The Shyster's Daughter, page 17
By the time we reach the stoplight at the base of the mountain, Holly pulls up alongside me and honks, two light taps like I’m a friend she’s just come across. Although I know better than to look, I do it anyway and that’s when I see him, Holly and Jim’s three year old son, Kyle, strapped in the backseat—his eyes full of fear, his mouth full of cracker. The light flicks green, his head wobbles back and Holly makes an illegal hard left in front of a UPS truck. He swerves to avoid her, and a small package tumbles out. Holly’s hauling it back up the mountain.
To try and calm down, I pull out my cell and call my sister. Rhea has recently moved back home after her boyfriend stumbled into the bathroom one night, aggressive and amorous and reeking of alcohol. He insisted that he join her in the tub. Just as she was climbing out, he fell in backward, grazing his head against the soap dish, groggily conscious. She saved him from possible drowning by draining the water, then fled in only a bathrobe with the baby to my mother’s house.
“What’d you expect?” my mother breaks in because she can hold it in no longer. I should question why she’s been on the line this entire time, but my sister is living in her house and therefore part of my mother’s rules apparently include listening in on phone calls. “You took this woman’s husband, Paula. Of course she’s going to come after you. This is the price you pay for having stayed with your father.” She lets out a hearty sigh. “I hope I don’t sound too critical, honey, because I love you. But you’re just like him. You cheat.”
The high school where I teach sits atop a brittle hillside on the border between San Bernardino and Los Angeles County in Diamond Bar. Considered a modern architectural landmark, the buildings are constructed of cool concrete, the corners cut sharp with mere slivers of darkened glass for students to be less distracted since they can hardly see out. The district supplements the sports teams by renting the school out as a location for films and car commercials.
Before pulling into the faculty parking lot, I hang up with my sister. Shortly after becoming a substitute I’ve taken over five freshman English classes mid semester because the teacher, a woman in her forties who was prone to growing facial hair, literally ran out of the classroom screaming after a couple of boys chanted “Sasquatch, Sasquatch!” There was more to it, of course. There were mid-quarter grades she failed to complete. With thirty-five students to a class and no means of discipline except for a pad of detention slips, she stopped trying to teach them anything and instead resorted to having them memorize and spell back to her list after list of vocabulary words.
On an emergency credential, I’m determined to prove to the administration I’m a safe bet. In class we’ve read aloud Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, both the Middle and Modern English versions out of the text, having the students play the characters, acting the roles in and out of their seats, soliloquies saved for standing on top of a chair. Whoever nails their lines best we vote on and that student gets to leave a couple minutes early from class. For a little downtime while I grade their essays, I put on the film version, the MTV version starring a young Leonardo DiCaprio with bangs and Claire Danes with darker hair and doe-eyed innocence. They play the desperate young lovers in a modern-day Verona, a gaudy and colorful suburb of Mexico City. Banana yellow souped-up convertibles. Sea blue low riders. Instead of hand to hand combat with knives and swords, there are shoot outs and fiery explosions at gas stations, guys with tattoos on their bald heads, transvestites dancing around in floppy curled wigs.
While I’m collecting their homework the phone rings. Reggie picks up. He’s the star three point shooter on the basketball team who last week I caught leaning for answers during a test and now sits closest to my desk.
“Yo, Ms. P.,” he says. He tilts his head to the side like the bill of his baseball cap. “Some lady with a funked out voice.”
I assume it’s my sister calling back, the Middle Tennessee dialect she picked up fast and slowed down her syllables. My mother likes to leave a few days between insults to forgive and forget.
“What’s up Rhea?”
“Rhea? I’m not your Tennessee ‘ho’ of a sister.”
It’s Holly, faking a drawl that sounds more like a bad attempt at a Spanish accent. How she got this number, I don’t know. The calls have always been to the house, never here. Jim must’ve mentioned to her where I work. The two of them must’ve talked about me. Figuring out I’m part of their small talk upsets me in a way that her tracking me down in my classroom or trying to run me off the road hasn’t. It upsets me in a way that makes me mean.
“What do you want besides your husband back.” I say this low so that Reggie and the rest of my students don’t hear.
On screen Juliet is out on her bedroom balcony, distraught, having just found out she’s fallen for the son of her family’s most dangerous rival. She throws herself forward and for a moment it seems as if she might let more than just her anguish over him go. “My only love,” she implores, “sprung from my only hate.”
Holly laughs. “I want you to see Jim the way I do. He’s a no good son of a bitch. He left his wife and three sons for Christ’s sake. What makes you think he won’t leave you?”
That afternoon I don’t drive home because I am bound for Lakewood, a forgettable little tree-lined suburb of Los Angeles that touts as its claim to fame being the birthplace of the first Denny’s restaurant. I’ve finally accepted Yia Yia’s dinner invitation. Recently she had hip surgery. Now in place of brittle bone a steel plate and screws join with her pelvis. Twice in the hospital her fever spiked and she was kept for nearly six weeks, treated for infection. “People her age die from this,” my father adds, putting his own screws to me. “She asks about you, you know. Why you won’t come by and see her.”
Breaking her hip isn’t what gets me. It’s the way that it happened. Yia Yia had been tending to her garden and fell getting up off her knees. Nobody was home, not my father or Psycho Gil. Although neither of them work, they were driving to the post office in the industrial city of Vernon where Psycho Gil keeps a box. He wants to deceive potential buyers into assuming there’s a fully operational factory that manufactures Liqui-Steal. Under the hot sun Yia Yia crawled several feet across the grass to the side gate where she lay beside garbage cans, running out of voice, calling for help. Close to four hours passed before one of the next door neighbors, a twin set of twenty something stoners who still live at home, heard her faint cries.
As I drive through Yia Yia’s one story housing tract I notice Psycho Gil and my father walking in the park, engrossed in conversation, strategizing no doubt between the jungle gym and the monkey bars the next move with Liqui-Steal. My father has been out of work since the last hearing when the judge recommended his law license be taken. Subsequently he fired his lawyer and has written his own appeal. Now he’s waiting to hear back from the three member Review Board. It’s a weekday and I find it hard seeing him dressed like Psycho Gil for the weekend.
Gone are my father’s dry cleaned suits and the paisley ties I used to steam iron for him. My father and Psycho Gil in their shorts and sandals look like they’re next up for a spirited game of shuffleboard. The only difference between them is a cell phone that’s attached in a protective case on Psycho Gil’s hip.
Yia Yia greets me at the door as if nothing has happened, the years we spent apart were never lived. Her scalp is visible, her thinning hair teased high as if she’s fresh out of the salon chair and it hasn’t had time to settle. We hug carefully because there is more between us than two generations of Greeks. There’s the knowledge that she refuses to believe her son ever put his hands all over my sister and me. No matter how many other female relatives will eventually surface with similar stories, she will go to her grave calling us all either confused or outright liars.
“I hear you’re dating an older man,” she says as I step into the foyer. You can always tell if you’re on Yia Yia’s grudge list by whether your picture is hanging up on the family room wall. Mine is there, right next to my twin cousins’ senior high school pictures, two of Uncle Dimitri’s four sons. Rhea and Nicholas aren’t—banished along with our cousin, Psycho Gil’s daughter, in the hallway which rarely sees much light. The picture of me is a color 8 X 10 taken in Kindergarten. My hair is down to my waist and I’m wearing a white apron dress with Winnie-the-Pooh and Eeyore characters clustered down the sleeves. My smile is big with baby teeth. It occurs to me, it sickens me, that it might not have been Yia Yia who put up this picture. Psycho Gil may like them as little as five years old.
“His name’s Jim Brown,” I say to Yia Yia. “He’s a professor.”
She shrugs at something about him she already doesn’t like.
“You might want to keep your last name if you marry. You’re a Greek, not a pilgrim.”
Spite and injury weigh heavily on the rest of her skeletal frame. She hunches over, moving across the pea green carpet and around her floral print furniture with a cane, not the walker her doctor prescribed. “My kitchen is too small to try and cook with a metal cart in my way,” she explains, heading right for it. Even at seventy-nine Yia Yia is too practical to be handicapped. I make coffee and she sets out a Tupperware container of Greek pastries—baklava and my favorite Koulourakia shortbread cookies with sesame seeds sprinkled on top she’s made from scratch.
While I dunk the cookies in coffee, she shows me snapshots of her trip to Greece Uncle Dimitri paid for. She shows me craggy headstones in tall grass where her father is buried up in the hillside, her mother too in the whitewashed sea port town of Nafplio in the Peloponesse. In another picture Greek dancers are skipping sideways in an arc, tiny lit lanterns above them, the men in balloon pants and black vests. The women dressed like peasants, their faces bare and their heads under scarves. Some are smiling while others look like their mouths are shaped in the middle of an “opa!”—an exclamation of enjoyment used when dancing or shattering plates.
Before my father and Psycho Gil return from their power walk at the park, I’m out on the patio on purpose so I won’t have to see them walk through the front door together. My father’s head has always been too big for a baseball cap or anything else to fit properly and this afternoon he balances a visor on the crown. He reads through Jim’s divorce papers, another reason why I agreed to come over. Jim trusts Holly and agreed to have her lawyer draw up the settlement, saving money by not getting his own.
With a pen my father marks up the margins the way I do grading student essays. “What the hell is this,” he says every other second, writing “no, no, no” at Holly’s lawyer requesting that Jim give her the house free and clear and he take the two small lots on the side.
“He wants her to have everything,” I explain. “He feels bad for leaving.”
My father shakes his head and scribbles some more.
“Natophisas.”
“You didn’t write that, did you?”
My father smiles poker style. He’s wearing a pair of sunglasses and all I see in the dark discs are miniature versions of myself.
“When the hell am I going to meet Professor Wonderful?” he says.
“Soon.”
“You still afraid to answer your own goddamn phone?”
I tell him what I haven’t yet told Jim.
“She followed me down the mountain this morning.”
My father stops writing. I don’t need to see his eyes to understand how disappointed he is in my weakness. I’m not acting like his daughter that would fight back at any cost. I’m acting like a woman that’s deaf, dumb, and nearly blindsided literally by love.
“You’re filing another police report on your way home tonight,” he says. “Then you’re getting a temporary restraining order like I’ve told you to goddamn do for months now.”
With his urging I’ve already filed two reports—one for the relentless phone calls, up to twenty-five a night, and another for having coached her three-year-old to kick me in the leg as hard as he could while we were on the floor binding Legos together. When I asked him why he did it, he threw up his hands and circled me again and again, shouting, “Mommy say kick ho, Mommy say kick ho” like it was a twisted game she’d taught him.
“Jim says a restraining order will only make it worse.”
My father laughs and shakes the divorce papers in his hand like he would his fist and I’m afraid what Greek curse word he’s about to call the man I love next. “You’re going to listen to someone who’s dumb enough not to hire his own lawyer during a divorce? You’re my daughter. If he won’t protect you, then I will.”
The sound of my father losing his temper draws Psycho Gil to the screen the way he was that afternoon watching me as I sat on the diving board, waiting to dry out from beneath his wet hands, the back of my shirt stuck to me like skin from the baby oil. I smell the pipe tobacco, the suntan lotion. Dinner is not an option—the confrontation put off again. In a minute I’ll come up with an excuse and leave through the side gate.
“Fine,” I say, aware of my audience. I pull out a stapled packet from my purse. “I’ll do it if you agree to fill this out.”
“What is it?”
“An application to take the CBEST so you can start subbing. You have to do something while waiting around for the Review Board.”
“To hell with my license, Paula Girl. I’m better off without it. I know you don’t like him but Liqui-Steal is really taking off. Last month Gil flew out to Palestine to spray it on some tanks.”
“Palestine?” I say. To me, the substance touted as Liqui-Steal looks just like store-bought paint. “Are you sure he wasn’t just down the freeway in Pacoima?”
My father talks over my sarcasm with his hands, all sweeping gestures like when he was going to clean up in Molokai, cornering all the tourist trade by building a hotel right smack in the middle of the island.
“I’m telling you,” he insists, “I’m having one of my feelings.”
I’m familiar with his feelings, the same feeling that buoyed him into buying a colonial estate, a forty thousand dollar horse, and some Hawaiian property in under seventy-two hours, the same feeling that has cost him his law license.
“Have they ordered any?” I ask. “The Palestinians?”
“Bureaucracy moves slow, Paula Girl.”
“Right. What about that farmer? He flew Psycho Gil out to test spray his tractor. Where’s his order? Lost in the mail for the past ten years or did the CIA intercept it?”
I’m scared of what’s happening to my father. I’m scared of just how far he’ll follow his brother into the alarming fantasy of FBI wiretaps, bullet proof vests, hand guns, Leer jets, and Middle Eastern wealth.
“Dad,” I say. “I don’t want you to lose it.” Even as I say it I’m not sure if I mean his license or his mind. What I will not know then until I check the State Bar’s website for myself is that the Review Board has already ruled against him. He’s deceived me for so long, insisting over and over again that it is still under appeal that he might’ve even started to believe the lie.
Coincidentally the fax machine goes off in the house, the hub of Liqui-Steal operations inside Psycho Gil’s bedroom. It’s only too obvious why he always has a cell phone strapped to his shorts. In his irrational need to claim my father’s attention, Psycho Gil is probably calling himself.
“You’ve only made things worse, Paula,” Jim says a week later at the news I’ve filed a temporary restraining order, written in black ink at the counter of the courthouse. Since finding out he’s had to twice go upstairs and pray to his higher power. Our first fight and it’s over Holly. Late this afternoon Holly countered, her response typed up by a paralegal. In it, she denies the phone calls, denies tailing me down the Narrows. She claims Jim wants her back. Miss Priamos is jealous of Mrs. Brown. Filing bogus police reports is the only way she knows how to hold onto a man who simply wants to return to his wife.
For his part Jim tries to both reassure me about Holly while also getting ready to head off to another A.A. meeting. “She doesn’t want to actually hurt you. I mean not physically anyway. She’s a good woman. Hol wasn’t like this before I left. I’m the one who’s done this to her.” He holds my shoulders so he’ll have my full attention. I’ve never felt our age difference until right then. “Give her a little more time to get past this.”
“Hol, Hol, Hol,” I repeat like the child he’s treating me. I’m tired of him defending his wife, never me. “Her name has two syllables, not just one.”
The two oldest boys are locked away in the bedroom watching TV and the youngest is standing expectantly in the wings in a soggy diaper. He knows the drill and waits while I kneel on the floor and spread newspaper. Jim is too upset about the restraining order to ask why I’m acting as if his child is a puppy that isn’t housebroken. Kyle is sensitive to smells, and nearly every time he soils his diaper, he throws up.
Jim waves from behind the screen, torn between his new alliance with me and the more emotionally evident one he still can’t quite let go of after nearly twenty years of married life. It’s the first time he’s ever not kissed me goodbye.
I force myself not to wave back and instead focus on changing Kyle, breaking out the Baby Wipes, the Pampers. The routine swiftness comes back to me from having taken care of Nicholas as a baby. “Countdown, Ky-O,” I say as I attach the sticky strips of a fresh diaper, our game that distracts him from the dirty one. “3, 2, 1.”
He rolls out fast from the newspaper, all brown eyes and chubby legs, scrambling to his feet. In the months he’s been coming over, he knows what comes next.
“Gam Cacker,” he hollers, speeding toward the kitchen. The diaper has made him adorably bowlegged.
I follow Kyle in to dispose of the newspaper, the used diaper, and give him a full two squares of his favorite snack that he’ll gnaw on for the next half hour.
