Let Me Explain You (19 page)

Then, uncharacteristically, Marina came out with, “You are worried about your father?”

Stavroula shook her head. Kept cutting. Could cut forever.

“You are troubled by something?”

“Everything's good.”

Marina went back to the peppers. But she gave some errands to the assistant closest to her, so they could be alone at their station.

“
Koukla
, have I ever told you the story of the milk jug?” Marina asked. “A story of my childhood.”

“You had a childhood?”

Marina smirked.

Stavroula once heard Marina say of Greece, “For a woman, it's nothing except a country full of dirty plates. That's why I got out before they could marry me off.” She heard Marina tell of the
pappa
s
's near-perfect run: “Fifteen sons and then a Marina—fat little girl, always riling up the chained
skylos
.” And she knew how fat Marina, spring after spring, snuck into the neighbor's hut to hold the baby rabbits, even though they hadn't yet latched to the mother; as a result, the neighbor flung the babies onto the roof, where they were food for birds. Did this deter Marina from touching the baby rabbits? It did not. This was all that Stavroula knew of Marina's childhood. Marina's stories rarely had anything to do with Marina.

“When Marina was three or four, she dropped a jug. A big glass milk jug. The bottom cracked, all the milk poured out. Her father, the beloved
pappas
, was not pleased because there was not very much milk in the village, the village goats were sick with a vengeful bug. It had taken days just for this little bit of milk sap, which had taken the
pappas
lots of friendly talks with herders. The
pappas
was angry. So what does Marina do?”

Stavroula's eyes moved to Marina's chin, which was covered in soft hairs. “What does Marina do?”

“I pick up the jug, which is perfectly perfect except for the hole at the bottom. I say, ‘No worries, it's only broken at the bottom.' ” Marina laughed now, just as little Marina must have made them laugh then, even during a national depression.

Stavroula knew where this was going. “What's the lesson?” Number 108.

“The lesson? No lesson. Except in this scenario, you,
koukla
, are holding the milk jug. You walk around wanting to believe that you are whole when actually you are pieces.”

Stavroula said, “I'm not the broken one.” Litza was broken. Her father, with his letter and demands, was broken. Stavroula knew what broken looked like, because that was everyone around her.

Marina dried her hands on Stavroula's clean towel, and pepper seeds clung to the cloth. “I think maybe I have spent a lot of time teaching you how to be strong and not enough how to be open.”

Stavroula picked up the knife again. She went slowly through the nearest carrot, cutting thin slices. They both knew there was nothing soft about Marina. How can you teach what you don't know? Besides, Stavroula wasn't interested in vulnerability. Vulnerable couldn't command a kitchen. Vulnerable was always the quietest voice in a room. Or, at least, the first one silenced.

Marina swept Stavroula's carrots into a pot using her bare arm. After some time she said, her back to Stavroula, “Your friend stop by today.”

“What friend?”

“Your friend, a woman. I went out myself to meet her.” Marina turned, holding a bowl, wiping it slowly, slowly with the towel at her waist. “She slips off her shoes while she eats. This is your friend?”

“We work together.” Stavroula's heart was pounding, making her feel very young. The chopping helped, she stayed with the chopping. She was not a child, she was a chef. Even in Marina's kitchen. She told herself so. “How long did she stay?”

“Not long.” Marina put the bowl down. Marina standing there, not cooking, not moving, which did not happen in this kitchen. The assistants toiled around them, pretending to hear nothing. Marina took a folded yellow paper from her pocket.

When Stavroula was a teenager, Marina refused to serve a gay couple, saying,
I know what goes in a mouth like that, and it's not my food
. About two lesbians who often came to the diner she said,
It must all be mush, like cake with no egg.
She wouldn't have cooked for these people if it weren't for Stavros making her.

Stavroula said, “She asked about Dad?”

“What else? Your friend expressed concern, and I tell her it is too early to worry.” Pause. “So she is not worried about him. Instead, she worries about you.”

The knife, that was the thing Stavroula had to hold on to. Her eyes down on the carrots. “What did she say?”

Marina unfolded the yellow paper. Flicks of water dampened the page.

Once, Stavroula summoned enough courage to ask Marina why she had a problem with these people. What was she afraid of?
Not afraid, Stavroula. Only, it makes me uncomfortable.

Marina, seeing Stavroula's face, made a sound like
chick-chick
. She waved her hand, and the kitchen emptied. All the orders that had to be filled, and it was just them. And the July menu. Marina patted the yellow paper twice as if it were a misbehaving child. “Your friend has decided to leave this for you because she thinks you aren't going back to work for a long time.”

July had annotated the menu, in light pencil, with notes like
They really are the best
, and
If you ever tell anyone about the whole chicken, I'll tell them about sausage.
But also,
These spices sound right, but they're not—they miss entirely.
And,
I lied when I said I liked this dish.
It looked like, in the course of only a few days, July had tried everything.

Marina said, “Where did you come from, with this menu?”

That was exactly what she said when Stavroula cut her hair—
Where did you come from, with this hair?

Stavroula kept chopping the carrots. The carrots would never run out. But her eyes were full of tears, her vision was orange threaded with silver. She held on to the tears, would not let them fall. She was trying to conceal herself from Marina, and she was trying to make herself known. She was fifteen all over again, shaking and hoping no one and everyone could tell. Marina, the person Stavroula had admired since she was a little girl, Marina, the person she loved most. The reason she has hidden all this time. There wasn't a word in her father's letter that Marina agreed with, except for what it had to say about Stavroula.

All Stavroula needed to say: This is who I am,
thea
. If I am who I am on the outside, I am who I am on the inside. But she couldn't. Thirty-one years old, and this was her answer:

A slip of the knife.

Blood on her finger, dribbling over the other fingers and onto the cutting board. Blood on the carrots. Who knew how many, they'd all have to be thrown out. That was Stavroula's first thought. The second was,
You did this
, but then whatever insistence there was in Marina's face faded. She was stricken, panicked. She pulled the towel from her waist and thrust it onto Stavroula's hand. She was clumsy, wrapping it around the injury.

Stavroula said, “I got it, I got it.”

Marina fiddled with a first aid kit. Doubtful she had ever opened one before. Shocking that she knew where it was stored. “You keep that tight.”

Stavroula wiped her face on the towel wrapped around her hand. It smelled like garlic, like her birthdays with Marina. Inside, the finger pulsed. There must be a lot of blood coming out. She had seen the slit the knife made, like a cat eye, an almond.

Marina brought Stavroula to the sink, and they ran water over the finger. “I don't know, I don't know,” she said. Funny, the way Marina was fussing. Stavroula had never seen anything like it.

“You feel like it's coming off, the finger?”

Stavroula laughed through the heavy crying. “No, it's not coming off.”

They figured out a bandage together. Not stitches, after all. Stavroula wound a piece of medical tape tightly around the gauze. Her finger felt safe hugged in like that, but blood was soaking through. She'd need to change it soon.

“Are you crying because your sister is always angry and your father selfish, or do we blame the carrots?” She said, “Or do we blame the broken jug. Or do we blame Marina?”

Stavroula said, “Carrots.” She met Marina's gaze for the first time in minutes. Marina's eyes, the slick exposed skin of onion. All this time, she realized, Marina had been rubbing her arm, massaging it as if to make sure the blood knew where it belonged.

Stavroula could not take it, losing the one person whose love had felt as everlasting as bread. There was no reason to fear her father's letter, except this.

“You stop this now. Crying only makes food bitter.”

“That's blood. Crying doesn't do anything.”

“Exactly, crying doesn't do nothing, so what is the point?”

She was fifteen. What was the point of crying? Litza was gone for good, and Stavroula was forced to take a job in her father's diner. To teach you a lesson, her father said. What she wanted to know was, What lesson? He said, Life lesson. She did not fight him. Somehow, with all the lessons she had been learning lately, the fight had gone out of her. “This is another kind of school, the Slop Room. You will learn important things, and you will learn them behind a sink, like your father. You will come direct from school. You will eat what only kitchen people eat, which is whatever we have much of. You will finish homework on your break, and then you will go to bed by ten o' clock.” She wanted to know how long she'd have to work. He said, “Until your lesson is learn.”

He fired the dishwasher. So she was dishwasher.

She wore elbow-length blue gloves, like a knight or a superhero. But it was awful work. Ingredients in sink form—starched noodles and congealed sauces and curdled batters and gluey fats and wilted fruits and creamed lunch meat—are the opposite of food. It got to be so that water looked funny without a film of cooking oil clotting the top. The Slop Room told Stavroula, not for the first time, what kind of world she was living in. The stuff on the pan, the pan itself, all that shimmery water, the soap bubbles, the blue gloves, her own skin—it was all the same. Trash, life, it was all the same. She saw a brown cloud over everything. She could not rinse the brown cloud. All her father said was, What is this about a brown cloud when we are cleaner than most people's houses?

She did not know what day it was. Eventually, she realized that breaded chicken meant Monday. Vats of goopy
avgolemono
soup meant Thursdays. All days meant without Litza, because Litza had gone to live with Dina. Had been forced out? Had wanted to go, all along? Stavroula wasn't sure.

“You finish schooling,” Stavros said, “you become a lawyer and a doctor, and you don't ever wash pots again. You don't ever put your hands in a full sink. You see my hands? A stranger sees them, he thinks I'm professional.” He flashed his pinky ring, its face the size of a quarter. It was an actual coin. The jeweler had customized the gold ring using a Greek drachma, a gift from Mother. “You see Marina there?” her father said. “You keep getting As the way you're getting As, and you don't look like her.”

Marina flunked a cleaver into bone. She said, “Your father, for one time, is half right.”

Marina was not pretty. When her hair was up in a slanted bun, which was always, her head looked like a ham hock. The skin on her face, in places, was the texture of fried cheese. There was a softness to her speckled quail eyes, and the wisps of hair around her temples were light, like whipped egg white. Her voice was the voice of a woman who knew who she was and had stopped apologizing for it long ago.

Stavroula did not want to look like Marina. She didn't want to go home smelling like Marina. The weak womanly business of preparing meals—she wanted no part of it. She thought her father had done Marina a favor by hiring her. Marina, Stavroula decided, was a slave to someone else's kitchen. She was not smart or strong enough to get herself out. But Stavroula would get out, out. And once she was brave enough to do that, she would be brave enough to go get Litza. Bravery would make her into something she wasn't: loyal.

But Marina was no woman. She was a priest, like her father the
pappas
. Marina respected blood. She demanded that all meat be butchered on premises, and because it was cheaper to bring in whole pig and lamb, because she had a connection that would transport the animals at almost no price, and because the meat was clean and fresh this way and she did the butchering for free, Stavros agreed. Marina claimed that bleeding the neck was a spiritual experience, and she burned incense as she hacked into the hoofs and attached the animal to a tree in the back lot through the leaders in its legs. Stavroula watched from the window. Marina was strong. Once they had the animal up, she could do the rest herself.