Let Me Explain You (18 page)

“He wants to bully everybody into forgiveness, and you're dumb enough to fall for it.”

“This letter, Litza. He means it.”

Litza snatches the letter, scrunches it up. “Did it ever occur to you that he actually wants us to find this shit? That he's leaving it like crumbs, which is what he always leaves us?”

“Where is he, Litza? Why hasn't anyone found him yet?”

She wants the question to hang in the air, like the smell of something frying, as it does for her. Litza snorts. “You know when we'll find him? When he wants to be found. This is what he does, he disappears when it's convenient.”

“Then why bother looking for him? Why have we been searching through his stuff and going to funeral parlors?”

Litza refuses to say. Her reasons, it seems, are private, or she just doesn't want to give Stavroula the satisfaction. Somehow, she is looking at Stavroula dead-on and also watching her from the corner of her eye. Something Litza does when she readies to pounce. “Would you mourn for me, too? If I were missing?”

“Yes.”

“And they think I'm the liar. You wouldn't have even called out of work.” Litza shifts her coffee mug to the center of the crumpled letter. When she picks up the mug again, it leaves a brown ring. “Nobody knows how weak you are, Stavroula. Not even you.” But it does not come out like cruelty. It comes out like pity. Litza's eyes swell, and for a moment Stavroula believes she will be forgiven.

Then Litza is down the aisle, still holding the mug. Yelling, inexplicably, all seven digits of July's number.

Stavroula wants to yell back, but Litza is through the doors. And what's there to say? No one tries to prevent Litza from doing what she wants to do. People, even strangers, even sisters, have the instinct of caution. Sooner or later, every interaction becomes a forgone conclusion—the way food turns to shit.

Stavroula watches from inside the diner. Litza, seething, heads toward Stavroula's car, which is across the parking lot. There are no cars near it, even Litza's is four, five spaces away. Litza launches the mug, and it smacks against the driver's-side window. The ceramic breaks apart and drops to the asphalt. Amazingly, the window does not break. The coffee runs down the glass like muddy rain, dribbling onto the door handle. On the table is the letter with a brown
O
in the middle.

Dear God,

It is me: Stavros Stavros Mavrakis.

Do you know, all these times, I have been writing love letters—to my daughters, my wives.

No one understands that the entire life of Stavros is a love letter with no possible translation. So it is to you, God, I write my final letter, which this is a letter of heartbreak. And I hope that you answer with mercy, which when you think down to it is what love really is.

Did you realize, all these times, I address to you in English? But I think it is the only way, God, You, will listen. Greek is the language of my beginning, and English the language of my end. Two lives, two languages. Also, God, you see how much I am with improving my writing. A man spends his whole life trying to say it better.

An egg, you remember, because you Created it, is the smallest of all living matters. It can understand only its small, warm self. The egg cannot see, only feel. Inside the shell, the heartbeat is the constant belief. There is a Truth in this: in the history of the world, it is eggs that have change everything.

Why could I not be this egg, God? Why do you have to crack Stavros Stavros Mavrakis?

I have seen you make scramble of the lives of Litza and also her mother, Dina. For Marina, for Stavroula, you boil life until the wet egg is becoming not egg, but almost meat. Then there are eggs that are laid by golden geese, like Ruby, Hero, like men who are famous and rich. How is this fair and equal, God, to give for some?

My ex-wife, she is the rotten egg.

But for Stavros Stavros Mavrakis, you have made me over hard. The Chef does not care that I have been cooking too long. You, the Chef, hold me to the pan. You, the Chef, ruin me, because a man, like an egg, cannot be change back to what he once was or what he was never meant to be. Once an egg is cooked, it cannot be forgiven.

Some may call my letters the letters of a suicide or a crazy man, or some even the prophet. And maybe those are the fates of Stavros Stavros Mavrakis. But Here is the Actual Truth:

Stavros Stavros has cooked himself.

He is a weak man.

I can confess this to you, God: I feel the broken in me, the white parts of me so cook they are almost fry. I could be better and want to be. But my whole life, I am too afraid to be something special, like omelet or cake. I think being an egg means I can be only yolk.

I wish to go differently in death.

Dear God: Make the life of Stavros Stavros Mavrakis over easy.

Litza parked at the 7-Eleven, as usual, so Father Panayiotis wouldn't see her coming. She stamped out a cigarette and entered the church through the cafeteria doors. Without people in the room, her heels made the floor sound much harder than it was. The floor sounded like Stavroula. Nobody saw her cross into the cathedral, which was bright—chandeliers, the windows splintering into stained-glass scenes. Her favorite was a mountain cracked open so you could see the body of Jesus lying beneath it.

Litza was doing everything her father was asking of her. But he was never going to know. He could die today, he could call up choking on his own bones, and she wouldn't tell him.

She crossed herself and popped a Perc. Out of respect, she looked away from the saints, all of them brushed with actual gold because everything precious, even God, is made from gold. She felt like God did listen to her, sometimes, that was why she came, but in the rushed way you listen when you have somebody else on the line, or how a customer representative listens when she knows she's got many more nearly identical calls to take. Still; He listened. This was what she needed, all the saints staring down thinking only of her. She was not made of gold, but she was trying to be a better person. Couldn't Stavroula see she was trying?

Above, Mary held baby Jesus and blessed everything. Mary, the clueless bitch, lucky to have her baby.

Having children was a little test that she had given to her body and to the universe, and they had both failed. Here was another thing stripped away, another thing God did not want her to have. It wasn't her ex-husband that was the problem—it was her. She had gone to the doctor and he said, yes, unfortunately it looked like 628.2, yes, there could be trouble conceiving. It might be genetic. Stavroula, for all her condescension, she could be 628.2, too. Imagine—they might suffer from the same condition. Stavroula could be exactly like Litza, only not know it.

Even when she had run away from all of them—Dina, too—and was getting into some serious trouble, Litza had believed she'd make it right by one day having a child of her own. The decades she had spent on her own. The shitholes she lived in, she eventually realized, were on the inside. She wanted to show them—her family, who never came looking for her—that she had survived despite them all, and not only survived but thrived—because look at this beautiful baby girl.

Litza, you need God in your life.

Litza rolled a candle between her fingers, not so much that she'd put out the flame. The flame seemed very sure of itself. It knew it was a source of pain as well as life.

Once, when they were new to this country, she and Stavroula had sat in a Catholic church together. They were told to go and kiss the feet of Jesus and had come back laughing, because it was strange to be in a place where the appropriate gesture of faith was kissing a dead man's plastic feet. That day, they accepted shame together. If only she had a daughter, she wouldn't need a sister. Her sister, who could only guess at what Litza was. Her sister could kiss her Greek ass.

She squeezed the top of the candle, where the wax was hottest. It burned until she did it enough times that the wax protected her. The buttery wax hardened into a new, clean skin that immediately began to crack. She brought her finger back to the flame and held it there. Her fingertip reddened but she did not take it away.

What the letter really said was,
you are a nothing, a loser, a woman, a no one.
He used up his final words with words he had used all her life. And he was right, because she could not even do the one thing that all women could.

Yes, she destroyed the bakery case. It was like shattering a crystal. No, an angel. She wreaked destruction on a Sunday, and no one saw her coming. She came the day after the honeymoon, when all should have been calm and her husband was napping with a pillow stuffed beneath his ear. Yes, her father warned, the fiancé is a loser, had turned into one the way that sometimes turns into always; he had lived through it with Dina and he didn't want that kind of life for her: she could walk away from the wedding today and no big deal. Yes, he walked her down the aisle. Yes, she was a stunning bride, with baby's breath in her hair and a waist tight as a knot. Yes, cousins came from Greece that she had never even met, all of them to celebrate her, and, yes, there was both a band and a DJ, and they threw dollar bills at her feet and her father's as they danced; and, yes, her father rented a van and took the cousins to the Saratoga horse races to show them a good time, and yes, he paid for their hair to be styled on the morning of the reception. Yes, it was a wedding of abundance, an abundance she had never known. Yes, Stavroula gave a toast that promised a fruitful marriage borne of friendship. After only one week, Litza left her husband. Her father was right about the man she had chosen to spend her life with: he was not worthy of her.

She took shards of the bakery case with her. She put them in her pockets, slicing two of her fingers.

Yes, she came for destruction on a Sunday.

She sat at the counter, she ordered black coffee. She felt the hot liquid go all the way down. How could it scald what was already scalded? But it did. She slid her hands down the cold metal bars of the stool—she felt like she was lifting the heavy bottom half of her own body—and she rammed the stool into the delicate cake case. Everything shattered. Her father was there instantly, making
wh-wh-wh
sounds—after all he had given her—and he was not even separating her from the stool like she expected. The icing stuck like Spackle to the floor, his arms. She dragged the stool out behind her. Yes, she could see it in her backseat, yes, she bled, yes, she knew all the while what she was allowing herself to become. She drove to Stavroula's place of business, and nobody saw. She held the stool over her sister's car for a long, long time—no one, no one, to save her from herself—she came down with all of her strength. Her sister's window blowing out; the scream she had been holding in forever. Yes, she needed God in her life. Yes, she had problems. But who was the one who broke their promises?

The cathedral was blazing sunlight. She was doing that with just her thoughts and feelings. Litza pressed a palm to her arm. It was wax. Her legs were wax. Her nails were not nails. Her fingers could break off one by one if she wanted to. Her heart, animal fat.

Her legs lifted off the wooden pew. Her feet went first, her feet tipped toward the sky. Jesus was inviting her up to be his personal best, and all the icons could watch. These were not angel wings, she was more like a moth, easily torn and shredded. Really, she didn't need wings to get where she was going, heat was making her rise. Mary's eyes tracked her ascent. Mary's eyes moved in the paint and said,
I have, you want
. Litza slapped at the domed ceiling. She went eye to eye with the saints, whose tongues did not sit like pudding in their mouths.

She looked down. Her body was dripping, hitting the floor, and curling into rind. The candle dropped for a very long time, extinguished itself.

She fell down to the blue carpet that loomed beneath like an ocean. She dropped headfirst. No one to grab her arm, no one to turn her upright. If her father had been in the sky with her, he would have watched her pierce the clouds, then the water. He would have kept going. But he was not even there to do that.

Litza ran down the aisle. Her heels sank into the carpet, but she got to the doors before anyone saw her. She hit the weak sunshine, still warm but shaking, and lit a cigarette.

Marina stood at the chopping block in the black slippers Stavroula had always known her to wear. The wisps of hair at her neck were matted with sweat. The three assistants around her worked hard to keep up. She was cutting carrots. The carrots were huge, the size of a child's forearms. Marina did not do wimpy carrots. Stavroula dropped the brown bag at her elbow.

“More medicine already? Pretty soon I will be eating medicine breakfast, noon, and with coffee.” But she smiled when she looked into the bag. Inside were two vials, plus a cupcake, which was forbidden by Marina's doctor.

Stavroula accepted the knife from Marina and remembered that a knife was not a knife when it was also a hand—one of the very first lessons that Marina taught her. She ran the blade against the carrot. Orange disks whirled onto the board. She felt the tension in her body release whenever the blade sank. These clusters of cells would be broken down so that other cells could live. One of Marina's 107 lessons.

“You're busy,” Stavroula said. She hoped it did not come out a question.

Marina ran her hands along a line of peppers, removing seeds from their sockets. “You wait. Marina is going to take her own little nervous break, then we will see where Stavros disappears to.”

What did Stavroula expect? They weren't ones to talk family problems, so. When Mom Mom died, Marina gave fifteen-year-old Stavroula a new recipe to try and a honey bun; the next week, Stavroula returned with a recipe of her own. That's how Marina coached her to deal with loss, absence. There was something to it, of course. And it was, in part, why Stavroula loved Marina like no one else. The more Stavroula chopped, the more it began to feel like her father was fine. She made a pile of the orange carrots and swept the greens off the board. It was nice, this kind of grunt job—something she didn't do that often anymore. She wiped her knife on a clean towel, one that had no smell. Habit.