Pearl of the Night Necklace

1. 

Cross Town

SUMMER

Yiayia resided in a white, two-story, shingled apartment stacked over the restaurant like the top two layers of a buttercream cake. 

The restaurant was a roomy rectangle with a long, plate glass window lining State Street.  There was the dining room side and the side with the bar and pink lunch counter. The dining room and the bar each had their own entrance from the street, resulting in the unintended consequence of averting a crossover of patrons.  In spite of the fact that the drinking side of the restaurant shared space with the lunch counter, I was forbidden from walking behind the mahogany bar, even to collect the afternoon mail.

 “It isn’t proper,” Papou would insist.

But I was permitted behind the lunch counter where I never tired of setting a fat  porcelain cup under the spout of the dairy dispenser and then lifting the arm to fire a single creamy shot into a customer’s coffee.

It was early in the day, when Yiayia's apple green kitchen reflected the radiant morning light, encouraging and bathing all who entered in the manner of an everlasting summer. Here among the sunbeams,  she and I  worked her beloved recipes on the Formica table fitted with the center leaf, as Papou watched from the couch with the newspaper in hand. Papou had a easy, gentle, manner and he loved me with all his heart, until the day his own gave out and mine temporarily paused. Once Yiayia and I returned to life  we were careful not to disturb what remained, Papou’s  wallet, embossed by the coins he carried for the paper, and his slippers, still tucked under the legs of his recliner, long leather canoes I  would twist from his feet before afternoon naps on the kitchen couch. 

  We'd lost our balance and felt tender and shaky in the aftermath of loss, so Yiayia had no choice but to teach me to fire and forge our leftover resolve like marble, destined to tumble through ages of rocks, water and sand. 

With Papou gone, the restaurant fell to my grandfather’s nephews who were ready to assume the family business.  But it was in my grandmother’s kitchen where the real cooking took  place. 

I’d awoken on this day to an intoxicating memory fleeing from the oven.  Yiayia, who'd been up for hours, had made  tiropita. Although I would have normally mixed  the cheeses or basted the dough in a slurry of butter and oil, she'd left me to sleep. By the time I'd walked into the kitchen,  all traces of her handiwork were gone save for a plate of marmalade toast and a shot of apricot juice.

“We will leave when the tiropita comes out,” she reminded me.

 I finished my breakfast and climbed back upstairs to wait and wander through the spare, abandoned storage space we called the big room where I was greeted by an old cedar chest, a couple of bureaus, a few chairs and several open sturdy boxes filled with clothes.  As was my usual routine, I reached for the closest box and puzzled in the flaps, then did the same with the rest before stacking them one atop the other on one of the bureaus. Next I grabbed a chair and carefully climbed over each box until I'd reached the top, and then tentatively stretched out my body and rolled on to my back to face the ceiling.  By my eleventh birthday I would be too old for this game.

 “Pearl, come and eat. Meta tha bame sto Horowitz Brothers gia na parels to yfasma sou, after we will go to Horowitz Brothers for the fabric,” yiayia reminded me.  

Yiayia still sewed the occasional dress for me to wear and Horowitz Brothers was where she shopped for fabric and notions. We typically made this errand together, which was more than fine because it gave us more time together. I lingered in this thought, when a clang from a pan hitting the oven rack awakened the smell of pastry, as thin as leaves, nudging me from my sweet reverie. I hurried off of my cardboard perch, eager for the crack of oiled filo and the confetti of crumbs to follow.  But in a  rush to descend, by the time my sneaker hit the sideboard there was less than a second to brace my weight against the paisley wallpaper, forcing a muffled crash.

                “Pearl?”  The sound of my name sailed up.

“Amesos, right away!” I tosssed back  with the tenderness that came without effort in this house. 

She spoke my name and at once I was made precious.

 On my way through Yiayia’s bedroom, suddenly captured by my reflection in the moon-shaped mirror, reminded me of the absence of any resemblance to Yiayia, who was my mother’s mother and whose watery blue eyes, gunmetal hair and remarkably unlined face was like peering into a quiet sea. I was, rather, a carbon copy of my father and of his mother, the first Pearl, who I’d met through dry, sepia photographs.  There was no denying the shape of our eyes, large and gently sloped like poplar leaves. I was interrrupted again by a bolt of thundering utensils. Abandoning my twin and rushing downstairs, I scrambled barefoot to the kitchen for  tiropita, the crisp feta pie now resting in the center of the table  atop the tiny, colorful pot holder I’d once woven on a plastic loom.  Yiayia lifted a four-inch square  from a corner of the pan and motioned me to sit.  I surrendered to my first bite of steaming cheese until there’s nothing left but a spray of tiny, papery leaves melting against my tongue like snowflakes.  Yiayia retreated to the hallway mirror one last time before we left.  

  “Ella Pearl,  tora bame, we’re going,”  she called.

On any given day, the hallway to this apartment felt like the reward for running up the flight of sixteen stairs it took to ascend from the parking lot. I was greeted by the entry which was lined with rolled linoleum; ochre squares patterned like ceramic tile. 

Woolens and netted hats clung to hooks. There was a table for mail, powder and lipstick, and a mirror framed in painted gold. We made phone calls from a dedicated leather and mahogany chair, whose creaks betrayed any hope of privacy.

  “Ella.” Yiayia calls out to me,  traversing the staircase, one step at a time.

Yiayia’s words were dispensed with the kind of precision with which she infused everything: the rolling of pie crust, the threading of silk through an unseen eye, the tap of a toe down and up against the pedal of the Singer  producing a racing hum, whose drone and subtle vibration could right my wayward thoughts at any given moment. 

“Bame Pearl.” 

At the sound of her voice, I am tethered and continents away from my house across town, where tirades shake and ravage rooms, where my father throws his clipped, caustic language of intimidation and  opposition in a howling delivery of tone and verse. Just yesterday, he was midway through another strike.

“You know nothing,” he continued. “Nothing, deeepota.  Deepota ya to maezi,” “Nothing about how to run a business. I do everything,” he asserted.

 While my father deployed language like a weapon, my grandmother extended it like a feather.   It was this contrast that clearly defined the critical balance of power I knew from birth, and one which required a clear understanding of how to  proceed at any given time. But it was yiayia’s plump and nimble hands that reached deep into my heart, ensuring that I spend the bulk of my days in the warm glow of her sublime company, momentarily safe from my father's fury which could be tripped by anything.

“Chapachula” my grandmother smiles.

I am well versed in this endearment.  It had been packed from another life and translated to mean the opposite of a neat appearance. With scratches on my legs and my hair pulled back with a stretchy orange headband,  I appeared younger and preferred it that way. Yiayia’s penchant for the empire style dresses she stitched reinforced this illusion.

“Yiayia” I ask.  “Where are we going after Horowitz?”

“ You should go home, Pearl.  You’ve been here a long time.  Your father will want to see you.

I turned the sentence around and felt it tighten around my stomach like a belt.  I was trying to craft  the right words to prevent my return to the house across town. Going home was never as easy as the reverse when the car seems to drive itself. But I took comfort in reaching for the pink pearl I wore around my neck, guiding the iridescent gem along its chain, back between my collarbones.

“Yiayia. They don’t know when I’m coming, so I can go tomorrow.” 

And after a few quiet minutes comes her reply.

“Alright Pearl, call your mother. We’ll bake something when we get back.”

My grandmother struggled to enforce visitation. Not that it was formally mandated, but she was proper to a point, evaluating all loopholes and using them accordingly when it came to my well-being. But still I  was surprised by the certainty of her declarations and unwavering intention. She might have been the only person I ever knew who wasn’t  afraid of my father. But she was afraid for us, which was why she seldom hesitated to retrieve me for days at a time.