Let Me Explain You (26 page)

In the moonlight a line of chickens squatted on planks. They perked up when he pulled a sack off the wall, thinking it might be a second feed time, something that happened occasionally to encourage fowlic euphoria and the production of eggs. The chickens clucked but when no kernels appeared, they bobbed their necks in suspicion. This was not Stavros Constantine, they realized. This was not feed time, when the bright orange bowl fills the sky and signals to their ovaries that it's time to release egg cells. This was a fox or a dog.

Stavros Stavros stepped over damp, shit-smelling hay, his eyes on the smallest bird. She had her head tucked in a wing but shook awake. “Don't worry, little
kotopoulo
,” he whispered. “I only need one leg. Not even one leg, one toe. You will not miss it.”

The chicken squawked. He lunged. She flapped her wings, half-flew to a higher beam. He ran after her, sack raised over his head. Loose feathers, old-lady clucks, a frantic instinct to get out of reach. Which they all did. Stavros Stavros was panting. What he needed was a knife. A big knife. A butcher knife from his mother's kitchen that no chicken had ever said no to.

The porch light was on: it had not been on before. He walked slowly. He debated about climbing through a window. But there was no other way to get to the kitchen. He decided to go forward; he had no choice. If it were his father, he was probably passed out at the table. If it were Dina, he would make her come out to the coop with him.

It was his mother, sitting with a cup of tea at the table, face and hair still ensnared in sleep. On the table was a fork and bowl of lemon potatoes, his favorite.

“It's late,
mitera
. You should be asleep.”

She chuckled. “My son, telling me about my empty bed when he is out of his.” She tossed him a pair of sandals. He did not put them on. “I know your feet must be ice blocks. You hate to go barefoot.”

“Why are you having tea by yourself in the middle of the night?”

“That is a good question. Here is a better one. You have a bride, but you are out molesting my chickens.”

“There was a stray dog. I chased it off.”

“Oh, so you left your first night with Dina to check on the animals. She must have been pleased.”

Stavros Stavros said nothing. Katerina stood, walked around the table, and led him to a chair. She slipped the sandals onto his feet. Even when she scrubbed the floors, she did not kneel. But here she was kneeling before him on the one night he did not deserve it. She speared a potato on the fork. He took a bite, the potato melting on his tongue. She had warmed them.

“You think your mother does not see what is going on,” she said, “but that is because you have the milk-eyes of a newborn cat.”

Stavros Stavros ate another potato, and another.

Katerina pulled the bundle of sheets from beneath the table. “Tell your mother,” she said. “She will help you fix it.”

He tried to take another bite, couldn't. The tears were coupling, falling. “It's not your problem.”

“Oh, no, Stavraki. That is exactly what it is.”

He began to sob. He knew she would label him impotent, cuckolded, just like the rest of the village. “She's a whore,” he said quietly. “You had me marry a whore.”

Katerina did not ask Stavros Stavros to acknowledge that the arranged marriage had been his idea. She reached across the table. “The best thing to do with rotten meat,” she said, “is send it back. Not cry over it.”

“It's too late,” he said. “There is nothing you can do.”

“There is a saying,” she said, standing. “ ‘It's the old chicken who has the juice.' And I, Stavro, have plenty juice left.”

Within minutes, six of them were seated in the visiting room to discuss the problem. Dina sat with her chin on her knees. It was not satisfying, because she would not raise her head to receive their judgment.

Mihalis Lazaridis was stern looking in wide, tinted glasses, someone Stavros did not want to come up against but not someone Stavros feared. His dark hair flat against his head, only the strands near his forehead daring to break free. His huge nose, which might have appeared clownish on another man, gave him the look of an animal that lived close to the ground, made to scrounge. Two deep frown lines cutting down his face indicated that smiling was a trial.

“We've had a difficult time with her in the States,” Mihalis apologized, uncharacteristically. “We thought things would get better once she found a husband.”

“Three thousand drachmas,” Katerina answered, “or she goes back alone.”

Stavros Stavros looked up in surprise. What was she doing? She had said nothing about money.

Irene Lazaridis cringed. “You ask too much.”

“What is too much is that you allowed your daughter to spoil, then you give her to my son pretending she is fresh enough for marrying.”

Stavros Stavros saw now that the potatoes, the sandals, the kneeling were just business. His mother cared about his honor only if it mattered to her pocket.

Mihalis raised his hand to Irene. “It is fine,” he said. “We will honor it.”

Dina's eyes flicked from one person to the next, reminding Stavros Stavros of the crazed chickens in the coop. He suddenly felt like one of those chickens, too. She said, “I'm not going back with him.”

“It will cost you the three thousand,” Katerina said, “and you will buy his airfare.”

Irene threw her hands up. “No. That is the line for me.”

“There is another saying,” Katerina said. “And that is that when you bring a chicken to the table, somebody has to pluck the ass.”

Mihalis's mouth became very tight. As a Greek man, it was his prerogative to explode into expletives when being robbed, but he understood that this was a sensitive situation. “Yes,” he said. “We will do it.”

“I won't,” Dina said. She looked at Stavros Stavros. “You see what's happening? They want to get rid of you as bad as they want to get rid of me.”

The
sixameni
, the liar. He should have known not to trust her the minute he saw one of her eyes wasn't trustworthy. But Stavros Stavros looked to his mother. Was it true? Were they trying to get rid of him?

Katerina, in response, came to Dina. “
Koukla
,” she said, “do you know what your first mistake was?”

“Marrying your son.”

“Before that.”

Dina, sullen. “Coming back to this goat-fucking country.”

“Before that.”

“Being born.”

“Being born a woman,” Katerina corrected. “A Greek woman.” And she went out. She returned with a chicken. It clucked in alarm, knowing instinctively that being in a house meant danger. This was her big plan all along? His plan? “Yes,” Katerina said. “And it will work.” Everyone present would swear to it.

Stavros Stavros was pulled into the kitchen. They stood at the sink, where Katerina gripped the bird by the neck. Mihalis held the sheet. Stavros Stavros dumbly took the knife from his mother. He looked at Dina, who stood as far away as she could without stepping out of the kitchen. Her feet were inexplicably dirty. She seemed to blend in with the pile of potatoes that had just been dug up. No, he and his wife were not the same. He closed his eyes.

Katerina stopped his elbow. “One leg only. I don't need a bloodbath. If there is too much, the gossips will know.”

“Am I doing this or you?”

Katerina looked at him for a long time. She stepped back.

Stavros Stavros kept his eyes open this time, ignoring the clucks that sounded too much like his wife in their marital bed. A deep red gash appeared on the bird's leg, and she cried and flayed her feathers. Much-desired drops darkened the sheet.

Katerina turned to Dina. “
Ela etho
,” she said, and right there in the kitchen she smeared some of the chicken blood onto her daughter-in-law's inner thighs. It was as if Dina didn't feel it happening until it was already done, because she slapped at Katerina's hand just as she was pulling away. Katerina ignored it. She instructed her not to bathe in the morning. If anyone demanded proof of her virginity, it would be there.

Stavros Stavros wanted to run from the farm, from the red in the sink that was suddenly the price for America. Watching his mother shove her hands between his wife's legs, he felt sick for them both. He saw Dina's eyes when his mother handled her and understood she was suffering. Maybe she deserved it, but it was shameful, sad. He turned now to look at his pitiful wife with eyes of ripped cloth. This was real now. He was bound to this marriage. There had been an arrangement and a wedding, yes, but this clandestine act was what joined him to Dina.

It was five, just enough time for the Lazaridises to get home before the herders brought their goats to graze. The village would not be surprised to see Dina at home with her mother. They would understand that she had gone to Stavros as a dutiful, loving, urgent wife and now returned to her parents' house to prepare for America.

“Try to keep track of her for tonight, if you can,” Katerina called at their backs.

The chicken was released back into the coop, her leg bandaged. She would walk with a limp until she got cooked into a soup.

The next day—September 3, 1979—Stavros Stavros left the farm for good. He experienced the tipping of a plane at takeoff. The food was
skata
, the coffee was
skata
, the bathrooms were
skata
, but he loved all of it. When he called his brothers, he would tell them it was like driving an air-conditioned tour bus through clouds. He was not happy with Dina, but he could not pay attention to his anger with America so close. Everything new. Everything different. No one in America would know about his wedding night. She would promise never to tell. She would make it up to him. He would forgive her. He could be a good husband, a good person, in the modern world.

From Stavros Stavros's window, America rose both big and small. The cities, the pastures. He realized how many times as a child he had created this exact world—out of plants and sticks and bones and coffee grounds. Stavros Stavros had already made America. This knowledge gave him confidence, strength. It pushed away the nervousness that tasted like beets. But also, America was big. It was very, very big, even from far above. It stretched like the sea. So many houses, so many buildings, all of them proud, one taller than the next, all uninterested in their neighbors, all unconcerned with the way things have always been. A building wanted to be 86 floors, it could be 86 floors. He wanted to be America like that. Recognizable, respected, the best, the biggest, the only. He decided, in that moment, to make a singular decision.

“Dina,” he said, shaking her awake. “From now on, I'm just plain Stavros.”

Dina opened and shut her eyes.

Stavros wasn't sure if she heard him, but it didn't matter. Soon, everyone would learn his name: Stavros Mavrakis. Because where he was going, there was only one.

They did not know each other. They had nothing in common, if nothing meant being Greek. But Dina had told herself she could overlook his weak lips and the way he swung his arms as if he were a much larger man. He was proud—what Greek wasn't? He was short—what Greek wasn't? When his eyes grew wet with pleasure, it was not because he was looking at her; it was only that he was boasting or drunk or both. But Dina had not cared that he did not love her, because she did not love him. Now he wanted her to settle down, give up her life. For that, she could have stayed home with her parents. She had mistaken Stavros Stavros for an out; he was more in than her father. Her previous life, he couldn't even dream it into existence. He did not know that before Stavros Stavros, she had been an astronaut, a spy, and a meteorologist.