Let Me Explain You Page 7

  That lie, that was one of the worst moments of Stavroula’s life. It kept after her with the question, Was it worth it? For a long time, Stavroula expected Litza to bring it up, but she never did. It wasn’t that Litza had finally adjusted to life with their new family. Litza didn’t get over anything, she was just storing it up.

  Driving home from her restaurant, Stavroula let herself wonder about how the email had hit Litza. How would she make him pay for it?

  Listen, and We shall explain.

  Survival is Our instinct, passed down from a long line of hunched farmers

  who coax life from the most insignificant seed; who received it from foragers of berries and sticks and names; who got it from bands of tribes scratching the dirt; who got it from wild, hunted men; who got it from animals trying to stand upright; who got it from all fours scurrying the earth; who got it from, who got it from . . . where it originated in amoebas frantically searching for a way to reproduce all by themselves without saying the same old thing, without having to share a single resource with even one other cell.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  Stavros sat on a cinder block, smoking far enough away from the adopted goat where he would not be bothered for cigarettes. He took a big-fat-self drag. The goat rattled its chain, but Stavros was not in the mood for sharing cigarette butts with a filthy animal. All the sharing he had been doing these days, and what did he get back? A goat messenger of Death hanging around the diner and scavenging his brand of cigarettes. A family of women who does nothing except take and take from him, giving him no real answer to his final wishes. He told himself, very clearly, that he did not love them, having never really loved them. Let them go on thinking they are dealing with a butcher who doesn’t give store credit, the bitches.

  Had his been a suicide email, he would have written, Nobody is to blame, only the poor foreign bastard with the rope in his mouth. A suicide note had no honor, whereas his letter—it was blessed. What did he have to do to convince them of that?

  The paper from the funeral director asked about military honors and if he was in the American army. No, he was not. He was Greek: Greek army. There was no box for that. Did he wear glasses? No, but he had checked yes, because he thought it might make him look on the outside how he was distinguished on the inside. Who would help him choose the silk shirt they would bury him in? Who would throw in the final rose with the dirt? Maybe his ex-wife would throw in a headless flower? This form, it was not enough for him. There were other arrangements to be made that this form did not address. He pressed the ballpoint pen into the pad that rested on his knee. He wrote in Greek, HOW TO SAY GOODBYE. Then he crumpled up the paper and threw it to the goat, who ate it as a second favorite to the cigarette. Like all of them, the goat has no real love for Stavros and takes trash and gives back nothing: and that is why Stavros keeps all of his cigarettes to himself now. Something he should have done from the start.

  Stavros crushed out the cigarette, which it smelled to him like his own fingernails, and lit the next. His pants and also his socks were orange from the dirt of the lot; he could count the number of days he had sat out here on this very cinder block.

  Stavros started again, on a clean sheet. Every man deserved a clean sheet, didn’t he?

  He started, with Greek, SONG TO SAY GOODBYE, Tpαγούδιγια να πω Αντίο. This satisfied him and made him think maybe his first ideas were not always the best, but eventually he would come up with the right ones. He took in a deep breath of the cool air. He was still alive so was able to make mistakes.

  He wrote, on a new line, THINGS TO DO BEFORE DEATH.

  1. Fix ice machine

  2. Fix G in Gala sign so that it is lit up like on the first day we open

  3. Cancel vendor for seafood because he is dishonest druggie

  4. Finalize will, give it to the lawyer so no one selfish or conniving will make any changes to it

  5. Call Hero

  6. Write obituary to remember Stavros with respect

  7. Which clothe do I want to be bury in (a shirt with pocket for the picture of Rhonda and me)

  8. Find picture of Greek Agora

  Then—

  7. Which clothe do I want to be bury in (a shirt with pocket for the picture of Rhonda and me)

  8. Find picture of Greek Agora

  He began to replace the scratched-out #7 with Picture of Carol and Family but scratched that out, too.

  9. Leave message on voice mail for Carol, which explains what ruin Family and Marriage: If a person is good to me, I would be a hundred times good back to them.

  But with the liberation of the women comes forgetting about the man. The man went out to make, and the woman? She wait for the man to come home so she could take what he makes: then she gets a job to go make some more because enough is not enough. That is why the Family dissolve. And the children become selfish and have no thought for the father, only themselves, the same as the Mother. And we can’t blame the man for that, sorry.

  The goat snorted. Proving a goat is no different from family. Or, if you look at it another way, they are all goats not to care that their father is dying in seven days!

  What else can be done in only seven days?

  10. Send package to Greece

  11. Make final decision on the executor

  12. Make final payment to Gabriel for funeral service

  13. Make final wishes heard

  14. Make bakery case shine

  Enough. The list, it can go on forever. There is too much to do. He still has to have a talk with Marina, who will keep his diner alive after he is done for good but who refuse to listen to anything he says, even more so now than ever. He still has to decide what happen to all the property, the house and business, which he made from scratch. There is goodbyes to be written to the one or two people of his life who mean everything to him—the people who knew him before he was a success. Then there is the goat.

  Then there is Stavroula, Litza, Ruby. There is his fat ex-wife.

  Seven days is still seven days, it was dawning on him. And the last seven must be the most important. What he has left may not be enough days to get all the spoils, but it may be enough days to get some. Seven days makes him all of a sudden into a very busy man. Before too soon, it would only be six days. Then five. Then four. Then none.

  If the world can be made in seven days, in seven days Stavros can retake his life!

  He folded up the paper, slipped it into his pocket. He smashed out the cigarette.

  He looked at the goat. The goat was not lazy or stubborn, it just did not know any better. The goat ate trash, for peace sake! It was waiting for him, for his wisdom and charity. And Stavros, being the nice man he is, cannot look at a hungry goat and give nothing. He must offer mercy, for the goat knows not what it does. So, on the way up to his apartment, he takes up the two butts and tosses them where the goat could reach: with mercy.

  DAY 7

  * * *

  Anger, Rage

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  Litza watched from her car as her father climbed the rickety stairs of his snake-hole apartment for a nap, a Greek custom he had never kicked. She saw that Marina was outside, on the side of the building, sharpening knives. She knew she had time to break into her father’s office unseen. It would be easy. She had years of experience of walking through the back door of a place as if she belonged there; they wouldn’t think twice if she pulled out a key. They wouldn’t think, isn’t this the one who smashed the bakery case? They wouldn’t think, she’s looking for her father’s will.

  It had been gnawing at her since her trip to the diner: if he was picking out coffins, he was drawing up a will.

  When she was twelve years old, Litza found herself at a major league baseball stadium for the first time in her life. Who knew why her parents let her go, maybe to get her out of the house, maybe because Mother hoped that if Litza spent some time in the world as a kid, among children with no agendas, Litza woul
d start to act more like a kid and not like the falsely accused in pursuit of vindication. Mother gave her an extra five dollars with encouragement to have fun. That, and the game lights, seen at a distance from the school bus window, made Litza feel warm. Special. It was nice, and some instinct suggested that she always ought to feel this with Mother, but then the feeling flickered and cooled. It rubbed her, having to watch it fade. She returned, as she always did, to the dankness of the feeling’s absence. She decided Mother wouldn’t be the one to make her feel special; none of them would. She’d make her own self feel that way.

  What was it that the first security guard gave in to? Was it her smoky eyes? Was it her persuasive, kid-boxer personality? Was it that she innocently attended to his body language and his need for entertainment, while the other preteens gave all their attention to lip gloss? Her refusal to be kicked back to the nosebleeds? She slipped her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, which hugged her hips like a skin soon needing shedding. He gave in to her charm, was able to acknowledge that she had power for a twelve-year-old. He whispered, “Tell them you want to use the photo booth on level two.” She did, they let her pass Gate 2. She did not see the guard again. She left the hangers-on at Gate 1 with the lie that she’d be back for them. She cruised past the box seats. She kept calling, “Dad? Dad?” as if she were just rows away from her father, and no one answered, and no officials stopped her to check her ticket for the Field Level. This taught her that all you have to do is get close enough, and act as if you belong, and no one will suspect you—but ultimately this was a lesson for someone like Stavroula, not someone like her, who didn’t want to belong if she wasn’t wanted. She hung her arms over the fence. She watched the players come down the sideline. Orange cake on their spikes, clay dusting their knees; she imagined herself being raised on their shoulders, being taken for pizza and soda in the locker room afterward with the winning game being dedicated to her. She called to an ump. Who knew why he came all the way from shortstop? How did she convince him to give over the black Magic Marker tucked into the breast pocket of his striped uniform, resting near his official silver whistle? She might as well have asked for his belt. But he indulged her, they all indulged her, they didn’t know how not to. And then the baseball player winked at her, among all those other people—who had a right to be there, who had bought tickets and did not scheme their way down to the cushioned, special seats—among all those cute, much cuter kids. She got all of their signatures. She did not care about baseball before or since, but on the way home she made sure the students and teachers saw what she did.

  Litza entered her father’s office, leaving the door open just a crack so she knew what was going on out there.

  Through the waffled glass blocks, more portal than window, no one could see her rifling through his papers. She began her search for Who gets the ring he uses to crown his pinky/Who gets the used BMW/Who gets the used diner/Who gets the money he has undoubtedly hidden in undisclosed accounts? Will he give it all to his black girlfriend, who never had to suffer through him as a scaly, angry man? who got him in his lame years? who never understood that, not so long ago, he wanted to shake and rattle, to crack all of your plates and saucers so that you had to lap your milk from porcelain shards? Or was he going to leave everything to the fucking goat tied up outside?

  He wasn’t going to die, but if he thought he was, the first thing he’d reach for was his money. He liked to say that he had come to this country with fish bones in his pocket and intended to leave with a whale. He’d settle the will before any other business, she was sure of it, and she wanted to see if she was in it. She was entitled to whatever she could melt his estate down to, she was Big Daughter Bank to his defaulted parenthood. She was owed a future and security and a family of her own. With this will, her father would look at everything he built in the last thirty years (she could concede that he had built for himself a successful life) and decide how the seed would be scattered. In the will he would become mortal, and also immortal, and while these thoughts flapped in and out of Litza’s mind, too wild to be ensnared by understanding, she knew that she would see, once and for all, who mattered and who didn’t, who he loved and who he didn’t.

  Plus, Litza needed a new car.

  She scurried around the office, quick and decisive movements that made her look, and feel, raccoonish. That made her scurry even more. She was manic, the best she had felt in a long time. Her father’s desk gave up addresses, phone numbers, an account of vendors. No money in the drawers or in the freezer of the minifridge, which is where she would’ve kept it. He kept his in a safe. She doubted, though, that he had locked the will away. It was the kind of thing he’d want them to find.

  The desktop was password locked. She stared at it, thinking it could tell her something. She tried DINER, GALA, then GREECE. The computer was as forthcoming as he had ever been. After SARATOGAS, GALAKTOBOUREKO, CRETE, MONEY, $$$$$$, RHONDA, RUBY, GOAT, she tried MORI, a pet name he had thought to use until she turned seven and then he didn’t bother anymore about pet names. She typed MALAKA, left it on the screen.

  There was a space between the desk and a cabinet, and she felt there. She found a brown leather portfolio. In it was a brochure for funeral caskets. She also found a torn sheet of paper that told her,

  The depression is on me like a wolf tooth.

  The wolf may take you by the throat,

  but it is not the wolf that take you whole.

  God is on the snout for Stavros Stavros Mavrakis.

  And then, folded and taped, his Last Will and Testament. Today’s date.

  I, Stavros Stavros Mavrakis, being age of majority, being of sound mind and memory, not acting under duress, under influence, fraud or menace, declare this. He revoked his prior will, and he revoked his prior marriage with the typed line, “I am not currently married.” He revoked his children, too. The section called Gifts was blank, as was Residuary Estate, as was Executor and Executor Powers. No indication of where his money and possessions and remains and estate would go. It was a blank will, or it was the wrong one altogether because the real one was elsewhere, or it was his doubt that he was really going to die, or it was telling her something that Litza couldn’t quite figure out. Or he was just going to rewrite it after his nap.

  The photograph slipped out of a side pocket in the portfolio. It curled at the edges. She did not recognize this picture, and it took some minutes for her to realize that she did know the little girls in the photo. Her, her sister. Ages four and six, a close-up. They were swathed in pitchy white dresses, which, like the rest of the photograph, had faded to the color of concrete. Their hair was pulled into pigtails. Litza traced the red ribbons at the collars and wondered who had had the imagination to tie them on. The girls’ faces were as round and fresh as hard apricots, except there was sleeplessness in Stavroula’s eyes. A child has dark circles under her eyes? Stavroula, her smile a little cocky even then, face and shoulders imperceptibly ahead of Litza’s, which should have served as a warning to Litza that she’d better sit up. But Stavroula’s hand, on the back of Litza’s neck: it said, Here we go, together. Here we are, and you can take us both or you can leave us both. The cocky smile, maybe, but still the hand on Litza’s neck saying, No matter who comes: it’s us together.

  “Looking for something?”

  Litza’s heart kicked like a hoof. Her sister, finally.

  When Litza was eight, ten-year-old Stavroula was standing just like thirty-one-year-old Stavroula was now. At the door, simultaneously wanting to know and not know what Litza was doing in their parents’ room, the nervousness in her close to curdling the fun because Stavroula was always obsessed about getting caught at things she was barely doing. The tone accusatory, but also curious, wondering. And what did Litza show her then? A wooden man made of clothespins, which her father, as a little boy, had first bound together with laces from his own father’s work boots until his father surprised him with a smear of glue, kept warm in his pocket between two sheets
of wax paper. And what did Stavroula say when she saw the wooden man? Are you going to break it? And what did Litza do? Break it. And then what did Stavroula do? Tell. She went running with her mouth open for telling. And then what did Litza do? What did Litza do? When she heard Stavroula running with her mouth open to Mother? Break it even more, that’s what she did, so that the wood became pricks and sawdust. And then what did their father do? Punish her. But in the privacy of his room, he moaned a little, she saw him when she was supposed to be sitting on the bottom step of the attic, grounded, she saw the way that mourning and sadness and an inability to gather the shards of days you can’t remember, still feel close to, could turn his cheek into something that bobbed and gulped, like a frog dipping up and down in his home pond. And what did Litza do? She glued the man back together. And what else did she do? She buried the man in the backyard. And what did Stavroula do? She made their father a new man from clothespins and said that it was from both of them. But it took years—not until the wedding, really—before Stavroula would conspire with Litza again.

  This was a moment when one could have asked the other how she was, but Litza didn’t do it because Stavroula didn’t. Dear Stavroula: I’m fine, how are you? Stavroula, the control freak, everything on her terms.

  Litza slipped the photograph beneath sheets of paper on her lap. “You lost weight.”

  Last time Litza saw her, Stavroula’s hair was long and stringy, and she was fat, and she accused Litza of doing something she did not do. OK, she took a stool to her father’s bakery case, but did that mean she was automatically at fault for her sister’s car window? Weren’t there thousands of other people capable of petty vandalism? Why did Stavroula have to leap to blame her? Yes, the younger, dumpy version of Stavroula loved to deliver judgment on Litza. Was this the same Stavroula now? She wasn’t sure. Her face, which drew to a point at the chin, seemed not so serious the way Litza remembered it. Stavroula had changed how she dressed, or how her clothes fit, so that her pink sleeveless shirt and jeans made her seem a year younger, not older. She was wearing earrings, though not the ones Litza had made her—generic, lifeless hoops, from a mall, no doubt. Stavroula’s hair was short, shaved in the back and lightly curled on top. The way Stavroula looked said she looked this good because she hadn’t had to bother with her sister in many months. Stavroula was like a divorcée who had realized, finally, that she was better off. Litza was the one who aged in the last year. Sure that Stavroula was sizing her up, too, Litza hoped that Stavroula did not catch this, and then she hoped that she did and felt responsible. Wait, Stavroula was wearing eyeliner? She knew how to do that?