, which he hid from his brothers, or his favorite dessert from his adolescence, which he made at the kafenia. It would be the dessert from this morning, when he went for pancakes instead of work, when he cried in front of strangers who did not mind him crying because a Greek newcomer did not matter one way or another.

  Without being invited, someone with his own plate of galaktoboureko sat down across from Stavros. He pulled a fork out of his sleeve and began to eat. Stavros wiped his face into a friendly smile. He knew that strangers did not just appear at your table and start to eat with you. This was a countryman. His nose was Greek enough to spear a fish, the eyebrows needed mowing, the teeth in his mouth faced any which way as if they were old men at the village center. Stavros ate for some minutes without offering his family name or island or asking the other if he was from the mainland.

  When he finally spoke, the Greek’s voice was the consistency of the galaktoboureko. It was not just that Stavros was warmed to hear Greek spoken by someone who wasn’t Dina or her parents and their acquaintances. It was that the man sounded as if his parents, his family, were all made from honey too sweet to come from bees.

  Hero Karmkambasis said with his fork, “Mainland or island?”

  Stavros cleared his throat. “From Crete.”

  “Crete, I should have known. You have that stunned look of a kri-kri.”

  If they were still in Greece, Stavros would have taken this as an insult. Here, being compared to the famous goats of Crete was camaraderie. He said, “Is this a place for Greeks?”

  Hero ran his fork along the plate to scrape up custard. “Greece is the only place for Greeks. But this is a nice second. You see them come around when they’re homesick.”

  Stavros saw that he was the only one.

  “Every week, I get twenty Greeks crying over my galaktoboureko,” Hero said. “They all tell me how much it tastes like their mothers’.”

  “You made this?”

  Hero turned his face as if about to share a secret. “Ela, you can say Hero’s is as good as your mother’s. I won’t tell her, or your dead yia-yia either.”

  “It is better than my mother’s,” Stavros answered. “My friend, better.” Because it was here, and his mother’s was not. Because Hero was here, and his mother was not.

  “When I first come to this country, the boss says to me, ‘Oxi, Hero, you are no chef, you are a mechanic.’ And he is right. In Greece I had been trained to work with hard stuff only, not this soft butter and dough, which falls apart in my hands. It doesn’t take me too long to get the idea, though. All it takes is the boss’s wife going into labor, and Hero the only one left in the kitchen.” Then Hero said, “Since you like it so much, friend, you can have this one for free.”

  Stavros opened his mouth to refuse, and then he shut it. In other circumstances, he would have felt wounded in his pride, which stretched over his whole body like a second skin, but here he couldn’t. Stavros could tell that Hero was not pitying him. Hero had been at this place before. Someone had given him a slice of galaktoboureko when he was down, when he was just starting. With his galaktoboureko, Hero was offering him entry into a brotherhood. It was his first invitation in this new place.

  Stavros’s eyes looked to the crumbs on his plate, where the tears were falling. “Thank you,” he said in English.

  Hero stood so that Stavros would not be embarrassed, and he dropped the wet rag from his shoulder onto the table. He picked up his plate and began to wipe the table. Stavros reached for the rag.

  “Ela, relax,” Hero said. “You clean the tables in your house, I’ll clean the tables in mine.”

  But Stavros went on to wipe the table next to him, and the one beyond that. It was not because he could not pay for his galaktoboureko. It was not just that he wanted to hide his custardy eyes. What was this new feeling?—ah, it was that he could wipe every table for the rest of his day and still feel indebted. Stavros scrubbed at a sticky spot. He collected all the napkins and silverware onto a dirty plate. He could feel the Greek staring at him.

  “Hey, Cretan,” Hero said. “You ever work in a restaurant before?”

  Stavros nodded without nodding. He said, “I ran two kafenia back home.”

  Hero laughed. “Didn’t we all.”

  “I can run a kitchen. I can cook.”

  “I run the kitchen. I cook. What I need is a dishwasher. Can you do that?”

  He could. He could wash dishes for a man who by kitchen alone could convince everyone that he was their Greek mother, who wanted to share his galaktoboureko with other Greeks, who was respectful enough to stand when another man was starting to cry, who was here at the right time, when Stavros was at the end of his money and courage. Stavro
s said, “I can do anything you ask me to.”

  The next few weeks, Stavros was good to Dina. They took walks at night, they held hands through the park when no one was around. He talked about his job as if it had been the plan from the start. In America, kafenia did not have prestige or authority. They were convenience stores selling Twinkies and cans of Shasta; they didn’t even serve coffee, it was just cloudy water. Stavros wanted to open a kind of business that would get him respected and paid. He would become an innovator, like Hero. He would show everyone, most of all his mother. He would open a diner.

  “There’s something in the corner of his eye, when no one’s looking,” Stavros said excitedly. “He can tell that I’m no dishwasher.”

  “He’s going to give you a raise?”

  “Right now, I am giving him the cleanest pots he can imagine. They come out more oraio than they were when he bought them brand-new. He will see what a good job I am doing, and he will give me the chance to earn more.”

  Dina tucked her head into the crook of his arm. She said, “You always do a good job.”

  He liked that. He liked how they looked, man-wife, against the chilly copper sky. He liked that she was proud of him, that she believed in him. “Agapi mou, I am doing all of this for us.”

  She looked up and smiled. Her left eye wandered, then found him again. Stavros laughed and kissed it, his mustache tickling her.

  They went home and made their first Greek baby.

  Over the next few months, while Dina picked up extra weight, Stavros picked up extra hours. He would wash dishes for the morning shift, then wash dishes for the afternoon shift, then scrub the floors, then sleep on a cot in the back room, then wash dishes for the evening shift. Washing dishes became such habit, sometimes he got up from dinner at home and started scrubbing the ones in his wife’s sink. His hands were not the callused hands of a workingman; they were the bloated, worn hands of a sailor.