Let Me Explain You (31 page)

“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. Stavros 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.

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.”