Pearl of the Night Necklace

                                    “From deep inside, the center of the earth.

flour and anise and the taste of metal.

Luck hides, magnetized”

Chapter One

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 apartment was spacious. And it was safe. Below us, the roomy, rectangular restaurant with its grand, plate glass window lining State Street served as our second home. 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 pink lunch counter, I was forbidden from walking behind the mahogany bar, not 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 lifting the arm to fire a single shot of milk into a customer’s  coffee.

It was early in the day, when Yiayia's apple green kitchen most reflected the radiant morning light, encouraging all who entered in the manner of an everlasting summer. Here among the sunbeams we worked her beloved recipes on the Formica table permanently fixed with the center leaf, while Papou read his newspaper from the couch. He adored me and truly cherished my visits, until the day his heart gave out and mine momentarily paused. Once Yiayia and I awoke from our grief,  we were careful not to disturb what remained. There sat Papou’s wallet, embossed by coins he carried for the paper, and his slippers, still tucked under the legs of his recliner; long leather canoes he would wait for me to twist from his doughy feet before afternoon naps on the kitchen couch. 

       Still, we were knocked off balance and arrived tender and shaky in the aftermath of loss, so Yiayia had no choice but to show me how to 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 this day to an intoxicating memory fleeing from the oven.  Yiayia, who'd been up for hours, had made  tiropita. Although I would normally mix  the cheeses and bast 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'll leave when the tiropita comes out agapi mou, my love,” I heard her say from the pantry.

 I finished my breakfast and climbed back upstairs to wander and wait . The second floor consisted of two connecting bedrooms, a small bathroom with a claw-foot soaking tub and an alcove, just wide enough for a twin. At the front of the apartment was the dusty, spare room, devoid of furniture but cluttered with cardboard boxes and a lithograph of Amsterdam propped on one of the walls.  I stepped inside for a peak and then changed my mind and retreated through one of the bedrooms where I was captured by my reflection in the moon-shaped mirror. This only confirmed once again 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 his mother, the first Pearl, who I’d only met through brittle, sepia photographs.  There was no denying the shape of our eyes, large and gently sloped like poplar leaves.  I heard a crash and was suddenly startled by a bolt of thundering utensils.

 “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 gave us even more time together. I lingered in this glorious thought until another clang from a pan hitting the oven rack nudged me from my reverie and awakened the smell of pastry, as thin as leaves.  All the while, I stood eager for the tiropita, the crack of oiled filo and the confetti of crumbs to follow.

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

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

She spoke my name and I was made precious.  I abandoned my twin and rushed barefoot to the kitchen where I was greeted by the crisp feta pie now resting in the center of the table atop a colorful pot holder I’d once woven on a toy 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 was nothing left but a spray of tiny, papery leaves that melted on my tongue like snowflakes. Yiayia watched and then 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 entrance into the apartment felt like a reward for running up the flight of sixteen stairs it took to ascend from the parking lot. The landing became my portal to freedom. Walls were lined with rolled linoleum in a pattern of ochre squares to resembled ceramic tile. Woolens and netted hats clung to hooks. There was a table for the mail and Yiayia's compact and a gold framed mirror to check her lipstick. We made phone calls from a dedicated leather and mahogany chair whose creaks betrayed any hope of privacy.

  “Ella.” Yiayia called out to me, carefully navigating the steep 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 and where my father threw 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 flung at my mother. “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 spooned it like island honey.  It was this contrast that 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 smiled.

I  was 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 than my eleven years 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 that 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 when reaching for the pink pearl I wore around my neck as I  guided the iridescent gem along its chain safely home between my collarbones.

“Yiayia" I said. "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 just 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 never hesitated to rescue me for days at a time. 

             I jumped the stairs eight at a time and walked out into the restaurant parking lot where my grandmother was waiting.  Our building with the apartment above and restaurant below had been purchased by Papou and his brother before my mother was born.  For me it had always been there, anchored through concrete like the roots of a great elm, sustaining generations through years of economic and cultural uncertainty. The restaurant was everything to my grandfather and his brother who as fresh immigrants, ran their business  through days and nights consumed by cooking,  countless dishes and and the perpetual weight of worry.  

When Papou died, it became no longer necessary for Yiayia and I to descend into the restaurant kitchen at 5am to mix batter for the blueberry corn muffins, tasks gradually erased by random cooks. But our love affair with the restaurant still provided us with a second oven and dedicated fryer. And Yiayia could be counted on to prepare her specials every now and then for the  nephews to fetch and feature in their menu; dolmathas, grape leaves steamed in brine, stuffed with ground beef and short grain rice, and flavored with warm spices, lemon and onion. She could assemble these savory packages,  remarkably uniform in size and shape while resting her achy knees at the kitchen table.  On meat-free Friday nights I would be sent down with a plate of raw fish and potatoes for the cooks to fry.   In this way, we  clung to the remnants of an old life while casting off deeper connections after Popou, and soon after, his brother, passed on.

Though the restaurant and menu were regularly revised with the changing times,  lines were sharply drawn. The family may have lent their lives but they never surrendered them completely.  My cousins and I were raised with the understanding that customers were to be observed from a safe distance.  This culture of protection and overprotection provided the insurance they counted on  to protect us from danger, a custom reinforced by the Greek word, xenos, connoting both stranger and guest. 

  My grandmother unlocked the car door and I slid beside her on the sunbaked upholstery in the front seat.

                                  “ Ba, ba, ba.,” “Vi, vi, vi.”  she sighed.

I’d  been hearing these singsong syllables for as long as I could remember, the very expressions that somehow conveyed as Yiayia explained, the inevitability of life as it was written. I knew that at that moment, my grandmother was remembering  Papou. 

                           “Pearl,” said Yiayia, “Your grandfather loved this car.”

“But he didn’t know how to drive.” I reminded her.

“ I drove.” she answered with pride.

“Bame Pearl.” “Lets go.” 

With Yiayia behind the wheel of the Pontiac, we took off  for downtown. I rolled down my window and looked to our neighborhood still populated by immigrants who’d alsoarrived en masse to gamble their hands on their futures.

        Yiayia  had once been one of those early arrivals, passing through Ellis Island following a month-long, trans-Atlantic solo voyage at the age of twenty-three.   As the story goes , my grandmother had been brought to the pier by her brother Vasso. But it had required multiple attempts on different days for her to actually board the tender that would ferry her to a liner departing for England and then America.  This was due to the fact that when the reality of becoming separated from her mother and siblings truly hit, my grandmother became so profoundly distraught, that her brother Vasso could not bear it and felt he had no choice but to take her home. The next few attempts were no different. But on the fourth or fifth try, my ever-resilient grandmother was convinced to depart for the States, enduring  days and weeks of ocean and sky, until aid workers from the Red Cross put her on a train at Grand Central Station to be collected ninety minutes later by the man who matched the photo of my grandfather inside in her bag.  My grandmother's journey was consistent with the custom of daughters needing to be married off to good and decent Greek men. However the details of this oral history were always vague.

       As we rode to Horowitz, I reimagined the cityscape as patches of fabric stitched together by Yiayia’s capable hands. I watched as proprietors of small family businesses, vegetable markets, smoke shops and the like,  pushed themselves onto sidewalks in search of customers. We were lucky to find parking directly adjacent to the massive storefront that was Horowitz Brothers. The grand window mannequins appeared resplendent in elegant dresses still attached to sprawling bolts of fabric and trim in spectacular color and texture. Hand painted signs announced new arrivals and sales. Horowitz Bros. had opened its doors in 1939 and would span a run of 65 years before closing for good. It was as much a destination as it was a working resource for dressmakers. Strolling through its three expansive floors,  the air was rich with the scent of cotton and tulle, oil and dust trailing the formation of sewing machines along the corridors by the historic elevator.

“Ella Pearl. Which do you like? Afto?”  inquired Yiayia.

Intoxicated by possibility I ran my fingers across dense bolts in an assortment of cool weave and zeroed in on a sheer orange and pink paisley. Yiayia found  a  matching batiste for the lining.  The clerk measured and cut from the two coordinating rolls of fabric as I watched.

“Would you like to hold on to this? she asked.

She dropped the delicate brown onion-skin bag into my hands and then accompanied us through a labyrinth of aisles in search of a zipper and thread and lace for the trim. The clerk steered Yiayia towards large, illustrated pattern books to flip through for a particular design of choice. Once her selections were made, the clerk would locate the actual tissue pattern filed in the wooden drawers that were nestled inside the majestic oak cabinetry. How could she know that Yiayia preferred to create her own patterns from newspaper? With the primary shopping behind us, there was a little time to browse through the coveted remnant basket which to our great luck, only minutes before had been replenished.  We sifted through bundles of folded fabric until Yiayia pulled out a green cotton print with a few cushions in mind. We walked the floor and continued to brush against bolts of fabric, stopping occasionally for a clerk to cut a small sample of strip here and there; strips  I knew would eventually be fashioned into tiny outfits for my collection of Barbie dolls.

    Our ritual now complete, we headed back to the flat for another of my Yiayia’s adopted curatives, a scoop of vanilla ice cream buoyed in a sea of ginger ale.  The decision not to return to my mother had been made.

Chapter Two

Patates Tiganites

“Yiayia?” I asked the following morning. “When is mom coming?”

I scanned the length of the street through the wavy glass of living room window in a painterly impression of the street below. Although I worried about returning home, I  ached to see my mother when I suddenly heard her on the stairs.

 “Pearl!”   said my mother, wrapping me in her arms.

“Katse leeyo Amalia, sit,” interrupted my grandmother, throwing her a look of relief.

We collapsed into our chairs  at the kitchen table and Yiayia , for the second time that morning, prepared the coffee and set out a bunch of seeded grapes. The Greek or Turkish kafe was prepared in a briki or ibrik, the diminutive long handled copper pot, broad at the bottom and tapered nearest the top, irreplaceable and worn to a rich patina the color of mustard. The coffee beans had been crushed to a powder at the Greek Import. Yiayia opened the bag and dropped a heaping tablespoon into the torrid boil. Then she tossed in a teaspoon of sugar, lowering and then raising the heat until the process was complete.  I watched her pour the steaming liquid into each demitasse,  assigning a little peak of froth atop each one.  I picked up my tiny spoon to stir the cream  and imagined  what fortunes lay inside my cup. That's when Froso came to mind.

“Mom,” I said. “We haven’t seen Froso in a while.”

Efrosini or Froso, was the short and sprightly cousin of our grandmother. She was somewhere between 60 and seventy years of age and as ebullient as a fizzy drink. 

Froso worshiped my Yiayia and visited as often as she could-not wasting one minute to sit for a coffee and a little fortune telling. It was thrilling to finally empty our cups so Froso could invert them with the purpose of interpreting the muddy rings left behind. The readings were exhilarating despite their predictability. There was the recurring mysterious visitor wearing a large hat. And there was always the ship and a great crossing.  After my mother’s fate was  mumbled away in a quiet smile it was my turn for fairy tales and romance. Afterwards we’d sit in silence so Froso could study me through her coke-bottle glasses to impart a tender conclusion to the reading.

“Your heart holds a quiet power Pearl. Remember that,”  I recall her say.

Apart from her gifts as soothsayer, Froso was a determined cook who championed greens and fresh herbs like the potted plants she cultivated on her Brooklyn fire escape and  whose properties she believed were further boosted with generous wedges of lemons. 

“This will keep you in good health agapi mou, my love.”

“ Greens. Pearl, dark leafy fresh greens,” reminded Froso. "And plenty of lemons."

Yiayia, quietly amused by her cousin,  likened Froso’s words to the sweetness of honey.

For my second breakfast of the morning my grandmother set out candied orange rind plated with delicate spoons.  The unbreakable spell of the morning sun infused us like the sweet syrup we poured over dense semolina cake still warm from the oven. 

“We’ll need to go back soon,”  my mother announced as if suddenly remembering the time.

         When I wasn’t sheltering in my grandmother’s kitchen,  I lived in the first floor apartment on the corner of a busy avenue across town.  Because our apartment was street level,  my father insisted on keeping the blinds closed at all times. This forced the sun to find impossible ways to squeeze through and around the old frames. The closed blinds coupled with my father’s austere rationing of electricity made us dependent on whatever natural light or light from the street found its way to us through our perpetual winter. But this was only the beginning of what divided us from the world. The entire structure of the house was fortressed by several formidable rings of defense; the blinds, the absence of light, the blur of the original windows, the over-abundance of caulking, the massive Elm trees, the army of hedges, the relentless four lanes of heavy traffic and my silence.  

In the apartment directly above our own, a slender middle-age woman from somewhere deep in the south, circled the length of her flat in the early evenings. Everything we knew we conjured up from her powerful drawl and the click click click of those high-heel slippers edged in fur.

“Ah can’t balieve how blue the waaater is,” she observed one evening on her way up the stairs when my father stopped her with a stack of photos.

My father could be downright charming to just about anyone outside our family. Still,  the walls were not thick enough to fool anyone who happened to be listening.

The apartment on the third floor however sat vacant and in need of numerous repairs that my father would attempt to remedy without the services of a plumber or electrician. And he was driven to all manner of improvised measures from asbestos removal to plumbing.  Sidewalks and driveways required me to man the hot tar with a two by four lest it bind up and harden. Sometimes, my imaginary older brother Gus would appear at my side. Gus, stoic and sweet, was my lone sibling and once my partner in this dark apprenticeship. But I had to make him imaginary, after he died from an undiagnosed heart condition when I was eight and he was twelve. Still his interrupted life failed to stop me from aging him into the teenager I now needed him to be and to appear whenever I needed him the most.   Sometimes when I was ordered to hold the flashlight while our father plugged a hole or wired a socket, I might sometimes feel Gus' hand on top of mine helping me steady the light. The repairs were relentless. The building was old and the windows were worn and heavily leaded, their guts frayed and their chalky bones patched in an unending cycle of good enough. Our arms ached with the weight of wood and glass while my father sutured their innards and grafted their screens with scraps of mesh.  When  in the process of these clumsy surgeries and it became impossible to maintain our customary distance, the  act of standing so close to my father rattled me.

At times I wondered if  the natural mystery to solving these everyday problems might have been interesting if not for the misery pooling in the basin behind every leaky toilet. Joy was as elusive as rising smoke from my father’s Pall Malls. The mood, as fragile as the burning snake of ash that fell and exploded on my father’s shoe as Gus and I looked on.

 It was Gus who'd taught me to paint, to drain every crusted drop from the cache of elderly cans he was periodically made to haul from our dank basement. Whenever a tenant moved out,  we would be dispatched to the empty apartment to cover plaster and trim using what I could find. Gus and I had become experts at cutting the hardening  hues with enough water to coat as much wall as we could using brushes as stiff as old beards. And when the light would fade,  I recalled how we would soak our tools in turpentine, searing our collective memory with the fumes that drifted into our eyes and brains.  With the memory waning, Gus would vanish into the night sky.

Living on the ground floor of our three family house gave access to two exits,  the back door off of the kitchen, and the front door leading to the grand and generous porch and stairs. Our traditional 1920’s apartment might have been ample, if it weren't for our impulse to circle through rooms in a choreography of avoidance.

“Pearl?” said my mother startling me back to attention at the table. “What are you thinking about?”

                                             “Nothing, I answered.”

My mother and Yiayia had moved into a discourse about how long my father had been waiting for dinner. Once the last plate in my grandmother’s  kitchen had been washed and dried, my mother and I had no choice but to  return home. My father had been waiting for more than an hour for dinner.

We didn’t speak on the drive back. Once we arrived I trailed behind my mother who was rushing over to the refrigerator. Over in the corner Gus appeared and then raised his finger to his lips before quietly creeping through the dining room and out the front door.

    “Oh my Pearl. It’s late. Get the oil. I’ll fry,” said my mother.

My father walked in from the bedroom mumbling incoherently. He seemed annoyed by something. I whispered hello into the room and he raised his head to  look at me.  He might have been about to say something and then changed his mind.   He picked up the newspaper instead and began to read.

  “Pearl. Help me set the table. Your father’s very hungry,” pleaded my mother.

                        “ I’ll  make the  potatoes.”

Each night, integral to the ritual of my father’s dinner, was a plate of deep fried potatoes. My mother prepared them under running water, rinsing and peeling their dusty skins using a small utility knife. She chopped them wet and starchy into thick quarters and blotted them with her apron.

“Pearl, this skillet is older than you,” she rattled nervously,  raising the temperature of the oil upwards of a sputtering 325 degrees before carefully submerging her cuts. 

I watched my mother wait for the potatoes to darken into glistening golden slabs.  The sound of the hiss and sputter from the oil, filled the room. My mother switched off the electric, raised her slotted spoon and delivered the crisps to a plate lined with paper towels to salt them. Potatoes at every meal were non-negotiable.  The  bitter greens would  need to be drained from the pot of boiling water. She carefully carried it to the sink and dumped the grassy vegetable into a colander. She shook it with both hands to force the last of the moisture through and then turned the greens into a ceramic bowl where she lathered them with olive oil and lemon.  My father waited at the table, anticipating the moment when his brain would board a memory-plane to the island where patates tiganites was a domestic staple. Steam from the dish filled the kitchen with his private and expansive dream. Somewhere in the room, Kooch re-appeared. Kooch was the newest in a line of cats who appeared and disappeared over the years. Each tabby was as indistinguishable as the last and each one was named  Kooch, Koochie, or as my father preferred, Koochia. This particular Koochia had recently given birth in the closet of the bedroom I used to share with Gus. My father revered the cat, as he did  all creatures of the animal kingdom in the order of his affection.  A passing squirrel sprinting across the yard could trigger a shift in his demeanor.  But nothing moved him like the titanic aquarium he kept in the corner of the living room. 

At that moment, perhaps sensing my silent plea for distraction, Kooch chose to float back through the kitchen, knitting her body in and around the legs of the table before finding my father’s outstretched hand.  The odor of  fry clung to every surface in the silent space.  I  sat.  Somewhere the clock ticked. Evening buses shook the panes. 

My mother, who was no longer consumed by potatoes, lowered herself into a chair like a stone. I knew it was impossible to avoid the futility of waiting for my mother to say something. So when nothing came as nothing would, I held my gaze over the top of my glass and  turned a sideways glance towards my father. In one hand, he held a forkful of potato.  The other hand was pushing  a heel of bread  into his mouth. His quiet enthusiasm for the food resembled a man who hadn’t eaten in months. When he had finished, my father scraped his chair across the linoleum and  rose from the table. The vacancy left by his departure made the room feel cavernous. It made the appliances in the kitchen slow their revolutions to a cool silence and  cleared the paths to the exits.  My eyes focused on the blue boomerangs floating in the black Formica table and then  I watched as my mother walked the frying pan over to the sink to tip the oil into a can.

“Pearl, unfold your hands now. Relax, my angel,” said her mother.

My mother liked to explain my father’s troubles as melancholy.

 “Melancholy. Melancholia” I remember reading. 

 I had looked up the word one day in the leather dictionary on a shelf in my grandmother’s living room.

                     “As a noun: a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause. As an adjective: having a feeling of melancholy; sad and pensive. Melancholia: a mental condition and especially a manic-depressive condition characterized by extreme depression, bodily complaints, and often hallucinations and delusions.”

Rage:   a: violent and uncontrolled anger

b: a fit of violent wrath

Wrath: strong vengeful anger or indignation”

With my father now absent from the kitchen, I imagined  him laying on his side of the bed he shared with my mother. The curtains would rise and fall in the breeze, spilling a slice of the world outside his window where roses grew plentiful in spite of neglect. He might roll on his back with his hands clasped over his stomach in the posture of the dead.  He might have closed his eyes. He might have been thinking about Gus and that two things that could be true at the same time. He had loved Gus. This was true. But my father had been unable to harness his anger and allowed it to rage like a recurring tempest. He might have considered this. I couldn’t say. Because I had already walked through the living room and into what was once the foyer of our house and was now my bedroom.

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