Let Me Explain You

by Annie Liontas

  It was exhausting, yes, but it was life-making. He was bringing home every-week paychecks without having to feel abused. He was bringing home full-cooked meals for his wife, who was eating for two. He was working with a man who respected him, a man who had come from Corfu when he was just sixteen.

  “What the man can do with potatoes,” he said to his mother over the phone in one of their monthly conversations. “He makes them taste like they could never have come from the ground.”

  What Stavros meant, but could not say, was that Hero made it seem as if nothing he touched came from the ground. Not his business, not his customers, whom he coaxed with recycled compliments, not his beautiful and smart and pleasant wife, not his son who was growing up to be the head of business. Even Hero—Hero himself—was made of much more than humble clay. No matter what came, Hero was smiling, acting as if each morning were one big galaktoboureko.

  In the first weeks of employment, Stavros saw Hero terminate two waiters. “I wish you were my wife’s family, so then I would be forbid from firing you.” Then he gave them each a free meal and sent them to his cousin’s place, where they could apply to drive trucks. Then he hired two new men, whom he loved just as much. “These men, these are my family,” he said. The same thing he had said to the men they were replacing, the same thing he had said to Stavros on his first day of work.

  In ten years, Stavros planned to be him.

  “How fat is that woman of yours?” Hero said. Stavros with his feta stuffed into bread and his Saratoga, Hero with his American coffee and Greek sweets. Stavros on an overturned mop bucket, Hero on a three-legged stool that should have had four. He spoke in English.

  Stavros answered in Greek, “Getting fatter.”

  “They are wonderful when they are fat.”

  “She farts these ugly pregnancy farts. They are just terrible, because how is my son not suffocating in there?”

  “Is this your biggest problem, that your pregnant wife farts?”

  “Hero, I’m choking. I am at the point where honey mustard smells exactly like fish.”

  Hero took pleasure in this. He got up and rummaged through the pantry. He came back with two jars of honey mustard. “Tell Dina she can thank me in the future, after she names her son Hero.”

  “You are a malaka, you know that?”

  “Pregnancy taught me somethings important, Stavro. First, the mother is always number one, because the baby is always number one. Second, whatever the mother craves, she will hate once the baby comes: she will not even be able to smell it.”

  “No more honey mustard, Hero.”

  “Happy mother, happy baby,” Hero insisted, pushing the jars across the table. “Bring these home, you get to be happy husband.”

  Stavros brought them home. The next day, he got a promotion. Dishwasher-busboy.

  The problem was that the new Dish that Hero hired was Hero’s wife’s lazy cousin and did no work, so when Stavros came back to the kitchen, he was stuck with the same load he had bused the hour before. Hero wasn’t pleased, and he blamed Stavros.

  “Think of these dishes each like a crying baby,” Hero said. “They have to be picked up, washed, and put to bed. You don’t just leave them lying on the floor with dirty diapers.”

  Stavros was not going to lose this dishwasher-busboy job because of some no-initiative immigrant, and he was not going to keep it out of pity. He was going to earn it.

  At home, it was also getting harder. Dina was another lazy. All she wanted to do was stay on the couch with her arm on her belly, sometimes throwing up. Or else she took walks alone—good for the baby, she said. Her mother came by once a week to help. Dina said it was not enough. Stavros did not understand how it was not enough. How could one woman not take care of one apartment, when that was the one thing she had to do? But Dina complained so much, she got him to hire a “helper”—her friend Stephanie. All Stephanie gave help with was eating food in his cabinets and bringing in the mail from the mailbox, which was practically in his house.

  “She does not even vacuum. She does not even touch the laundry. I work all night running a restaurant, and I have to wear dirty clothes,” he said in Greek.

  “The vacuum’s broken,” Dina said in English.

  “She is not a helper. She is an unhelper,” he answered in English.

  “It’s too hard to be here by myself.”

  “What does she do for you that is worth thirty dollars?”

  “She helps me get through the day,” Dina said. “She takes me to the doctor.”

  She did take Dina to the doctor. She also brought Dina daily medicine. She spent days with Dina as if they were sisters, and they spoke English so fast, like the people on television, that Stavros could never understand what he was doing that was so funny. But he kept Stephanie around because his mother told him that Stephanie was doing for Dina what Dina’s sisters-in-law would be doing if Stavros and Dina still lived in Greece.

  There were other problems, ones he did not tell his mother about. Money problems, which were Lying problems, which were Wife-Husband problems, which were Future problems. He gave her money for electric, for phone, but somehow the bills remained unpaid. They are processing, Dina said. For two weeks, they were processing, twenty-four hours a day processing, and at the end of the process, the woman on the other line told him that their balance was still $78. The dollars for the electric, which he cut off from the skin of his palms, were gone. The money for the phone, which he skinned off his knees, was gone. The groceries, there were no groceries.

  “You work at a restaurant,” she said. “All of your meals are free.”

  “I gave you almost a hundred dollars,” he said. “What did you spend that on?”

  “Baby stuff.”

  “Show me the baby stuff. Show me where it is.”

  She lifted her shirt and smacked her belly. “This is not just a snack, you know.”

  He did not hit her. He raised his hand, but only in sternness. She had learned to shield her face and turn her body in a way that showed him the shape of his child. He felt shame. He could not hit his son. He did not want to hurt his wife. He was frustrated. He went to work so that she could deal with the electric company and the phone provider and the grocery clerk. He needed her to be his English mouth and his paying hands.

  Hero could read Stavros’s temper, even when Stavros had never really let him see it. “Just because you have to crack some eggs doesn’t mean you have to break the yolks,” Hero said, which was somehow supposed to mean that Stavros was too hard on Dina, that Stavros had to be more patient and understand that his wife would one day be his children’s mother. In Hero’s world, a man was the ruler of his house but he never had to show it. Meanwhile, Dina ignored his wishes. Stephanie was at his home when he left in the morning and at his home when he came back at night. Stephanie was one time sleeping in his own bed, so Stavros had to lie down on the couch without even a blanket. “Gentle, gentle,” Hero said. “Siga, siga.” Meanwhile, there were more medicine baggies on the table. Meanwhile, he found an exposed razor under the coffee table and was told by Dina that it was to cut capsules in half so she did not take too much at a time, so that the baby wouldn’t be up all hours and she could get some sleep. Meanwhile, all this medicine was costing more money.

  “This spending trouble, it will all go away when the baby comes, and then it will all get worse.” Hero laughed, continued to laugh when Stavros wouldn’t. “You have to learn to relax, Stavro,” Hero said. “You have to be more like me.”

  “Hero, Hero, Hero, Hero, Hero, Hero. The world is not all Heroes. The world is Stavros Mavrakis, also. I go home to problems, they are not Hero problems, they are Stavros Stavros Mavrakis problems, they are baby and Dina, they are money problems, they are dish problems, they are the only troubles of Stavros Stavros Mavrakis.”

  It was his first outburst in English. The plating and washing stopped. Stavros felt pinned between the cruel curiosity of the kitchen and the firing he felt coming. His
face was hot with anger and grease. He would have to go back to Mihalis, to Andonis, to jokes in his shoes, to life without his friend Hero.

  Hero laughed, clapped him on the back, and everything started up again. “Poor Stavros Stavros,” Hero said, “sounding like you have more problems than dishes.”

  STAVROULA MAVRAKIS

  * * *

  In her mind, what Dina was carrying was not a baby but a car battery. Being pregnant, like being high, was just another way that electrons zigged from negative to positive back to negative. When nine months were up, what she would push out would be a black box of energy. Still, Dina told herself, “When she gets here, it will all be about her.” In three months, when her firstborn arrived, Dina would go from idle to forward. No one ever told her she could do anything, but this—this, everyone said, was automatic. It was natural for her to make children.

  “A woman’s thighs, there are only two reasons for them: men hold on as they’re going in, and children hold on as they’re coming out.” She could not remember which man in her life had said that—father, husband, father’s friends, husband’s friends, strangers over Greek coffee. They had probably all said it at some point.

  The wonderful part about being a mother, though, was that no one treated the thing inside her like a battery and no one treated her like the broke-down car. She could feel the pride and warmth radiating from her father. He rubbed the bump of her belly as if it were the back of his grandson’s head. Her husband kissed her belly button as if it were his son’s sleeping eye. Her mother was over all the time, calling the baby Blessing. And then she started calling Dina Blessing, and then she used Blessing interchangeably so that Dina wasn’t sure which of them she was talking to. The real blessing, Dina thought, was how happy they all were because of something she was. A state she was in: with child. All she had had to do was lie back and it happened to her, their happiness. She had never been able to do that before.

  Being pregnant had softened Stavros, too. They had fights still, but the bigger she got, the better he got. He came home straight from work to lie in bed and massage away her heartburn. He rubbed the fuzz at the top of her belly and said, “I don’t think it’s a child in there, I think it’s a goat. You have my milk in there, little kri-kri?”

  He talked often to his mother now. Dina would wake at two in the morning to robust Greek. Their hot personalities had a chance to cool over the thousands of miles of telephone line, their voices full of excitement rather than bullying. In Crete, the animals and fields had already been watered and fed, and his mother was gossiping about the village and prodding him about Dina and work. From the bedroom, Dina watched Stavros pull at the strings on the apron folded on his lap. She heard him say things like, “There is so much land here, but they carve it up into little pieces,” and “She looks fat and beautiful.”

  Yes, when the baby came, Dina was going to change. She was going to keep this Stavros.

  She did not have the heart to tell him it was a girl. He was convinced—they all were—that he would have a son. Dina had passed all of his tests. The Key Test, she picked up the fat end of the key. The Dream Test, she told him it was all snakes and stairs, when really it was moonbeams turning into moaning whales and lizards simmering, their tails hanging over the pot. At one point he was discouraged, saying, “You are carrying too high.”

  “This is not high. I am just short.”

  A Sunday morning, he pulled her out of bed early. The moon was still a chip against the brewed sky. She wiped her eyes and padded out to the kitchen. Sleep was ringing in her ears, but she could sense how excited he was.

  He said, “You are far enough along now. This will tell us for good.” He had a briki going. He poured her a steaming cup of thick Greek coffee. “Drink, please.”

  “I won’t be able to get back to sleep.”

  “Of course not. Now drink, and hang the question up in your mind: Is this a boy?”

  She took a sip. She couldn’t stand Greek coffee, the way it left grains in her mouth. She said, “How do you know how to do this?”

  “My grandmother, when I was small. I watched her read kafemanteia. Any Greek can do it, if he knows what he’s looking for.”

  He picked up Dina’s cup, even though it wasn’t quite empty. He said, “Whenever a girl got engaged in the old days, the married women of the village would come banging spoons against their copper brikia, all the way up the hill to my yia-yia’s house. They would shout at her—like a little song—Come Out Cup-Woman, Come Around Our Coal-Fire and Look Into Your Private Cup. Yia-yia sat with them in the dirt and said somethings like, Watch out for a bird that presents itself three times, or Children with speckled eyes bring good meat to your kitchen. Also, There is a white rat near, keep it nearer—that one she said a lot. I used to watch them from a corner.”

  Dina wondered what his yia-yia would have been able to determine about her in the coffee grains.

  Stavros held the cup out, turning it three times clockwise on its side, so the sludge coated the inside of the cup. He turned the cup over on a napkin and closed his eyes. She said, “What are you looking for?”

  He opened them. “Anything, but especially animals, rivers, initials. Yia-yia always wanted to find a face, but it never came up.”

  “What face?”

  “Let me concentrate.” Less than a moment later, he was setting the coffee cup upright. He pointed at the inside of the mug. “Symbols on the bottom are the past. Symbols on the sides are present. Anything near the top is what is approaching.”

  “What’s approaching?” Dina pushed herself up to see. In her head, she said, Show him whatever he wants to see. Show him three boys, if necessary.

  “This is what’s approaching.” He held the mug out. She saw a smear at the bottom, where his finger touched the grains. “You see the square?”

  She nodded.

  “That means a new home, like a foundation.”

  “So a boy?” she said.

  “Yes, of course. What else could be foundation?”

  The baby came two months early. Stavros raced from work to the hospital, saying to himself, “We’re going to lose him.” Speeding, treating stoplights like the flat, dumb faces they were, he made a deal with God about keeping the baby safe until he got there. When he made it to the lobby, he made a deal with God about keeping the baby safe until he could pick him up.

  A nurse told him that Dina was sleeping, but did he want to see his daughter?

  “Daughter?”

  “She’s small, but she’s a fighter.”

  The nurse brought him to the NICU, where the preemies were lying on their stomachs, wearing diapers the size of their whole bodies. Some were more robot than human. Some had skin that was not skin; he could see shadows of organs that he should not have been able to see. He averted his eyes until they came upon the one marked with his name. A day ago, his baby had been just a bump on Dina’s body. Now here she was in the world, trying to breathe with a tube taped over her mouth. Her legs were tucked under her body. Her thigh was the size of his thumb.

  Stavros put his face into his hands and squeezed. His son Stavros was not in his wife’s belly as he should have been. His son was a girl who had been ripped out too early and put inside a glass box to incubate, the way a baby chick might. Oh, this was not a baby. This was 3.1 pounds, this was an egg. How would she ever stand, with legs so small as that?

  “You’re the father?”

  Stavros looked up. It was the doctor. Stavros could tell, because he wore a white coat and glasses. “Yes, I am his father.”

  The doctor came around with a clipboard, rested his hands on the glass case. If there had been no glass, Stavros observed, his hands would have taken up his daughter’s face. “What’s her name?”

  Stavros blinked. “Stavroula.”

  “We’re giving Stavroula two liters of oxygen until her lungs have a chance to develop.”

  Stavros nodded. He could see now she had only a little bit of lung, not strong
enough to take breaths without the help of some machines. “What happened? Why is she alive so early?”

  “That’s what I’d like to talk to you about,” the doctor said, and led him to the hall.

  “Dina, she is OK?”

  “At the moment, resting.”

  The doctor’s office was filled with plaques and degrees and he sat in a leather chair, which made it easier to listen to him even though Stavros did not understand many of the words he used. The doctor said that their “goal” was to “minimize complications and promote normal development.” Stavros nodded. He liked the word normal. He crossed his legs. He said, “But this does not explain me why.”

  The doctor took his glasses off. He said, “How long has your wife been addicted to drugs?”

  Stavros uncrossed his legs. “I don’t know drugs.” He had seen her drink, not too often. Cocaine, he knew nothing about. Ten weeks early, he did not understand.

  “We need to talk about getting your wife help. If she’s going to be a mother, she belongs in a rehab facility.”

  Stavros did not understand rehab facility, either. The only place he saw Dina belonging was a hole. A deep one, so she had to dig herself out the way his daughter was digging herself out. He said, “How do we fix Stavroula?”

  “We’re monitoring vitals and weight gain. She’ll need to stay here for a while.”

  “Can I see her again?”

  “Yes. Would you like to see your wife first?”

  “The baby, please.”

  He could not take this. He could not have his baby be so small. He could not accept feeling so stupid in front of this man, in front of all the hospital people, because all that time he thought that the baggies from Stephanie were baggies from the doctor. He reached the door and again was let in, and again was alone with the infants too small to be real. He took a deep breath, the first since entering the hospital. He put his hand on the glass top, exactly where the doctor’s had been.

  He said, “Stavroula, don’t be shy.” The baby did not move. He stroked the glass.