[img_assist|nid=880|title=Love Park|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=130|height=195]On the night before I drove Daisy Diamond home, I picked up my parents at the hospital, where they'd been visiting with a parishioner whose wife was dying of cancer. As the man walked with my parents to the curb, his glistening bald head shone. He wore a wrinkled corduroy sport coat, despite the heat, and loosely tied sneakers that shuffled like slippers on the concrete. He was hunched over, less from old age, it seemed, than from grief. But when he came into the light of the streetlamp overhead, I could see that he was smiling gloriously. The man hugged my mother and took my father's hand. After my mother settled into the front seat of the truck and my father followed, the man held my father's hand through the open window. He pressed his moist lips to my father's knuckles and politely wiped them dry. "Your parents give us peace," the man said to me, "more than the doctors." I was nodding, speechless, as the man reached for my mother's hand and brought it to his lips. "I love your mother and father," he said. His eyes were brimming with liquid light. "I do too," I choked out. The man brought my parents' hands together and stepped back from the curb. My parents' fingers stayed intertwined in my mother's lap, even as the truck entered our driveway and came to rest under the basketball hoop.
Years ago, on the day my father installed that hoop, Andrew dribbled a basketball and shot at the stone wall above the garage door, announcing buzzer-beaters, while I straddled the gray metal pole in the grass, raised my worshipping fists, and cheered my big brother's heroics. The old man was bare-chested, jabbing his shovel into the stubborn earth just off the lip of the macadam, while Stavros, the always-reliable church custodian, stirred cement with a broom handle in a red, rusted wheelbarrow. The old man's shoulders rippled when he muscled the shovel's tip into the growing hole. That night, under the floodlight, the old man and Andrew played HORSE, while I caught their shots before they hit the ground. The old man sank baskets from the sidewalk and back yard, calling out swish!
Today, when I got back from Daisy Diamond's house, I wanted to chain the pole to my truck's front end and back up until I heaved it out of the ground and off the property. I wanted to take the stuffed paper bag from under the dashboard and set fire to it in the front yard.
I couldn't stay here-home. At the moment, I couldn't even get out of the truck, let alone go inside the house, this great house we lived in only because my rich grandfather had left my grandmother so he could live happily ever after with a cocktail waitress in Atlantic City. I wondered if my father, growing up, had known about his father, if he had lain awake in bed, picturing him sipping martinis and eyeing girls in fishnet stockings strutting past the blackjack table. Even before today, I'd wondered if I was the only one in the family, including Yiayia herself, who had any proper sense of justice-not that I hoped Papou was burning in Hell for what he'd done, but you'd think the woman would take down his photographs or at least stop wearing black like some widow whose husband deserved to be mourned. What used to drive me nuts was less that my grandparents had never bothered to get a divorce than that, for years, my yiayia pretended the old bastard had never left her for another woman-pretended he was coming back, until the day she got word he'd keeled over on a Carnival cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean. Yiayia's most recent self-quarantining, in fact, had been triggered by my prankish removal of Papou's large black-and-white portrait outside her bedroom, the absence of which had gone unnoticed only until I got to the kitchen, where I was too far away to make out the curses coming from the third-floor landing.
A legacy of betrayal, I thought. At least my grandfather had had the decency to be a public louse. At least his whole life wasn't a lie.
My shoulders sank, and my lungs seemed to shrink, as I realized that Daisy Diamond had dumped the secret onto me, perhaps for the same reason I wanted, now, to tell Andrew, Sophia, or anyone: to free myself from being the only one who knew.
As I skulked toward the sliding screen door, tip-toeing in the mulch, I could hear Sophia continuing a conversation that apparently had no end. I sidestepped Theo's untamed pink roses and leaned against the stone wall outside the kitchen.
"It's not just some idea, Dad. It's a real program that Veronica's totally doing, and you don't have to be a student. I told you at Christmas, and you've known this is my plan. I never said I'm not going to college-just not right away."
Sophia wasn't going to college right away because she'd spent her senior year doing God knew what with her friend Veronica, instead of meeting application deadlines. Actually, I had a good idea of what she'd been doing with Veronica, but I told myself she was going through a phase. She just wanted what everyone else wanted, she would say. Did they have to name it? They'd kissed, all right? She admitted that much to me, after swearing me to secrecy. A crush, I'd figured, until they went to the prom together. Meanwhile, Veronica's dysfunctional life, unlike Sophia's, hadn't foiled her academic success: she'd already moved out to Berkeley-Sophia's dream school.
Through the window above my head, I could hear the kitchen-sink spigot's perpetual hum, my mother making dinner or clearing up from lunch-cleaning raw chicken or rinsing sauce from plates-while reviewing in her mind Sophia's flight itinerary. I imagined my father, standing there, perplexed, wondering when, if ever, he'd actually approved his daughter's one-way trip to California. Over the sound of rushing water, Andrew made a joke about Sophia's need for the heaviest-duty suntan lotion-SPF forty-lest she make herself so dark that our mother, assuming Sophia might ever return home, would once and for all mistake her daughter for an Albanian or even African refugee from one of the church's missions, as if such racial blurring weren't precisely what Sophia had in mind. Theo blurted that she was better off not going to Berkeley after all, that she should stay home and hold out for the Ivy League.
Apparently, Sophia had rounded up everyone to hear her final complaints before her departure the next morning. Amid all the interruptions, she was trying to explain that she just wanted to explore for a year.
"Explore what?" my father said.
"Life. The world," Sophia said, as if introducing new words to her audience. "And I really don't appreciate that you think I'm going out there just because Veronica's out there. I'm the one who told her about Berkeley-"
"Nothing's been decided yet," my father said. "I don't want you flying."
"Flying? I have the ticket, Dad! It's a summer program! I'm leaving tomorrow! Where have you been?!"
"Mom's already got a care package assembled," Andrew added.
At last, with a deep breath, I shoved the screen door in its dry groove and stepped into the kitchen.
"Peter, you made it!" Theo sat in the old-fashioned schoolhouse desk next to the basement door, his string of gray worry beads twirling perpetually at his fingers. His blue eyes appeared magnified by the thick glasses he wore only when he didn't want to miss something.
"How long does it take to go to the Brew Hall?" my father asked.
"Brew Mall," Sophia corrected him.
I froze, wanting to lash out: You don't get to question me anymore! My heart was pounding. I glanced into the foyer, the sun-drenched hallway leading to the front door and beyond.
My mother stood off to my left, frozen for the moment, looking up from a white-capped blue bottle she'd just plucked from a cabinet converted for vitamin and medicine storage. They all seemed to be scowling at me, except Melanie, who stood by the refrigerator in an ocean-colored dress, smiling sweetly. Sophia and my father were in opposite corners, in standoff position, each head-to-toe in black, with a touch of silver jewelry: against the icon-littered backdrop of the kitchen wall stood my father, in black shoes, slacks, and short-sleeve shirt open to the first button, along with his silver wedding band; to my left, between my mother and me, stood my sister, in black calf-high lace-up Doc Martens, fishnet stockings, mid-thigh skirt, and tank top, along with her silver rings pierced through the brow and both ears, a virtual Slinky of bands along the forearms, and a stud through the belly button, in full view, like an evil eye aimed at the old man.
Andrew broke the silence. "Why don't you just take some classes?"
I stepped around the kitchen table toward the basement door, where Theo's worry beads clicked and smacked, vanishing in his grip and reemerging, a nervous gray blur.
"I'm not taking classes to make anybody happy. No class can make you an artist." Sophia glanced at me, to acknowledge the source of her wisdom, though I wanted no credit for the effect I'd had on her.
"You see?" my father said. "I don't believe this. Peter put this idea into your head. Theo-!" The old man glared at Theo's hands.
Theo silenced his beads, and I stopped cold.
"Don't blame Peter, Dad! You can't even give me credit for the stuff I do that pisses you off!"
"Honey," my mother said. "That word." She handed Sophia the bottle from the cabinet. "Put this with the other things."
"Pisses? Jesus, Mom, stop censoring me. You don't need school to be a poet. You just need to live life!" Sophia examined the label on the bottle. "Petroleum suppositories?"
I wanted to call out the Truth. Good News, Sophia! Dad's a fraud! We're all free! Then I remembered Daisy Diamond's words-your father's been trapped for years-and I thought, we're all trapped.
"You'll be eating different foods, honey," my mother said. "You never know how the change in diet will affect your bowels."
"Mom!" Sophia looked, horrified, at Melanie, who pretended, mercifully, to be distracted by the church calendar pinned to the refrigerator.
"If you're not going to college," my father said, "you can stay home until you're ready. Even Peter went to college."
"Look what it got him." Andrew grinned. "Just kidding, Doc."
"What does Peter have to do with anything?" Sophia said. "This is so humiliating..."
My theory was that this kind of verbal abuse had replaced the physical abuse we'd inflicted on each other as kids-and that all of it, then and now, disguised our brotherly, and sisterly, love. Andrew used to seal his mouth around my little nose and exhale his hot, wet breath, which poured through my nasal passage and back out my mouth. I would laugh and spit at the same time, in horror, then lie back on the carpet. When Sophia was old enough to endure such torture, both Andrew and I would pin her down and tickle her until her laughing turned to crying and, at least a few times, peeing-she wet her little cotton pants and ran screaming into the kitchen. Minutes later she would return in fresh pants, tears dried up, and spread herself on the carpet like an X. No more, Andrew would tell her, and eventually her giggling would once again turn to sobbing.
Sophia set the blue bottle next to a white surgical mask on the kitchen table, among the vitamins and first-aid items my mother had already collected. I recognized the red letters on the packet of iOSAT tablets-to be used only as directed by state or local public health authorities in the event of a radiation emergency. Months ago, Andrew had brought home a bag of surgical masks, along with the iOSAT tablets, from the hospital, announcing that he'd finally managed to confiscate the highly coveted antidote for anthrax poisoning. His teasing had been evident to everyone but my mother, who promptly arranged the packets in prominent locations throughout the house, but only after pleading with me to wear a mask at work and inquiring if the tablets might also protect against asbestos and lead poisoning, this in spite of the countless times I'd explained that I worked only with water-based paint.
Sophia was going on: "I want to go somewhere. And do something interesting and good for people. Help homeless people. He hasn't gone anywhere or done anything for anyone! He lives in the basement!"
As she went on, referring to me as a third-person pronoun as if I were not standing there in the room, I thought: we keep coming back for more abuse. Then I realized, it isn't so bad to be invisible, and sidestepped toward the basement door.
"Peter," Melanie said.
I looked up, my hand on the doorknob.
"Andrew and I still have our announcement."
Melanie was painfully lovely, her sandy-blond hair already, in late June, streaked with gold from the summer sun. When Andrew had first brought her home, I'd looked up from art history books and gone dumbstruck. By the end of the night she'd made her way back into the dimly lit kitchen, sat, and paged through one of my books, asking me about Ionic versus Doric, Impressionist versus Expressionist, and why I didn't have a girlfriend.
"Remember," Andrew said, "Melanie and I called everyone in here for a reason before Sophia hijacked everything with her little diatribe-"
"Fuck you, Andrew."
A dish slipped from my mother's hands, and, as she reached out to save it, another followed, each crashing on the cold tile floor.
"Enough with the language!" my father yelled.
"It's just a word!" Sophia hollered.
My mother stooped, and Melanie bent down to help.
I crouched toward the mess, but when my mother glanced up, I stepped back, curling my hair behind my ears and searching my pockets for a rubber band. I picked up a ceramic chip near my foot and set it on the table.
Theo tucked his worry beads delicately into his pants pocket.
Sophia paced in short steps by the sink, her eyes wild, her stiff, infant dreadlocks tumbling and jutting like spasmodic fingers.
Suddenly I became sad at the sight and sound of her-of this unceasing rant-and wondered if maybe she was going crazy, as she often claimed to be.
"...You don't say anything to Andrew and he completely insults me. That's so American, to care more about language than common human decency..."
Maybe this is how it happened, I thought: your brain can't keep it all together anymore; you've gotten too smart for your own good, and you snap, right here in the kitchen, eighteen years old, the people who love you witnessing the whole fitful breakdown, your brain splintering in as many directions as there are family members; or, as I imagined Theo decades ago, you're trekking through Athens in the prime of your life, knapsack filled with your next batch of books, your mind like a diamond, perfectly carved and sizzling with condensed energy, entire histories of civilizations and whole novels and epic poems you hadn't known you'd memorized firing out from your skull into your blood and muscles and nerves and into the sun-scorched world, while your sandaled feet mount the same rocks Socrates walked upon when he envisioned his fate, and you fall to your knees and scurry like a bug to a crack, crawling, in your mind, to the nearest safe place where you can rest and gather your thoughts.
Or maybe Sophia was the only sane one in the room-perhaps along with Theo-barely keeping it together while she watched everything around her falling apart.
"That's deep, Sophia." Andrew clapped.
"I hate you." She stormed off toward the stairs.
We all waited for the heavy footfalls above us to stop.
"Okay, let's hear this announcement," Theo said.
"Sophia has to be here," Melanie said.
"No she doesn't." Andrew sighed and stuffed his hands into his pockets.
"Yes she does," Melanie said. "We have to wait."
I turned for the basement again.
"Peter." My mother was still holding white ceramic triangles, like pita, in each hand.
"What took you so long?" my father said.
"Everything's in the yard," I said, opening the basement door.
"We've been worried about you," my mother said.
"Everything's fine, Mom."
"We agreed you'd wear a rubber band," my father said.
The fucking rubber band!-as if wearing it were the last thing I could do to maintain some dignity. I closed the basement door and took a single deliberate step toward my father. We didn't agree to anything, I thought, gripping my hair in a fist and then letting it fall. The shadowy grooves in the old man's forehead deepened. Andrew crossed his arms, offering his little brother a rare moment of deferential curiosity. I imagined destroying all they knew of family dignity, making my own announcement, loud enough so that even Sophia could hear me up in her bedroom: Our Father...!
"I'm twenty-six," I said instead, and I meant what being twenty-six implied: I was on my own now.
My mother placed the ceramic pieces on the counter and wiped her hands on her apron. "What is it, Peter?"
"Nothing."
Daisy Diamond, I wanted to say. Just her name, to see what the old man would do.
Sophia's silhouette-mini-skirted Medusa in combat boots-suddenly appeared in the foyer, before the Plexiglas storm door. She'd come quietly down the stairs, I realized, and now she stood staring into the front yard, perhaps envisioning her new life in California.
"I'm not your servant," I said to my father.
When Sophia turned around, hearing me, I signaled to her with a squint: Everything's cool. I'm not insane.
Just then the old man called out, "Sophia!" but she was already making her way into the kitchen.
"What?" she said.
Theo clapped and rubbed his hands together. "And now the moment we've all been waiting for!"
My father snapped, "Theo, skaseh!"-Shut up!
Sophia glanced at Theo, who was securing his glasses over his ears, and then she grinned at me: We're all crazy.
I nodded anxiously.
Melanie said, "We wanted to tell immediate family before anyone else showed up."
I slid my hands into my pockets.
My mother leaned against the kitchen counter. "I don't think I can handle any big announcements today."
"It's okay, Mom." Andrew smiled. "It's good news."
I crossed my arms. My mother folded her hands over the apron knot at her waist.
"Melanie and I wanted to announce this together," Andrew said. "We haven't even told her parents yet-"
"But we're telling them later tonight, so..." Melanie cupped her left hand with her right-hiding the evidence, I assumed.
My brother had finally done it...
"Well..." Andrew inhaled dramatically. "Melanie decided she's willing to convert."
Andrew had finally won her over to our side-not that there had ever been a real contest, not that he'd ever considered donning the yarmulke. Of course, Melanie's conversion meant marriage-a detail that, at least for Andrew, went without saying, though the look on Melanie's face suggested that the announcement had stopped short, too soon before my parents were rushing in toward the soon-to-be-converted Jew.
"Wait-" Melanie squirmed free from my mother's hug. "Mrs. Pappas, that's just the beginning..."
My mother stepped back. "Oh?" She glanced at Melanie's belly.
"Jesus, Mom." Andrew laughed through his teeth.
"Olympia-" my father gasped, as if my mother had just suggested something impossible.
"Well, I don't know," she said.
Melanie tucked her hands into her armpits. "Andrew, tell them."
My mother reached out and took Melanie's wrist gently. "Oh, Andrew," she whispered.
The diamond flickered like a Christmas light.
Melanie stared at Andrew, who gave a tiny shake of his head: Not now...
"Will the wedding be this summer?" my mother added, Melanie's hand docile in hers.
"Ma, it's almost July," Andrew said.
"Mrs. Pappas, there's something else," Melanie said.
"Melanie-" Andrew took Melanie's hand from my mother's hand.
"Don't grab me!" Melanie snapped.
"What's the matter, honey?" my mother said. "This is beautiful news."
"This is what I hate!" Sophia cried out. "Why is this such good news to everyone?"
Melanie's resistance to her conversion had secretly represented, for Sophia, humanity's, or at least this family's, last hope for salvation.
"Your brother's getting married, honey."
"Nobody's even said that! You're just glad she's converting!"
"No, Sophia," my mother said.
"It's not just that, Sophia." Melanie crossed her arms. "But apparently Andrew's having second thoughts."
"About what?" my mother said.
I had no idea. No way was she pregnant.
"All right, look," Andrew said. "We're engaged. That's what the ring means. That's it."
"I can't believe you." Melanie backed up toward the refrigerator. "You are such a coward," she huffed, and turned toward the garage.
"Let's talk about this in private," my father said. "Why don't you take a walk, Peter."
"Me?"
"With your sister."
"No!" Sophia cried out. "This isn't what God wants! Melanie shouldn't have to do this! God loves everyone!"
"Of course He does, honey," my mother said.
"Melanie, don't do it! Jesus was a Jew!" Sophia marched back into the foyer and slammed the storm door behind her. Through the Plexiglas, I could see her black boots trudging in the grass toward the driveway, her dark-brown, braceleted arms flailing.
"Don't let her spoil this," my father said, but Melanie had already gone into the garage through the door beyond the refrigerator.
"Honey..." my mother said.
"Let her go." Andrew brought his hands to his waist.
"Go talk to her," my mother said. "This is an emotional time."
"Trust me," Andrew said. "She'll be right back."
My father went into the dining room and stared out the bay window. Instead of Melanie or Sophia, four colorful figures were making their way across the front lawn. They appeared, framed in Plexiglas, as the bell rang.
In poked the pink pocked face and grinning bald head of Uncle Mike from Havertown. He extended a clear bottle of booze into the foyer. "Happy Name Days, Peters and Pauls!"
"Hey-ay!" my father boomed, entering the foyer from the dining room. He held the door and ushered them in. "Ela, ela!"-Come, come! He kissed and shooed them one by one into the kitchen, where I anticipated the roar of celebration, my mother's brothers, Uncle Mike and Uncle Joe, and their wives, Aunt Bess and Aunt Flo, forming a small mob of thick-strapped sundresses, bright green and orange handbags, white leather shoes and belts. "We've got wonderful news."
"Oh!" The aunts shuffled over to hug Andrew.
I lamented the predictability of the good news around here.
"Melanie's going to convert to Greek Orthodoxy!" My mother glowed, though her beautiful, sandy-haired daughter-in-law-to-be, who would become the mother of her grandchildren-likely her only grandchildren, if one considered how the lives of Sophia and me were taking shape-was nowhere in sight, a detail that didn't distract anyone from celebrating.
Uncle Mike raised his gift bottle of ouzo toward the ceiling like celebration champagne. "Let's have a drink! Glasses!" Glasses hung from Aunt Bess's clenched fingers. "Ice, Paul, ice!" He waved everyone toward the table. "Peter! Take this."
I took the bottle, wanting, suddenly, to be oblivious, drunk, along with Uncle Mike, in the colorful noise of his company.
Uncle Mike looked around. "Where's Sophia? Theo! Ela! Get us more ice!"
I pictured the watery plastic bags in my truck bed.
Theo was reaching out into the air before him like a blind man, his wine-colored slippers shuffling toward the freezer.
"Theo, put your glasses on!" the old man called out.
"Peter, what's the matter, honey?" Aunt Bess said. "You're quiet. You look pale. Look at your hair." She set the small glasses down on the table and took my face into her warm, damp hands.
"He's got beautiful hair," Aunt Flo said.
I gripped the ouzo bottle's neck.
"You feel hot, honey," Aunt Bess said. "Drink something. A little ouzo."
She pulled the chair out, and I sat down.
Theo set the shoebox-size ice container on the table and stooped to see his own hand plucking one cube and dropping it into a glass.
"Ice, ice!" Uncle Mike's thick fingers scraped the inside of the container. He called out, "Ice, Paul!" and swiped the bottle from my hand.
My father stared into the open freezer.
Uncle Mike plopped a filled glass into Theo's eager hand. "Okay, Theo, wait for the toast."
Theo jiggled his glass near his nose, watching the ice cube bouncing and turning the clear liquid cloudy.
My father twisted a half-empty plastic ice tray above the container.
"Ahh, bravo." Uncle Mike scooped a handful.
My father displayed the empty tray to me.
"I told you," I said. "Everything's outside."
"What good is it melting in the grass?"
"It's not in the grass," I said.
"Okay, okay," Uncle Mike said. "We have plenty of ice. Drink, Paul, c'mon."
Aunt Flo poked her arm through Andrew's, rehearsing for the aisle.
I folded my arms on the table.
My father handed me a glass.
"I took home one of your parishioners," I said.
"Everybody have a drink?" Uncle Mike called out.
"Who?" my father said.
Glasses rose, clanging amid audible smiles-"Hey-ay! Yiasou!"
"That's what took me so long." I was still sitting.
My father waited, arm raised with the rest of them.
"Daisy Diamond." I watched the old man's stony face.
"To Andrew and Melanie!" Aunt Flo called out.
My father turned his eyes to the ceiling, where clinking glasses hovered. They all awaited the priest's blessing.
"Stand up, Peter," Aunt Bess said.
For a moment I made the old man wait for his apathetic, atheist son; then I inched off my chair and reached toward the chandelier of glasses-"'Atta boy," Uncle Joe said-all our necks poised to receive the drink.
"Hronia polah!"-Many years!-Aunt Flo cheered.
I knew the toast, which was heard at every holiday. They all glanced at Andrew, who smiled back gratefully.
My father pronounced joyfully, "Keh stah thikah sou!"
I knew this one, too: And to yours! As in, your engagement-my engagement. I couldn't believe my ears-or eyes: the old man was grinning down at me, as the roomful of Greeks relished their blood-connection to Tragedy, spotlighting the poor soul whose story was most pathetic, just as they always turned their attention to the unmarried older sisters of young mothers with newborn babies, singing, "And to yours!" reminding them of their dried-up, disappointing lives, just as they were reminding me now that I was the only one in the room still unhitched, that I still hadn't found a nice Greek girl, or any girl at all.
They all sighed, "Ahhh," and displayed their hopeful smiles. With a unified tip of their glasses, they all leaned back, my father never flinching, and cooled their throats with sweet liquor.
Excerpt is from LOVE Park (Cable Publishing, May 2009). Jim Zervanos is the author of the novel LOVE Park. His fiction has appeared, most recently, in the Cimarron Review, Green Mountains Review, and Philly Fiction, a collection of short stories featuring Philadelphia writers. He is a graduate of Bucknell University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A teacher of English and creative writing, he lives with his wife in Philadelphia.