from CONJUNCTIONS
WELCOME TO “A FAMILY RESTAURANT"!
OWNED AND OPERATED BY THE BAKOPOULOS FAMILY SINCE 1929
This morning, my father approached me waving the new menu from RAY’S ITALIAN FEATS, our rival across the street, and demanded that I type this up for you.
“Write the story. It’s a menu, Leni, it’s supposed to have the story.”
“Which one?”
“Jesus, I don’t know, the story, our story! The family story!”
I.
OUR STORY:
In 1929, my great-grandmother, Demetria Bakopoulos, boarded a boat from Kalymnos, Greece, with her first husband, Hektor Bakopoulos, and their four small children and followed a dotted line across the Atlantic, which I will try to draw for you on this revamped menu if Frank gives me the green light, and sailed into the coastal waters of southern Florida until they arrived at the island of: New Kalymnos. Hektor worked as a sponge fisherman until he had enough money saved to lease the storefront that became A FAMILY RESTAURANT and then, courteously, died. Permitting Demetria to make the business deal of a lifetime and remarry a cook from the merchant marines who could devein and butterfly shrimp like a Lilliputian surgeon. Demi’s squirrelfaced eldest daughter, Eleni Bakopoulos, survived her mother and her stepfather and her three brothers and took over the business in 1952. For many years she was married to “an American investor,” Richard “Rocky” Spry—our oldest patrons at A FAMILY RESTAURANT always
speak about Rocky’s investing in finger-quotation marks and when Richard Spiy left her, she reverted to her maiden name and let hei sons know that their American surnames had magically, elastically snapped back into the Old Country: Now they were Frank Rakopoulos, age seven, and Ed Bakopoulos, age four.
Frank is my father—you might catch a glimpse of him if you are sitting in the booths against the wall. That seventy-year-old man who keeps slapping his neck, in the apron that comes down to his calves? My dad. He’s only making me write this to compete with that steaming load that eponymous Ray of RAY’S ITALIAN FEATS put on the back of his new menu, in which he lists all the cataclysms that his Sicilian ancestors survived en route to New Kalymnos—“Centuries of la miserial Earthquakes, fire, typhus, hurricanes, shipwreck, famine, scurvy, mallpox.” I think Ray forgot a letter there, All this they endured to deliver their “famous” pizza sauce to the Americas. That crappy sauce comes out of a box. Ray is a known defroster, a rat-faced liar who uses tomato paste and Kraft. We have no respect for Ray. I think he even enjoys that. Sometimes he eats with us on Sundays, when his restaurant is closed, and we heckle him; we’ve spent the last twenty years sharing our customers, volleying the families of New Kalymnos back and forth between our restaurants like the world’s slowest game of tennis. Ray, a bachelor, has mimeographed a daguerreotype of someone else’s enormous Italian family onto the front of his menu in beautiful sepia inks. You know I wouldn’t take an oath that Ray is Italian? He does have that mustache, and he puts some spin on the ball when he pronounces words like “ arrabbiata but I swear I would not be surprised if his obituary informs us that he was born in Milwaukee.
If you ate here between the years of 1971 and 1979, you remember this line from the old menu:
BE SURE TO SAVE ROOM FOR DESSERT: OUR “WORLDFAMOUS” FROSTY TREAT, MAMA’S DEATHBED SHERBET!
If that’s what you came for, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. We haven’t been able to serve that in decades. Not since my family forfeited our access to the secret ingredient.
* #
Rocky Spry, my grandfather, chose our name, A FAMILY RESTAURANT. Hand painted the sign, olive-green letters on dandelion wood. (Prior to this the place was a Greek speakeasy: a blank door and an umbrella.) Rocky assured Eleni that American diners would respect then restaurant for its candor— Look, why not call a spade a spade, right? We could put on airs, call ourselves a ‘bistro.’ Rut let’s face the music here: We re a goddamn family restaurant. A squat-and-gobble. So why not say, one family to another: You can eat here. Bring the kids, put the baby in a booster seat, have an onion straw, here’s a damn crayon and gin is on the way for old dad and mom.”
Apparently, Rocky left the family one month after the new sign went up. It s what you walked under to get inside here. By now, I should have brought your water. My apologies if it’s a busy night and it’s taking a little while.
How did Mama explain my grandfather’s disappearance to her boys? She didn’t. She invented a new menu item, “Mama Bakopoulos’s Goodnight Waffle,” because Eddy, after his father disappeared from the restaurant and the house, began demanding breakfast at night. Every night, for nearly a year: breakfasts. Into adulthood, my uncle Ed would go on strange gluttonous sprees where he squirted strawberry syrup onto all foods, “like a dog pissing the house during a thunderstorm,” was how my father explained it to me. This was decades before the self-help lexicographers defined my humongous, furious uncle Ed as an “emotional eater.” But you know, I’ve been working in A FAMILY RESTAURANT for my entire lifetime and it seems to me that veiy few people are eating on “neutral.”
Frank has an animal’s nonchalance about his past. My father, on his father: “Leni. I really don’t remember him. The guy could walk in here today and order a dog and I wouldn’t recognize him.”
“And what did Mama think about his leaving?”
“How the hell should I know?”
Ed and Frank were doomed by the restaurant to be Mama’s Boys deep into adulthood: big-eared teenagers and then bearded men on the streets of New Kalymnos, but ageless in the warm restaurant lights. You and Mama Bakopoulos have already met—that’s her shooting darts at you from the front of this menu. See? The lady in the cowl, with the face like a split baked potato? The small guy on her knee is my father,
Frank, age eleven, man of the house by the time that picture was taken in 1961. The slightly cross-eyed kid whose furry homemade “sweater vest” appears to be a bunch of sewn-together bath mats? His brother, Eddy. And all of the decor in A FAMILY RESTAURANT belongs to her childhood: “Mama’s Broken Victrola,” “Mama’s Bonnet That Looks Like a Detonating Pineapple,” “Mama’s Scary Wooden Toy from Oilikos.”
Irene caught my father at a rare moment, when he was living away from home for the first time in his life, twenty-two and working foi the electric company in Lefferts, New Jersey, on a contract job. Saving money, for a future that never quite came into focus. She fell in love with Frank before she’d heard word one about the family restaurant. She caught his eye at a no-name gas station, where he was standing in front of one of those big refrigerators—just to cool off, it seemed. This is my parents’ “how we met” stoiy. It was the single memoiy from their shared lifetime that could cause them both to light up. It s a lot more succinct than their second stoiy, how they ceased to know one another.
“Oh my God!” Frank pretended to scream when he saw Irene, a fake scream so acoustically similar to the real deal that she screamed too, and dropped her car keys.
“No, dummy, I’m screaming because of how you look , see?” he’d explained in a slightly embarrassed new register. “You shouldn’t be around the pumps, it’s a fire hazard. You’re, uh, you’re dangerously hot.”
“Huh?”
Later my father admitted to my mother that he’d flunked out of high school chemistry.
“You might react with the gas—and combust!”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
Two months later, they were engaged.
“Be my wife?” He’d had blue chewing gum in his mouth when he asked her. Irene had never felt so happy in another human’s company. When they kissed, they’d swapped the wad of gum back and forth with the goofiest solemnity until Frank swallowed the gum and had a coughing fit.
One night about a week later, she found her fiance sitting with red eyes, Indian style, underneath the pay phone in her dormitory. His mother was veiy sick. Would Irene maybe take a leave of absence from the junior college, come with him to Florida? His brother had called him home to help take care of her.
Yes, my mother said, quicker than a miner can strike a match, and unwittingly committing the next decade of her life to A FAMILY RESTAURANT. Can we get married first, though?” In Irene’s imagination the air of Florida was boiling, its waters thronged with dinosaurs. A part of her was afraid that if they didn’t many now, Frank’s offer would dissolve in the shimmering Florida heat. They were flying back in time to Frank s childhood, a zone in which he hadn’t made her the offer, where she did not yet exist.
(They d had a bit of a Who’s On First routine when Frank tried to explain the restaurant to her: “Yes, but what’s it called?” “A Family Restaurant . . .” “Frank! Stop teasing! OK: What is the name on the door of the freaking restaurant?” “That’s the name, Irie, it’s A Family Restaurant. . ..” “Oh my God, Frank.”)
“I can’t cook, you know,” she told Frank on the bus ride to the airport. My cooking is for shit.” The ring was blue zirconium. On the flight down, Irene crooked her ring finger as if beckoning their future, shooting light all around the airplane cabin. We are a married couple, in the sky. Frank had paid for their tickets, God alone knew how.
A stewardess poured them a tomato-juice toast on the honeymoon Delta flight to Frank’s home, To us, Irene waited for him to say.
“To Mama’s health.”
“To Mama.” Irene twirled her celery through the bloodred cup. When the seat-belt sign lit up she straightened in her chair as if electrocuted. Who the hell was Mama? What did she really know about any of these people, the Bakopouloses or Bakopouli, with whom she’d just agreed to share her life? Now that the plane was in the air she could clearly see a stretch of questions, whole cities of questions that she should have asked before takeoff.
“Your mother knows about me?”
Frank shrugged. “Not exactly.”
“You didn’t tell her you got married?”
Sometimes when Frank argued with her it was like watching a bear jogging to keep its balance on a rolling barrel. There was something antic and hilarious in the timbre of his voice. Something dangerous too.
“Of course not! Mama just had a heart attack!” Frank stared at Irene incredulously, as if his new wife were the one with a weak heart. “We’ll tell her in person. Easy does it. She’ll like you.”
It was hate at first sight. “Mama!” Frank had shouted up to his mother’s window from the driveway when they got in late that night. “Come down! I’d like to introduce you to the new Mrs. Bakopoulos!” This was
breaking the news gently? Irene wondered. She felt as if she weie watching a wrecking ball smash into the side of the split-level house.
I don’t know the details, but apparently this introduction went so disastrously that my mother crept upstairs, settling herself on the spaceship-themed coverlet on Frank s childhood bed while, downstaiis, her new husband explained her presence in Mamas house to Mama, Irene closed her eyes and counted to two hundred while she listened to a hailstorm of pots, followed by the sound of a groaning man hulling a discus.
“That?” shrugged Frank the following morning. “Yeah. Mama threw that there. I tried to stop her. It can’t be good, you know, for her heart.” There was a mop King in the middle of the Bakopoulos lawn. Iiene stepped delicately over it; the handle appeared to have struck and dented the Bakopouloses’ mailbox. The mop looked like an effigy of Irene to Irene, with its pale hair askew on the grass. She shared this observation with Frank.
“That’s nuts,” said Frank. “That’s a crazy way to think. Mama doesn’t even know you yet. Now, hurry to the car, Irene. I’m the prep cook, you’re the dishwasher. Mama’s orders. She’ll kill us if we’re late.”
DAY ONE AT A FAMILY RESTAURANT:
“Go help Mama clean,” Frank said. “She’d like that.”
“I clean!” Mama said, as if she were shouting out her own name, instead of merely volunteering to do the next verb on the chore wheel. Mama turned on the Porta Power vacuum and, without perhaps exactly intending to do so, chased Irene out of the restaurant like a bull charging a matador. Irene stood dazed in the sun, still holding a napkin. Days 2 through 182 were very much the same. In dreams Irene wiped the dishes and watched her own face shriveling, the young and vibrant layers of her life falling away like flower petals, all of the color and particularity draining out of her as she merged with the bleak, blank face of Mama.
No one lives forever. Irene gave herself this pep talk on Saturday nights, bunning sea dogs near the window with the big fan, straining to see the actual sea. Black waves tugged away from her, as if the world were on a wire, and the night would jump, retreat, jump again. Her eyes could only see so far into the twinkling mist that separated the island from the peninsula, but she had faith that it was there, Twenty minutes by boat. They could get back to it.
Frank bought Irene an old-fashioned green bicycle with a wide gray seat, an antique piece that I now own and ride around town. She tooled aiound the parking lot, waiting for his shift to end, her long legs whacking into the handlebars. Between her bruised knees and the green bicycle and the paint-blue island sky, Irene felt like a peacock trailing colois around the lot. She felt twelve, eleven, younger still, orbiting A FAMIIA RESTAURANT on the bicycle and waiting for Frank to exit thiough the back doors and turn her into Mrs. Bakopoulos, his wife.
Those are hickeys ? Mama accused her one day, peering out of the back door of A FAMILY RESTAURANT and pointing at Irene’s knees.
“What? Mama, no—”
“They are hick-eys,” she affirmed before Irene could explain her bruises, and tossed a bucket of steaming orange broth into the parking lot. The scene felt biblical, Irene later told Frank.
“If there had been a big rock next to the Toyota, your mother would have stoned me.”
Frank made a face. “She’s sick. Give her time.”
The plan was that my parents would stay on the island for three or four weeks, just until Mama was back on her feet. But Mama was on her feet all the time, chasing down Frank and Irene. Belatedly, many months after their wedding day, she threw rice at Irene. “You make these ones? Is sticky ,” Mama charged, and Irene, whose face now resembled the cover illustration of Beowulf, covered by a golden chainmail of long-grain rice, could not acquit herself. Irene gave Mama half a year. More. Not once in all that time, according to Irene, did my grandmother volitionally meet her daughter-in-law’s blue eyes, although sometimes Irene would look up from clearing a table to find Mama’s eyes boring a hole into her shoulder, as if she were trying to amputate Irene’s arm with an invisible mentally controlled laser. “Because my bra strap was showing, Leni. That’s how she was.”
Goddamn it. Frank said I had to get Our Stoiy told in eight hundred words. So that it would fit on the back of the menu. I still have to tell you about the sherbet, with its radioactive glow; the secret ingredient. The days when Mama died and I was bom.
Well, maybe I can staple pages.
Is it Happy Hour? Get the Shiver-Me-Timbers cocktail. It’s on me, compliments of the house. Blame me for delaying your meal, and Frank will give you a generous pour and bring it out with a complimentary
dish of mixed nuts. Growing up in A FAMILY RESTAURANT I made anything my toy—the forks, the foiled toothpicks. I was a lewd kid or something was wrong with my head and I thought these mixed nuts looked like naked sunbathers. Little nudist colonies of cashews. I used to line them up on the sunny windowsills while my parents fought about Franks secret—“Shh, keep sleeping,” I told them.
Did my mother pray for Frank’s mom to die? Not in so many words. “Take her soul, Lord,” she prayed vaguely, figuring that God was no dummy, he could read into that. Sometimes she intoned the prayers like a movie mobster—“Send Mama on a long vay-cat/-shun.
Mama, meanwhile, appeared to be losing her mind. Her pain medications made her dotty. She wore a shower cap instead of her hairnet, brought a red bowling ball to work, terrified the Happy Hour crowd by bursting through the kitchen door with a bouquet of knives.
“You!” she told Irene in a low vibrato. “You look like an anteater pissing through its nose!”
What did that even mean?
“It’s just an expression,” said Frank wearily. “It’s a shame that you don’t speak Greek. In Greek, she is a comedian.”
As Mama Bakopoulos weakened, my mother became bolder. “When are we leaving, Frank?” Right in front of Mama she would discuss her plans to raise her future children in California, to return to school.
“Frankie will never go with you there,” she’d say with maddening confidence. “No. To that place, with you, never.” She took her eldest son’s hand and held it to her belly, and Frank inclined his head toward her; Irene shuddered. His posture was an eerie inversion of a fatherto-be waiting for the kick. “Frankie will stay here with his mother.”
“I’m not leaving you, Mama,” Frank mumbled with a pained and apologetic smile. Weeks to live, was her doctors’ latest assessment.
As Mama’s health failed, so did the family business. Frank and Ed hired someone to do the cooking, a small, polite, slightly lethargic Portuguese woman named Domitila, who one night stole all the money in the till, two ten-pound sacks of crinkle-cut fries, the dainty ketchup spout, and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black.
Frank moved Mama to the cardiac ward; Irene learned that A FAMILY RESTAURANT was five months behind on rent. We’re closing down, Irene thought, her heart speeding. Frank and Ed would be freed
fiom the ten-block radius that hemmed the Bakopoulos men inside their childhood. She and Frank would start a family of their own.
Meanwhile, grief was doing strange things to Frank, who was after Iiene for the fiist time in months with a new kind of intensity, mutely squeezing her and licking her next to the ice machine, cornering her against the fieezeis, corralling her between the stacked towers of baby booster chairs. His grip around her waist was almost suffocatingly tight. In the past, whenever they closed together, he’d lift her onto the bar, slide a hand up her skirt under the fulgurating pink and emerald lights of Mamas seashell sconces. But Irene would no longer fool around with Frank inside A FAMILY RESTAURANT. When Frank leaned in to ldss her, it was Mama’s face that Irene saw leering at her.
“Outside,” she said.
Gross. I’m so sorry about that—I know, you came here to eat—I too find other people’s earnest sex lives extremely unappetizing. Particularly if the braid of legs in question belongs to one’s parents. But, unavoidably, this too was part of the story of A FAMILY RESTAURANT.
II.
In the hospital, in her death throes, Frank’s mother began to gurgle in odd syllabic patterns that he swore belonged to a foreign tongue. Paininflected utterances. Not just gibberish, but language —although nothing that sounded remotely close to Greek or English.
You’re right—it’s the medication,” Nurse Florentz said generously, giving my father the opportunity to allege something sane.
Moans rose from his mother’s veiled bed, shimmering waves of sound that might mean anything. The curtain danced on its silver rings.
“Wait—hear that?”
“I’ll see about the morphine levels,” said Nurse Florentz.
But Frank knew his mother. He didn’t agree with Nurse Florentz. He sat at the edge of her bed with a tape recorder, pausing only to gulp red gelatin cubes in the hospital cafeteria. Near the end of the tape he called his brother, Ed.
Ed said he couldn’t hear much over the blenders—it was Happy Hour. “Happy Hour,” said Frank, staring down at their mother’s dark face. She was snoring lightly, exposing a tiny row of teeth that made
him think for some reason of marshmallows dissolving in cocoa. How did anybody alive survive a parent’s death? His mother, awake now, smiled weakly at Frank—an unrecognizably gentle smile and in hei final minutes she spoke real words to him, whispery but distinct, in Greek. Frank waited for a little while, then hit PAUSE on the tape.
Frank and Eddy held the funeral on the island but had Mama buried in Greece, in a Kalymnos plot, a few miles from her ancient home. Frank found a special translator in Kos who was able to help him with Mama’s last instructions. It was a recipe that she had given him.
III.
The business was saved.
“You can cook now?” Irene asked him. “Since when?
“I’m just following orders.”
“Whose!”
Prior to Mama’s death, A FAMILY RESTAURANT served the same innocuous American beach grub that you see listed inside this menu: Cokes and Sprites, cole slaw, hot dogs with mustard and a catarrh of green relish. “Looks like somebody sneezed on a weiner,” Mama used to complain darkly. “What the Americans want to eat, though.” She’d inherited the incredulity and Old World hon or of her mother, Demi; like Demi, she read off the menu items as if she were reciting the terms of a humiliating war treaty: Hamburgers. Bacon Cheeseburgers. Clam Basket. Shrimp Basket. Chicken Fingers. (A macabre name that used to make me picture Foghorn Leghorn’s amputated hands.) Prior to Mama’s death, the only desserts on the menu were chocolate pie, apple pie, and the “Dieter’s Delite Fruit Plate”—basically an unripe whole cantaloupe that Mama sometimes tossed disgustedly at skinny people like a basketball. Overnight, the menu changed to include: SPECIAL OF THE DAY #6: MAMA’S DEATHBED SHERBET.
“I’d like to order number six, the Special—‘Ma’s Deathbed Sherbet.’”
“Number six, please.”
Some people were shy about ordering it.
“Fries and a Coke. And, ah . . . how’s that number six?”
“Yes, I’d like the number six. Mama’s, ah, Mama’s . . . right, that’s the one.”
Frank served the sherbet so shockingly cold that it numbed the
tongue. Whatever he was putting in it caused the dish to glow. The color was never quite the same—it was always pale orange, like a bowl of emulsifying sunshine, but sometimes a new batch would have these ladishy-pink streaks, sometimes it could look almost minty. Adults who ordered the sherbet reported tasting the usual suspects—nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, anise, raspberries, peach syrup, vanilla—and, invariably, Something Else. Their children only smiled; they looked like they were spooning up light.
I should clarify here that Mamas Deathbed Sherbet did not curse our customers or confer magical powers (at least, not to my knowledge). Nobody left their tables with X-ray vision or a beautiful new singing voice or an invulnerability to cancer. It was just a really good dessert.
Frank refused to tell anybody the “famous ingredient.” How strange, I used to think, that a secret could achieve such notoriety—this hole that everybody on the island could see. Inside our house, Frank’s secret was something round but empty, like the number zero—swallowed air. “It was her Will and Testament,” he told my uncle. “She left it to me because I’m the oldest, Ed. Her executor.” He’d shake his head almost theatrically, still trying to protect his kid brother. “Believe me, if you knew what I had to do to make the sherbet you wouldn’t be jealous.”
“Just taste it, Irene,” my father was still begging her in those early days. “It’s the best batch yet, honest to God.”
Irene learned that she was pregnant on the same day that Mama died. At first, my mother refused to touch Mama Bakopoulos’s dessert. One spring night, though, in her last trimester, when Frank was on another trip to Greece to procure the ingredient, Irene broke down and ate bowl after bowl of the orange sherbet; driven to it, I imagine, by the same spasms of hunger that can launch any pregnant woman into the streets in search of root beer and dill pickles, and by something even stranger. A rage that I can really only guess at here, cannibalistic, to consume her mother-in-law’s last traces. Expunge Mama Bakopoulos from the kitchen.
Then I was bom. Irene stared into the blanket that the nurses handed to her, jolted out of her wooziness. My mother, I’m told, began to wail with me. No. Even enervated from a forty-hour labor, Irene had to fight down a reflexive impulse to thrust me back at the nurse. She gritted her teeth, held on to me with all her strength. (And later the nurses would joke that the frightened new mother had clenched her jaw and
splayed her palms across my back as though she were trying to keep her hands from flying off a hot stove top! A pretty girl with an ugly baby.) She looked again: There was my face, which was also the puckered, miniaturized face of Mama Bakopoulos. A little wailing led bud in the blue blanket.
Reincarnation, why rule it out?
“Frank?” my mother asked that first night. “Do you think the sherbet could . . . bring her back?” '
Frank stared at her. “That’s not funny, Irene.”
Frank demanded that I be named for his mother; my mom viciously refused; many knock-down fights ensued; “Leni” was their compromise. That’s me.
My first days were black ones for my mother. At times she was certain that I was an anchor, flung overboard by Mama from beyond the grave, intended to secure her permanent mooring at A FAMILY RESTAURANT. Some caul covered my face so that she couldn’t see it—all she saw was Mama. Babies, what person alive is repelled by their smell, but Irene swore I smelled like Mama in her last days, vinegary and aged. Whenever she breast-fed me, she saw Mama’s Deathbed Sherbet melting into spectacular colors in its glass dish. When she rocked me, she had to swallow back the singsong Greek melodies that Mama used to croon while sweeping out the kitchen. How had so much of Mama gotten absorbed into her bloodstream? Antibodies, didn’t she have any of those against Eleni Bakopoulos? Those were the days when Irene grieved for her own mother more powerfully than she had since she was a teenager.
“Hush, little baby,” she sang, and flipped the portrait of Mama that Frank had set on my nightstand. All night she sat by my crib, watching me sleep. Sometimes I wish I could dream those earliest dreams again, whatever I used to see in the time before I could recognize my own face. Yellow, red, and blue shapes swung on wires above me, a zoo mobile, while through the crib bars my mother’s hand stroked my black hair. Mama Bakopoulos’s curls were already coming in. Irene watched me like a mirror, waited for her blue eyes to open in my face, for her face to surface in my flesh. But I failed, I couldn’t repeat any part of her. Frank says that our biological stalemate made him feel, for different reasons, as stunned and helpless as Irene did. He watched her watching me at the nursery’s edge, both of them frozen.
# *
Now my mother was in a sort of Chinese finger trap: She was never leaving Frank, and Frank was never leaving A FAMILY RESTAURANT. Several times a year, and never during the winter months, we all noted, my father flew to Kalymnos, Greece, for two weeks to retrieve more of the “secret ingredient.” Whatever substance Frank was bringing back was compact enough to fit inside his beat-up blue duffel. He once let slide to Irene during an argument that he froze the ingredient, to preserve it, and that he only needed “a pinch” of it to make a batch of the sherbet.
By this time I was three or four years old and already on the clock, carrying a horseshoe tray of blue marine salt and quartered limes to the drunks, walking on tipsy feet myself. I remember feeling small as a cat as I moved between the trouser legs at the bar, peanuts bouncing off my head, bathed in the lush sour stench of our patrons’ underarms. Once a big, gesticulating drunk brushed my earlobe with his lit cigarette and I howled so terribly—and salted the man, apparently—that Frank had to comp his hundred-dollar bar tab. In my earliest memories, my parents are always shouting to be heard over the happy din of other couples, other families. Their arguments peppered the air in the kitchen:
“Look at this!” Irene. “America is one of the fattest nations in the world. Maybe we should serve something else, Frank. Steamed zucchini! Carrots, raisins! Perhaps a slaw of some land—”
“Sherbet is not a fried donut, honey, it’s healthy! It’s healthy for business, that’s for sure.” Frank shook his head. “You could thank me, you know. Do you think it’s easy to make the stuff? Do you know how much money I’ve turned it into?”
“Change the menu,” she hissed. “Serve something else. Anything else, Frank.”
“Ed and Lisa are going to buy a home, did he tell you? Their mortgage payments start next month. And I’ve been thinking about private school for Leni. A new car to replace that shitbox LeBaron you drive.” Frank paused. “I leave for Kalymnos tomorrow.”
“And when are you coming home?”
“Soon.”
Sherbet—to make it does not require the Rosetta Stone. Here is the ingredient list for ordinary sherbet:
• 7 ounces sugar
• 1 V% tablespoons finely grated orange zest
• l A teaspoon salt
• 2 cups freshly squeezed orange juice
• 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 V 2 cups very cold whole milk
*
As a child, I couldn’t imagine where my father went for weeks at a stretch. Lisa was the first to broach the subject in the dining area. Lisa was Ed’s girlfriend, my babysitter, and mom’s sort of de facto sister-inlaw, a lanky woman with wide-set, spacey eyes and incorrigible red curls who was so beautiful to me. She seemed like an alien as she floated beneath all of the framed Bakopoulos portraits that Mama had nailed to the dark walls. Lisa hostessed and waited on tables and bitched pleasantly about almost every aspect of the restaurant’s operations.
“OK, Frank!” Lisa exploded one day, still trembling from the dinner rush. “Please just tell us: What are you keeping in that freezer? Are there perhaps some fucking bodies in the freezer? Are we all going to jail?”
“Yeah, is this some Soylent Green bullshit? Because kids eat that sherbet.”
“I eat it,” I said.
“Maybe it’s an endangered animal. Like a rhino.” Uncle Ed made himself hysterical. “Frank: Are you crushing up rhino balls or something? Is it a panda? I don’t want to spend my days in a federal penitentiary because the secret ingredient is some eye-of-newt shit, only the newt is, you know, a goddamn panda.”
Lisa and Irene stared at Ed.
Lisa took Ed’s hand. “I was just teasing before—I’m sure Frank’s just picking weird mushrooms somewhere. I don’t think he’s out in the bamboo strangling pandas.” She frowned. “Or people. Can you picture your brother hurting anybody ?”
Everybody looked at my mother. Who was staring at Frank. Gazes used to ricochet like bullets inside A FAMILY RESTAURANT.
“Where is Daddy going?” I asked that night.
“Away.”
“But where?”
“Greece. He says.”
“Why?”
“To make his mother happy.”
This leason satisfied me. It seemed to satisfy almost everybody. To make a mother happy, she told me bitterly, was a perfectly satisfying reason for doing anything. That Mama Bakopoulos had been dead for seven years seemed immaterial to the conversation. I told my mother that I thought Flanks reason was a plenty good one; at least, I understood it; every night, to please my mother, I was praying for a different face.
During the nine years we served Mamas Deathbed Sherbet, A FAMILY RESTAURANT never had to advertise: no church bulletins, no radio spots. We never had to change our underwhelming name. We were doing so well for that period that we’d been able to hire strangers to bus the tables, not kids from the high school (I’d begged my father) but a few slim, fickle men whom my father located with newspaper ads. They rarely stuck around our restaurant for long, I’m not sure why. During the interviews, my father seemed completely at a loss: “So do you steal?” he asked the applicants. “Do you work hard? You, ah, you like hot dogs?” I think he lacked the ability to judge the character of non-Bakopouloses.
Once Irene came downstairs to find Frank holding on to the phone with both hands, staring into the backyard—someone at Pepsi-Cola who vacationed on New Kalymnos and was a self-professed “number six addict” had just made him a high-six-figure offer for the recipe. “No, thank you,” Frank said. He hung up with a sigh. The scale was wrong, Frank explained to my mother.
“We can’t sell out. There’s not enough of it to go around.”
“Of what?”
“Of the secret ingredient. I can barely keep us supplied now!”
My dad wasn’t interested in talking to reporters. He wouldn’t even discuss it with a Tallahassee talk-show host, a TV laureate with a grin like a Halloween pumpkin whose message on our machine said he’d heard about the sherbet’s “reputation for causing elation!”
“Come over, OK, we’ll serve you a dish,” Frank told the telephone. “My God, what part of ‘secret ingredient’ don’t you people understand?”
We expanded; now we had two kitchens. Kitchen 1, anyone could walk into; Kitchen 2 was a galley-sized annex with a door to which only
my father had the key. Through the porthole in the door to the public kitchen, I’d watch him assemble the sherbet s public ingredients: sugar, milk, and fruit. Zesting lemons, Frank smiled like a Buddha statue. I’ve never seen a grown man look happier performing any activity than my father did, zesting. Kitchen 2 had no windows.
Like everyone, I loved the glowing stuff. That first bright bite seemed to make your hunger huger, like a lit match dropped into a well. I liked to eat Mama’s dessert in secret, under the tablecloth, with the bowl on my lap, the sweating glass sticking to my bare thighs. Going down, the sherbet burned. It slid along my throat until I clutched my ribs and rocked with the pleasure of it. I had nothing in my small world to which I could compare the flavor. Sometimes it seemed to contain whole 01 chards, and sometimes it was a single taste.
Happiness, it seemed, was one secret that our customers were eager to keep. You’d think the customers would demand to know Mamas ingredient, and perhaps they traded guesses in private, but I can’t remember anyone asking me about it. We garnished number six with orange rinds and fat red strawberries, and if people commented at all that’s what they chose to remark on—“Big strawberries, huh!” they’d say. Now I think that the families we served were wary of chasing the flavor off their tongues. Often the entire room of diners fell silent for an hour or more, a hundred spoons clinking musically on glass. “Fragrant,” “piquant,” “robust,” “bittersweet”—none of that Zagat’s argot came even close to describing its taste. As ever, Mama Bakopoulos had the last word.
“What a nice dessert,” families said, and then left two hundred percent tips.
Once I overheard a wire-thin teenager covered in red and black wolf tattoos, a guy who did not look like he had a sweet tooth in his skull, whisper, “It’s better than drugs.”
Today I have some new theories about the popularity of our dessert at A FAMILY RESTAURANT. What we gave them was only disguised as food, I think. It seemed to nourish some hidden mouth, some universally parched place. Just writing about it here, I can feel that spot in me beginning to salivate. I don’t know what to call it, but it’s what I spent my early lifetime catering to at A FAMILY RESTAURANT.
Forgive me, I see we’re approaching seventeen pages here. You must be starving. I’ll finish up so you can order. Whatever you do, avoid the
fish taco, Frank can’t get that one right—it tastes like a sea kayak that sprang a leak. Are you maybe considering defecting to Ray’s Italian Feats? Chucking our menu to read Ray’s Family Stoiy, a glib four hundred words piinted underneath that grinning cartoon of a Roma tomato, with the arms and the legs? I don’t blame you for that preference, but just remember—those laminated pictures of his nonna in her white twill mantelet, his handsome wife, the perfect children arrayed like a string of garlic bulbs around the rustic dock? It’s complete bullshit, of couise. Nobody has a family like that. And why is that tomato wearing Keds?
Nineteen seventy-five: A restaurant opened up across the street from us. Ray’s Italian Feats.
Italian Feats? What, he’s turning Dago cartwheels over there?”
“I think it was supposed to be ‘Feast.’”
This was confirmed by Ray: a misprint on the awning. “I plan to sue,” he said genially. Back then his menu was just a list: garlic rolls and spaghetti marinara and several of the more convoluted pastas. It was devoid of any histoiy or chummy cartoon tomatoes.
There was no open aggression between us, but sometimes we opened our back doors and let warring smells duel and tangle in the street between our restaurants. It was like the Sharks and the Jets, only olfactory.
One dusk I caught Ray staring into Kitchen 1, doing a pull-up onto our window ledge, his whole body tensed into the furious shrug of a cactus. I guess I should have called the police. “Scram, you trespassing defroster,” is what I should have said. “You should be ashamed.”
Instead, I led Ray around to the small back entrance to Kitchen 2. I watched him use his crowbar to jimmy the door. We stood breathing softly on the threshold, like some low-budget sci-fi movie—here we were, about to enter the spaceship, a dirty Chevy sedan inconveniently in the shot. I realized that I was holding Ray’s hand—how had that happened?—my fingers gloved together with his sweaty stubs, pepperoncini wafting almost imperceptibly out of Ray’s skin. Incredibly, Ray didn’t curse at me or shake loose from my grip. I don’t even think he was trying to steal our recipe necessarily—I think his hobbies just included petty crime. We entered the room. My father was standing with his back to the door, and I glimpsed something orange fluttering from his hands into a large mixing bowl.
I had never set foot in Kitchen 2. It was clean and oideily, a dollhouse version of Kitchen 1. Ray was already backing outside. Slowly, as if sensing our gazes falling on him like a net, my father stiffened and began to turn. “Is it you, Mama?’ he said, softly but unmistakably.
We fled.
“How was work?” Irene asked Frank later that evening.
“Work was work,” Frank smiled, the phrase he always used to doubleknot his day. I studied his thick fingers with\their blunt, clean nails, half expecting to see orange stains there. I never breathed a word about what I’d seen and heard that day to either of them. If my father was haunted, that was his problem. I was so tired of being mistaken by eveiyone for the ghost of Mama Bakopoulos.
One afternoon, Irene pulled my hair into a ponytail and put on sapphire earrings and walked us over to Ray’s Italian Feats. Ray was wearing a bookie’s visor indoors, stinking of hairspray and garlic, with a pompadour that never moved—I wondered if Aquanet could seep into your brain and paralyze the rest of you. The man was some kind of paradox, an original stereotype. Everything about him seemed inauthentic, but I couldn’t tie this deception to any clear purpose. Where he was honest, it turned out, was when it came to his ingredients.
“What’s in this?” she asked Ray. “And this?”
He narrowed his eyes. “You one of those that’s allergic to wheat? Don’t bring me any lawsuits.” Rut he listed every ingredient for her.
“Ladies, you’re gonna explode!” Ray said, bringing my mother her fourth dish, a densely layered fusilli. The tuna fusilli contained tuna, fusilli, black olives, tomato sauce, and oil. “Leni, look how delicious,” she said, and punctured something that could only be a noodle. She smiled up at Ray. “Are you married?” Ray grinned back. “Who’s asking?”
“So let me get this straight,” Ray said, much deeper into the evening. “You’re jealous of the ice cream?”
“It’s sherbet.”
“You’re in some kind of fucked-up love triangle with your husband and a bunch of fruity creams?”
Which was better, I wondered, to frame it in Ray’s terms or to say, “I’m in a love triangle with my dead mother-in-law?” What my mother said was, “I’m in a love triangle with a mystery.” My ears perked up. I
knew that Ray had seen my father sprinkle the orange substance into the bowl. Would he tell her? “A family secret.”
“Does she know?” Ray said. “Your daughter?” And they both stared at me. Ray coughed. I think she maybe does. She looks like she was probably bora knowing the recipe. Its eerie, Irene. Kids the spitting image—”
I know that,” I said, pulling at my face with my hands, and pushed away from the table.
As I grew older. Mama Rakopoulos began to surface out of my face like a galleon. My skin tone darkened from pink to olive; my eyes dulled to a somber green the exact shade of Swiss chard. Mama cracked her knuckles and so did I; Mama was mildly dyslexic, like me, always swapping numbers and vowels on the chalkboard menu; Mama had my crooked smile, my tree-trank ankles. At school most of my friends dreamed of having a doppelganger sister, but I’d missed her by a generation, my twin, my dead grandmother. Sometimes I fantasized that Mama Bakopoulos was still alive; she’d mother me better than this stranger with the flashing eyes, Irene.
“Your face is . . . ungrammatical!” Irene shouted at me once, and I knew what she meant. There was nothing horrifically wrong with it— basically, it was intelligible as a face—but it looked foreign, asymmetrical. “Un-American,” she told me on another occasion. If I had known more of the story of A FAMILY RESTAURANT—if my mother had taken the time to inscribe our stoiy on the menu, like I’m doing for you—I might have told her, “Mom, I’m not her” I am not the reincarnation of your mother-in-law, and I too wish I could get a doover on my bone structure. Don’t judge a book, Mom. I’m begging you. I’d stare at Mama’s mulish face on the cover of our menus and have the oddest sensation, as if I were reading my obituaiy from the future.
This March will mark my forty-seventh spring as an employee of a family restaurant. On Saturday nights I catch sight of my face in the wineglasses that I polish and I cannot believe that I’m still here.
When they were kids, imprisoned in the Bakopoulos kitchen while schools of other boys went glinting past the restaurant windows on bicycles, Frank and Ed had a favorite joke, a real eye roller about a head of romaine lettuce trapped in a fridge—
Knock! Knock!
Who’s there?
Lettuce!
Lettuce who?
Let us out, it’s freezing in here!
“Where are you going?” I asked my mother one night. Frank had left for Greece a week ago. She was tugging at the half-zipped lips of her bulging suitcase, trying to make it swallow the delicate bone of a white stiletto. I had never seen those shoes before.'J had never seen my mom in makeup, red lipstick and blue eyeliner that looked clownishly superfluous on her beautiful face. When she turned to me, I saw how tired her eyes looked. Anybody could see how hungry she was, how deeply thirsty, and this seemed to be the rotten joke at the core of A FAMILY RESTAURANT—that its hostess and waitress and cook and barmaid, the woman who had spent a decade in its kitchen, could wind up famished.
“I haven’t been sleeping, Leni,” she told me simply. “I’m going to find your father. If he doesn’t tell me this time—”
“Take me with you,” I’d shouted. A test.
I knew then that she really was afraid of me. I’ve heard people complain, of their mothers, “Well, she looked at me as if I were a stranger!” Rut Irene looked me dead in the eye, as if she knew my exact dimensions, my past and my future, and was all the more terrified. Her fear was so convincing that I was persuaded too—I was a monster, a changeling daughter, Mama Rakopoulos risen from the dead. “It’s a cloning,” Frank laughingly acknowledged when patrons held up the cellophanegreen menu with Mama Bakopoulos’s portrait to my face. Don’t judge a book. Don’t judge a book. I wished I’d been bom a boy. Had I looked like Frank or Ed, whose faces were only mildly traumatized by Mama, it might have been different for us. Decades later I am still trying to figure out what to say to my mother to let her know that I was locked in a prison too, staring out at her through the cage bars of my face bones.
To her credit, my mother didn’t lie to me. She didn’t say, “It’s OK” or “See you soon” or “I’ll be back.”
“I’ve got to find out what it is, Leni.”
I nodded, feeling that for once I was very close to my mother. I’d inherited her hunger. A cramp sent me lurching against the banister; suddenly I was dying to know the answer too. It did seem incredible,
didn t it, that we d been swallowing and digesting this ingredient for years without having the slightest clue what it was?
Goodbye, Mom!” I called down. “Good luck!”
With my parents gone, Frank in search of the secret ingredient and Irene in search of Frank, I lived with Uncle Ed and Lisa. I had just turned eleven. That was the summer they were trying for a baby, a process Lisa related to me in cheerful, indelible detail (“and that is why your uncle Ed follows me into the shower!”); it made me wonder why I didn’t have a brother or a sister. (Later Frank would tell me that Irene had lefused to have another child, terrified that any future son or daughter would be “contaminated” with Mama.)
Lisa didn’t believe that the orange sherbet was some kind of extragenetic mechanism of heredity; she thought my mother was crazy. And I tried to believe Aunt Lisa; only I could feel my grandmother inside my body, see her curling through my black hair and hear her cracking out of my knuckles, a sound as awful as footsteps on ice. She was coming back to life. While my parents were gone, I cut my hair as short as a boys and streaked it freakishly with lemon juice, read magazines about plastic-surgery options. One night, at Ed and Lisa’s place, I scoured my face in the bathroom mirror with steel wool from the restaurant kitchen, trying to escape Mama’s hex, until Lisa walked in on me and shrieked, applied peroxide to the pulpy mess I’d made of my skin.
Finally, emboldened by Ray’s criminal ease with the crowbar, I broke into my father’s secret larder. Kitchen 2 smelled like nothing at all: It was polished, the tiles almost blinding in the ticking light. I turned on the faucet, watched my hand blur under the jetting water. I stared at the quiet blades inside the blender and imagined putting my face inside it. I took the crowbar and began to hit the lock on the freezer, experimentally at first and then with all my might. When the lock fell away, I whistled—I honestly had not been expecting my anger to have any outcome whatsoever. The door opened with a little gasp. Inside was an enormous mixing bowl full of the orange sherbet, surrounded by tiers of bare and humming shelves. I hardly remember what I did next—I don’t even think I stopped to get a spoon, my fingers sinking into the cream—but when I looked up, Uncle Ed was standing over me—it was six o’clock. Family sedans were honking at one another from the lot.
“Leni,” was all he said, and from the curious, besotted, half-frightened way he was looking at me I guessed that he was watching his mother rise out of my odd green eyes. I stood up and let the empty bowl fall from my hands; it didn’t break, and I remember staring down at my reflection in it with a stab of disappointment. It spun like a planet on the kitchen tiles.
“I’m so full, Uncle,” I mumbled. I wiped at the liquid trickling out of my eyes and the comers of my lips. I didn’t know this then, but I’d just eaten the last-ever batch of our family recipe. For the next seven nights, I had dreams where I rinsed the suds from a thousand plates in the restaurant sink and saw Mama Bakopoulos regarding me somberly out of each one. That summer, only my father returned from Greece.
What astounds me now is that my father still defends my mother— more than that, he accepts the blame for her “sickness”: her refusal to come back to New Kalymnos again, her inability to see me as separate from Mama. Even today he’ll talk about Irene with the gentlest kind of sorrow, as if acknowledging that it was his cough that set her off, sent the germ of the infirmity somersaulting toward my mother.
“When did it start to go wrong, Dad?” I asked him recently.
“Oh,” said Frank, thinking backward. Doing the etiology. “When I kissed her, I guess? That first time?” He shook his silver head. “Nah, I think we were still OK then. I think it must have been when I asked her to marry me.”
He looked right at me, his gray eyes as steadily unsteady as the sea, and I imagined that my mother must have been about this same distance from him when he made the proposal. “When I asked her to become a part of the family. Maybe that was the cough that got her sick.”
When Frank stopped making number six, customers begged him for an explanation, and no one was satisfied with his gruff response.
“There’s none left.”
“None of what?”
“The secret ingredient. I ran out of it.”
“You can’t find more? Grow some more!”
And Frank would avert his eyes, give his head an angry shake. Like everyone, I hounded him:
“What was it, Dad?”
“Leni,” he said, touching my cheek gingerly. “I’m sorry. Really, it won t grow anymore. It got, ah”—he frowned, rummaging for the word he d found in the dictionaiy to explain what had happened to it after Irene divorced him—” extirpated.”
And I don t even think he was sorry, in a way—we stayed on at A FAMILY RESTAURANT but my father was always home now, and no longer a slave to the recipe, no longer the kitchen automaton of his dead mama. For years I burned with an anger that I found easiest to direct at my father, the paterfamilias who had cursed me with this face, the seciet hoarder, who wouldnt even try to ease the beating pain in me by drawing me closer, telling me the whole recipe. For years the ingredient remained a permanent blank in Our Story. Gradually I came to accept that Frank was telling the truth on one count: Whatever glue had held the three of us together, the bloodied epoxy that makes a family, was gone.
And that’s Our Stoiy—I’m sure your order will be up soon, if I haven’t brought it out already. I wish that I could bring you a sample of Mama’s Deathbed Sherbet; forgive me for taking so much time describing a choice that isn t even on the menu. I suppose it’s only fair, if you made it this far, to share the secret ingredient. Not too long ago, my father had a scary bout with pneumonia, in the same hospital where Mama died and I was bom, and one night his gray eyes flew open on the hospital pillow and clapped on to my face; he began to give me, very slowly, in English, the entire recipe.
The flowers growing on her grave in Kalymnos, Greece, had been planted by my father—his mother’s last wish. They were narcissus blooms, with brilliant orange coronas. Eveiy few months he returned to harvest them. My mother’s plane landed in Kos and she took the Kalymnos Star ferry to Pothia, arriving in the middle of the night, and asked everyone at the docks about my father’s whereabouts until she was escorted by the single cab driver traveling the streets at that hour to the gates of the cemetery—the very spot, the driver confided, where he had only recently deposited her husband, Mr. Bakopoulos. All those years ago, Ed and Frank had paid a fantastic sum to have their mother interred here (for a dying woman, that Mama sure managed to croak out a lot of requests). Irene went crazy when she found Frank there, kneeling on the woman’s grave and plucking up the blooms. The narcissus petals glowed a familiar orange, budding out of the soil that served
as Mama’s ceiling. Something unspeakable happened to them that night, something that is still humming, entirely unknown to me, behind the simple scroll of the recipe. Whatever words flew between them under the moon of Old Kalymnos must have been terrible, I think, and it’s easy for me to imagine my mother pulling the flower beds up by their roots, like hair, clawing at the orange petals that she’d been forced to serve and swallow for more than a decade, and my father calling her crazy, crazy, trying to pin her arms behind her back. The following night she came back to the grave site, he told me* and salted the earth.