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 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 bar each had their own entrance from the street, 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, even to collect the afternoon mail.

 “It isn’t proper,” Yiayia 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.

        Although Yiayia had lived alone for a number of years. Papou’s memory filled every corner of the flat. I was too young to remember my grandfather before he left our lives, but his presence was enshrined by a lifetime of stories. I sometimes picked up his wallet from the side table where it sat, revered like an ancient artifact, beautifully embossed by the coins he once carried for the paper. And I liked trying on his slippers, still tucked under the legs of the recliner-long leather canoes Yiayia would twist from his doughy feet before afternoon naps on the kitchen couch. 

With Papou gone, the restaurant fell to my grandfather’s nephews, 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 baste the dough in a slurry of butter and oil, she'd left me to sleep. By the time I walked into the kitchen, all traces of her handiwork were gone, save for a plate of marmalade toast and a shot of apricot juice.

“Faye, eat. We'll leave when the tiropita comes out agapi mou, my love,” I heard her call from the pantry.

At the sound of her voice, I am tethered and continents away from the house across town, where tirades shake and ravage rooms and where my father throws his clipped, caustic language of intimidation 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 out like honey.  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 moment. But it was Yiayia’s plump and nimble hands that reached deep into my heart, ensuring that I spent 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.

           I finished my breakfast and climbed back upstairs to wander and wait. The second floor consisted of two connecting bedrooms; an alcove wide enough for a twin; a small bathroom with a claw-footed soaking tub; and a dusty spare room at the front of the apartment, devoid of furniture but cluttered with cardboard boxes and a random lithograph of Amsterdam propped against a wall.

 I stepped inside for a quick look and then changed my mind and retreated through one of the bedrooms where I was captured by my reflection in the moon-shaped mirror. I turned to face what I already knew-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 only met through brittle, sepia photographs.  There was no denying the shape of our eyes, large and gently sloped like poplar leaves. All at once I was startled by the sound of a crash in 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 called up from the kitchen.

“Na mee eese san tsahpahtsoolah, don’t look sloppy,” 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 by a stretchy orange headband, I appeared younger than my eleven years and preferred it that way.

          Yiayia still sewed the occasional dress for me to wear and Horowitz Brothers was where we shopped for fabric and notions. We typically made this errand together, which usually meant a longer visit.  I lingered in this hope 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, 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 tossed 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 red and yellow 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 me 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 to Yiayia’s apartment felt like the reward for running up the sixteen steps it took to ascend from the parking lot. This landing was my portal to the tranquility that awaited.  The walls were lined with rolled linoleum in a pattern of ochre squares to resemble ceramic tile. Woolens and netted hats clung to hooks. There was a table for the mail, my grandmother’s compact, and a gold framed mirror to check her lipstick.  Phone calls were made from a dedicated leather and mahogany chair, whose creaks betrayed any hope of privacy.

  “Ella,” Yiayia called out to me, carefully navigating 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, inextricably linked to the beat of my heart, could right my wayward thoughts at any given moment.

“Yiayia” I asked.  “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 and felt it tighten around my stomach like a belt, while at the same time I tried 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 pearl I wore round my neck, guiding the pink iridescent gem back 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 I was still surprised by the sheer certainty of her declarations and her unwavering intention. And she was the only person I 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 once, and stepped out into the restaurant parking lot where Yiayia was waiting.  This building, with our apartment above and restaurant below had been purchased by Papou and his brother before my mother was born.  It had always been there, anchored through concrete like the roots of a great elm, sustaining generations along 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 menus, dishes, and their daily accounting of survival.

              As the years passed, 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 now and then for the nephews to fetch and feature in their menu; like 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 small savory packages, remarkably uniform in size and shape, while resting her arthritic 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 deep fry.  In this way, we clung to the remnants of an old life while casting off cherished connections after Papou, and soon after, his brother, were gone.

                    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 remembered.

“I drove,” she answered with pride.

“Bame Pearl, let’s go.”

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

        Yiayia had once been one of those early arrivals, passing through Ellis Island following a month-long, trans-Atlantic solo voyage from Greece at the age of twenty-three.   As the story went, my grandmother had been brought to the pier by her brother Vasso. But it had required multiple attempts over a several days for her to actually board the tender from Piraeus that would ferry her to the liner departing first to England, and then America.  For when the reality of becoming separated from her mother and siblings truly hit, my grandmother became so profoundly distraught, that her brother Vasso had no choice but to take her back home. Subsequent attempts were no different. But on the fourth or fifth try, my ever-resilient grandmother somehow convinced herself to leave, 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, tucked inside in her bag. 

         Back in the car, 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? This one?”  inquired Yiayia.

Intoxicated by possibility I ran my fingers across dense bolts in an assortment of cool weaves and zeroed in on a sheer orange and pink paisley. Yiayia expertly located 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 brown, glassine bag into my hands and then accompanied us through a labyrinth of aisles in search of a zipper, thread, and lace for the trim. The clerk steered Yiayia towards large, illustrated pattern books to search for a design of her choice. Once a selection was made, the procedure called for the clerk to locate the actual pattern filed inside the sliding wooden drawers of a majestic oak cabinet. Yiayia browsed without revealing her preferred practice of cutting patterns from newspaper. With the primary shopping behind us, we sifted through the coveted remnant basket which had been replenished a few minutes earlier.  Yiayia pulled out a green cotton print with a few cushions in mind.  Then we walked the floor, continuing to brush against bolts of fabric and stopping occasionally for the clerk to cut a small strip here and there- clippings that 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 one of Yiayia’s adopted curatives, a scoop of vanilla ice cream buoyed in a sea of ginger ale.  For now, the decision not to return to my mother had been made.

Chapter Two

Patates Tiganites and Wild Greens

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

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

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

“Kahlos eerthes. Katse leeyo Amalia, good you are here, 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 coffee; this time serving it alongside a cluster 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 all three.  I picked up my spoon to stir the sugar and imagined what fortunes might lay inside my cup, 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 my grandmother, somewhere between sixty and seventy, and as ebullient as a fizzy drink.

Froso worshiped my Yiayia and would visit often-not wasting one minute to sit for coffee, and fortune telling. It was thrilling to finally finish our cups so Froso could invert them and interpret the muddy rings left behind. The readings were exhilarating despite their predictability. There was the recurring mysterious visitor in a large hat, the ship, and the great crossing.  After my mother’s fate was mumbled away in a quiet smile, it would be my turn for fairy tales and romance. Then we would sit in silence so Froso could study me through her coke bottle glasses and impart a tender conclusion to the reading. 

“Your heart holds a quiet power, Pearl. Remember that.”  

Apart from her gifts as a soothsayer, Froso was a determined cook who championed greens and fresh herbs like the ones she cultivated on her Brooklyn fire escape and whose properties she passionately 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, often likened Froso’s arrival to a party. But to my mother and me, Froso’s visits momentarily insulated us from the chaos across town.

My grandmother finished our breakfast with candied orange rind served with the tiniest spoons—my mother’s favorite. 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. I felt my stomach fall.

         When I wasn’t sheltering in my grandmother’s kitchen, I lived in the first-floor apartment on the corner of a busy road 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 and my father’s rationing of electricity made us dependent on any traces of ambient light finding their way into 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 old windows, the abundance of caulking, the massive Elm trees, the army of hedges, the relentless four lanes of traffic, and my silence.  

                   In the apartment directly above our own, a slender middle-age woman from somewhere in the south, circles the length of her flat in the early evenings. Everything we knew we conjured from her deep accent and the click click click of high-heel slippers trimmed 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 a listener.

                 On the third floor, the apartment sat vacant and in need of numerous repairs which my father would try to remedy without the services of a plumber or electrician, as 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, when I felt particularly on edge and deeply consumed with worry, my older brother Gus would appear by my side. Gus, stoic and sweet, was once my lone sibling and long-ago partner in this dark apprenticeship-until the day his heart stopped, and mine momentarily paused. 

     From the moment Gus died from an undiagnosed heart condition when I was ten and he was fourteen, not one person in my family ever spoke his name again, so I

couldn’t either.  We had

come apart, not piece by piece, but all at once, shattered, with no desire to

ever collect ourselves again as we ambled through our personal solitudes. And

life went on without us. So Yiayia had no choice but to show us how to fire and forge our leftover resolve like marble, destined to tumble through ages of rock, water and sand. 

               Still-I needed more, and my prayers were delivered by grief when Gus’ interrupted existence fueled me to secretly return him to life, to my life, preserving him as the teenager who now appeared when I needed him most.  I told no one.  But whenever I was ordered to hold the flashlight while our father plugged a hole or wired a socket, Gus' hand would rest like a shadow over mine to steady the beam.  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.  And 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 smoke from my father’s Pall Malls-the mood as fragile as the burning snake of ash that fell and exploded on his shoe as Gus and I looked on.

                    It was Gus who once taught me to paint, to drain every crusted drop from the cache of elderly cans he was 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 we 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, we’d soak our tools in turpentine, searing our collective memory with the fumes that drifted into our eyes and brains.  Then Gus would fade into the night sky. And my heart would break all over again.

Living on the ground floor of our three-family house gave access to two exits, the back door off the kitchen, and the front door leading to the porch and staircase. This layout was a constant map running in the back of my mind.  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 to attention at my grandmother's table. “What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing, I answered.”

             My mother and Yiayia then moved into a conversation 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.

             We didn’t speak on the drive back which went by way too quickly. 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 bothered by something. I muttered 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.  Instead, he picked up the newspaper 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, as was horta—bitter, wild dandelion greens that would have to be drained from the pot of boiling water. She carefully carried it to the sink and dumped the grassy vegetables into a colander. She shook the metal helmet 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 and horta were domestic staples. Steam from the dishes filled the kitchen with his private and expansive dream. Somewhere in the room Kooch re-appeared,  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, estranged by family life, revered the cat as he did all creatures of the animal kingdom—in the order of his affection.

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