Naked (5 page)

“Tell that cow of yours to tone it down a little,” my mother would shout from her stool in the breakfast nook. “They can hear
her chewing her goddamned cud all the way to the state line.”

“Oh, Sharon,” my father would sigh.

“Oh, Sharon, my fat ass,” my mother would shout, dashing her plate across the counter and onto the floor. Moments later she
would rethink her exact wording, adding, “It’s fat, my ass, but not as big as the can on that prize heifer you’ve got shoveling
down three sacks of clover she harvested from the Kazmerzacks’ front yard, mama’s boy.”

My mother had a wealthy aunt, a calculating and ambitious woman who had married the founders of two Cleve-land department
stores. The woman died paranoid and childless, leaving the bulk of her estate to my mother, her sister, and a handful of nieces.
Having money of her own provided my mother with a newfound leverage. She took to wandering the house in a white mink cape,
reading aloud from the various real estate brochures provided by a man who arrived late one afternoon introducing himself
as her broker.

“This one’s got a full-sized redwood sauna, separate bed-rooms for each of my children,
and
a view of the distant volcanoes. It reads ‘Divorcées welcome, no Greeks allowed.’ Oh, it sounds
perfect!
Don’t you think?”

The money made her formidable, and within a month, it was decided that Ya Ya would be sent to a nursing home. My father packed
her belongings into the station wagon, and we followed behind in my great aunt’s Cadillac, fighting over who would use the
fake-fur throw.

She went first to a private facility, where she shared a room with a sprightly, white-haired lunatic named Mrs. Denardo, who
crept out of bed late at night to shit in the hamper and hide Ya Ya’s dentures in the chilly tank of the toilet.

“I’m the stepsister of Jesus Christ sent back to earth to round up all the lazy, goddamned niggers and teach them to cook
ribs the way they was meant to be cooked, goddamnit.”

We were enchanted and took to giving her the gifts meant for Ya Ya.

“What’s this? A sack of almonds, you say? You can take these and shove them right up your puckered pooholes for all I care.
I don’t want nuts, motherfucker, I want drapes and shoes to match.”

Ya Ya complained strenuously, but lost in the energetic saga of her roommate, my siblings and I never paid any attention.
We organized a variety show tailored to Mrs. Denardo’s exotic tastes and practiced for weeks, moving from the song “Getting
to Know You” to a dramatic re-enactment of the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre.

“Your show was a piece of stinking shit,” she yelled, surrounded by an audience of beaming senior citizens. “You don’t know
fuck about shit, niggers.”

The private hospital had seven circles of hell, and when Mrs. Denardo was sent upstairs to its steaming core, my brother,
my sisters, and I lost interest in visiting.

Once the construction was completed, Ya Ya moved into a spanking new building reserved exclusively for senior citizens, a
high-rise development called Capitol Towers. The apartments featured metallic wallpaper and modish asymmetrical rooms, the
wall-to-wall windows offering a view of the local mall. No one in Raleigh lived in a high-rise, and we found ourselves briefly
captivated by the glamour. My sisters and I fought for the opportunity to spend the night in Ya Ya’s swinging clubhouse, and
one by one, we took our turns standing at the darkened window swirling a mocktail and pretending to be mesmerized by the glittering
lights of North Hills.

I enjoyed pretending that this was my apartment and that Ya Ya was just visiting.

“This is where I’ll be putting the wet bar,” I’d say, pointing to her shabby dinette set. “The movie projector will go in
the corner beside the shrine, and we’ll knock down this dividing wall to build a conversation pit.”

“Okay,” Ya Ya would say, staring at her folded hands. “You make a pit.”

Again my father hoped Ya Ya might make some friends, but the women of Capitol Towers tended to be short-haired modern grandmothers
with compact cars and stylish denim pantsuits. They kept themselves busy with volunteer work and organized bus trips to Ocracoke
and Colonial Williams-burg.

“That is so cute!” they’d say, fawning over the tissue-paper Santa decorating the lobby. “Isn’t it cute? I told Hassie Singleton
just the other day, I said, ‘That Saint Nicholas is just about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!’ And speaking of
cute, where did you buy that sweatsuit? My goodness, it’s cute!”

The word
cute
perfectly illustrated the gap between Ya Ya and her new neighbors. Stretched to its most ridiculous limit, their community
password had no practical application to her life. She owned no makeup or jewelry, wore no breezy spangled sweatshirts or
smart, tailored slacks. Her door was free of seasonal cutouts, and she would no sooner square-dance than join the Baptist
ladies for a tour of the historic pantyhose factories of Winston-Salem. She left her apartment only to ransack the community
garden or sit quietly sobbing in the lobby, drying her tears with the tissues used to sculpt the latest holiday display. This
was not the picture Capitol Towers wished to present. These were robust seniors hoping to make the most of their retirement,
and the sight of our grieving, black-clad Ya Ya deflated their spirits. It was suggested by the management that perhaps she
might be more comfortable somewhere else. Legally she met their residency requirements, but spiritually she was just too dark.
They began keeping tabs on her, looking for some technicality, and were overjoyed when she fell asleep late one afternoon
and set a small fire with her neglected iron. Forced to leave Capitol Towers, Ya Ya took up residence at Mayview, a low brick
nursing home located next door to the old county poorhouse. This was an older, considerably less mobile crowd than she’d known
at Capitol Towers. Many of the residents were confined to wheelchairs, their spotted scalps visible through tufts of unkempt
hair. They peed themselves and sat farting in the lobby, chuckling at the trumpeting sounds that issued from their nightgowns.
Unlike her former home, Mayview made no attempt to disguise the inevitable. There was no talk of one’s well-deserved golden
years, no rented buses or craft carnivals. This was it, the end of the line, all passengers please double-check the overhead
storage bin before disembarking.

It was a sad place to spend the afternoon, so rather than endure the death rattle of her roommate, my father often brought
Ya Ya to the house, where she sat in the carport, staring off into space until it got dark enough to catch a few moths.

She was joining us for dinner one night in the backyard when my father, trying to engage her in conversation, said, “Talk
about your shockers, did I ever tell you that Ya Ya found her own brother dead in the middle of the road? The guy was slit
from his chin to the crotch, murdered by rebels just for the hell of it. Her own brother! Can you imagine a thing like that?”

“I imagine it every day of my life,” my sister Lisa said, tossing an olive pit onto my plate. “How come
she
has all the luck?”

“Was there a lot of blood?” I asked. “Did he crap in his pants? I hear that’s what happens when you die. Were his organs soft
to the touch, or had they been hardened by the sun? How old was he? What was his name? Was he cute?”

Ya Ya cast her eyes toward the neighbors’ basketball court. “In Jesus’ blessy name,” she said, crossing herself with a bar-bequed
chicken leg.

It was maddening, trying to get information out of her. Here she had a captive audience
and
a truly gruesome story but was unwilling to share it. My father had told us on several occasions that Ya Ya’s marriage had
been arranged. She had been sent as a young woman from her village in Greece to New York City, where she was forced to marry
a complete stranger, sight unseen.

“Did you have a plan B in case he was deformed?” we asked. “When you finally met, did you kiss him or just shake his hand?
How did you know he wasn’t related to you? Did you ever date other guys?”

Each time we asked, our questions went unanswered. What we considered newsworthy was just another mundane detail of her life.
Her husband, the man we addressed as Papou, had been just as morose as she was. We had to turn their photographs upside down
in order to catch them smiling. The fact that they had only one child told us everything we needed to know about their erotic
life. He worked, she worked, their child worked; they never expected anything more out of life. Papou had died when I was
six years old. He had been in the newsstand late one night when intruders hit him over the head with a lead pipe, rupturing
a vein in his head. He was carried to the hospital and died on Christmas Day.

“Did you still open presents?” we asked. “After he died, did he crap in his pants? Did the thieves concentrate only on money
or did they take magazines and candy bars while they were at it? Did they catch them? Did they go to the electric chair? After
they were electrocuted, did they crap in their pants?”

“He go to Jesus now,” Ya Ya would say. End of story. We asked our dad, who said only, “He was my father and I loved him.”

That was not the information we were looking for, but to this day it is the only response he provides. Is it loyalty that
keeps him from telling secrets about the dead, or is there simply nothing to report? How could you spend that many years sleeping
at someone’s feet and not remember a single detail?

“Of course you love Ya Ya,” he would say. “She’s your grandmother.” He stated it as a natural consequence, when to our mind,
that was hardly the case. Someone might be your blood relative, but it didn’t mean you had to love her. Our magazine articles
and afternoon talk shows were teaching us that people had to earn their love from one day to the next. My father’s family
relied on a set of rules that no longer applied. It wasn’t enough to provide your children with a home and hand over all your
loose change, a person had to be
fun
while doing it. For Ya Ya it was too late, but there was still time for my father, who over the next few years grew increasingly
nervous. He observed my mother holding court in the bedroom, wondering how she did it. She might occasionally snap, but once
the smoke cleared we were back at her feet, fighting for her attention.

I was in my second year of college when I received the news that Ya Ya had died. My mother called to tell me. I cradled the
phone beneath my chin, a joint in one hand and a beer in the other, and noticed the time, 11:22 A.M. My roommate was listening
in, and because I wanted to impress him as a sensitive and complex individual, I threw myself onto the bed and made the most
of my grief. “It can’t be true,” I cried. “It can’t be true-hu-hu-hu-hu.” My sobs sounded as if I were reading them off a
page. “A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. A-hu-hu-haw-haw-haw-haw-haw.” I had just finished reading Truman Capote’s
A Christmas Memory
and tried to pass it off as my own. “I feel like a piece of my soul has been ripped away and now I’m just a kite,” I said
rubbing my eyes in an effort to provoke tears.

“I’ll walk across the campus later this afternoon and search the sky, expecting to find two clouds shaped like hearts.”

“I’ve got just the thing for you, bud,” my roommate said. “Just the thing for you and me both because, I don’t know if I told
you this, my own grandmother died just a few months ago. My brother dropped by to do his laundry and there she was, stretched
out dead in front of her trophy case. That shit is harsh, my friend. You and me have got some grieving to do, and I’ve got
just the thing to set free the spirit.”

His remedy involved two hits of acid, a bag of ice cubes, and a needle. We split a pair of gold posts and sat hallucinating
in the dormitory kitchen as a criminal-justice major pierced our ears.

I flew home to Raleigh the next day, where my father said, “There’s no way you’re coming into my house with an earring. No
sir, no way.”

I spent the next several hours in the carport, threatening to sleep in the station wagon, unwilling to compromise myself for
the likes of him. “Asshole!” I yelled. “Nazi!”

“Listen,” my mother said, stepping out the door with a tray of marble-sized meatballs. “You take the earring out, we go to
the funeral, you stick it back in before you catch your plane. The hole won’t close up that quickly, take my word for it.
This is something I want you to do for your father, all right?” She set the tray upon the hood of the car and picked up a
meatball, studying it for a moment. “Besides that, an earring looks really stupid combined with glasses. It sends a mixed
message, and the effect is, well, it’s troubling. Give me the earring and I’ll put it away for you. Then I want you to come
inside and help me straighten up the house. The Greeks will be here tomorrow afternoon, and we need to hide the booze.”

I removed the earring and never put it back in. Looking back, it shames me that I chose that particular moment to make a stand.
My father had just lost his only mother, and I assumed that, like the rest of us, he felt nothing but relief. He’d been cut
loose from his Greek anchor and could now drift freely through our invigorating American waters. Ya Ya left behind no money
or real estate, no priceless recipes or valuable keepsakes, nothing but a sense of release; and what sort of legacy is that?
I can’t help but imagine she had started off with loftier goals. As a young girl in Greece, she must have laughed at private
jokes and entertained crushes on young stonemasons named Xerxes or Prometheus. When told she would be sent to a new world,
I hope she took a few hours to imagine a life of cakes and servants, where someone else would shine her shoes and iron the
money. Life had sentenced her to die among strangers. Set out to pasture, she spent her final years brooding and stamping
her feet within the narrow confines of her fragrant stall.

“When I get like that, I want you to shoot me, no questions asked,” my mother whispered. “Disconnect the feeding tubes and
shut off the monitors, but under no circumstances do I want you to move me into your basement.”