“Like spareribs?” I asked.
“No,” said Eli.
If I’d had a plate of spareribs, I would have dumped them on his head. I had a penchant for doing things like that.
“I wouldn’t call this Jewish cooking,” said my mother.
“Chicken?” Eli was surprised.
“Why is chicken Jewish?” I asked.
My mother mouthed, It’s not, at me. To Eli she said: “I think chicken is universal.”
“Oh?” said Eli. “The prevailing meat is lamb.”
“There,” my mother pointed out. “In the area of Iraq and Iran. Right?”
“Also goat,” he went on. “In Greece as well, there is a great deal of goat. Some would say too much.”
“Now, is goat stringy?” my father asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever had goat.”
“Unfortunately, yes. But then, often, so is the lamb. Poor grazing country,” Eli concluded.
I was so bored my teeth itched. I banged my feet on the rung of my chair a few times. I knew if I looked up, my mother would scowl or shake her head, so I looked at my plate.
“You are studying Greece?” Eli was addressing me.
I nodded.
“Like your mother.” He looked across the table at her.
“I was doing it first,” I said.
“Greece is big enough for both of us,” she told me. “Anyhow, I’m studying Greek and you’re studying Greece.”
“You don’t study the language?” Eli asked.
“No,” I said. “Trojan War, that kind of thing.”
“There is no ‘that kind of thing,’ ” Eli said. “Nothing is like the Trojan War.” He smiled a scary, pinched smile. “You ought to be studying the language as well.”
“She’s only nine,” my mother said.
“At nine, I was studying Greek and Hebrew,” Eli said. He tucked his pointy beard into his neck like a pigeon.
If I’d said that, my mother would have told me not to brag. But to Eli she said, “Boy! That’s impressive. And I suppose you spoke Arabic as well.”
Boy was not one of her customary exclamations, so I decided she was just being polite.
“Of course,” said Eli.
“And then your English is beautiful,” my mother went on.
I wondered why she was making such a fuss.
He briefly pretended not to accept this compliment. “No, no, I merely stumble along.” He ate a bite of bread. “But it is imperative, you know. Or maybe you don’t really know.”
My father put his fork down. Something he didn’t know? “You mean a native speaker couldn’t possibly appreciate the importance of English?”
“I suppose.” Eli was willing to grant my father his version. Then he warmed up to the idea. “That is what I mean. It’s a passport, you see, a ticket out of the East.”
“I thought the East meant China,” I said.
“The East begins in Greece,” said Eli.
“Really?” My mother was genuinely surprised, not just pretending to be. “How can you say that, when we think of Greece as the foundation of the West? It is the foundation of the West.”
“Bribery, corruption, inefficiency, the attitude of letting it go until tomorrow, a tomorrow that never arrives. Pah!” Eli pushed his plate away. “Unbearable.”
“Greece?” my father said. “Hmm. But Israel wasn’t like that, was it?”
“Different but worse,” said Eli. “The—the—smugness, I believe you call it?”
“Probably,” my mother said, “from what I’ve seen of them.”
“But more efficient,” my father put in cheerily.
Eli didn’t say anything.
“So it was good to move here,” my mother said.
“It has been a great relief,” said Eli. “I must be a crypto-German. I like order. I like the rational. I even like the winter.”
“It’s only November,” my mother said. “You haven’t seen much winter yet. But maybe you are a touch German—I mean, perhaps you have German ancestors, and some sort of Jungian race-memory?”
“No. Safar, Sephardic. They came after the expulsion.” He squinted at my mother. “Are you a disciple of Jung?”
“It was a joke,” my mother said.
“Anti-Semite,” Eli mumbled.
“The Spanish expulsion?” my father asked.
“Yes,” said Eli. “We do not have an illustrious bloodline going back to the Babylonian Exile.”
My mother stood up and pointed at me. Time to clear the table. “What would people like for dessert?” she asked. “We have chocolate ice cream or orange sherbet. Or, I suppose, you could have both.”
“Sherbet, please,” Eli said.
“Continuing in the Persian mode,” said my mother. “Did you know that?” she said to me. “That the Persians invented sherbet?”
Standing in the kitchen stacking the plates beside the sink, I felt the chilly undertow, the tired, dim, muffled sinking into deadness coming over me. I didn’t like Eli; he was fussy and mean. I didn’t like the Trojan War. I didn’t like finding out that almost everything in the world had been invented, one time or another. Things were better when they were unexplained. Watery, super-cold sherbet was more wonderful before it was Persian. Before it was Persian, it was a miracle of nature. Now I had to imagine someone—and inevitably it was an Eli-like someone, with a pointed beard, pleased with himself—tinkering with fruit and water until—Bingo!—he’d invented sherbet.
Miss Evie had said that now we would begin to understand the world. I didn’t enjoy understanding it. I preferred the mysteries. She’d been wrong about a lot of things, anyhow. She said the Greeks invented everything important, but it turned out they hadn’t. They hadn’t invented the Bible, for instance, and that was a lot more important than some of the other things they hadn’t invented, like sherbet or porcelain.
“I’m tired,” I said to my mother. “Can I go to bed?”
“Sure,” she said. “You don’t want any sherbet?”
“No.”
“Okay. Say goodnight to Professor Safar. And take the dessert plates to the table.”
I took them. I said goodnight. I tromped upstairs to my attic room, where I sat on the bed and stared at the wall. From up there I could hear an occasional tinkle and murmur as they ate their sherbet and chatted about how important Eli Professor Safar was and how difficult his life had been. I stared at the wall until my vision became peculiar, as if I were looking through a dark, throbbing funnel and could see only a small circle at the narrow end. My ears were buzzing. I felt swirly and horrid, and I liked it. I wanted to feel even more horrid. It was comforting to have a body to represent the mind or the soul or whatever it was inside me that hurt.
I’m just too tired to go on with all this, I said to the wall.
That made me feel better. I don’t want to and I’m not going to, I said to the wall. Good-bye to the Trojan War and Chinese porcelain and people coming over to pay court to my mother and Alexander the Great and even to things I liked or had once liked—my bicycle, the blood-soaked House of Atreus, sour cream. I didn’t have the energy for any of it.
I wasn’t going to be transformed into a cow. I was going to turn myself into a kind of human seaweed that lived in the clammy dark where you don’t want to put your foot. I would hide there, wafting back and forth, cold and unseen. Maybe someone would come looking for me. Probably not.
Along with the Bible and perhaps in compensation for the loss of Vishwa, my parents had got me my own record player for my birthday. It was red and black and had two boxy speakers that hooked onto the sides but could be detached and pulled out several feet to create a somewhat stereophonic experience. It came with a pack of needles and a yellow cloth for wiping the records. A.A. and Ingrid had added a sophisticated damp roller of the kind A.A. used to clean his records and a small bottle of intoxicating acetone-tinctured fluid. They also gave me two records that Roger and I listened to a lot at their house, The Moldau and The Fountains o
f Rome and The Pines of Rome. And my mother gave me Petrushka.
Soupy, melancholic Smetana and agitated, overstated Respighi were more enjoyable over at the Bigelows’. Their sounds were part of the whole Bigelow atmosphere, and when I listened to them in my bedroom, I didn’t have the same sorts of feelings about them that I had in the crammed, dark Bigelow living room, where Roger and I would do what we called modern dancing to Smetana (Respighi was too unpredictable melodically for this). We’d whirl around, knocking into sofa arms and standing lamps and heaps of magazines and picture books while A.A. sat in his big black leather chair reading a psychoanalytic journal. Alone in my bedroom, listening to these records without using them as program music, I heard a cheesiness I hadn’t noticed before. A.A. was well aware of it. When handing them to me the day after my birthday, he’d said to my mother: Nice whooshy garbage the kids like.
Petrushka was another thing entirely.
It was about me! The simple sad melodies, the hurdy-gurdy interludes broken into by yelling brasses, the skipping about among many different tempos and moods—its surprising shifts and turns reminded me of myself. It sounded the way it felt to be me. It was familiar before I’d finished hearing it for the first time.
This made me irritated with my mother. How had she known I would like it so much?
I also liked looking at the photograph of Stravinsky on the record sleeve. He looked a bit like Eli Professor Safar, which was bothersome, but his expression was different, sad, like the songs in Petrushka, and tired out. He had enormous bags under his eyes. I liked that as well. I too had bags under my eyes, inherited from my mother. Sometimes I stood at my bathroom mirror and pulled the edges of my eyes upward until I’d eliminated the bags. They popped back the moment I let go. Stravinsky’s bags were so big and puffy that it looked as if he’d taken the opposite approach and decided to cultivate them.
Didn’t I have some things to cultivate? Couldn’t I find in myself some qualities that others might see as flaws but which I could make into the hallmarks of my specialness?
Winter. I’d sit in my room listening to Petrushka in the long dark that fell as soon as I got home from school. I knew it by heart and could sing it straight through; Vishwa would have been delighted with me.
The disappearing-underwater-seaweed act had been a bust. It had been too effective. As I’d feared, nobody noticed and nobody came looking for me. That clarified my goal: I didn’t want to disappear, I wanted to disappoint. I’d listen to Petrushka and list all the things that were wrong with me so I could figure out how to make them worse. I was going to be a failure: That was clear. I wanted to be the biggest failure possible.
One of my major faults was I had no interests. Interests were things people liked to do even if they weren’t good at them. Roger, for instance, liked to play the clarinet despite having little talent for it. He went to solfège and learned the names of the notes and didn’t care if he sang off-key. Whereas I, the solfège dropout with excellent pitch, would freeze when I sat down at the piano, furious that I couldn’t tear off a mazurka without practicing.
Another big fault was my attitude toward school. I didn’t want to bother learning things I’d decided (on nearly no evidence) were boring, and if there were things I wanted to know about, I couldn’t stand not knowing about them already. Trying to learn them in public humiliated me. The only way I could learn things was in secret, slowly building up knowledge by poking around in books with nobody watching or telling me what to read.
Sometimes I wondered what I would be like if I weren’t this way. A cheery little girl who changed her T-shirt every day and played the violin and could recite the times table up to twelve? I didn’t even want to know her, let alone be her. Other times I wondered how I’d gotten this way. But that was fruitless. I was this way, and I had to try to make some use of it.
What could I do, how could I parlay my incapacities and disinclinations into a successful position, an unassailable major badness that nobody could dispute or take away from me?
Even then, in the midst of this fourth-grade turmoil, I could see that my will to failure was an ambition, no different from the ambition that seethed in all the inhabitants of Cambridge, who dashed around me pursuing glory. I was just like them: determined not to be mediocre. I would stand out. I would, I would. My Nobel Prize—Worst Daughter, Worst Student, whatever it might be—awaited me.
Greece
Light everywhere, like a trumpet.
Stony headlands and sea fingers that pointed in between the spits. A high hissing—maybe crickets—in the hills above Piraeus. It was July. At the cement wharves, ferries and freighters and two-man dinghies and yachts with maroon sails strained and bobbed at their bollard lines on the tideless water, pursued by wind.
My father was involved in a big commotion. The other participants were a pair of guys with blue caps and black mustaches, our guide-friend-interpreter George, and the sideview mirror that had once been part of our Chevrolet, which was newly disembarked from the freighter that had sailed out of Providence, Rhode Island, six weeks earlier. Wounded, ignored, the car sat on the pier looking huge and American and lopsided, while my father brandished the evidence above his head.
“You broke this off!” he yelled.
George translated.
Both men in caps yelled things back.
“They say they didn’t break it.”
“But it’s broken,” my father yelled.
The men yelled. George translated.
“It was broken from the start, they say.”
“Lies! Lies!” My father raised the amputated mirror, which flashed a frantic circle of light on the concrete where we stood. “It wasn’t broken in America.”
The men lifted their chins and sniffed.
“They say, ‘Prove it,’ ” George translated.
“How can I prove a negative?” My father looked briefly defeated. Then he perked up. “Liars. You are liars and thieves.”
George declined to translate. He put his hand on my father’s shoulder. “You will not get anywhere with them. I have a wonderful mechanic in town. He will fix it for you.”
“I want compensation,” my father said. “I want a refund.” He turned to the duo again. “Money,” he said. He rubbed his fingers together in the universal money symbol.
The men conferred. Then one said an earnest long something.
“They say,” said George, “that we will have a drink together. There.” He pointed up the dock toward town.
My father shook his head.
“Yes,” said George. To the men he said something more complicated than yes. “We will have a drink with them and we will go to my mechanic.”
“It’s eleven in the morning,” said my father. “It’s too early to have a drink.” It was a stab at an objection.
We walked up the long shimmering jetty. “It is not satisfactory,” my father said. I trailed behind the phalanx of men.
The bar was the size of a closet. A man who looked exactly like the two guys in caps uncorked a grubby bottle and poured four glasses of a clear spirit, then added several drops of water from a clay jug on the counter. The glasses clouded over, as though they’d been filled with smoke.
In chorus the sailors raised their glasses, said, “Eeseeyeyensas,” and drank them off in one gulp. My father and George drank too.
“America,” one of them told my father.
He nodded.
“My brother, he Chicago,” he said. “Many years.” He began to sing. “Chicago, Chicago, That’s my home town.” He sang quite well. “You Chicago?” He pointed his glass at my father.
“Boston,” my father said. To George, he said, “Let’s get going.”
But Chicago’s brother had signaled another round. Now they both lifted their glasses toward my father.
“You Ess of Ahh, You Ess of Ahh,” they said. “Very magnificent country,” Chicago’s brother added.
George poked my father in the side. My father raised his gla
ss.
“Hellas,” he said. “To Hellas, also a magnificent country.”
The non-Chicagoan said something to George, who nodded.
“They’re going to bring your car down here, to you,” he told my father.
Without the two guys, the bar was almost big enough for the three of us. I’d been leaning in the doorway; now I came in and sat on a stool at the counter. The proprietor lifted the bottle toward my father, who shook his head.
We waited for the powerful familiar grumble of the Chevrolet. George picked his teeth. I sniffed one of the empty glasses: licorice. A strange country! The barman began to whistle and clear his throat. Eventually, he tapped George on the arm and whispered to him.
“He wants to be paid,” George said to my father.
“I am paying?” My father was astounded. “They invited us. It was my refund. They invited us!”
“They’re getting the car,” George explained.
“That’s a refund? Driving the car four hundred yards? That’s not a refund.”
“He needs to be paid,” George said.
“But they invited us!” My father could not accept this injustice.
“It’s only a few drachmas.”
“Liars,” said my father. “Thieves and liars.” He paid.
We followed George’s Fiat back to Athens on the terrible twisting road. My father had calmed down by the time we arrived at our apartment building. To my mother he said only: “The side mirror broke off in transit. George’s mechanic will fix it.” No duplicitous seamen, no bar, no rage on the docks.
My mother was stretched out in a rattan deck chair on the balcony, drinking fresh orange juice and smoking her new favorite cigarettes, Papastratos Ena, with the Bauhaus packaging: white background, green circle inset with a red numeral, very chic. From our wraparound terrace you could see—almost—the Parthenon. You could see the Acropolis, at any rate. You had to go up three floors to the roof, where the maids hung the washing in the midday sun, and part the sheets and the double-D brassieres and the vast fluttering undershorts to get a real view of the temple: white and silent, self-contained, framed by laundry and unconcerned about it.