“Shame on you, Lina.” But Desdemona was laughing now, despite herself. It was wonderful to see her old cousin again, a little piece of Bithynios still intact. The dark pantry, full of figs, almonds, walnuts, halvah, and dried apricots, made her feel better, too.
“But where can I get the rent?” Lefty finally blurted out as they headed back downstairs. “I don’t have any money left. Where can I work?”
“Not a problem.” Zizmo waved his hand. “I’ll speak to a few people.” They came through the sala again. Zizmo stopped and looked significantly down. “You haven’t complimented my zebra skin rug.”
“It’s very nice.”
“I brought it back from Africa. Shot it myself.”
“You’ve been to Africa?”
“I’ve been all over.”
Like everybody else in town, they squeezed in together. Desdemona and Lefty slept in a bedroom directly above Zizmo and Lina’s, and the first few nights my grandmother climbed out of bed to put her ear to the floor. “Nothing,” she said, “I told you.”
“Come back to bed,” Lefty scolded. “That’s their business.”
“What business? That’s what I’m telling you. They aren’t having any business.”
While in the bedroom below, Zizmo was discussing the new boarders upstairs. “What a romantic! Meets a girl on the boat and marries her. No dowry.”
“Some people marry for love.”
“Marriage is for housekeeping and for children. Which reminds me.”
“Please, Jimmy, not tonight.”
“Then when? Five years we’ve been married and no children. You’re always sick, tired, this, that. Have you been taking the castor oil?”
“Yes.”
“And the magnesium?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We have to reduce your bile. If the mother has too much bile, the child will lack vigor and disobey his parents.”
“Good night, kyrie.”
“Good night, kyria.”
Before the week was out, all my grandparents’ questions about Sourmelina’s marriage had been answered. Because of his age, Jimmy Zizmo treated his young bride more like a daughter than a wife. He was always telling her what she could and couldn’t do, howling over the price and necklines of her outfits, telling her to go to bed, to get up, to speak, to keep silent. He refused to give her the car keys until she cajoled him with kisses and caresses. His nutritional quackery even led him to monitor her regularity like a doctor, and some of their biggest fights came as a result of his interrogating Lina about her stools. As for sexual relations, they had happened, but not recently. For the last five months Lina had complained of imaginary ailments, preferring her husband’s herbal cures to his amatory attentions. Zizmo, in turn, harbored vaguely yogic beliefs about the mental benefits of semen retention, and so was disposed to wait until his wife’s vitality returned. The house was sex-segregated like the houses in the patridha, the old country, men in the sala, women in the kitchen. Two spheres with separate concerns, duties, even—the evolutionary biologists might say—thought patterns. Lefty and Desdemona, accustomed to living in their own house, were forced to adapt to their new landlord’s ways. Besides, my grandfather needed a job.
In those days there were a lot of car companies to work for. There was Chalmers, Metzger, Brush, Columbia, and Flanders. There was Hupp, Paige, Hudson, Krit, Saxon, Liberty, Rickenbacker, and Dodge. Jimmy Zizmo, however, had connections at Ford.
“I’m a supplier,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Assorted fuels.”
They were in the Packard again, vibrating on thin tires. A light mist was falling. Lefty squinted through the fogged windshield. Little by little, as they approached along Michigan Avenue, he began to be aware of a monolith looming in the distance, a building like a gigantic church organ, pipes running into the sky.
There was also a smell: the same smell that would drift upriver, years later, to find me in my bed or in the field hockey goal. Like my own, similarly beaked nose at those times, my grandfather’s nose went on alert. His nostrils flared. He inhaled. At first the smell was recognizable, part of the organic realm of bad eggs and manure. But after a few seconds the smell’s chemical properties seared his nostrils, and he covered his nose with his handkerchief.
Zizmo laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Do you want to know the secret?”
“What?”
“Don’t breathe.”
When they reached the factory, Zizmo took him into the Personnel Department.
“How long has he lived in Detroit?” the manager asked.
“Six months.”
“Can you verify that?”
Zizmo now spoke in a low tone. “I could drop the necessary documents by your house.”
The personnel manager looked both ways. “Old Log Cabin?”
“Only the best.”
The chief jutted out his lower lip, examining my grandfather. “How’s his English?”
“Not as good as mine. But he learns fast.”
“He’ll have to take the course and pass the test. Otherwise he’s out.”
“It’s a deal. Now, if you’ll write down your home address, we can schedule a delivery. Would Monday evening, say around eight-thirty, be suitable?”
“Come around to the back door.”
My grandfather’s short employ at the Ford Motor Company marked the only time any Stephanides has ever worked in the automobile industry. Instead of cars, we would become manufacturers of hamburger platters and Greek salads, industrialists of spanakopita and grilled cheese sandwiches, technocrats of rice pudding and banana cream pie. Our assembly line was the grill; our heavy machinery, the soda fountain. Still, those twenty-five weeks gave us a personal connection to that massive, forbidding, awe-inspiring complex we saw from the highway, that controlled Vesuvius of chutes, tubes, ladders, catwalks, fire, and smoke known, like a plague or a monarch, only by a color: “the Rouge.”
On his first day of work, Lefty came into the kitchen modeling his new overalls. He spread his flannel-shirted arms and snapped his fingers, dancing in work boots, and Desdemona laughed and shut the kitchen door so as not to wake up Lina. Lefty ate his breakfast of prunes and yogurt, reading a Greek newspaper a few days old. Desdemona packed his Greek lunch of feta, olives, and bread in a new American container: a brown paper bag. At the back door, when he turned to kiss her she stepped back, anxious that people might see. But then she remembered that they were married now. They lived in a place called Michigan, where the birds seemed to come in only one color, and where no one knew them. Desdemona stepped forward again to meet her husband’s lips. Their first kiss in the great American outdoors, on the back porch, near a cherry tree losing its leaves. A brief flare of happiness went off inside her and hung, raining sparks, until Lefty disappeared around the front of the house.
My grandfather’s good mood accompanied him all the way to the trolley stop. Other workers were already waiting, loose-kneed, smoking cigarettes and joking. Lefty noticed their metal lunch pails and, embarrassed by his paper sack, held it behind him. The streetcar showed up first as a hum in the soles of his boots. Then it appeared against the rising sun, Apollo’s own chariot, only electrified. Inside, men stood in groups arranged by language. Faces scrubbed