Calypso(32)

“Well, there was us,” he said.

“Us?”

“I mean your mother and me.”

I covered my ears and vomited a little in my mouth.



The restaurant in Atlantic Beach resembled a shack, so I was surprised by the fancy menu, which was handed out by a young, bow-lipped woman with a sweet eastern North Carolina accent. “I like to start with the women if that’s OK,” she said when it came time to take our orders. She turned to Lisa. “So what will you be having this evening, milady?”

It was such an unexpected word, so refined, and Amy repeated it all night. “How were your five double Scotches, milady?”

When our food arrived, I mentioned a flight attendant I’d recently met. “I was asking her about the things passengers leave behind on planes, and she told me that earlier that week she discovered a used Kotex in one of the seat backs.”

“Oh my God,” Amy said, delighted.

“And it was still warm,” I added.

My father looked down at his flounder. “Is that any way to talk at the table?”

“He’s disgusting,” Hugh said, happy to have found something he and my father could agree on.

I then brought up a fellow I’d met in New Mexico who has an uncle named Phil McCracken.

“What’s wrong with that?” my father asked.

“Fill my crack in,” Lisa said. “Get it? Like butt crack?”

My father sighed. “The level of discourse here is definitely lacking.”

“So tell me, Lou,” Hugh said, “what was your father like?”

He was trying to open things up a bit and didn’t realize that, subject-wise, he’d steered us onto a dead-end street. My grandfather, the man we addressed as Pappoú, died when I was six years old. He came from Greece, as did Yiayiá, my grandmother. Neither of them spoke more than a hundred words of English, yet they owned and ran a newsstand in Cortland, New York. The space was long and dim and narrow, like a hallway that led to nothing, lit by a bare bulb. They lived in the small apartment upstairs, and though I can picture it clearly, all I remember about Pappoú is that he was short—five foot one, according to his immigration papers.

“Why are you asking about my father?” my father said.

Hugh shrugged. “I’ve just never heard much about him.”

My father signaled the waitress for another vodka tonic. “Well, he was a very…hard worker.”

“You’re not going to get any more than that out of him,” Lisa said to Hugh. “Believe me, we’ve been trying all our lives.”

I never told my father, but a few years earlier I’d received a letter from an eighty-two-year-old woman in Cortland. She said some nice things about my books, then added, “Your grandfather was a pig.” Then it was just her name, no “best wishes” or anything.

“I have nothing more to tell you,” my father said when Hugh asked for details. “The man worked very hard, both my parents did. There wasn’t time for anything else.” It’s maddening how tight-lipped he is on the subject. Greeks tend to disapprove when their children marry outside the culture, so Pappoú was a real dick to my mother. She’d shudder at the mention of his name but never got specific, saying only, “You’ll have to take that up with your father.”

“How can you not have a single memory of him?” I asked later that night on our way home from the restaurant. “I mean, there has to be something you recall. Did he drive a car? Did he ever listen to music or read? I remember Yiayiá saying some pretty rough things about black people, which is odd given her limited vocabulary. It’s like she took English lessons from a Klan member but quit after the second day. Was he that way too? Did he smoke? Did he give you Christmas presents?”

“He’s asleep,” Hugh told me.

“What?”

“Your dad, he’s asleep.”



The next morning I saw my father at the dining room table, leafing through a magazine Bob had brought. It was about North Carolina crafts and had a salad bowl on the cover. “Hey,” he cried, looking up as I came down the stairs, “there he is!”

Lisa entered at around the same time, saying, “How you doing, Dad?”

“Fantastic.”

It is my habit to write in the morning, so I made a pot of coffee and carried it up to the room Hugh and I share. My worktable is in a corner, beside a sliding glass door that looks out onto the ocean, and I’d been sitting at it for an hour or so when my father wandered in. This is something he’s done since I was a child. I’d be at my desk, drawing or doing homework, and he’d come in and stretch out on the bed.

“What’s going on?” he’d ask.

A minute later he’d be fast asleep. This continued after I moved out and had my own apartment on the other side of Raleigh. He’d walk in without knocking and go straight to my bed, almost urgently, as if it were a toilet he desperately needed to use.

“So what’s going on?” my father asked, hands on his hips, looking out my sliding glass door at the ocean.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just trying to get some work done.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and tested it, the way you might if you were shopping for a new mattress. I noticed that his feet barely touched the floor, and as he lifted them in order to stretch out, I turned back to my computer and finished a letter I was writing to a convict. I get a lot of mail from people in prison, both men and women. They rarely say what they’re in for, but what with the Internet, it’s easy enough to find out—drugs, in this case.