Things Even González Can't Fix - Christy Chilimigras

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the Spice Girls into our repertoire. In this home, I would sit alone on the carpeted lounge floor, a single lit candle resting in front of my crossed legs, and screech along to Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’. Then, at the end of the song, dramatically exhaling, blasting the flame into oblivion, before lighting it again and lambasting the neighbours’ ears once more. In this home, the poet, the romantic, the Dragon and the child in me thrive. I fall asleep every night praying to wake up to snow … in the middle of a South African summer. In this home, I name my first pets, two goldfish, Romeo and Juliet – only to wake a few weeks later to find them both floating, dead, in the bowl. Oh, the poetry of it all! For my two fish, Romeo and Juliet, to have pegged together, on the very same day! In this home I learn how to exhale, to play, and never treat my pets again as though they are Greek, thus avoiding over-feeding them to an untimely death.

      At this point, while I am living my best life, My Father moves back to his childhood home with his mother, my YiaYia. Located in Rosebank, the low walls of this home barely conceal the stereotypes that keep the My Big Fat Greek Wedding franchise going. Old furniture preserved in mint condition with the help of plastic covers adorns the lounge and the dining room and the other dining room (one to use, one only to look at). Old biscuit tins filled with useful and useless things can be found in every room. Here, My Father and my YiaYia speak to each other in Greek bursts, and while I never understand a word of it, I know their conversations aren’t kind. My Father, still harbouring resentments from his early childhood, had proceeded to pack every issue he’d ever had with his mother neatly onto a shelf in his mind. Able to pick from the spines of his memory with feeling, eyes closed, he’d regale Protector & Soul and me with elaborate tales of all the ways in which she had failed him throughout his life. He would tell us, annunciating each heartbroken and heartbreaking syllable, how she’d never loved him as much as she did his sister, who was given a piano and a guitar and a car and he hadn’t. She hadn’t devoted as much of her attention or affection to him as she had with everyone else. She didn’t love my sister and I as much as she loved our cousins, who were born to the favoured sibling. He wasn’t good enough, and we weren’t good enough. ‘Look at how she brings your cousin chopped cucumber and tomato while he watches TV,’ he’d remind us as he swung his arm in the direction of my younger, blonde cousin with his big, lovely head staring contentedly at the television screen. ‘She doesn’t do that for you. Oh, and, Christy, even though you’re only six, she’s told the family back in Greece that you’re a poutana.’

      ‘What’s a “poutana”, Daddy?’

      ‘It means whore. Your grandmother tells everyone you’re a whore.’

      My YiaYia, always clad in the same dresses, the pale pinks and greens of thin cotton lined with white frills that Johannesburg housewives buy for their domestic workers, would shuffle from room to room, her loose brown sandals exposing the chunky, plum veins resisting compression beneath her nude tights. Despite her legs betraying her, she is known for her flawless complexion. The skin on her face refuses to warp even while her sunken cheeks invite it to turn to waves. Framing her youthful face is her pale brown hair that dances with the grey but never lets it take the lead.

      Having moved to South Africa at the age of 17 to start a new life for herself with my Pappou Number Two, she slowly somewhat mastered the English language. But even after a near-lifetime here, words spoken in anything other than her native language fall heavily from her lips like rocks she’s had to force out with a marshmallow tongue. Watching her through my young eyes in the mornings when I awoke in her home, I’d feel my frustration rise as she’d exhume a slice of white bread from within its packet before sliding it into an old, silver toaster. Once it abruptly popped up, only a few shades lighter than her houseboy, Paul, she’d carefully butter it. She’d slice it down the middle into two, oozing rectangles, and then with fluid movements, retrieve tin foil from the pantry, carefully wrap the toast, and lay it in a kitchen drawer next to where the cutlery slept. There the toast would sit untouched for two days, before she’d give in, tear it up, and toss it wildly into the air over the lawn, any number of birds waiting to be fattened up below. Having known what is was to be starving during her youth in Greece, she was adamant to always have food in her home, in her drawers, and, begrudgingly, finally in her neighbourhood pigeons. It didn’t matter how long she’d been in this country, she simply wasn’t of this country. Leaning in to me one day when I arrived at her front door with a childhood friend who’d come for a visit, she screamed in a whisper, ‘Chrysanthy, do you know your friend is a mavro?’

      Me, responding in an actual whisper, ‘Yes, YiaYia, I know she’s black.’

      In another of my earliest memories, I am in the back seat of My Father’s gold Toyota Corolla while my big sister, who at this point in her life is referred to as ‘Tiger’ by My Father, sits in the front seat with her tomboy-scabbed knees leaning dramatically to the left, away from the driver’s seat, distorting herself to the point that she looks ready to break. We are reversing out of the driveway. He has his arm slung over my sister’s seat to anchor his twisted body as he looks back, and says to me, ‘Mouse, I don’t care who you bring home. As long as he’s white. And if he’s Greek, that’s a bonus.’

      I like to think that even then, at the age of seven or eight, I was certain of at least two things:

      1 Whatever a mouse lacked, a tiger made up for.

      2 My Father was absolutely full of shit.

      I don’t remember when first we started spending every second weekend at My Father’s house. It was always just our condition. The way it was.

      In playschool, I remember how every second Friday morning saw a shell of a Christy. Slinking into the classroom, I’d haul my black weekend bag along with me. The teacher would pop it, effortlessly, onto the top of a shelf where it would wait until My Father picked us up at the end of the day. There on the shelf it would watch and weigh on my mind. Heavy and horrendous and existing. The only solace during my childhood Fridays in playschool came in the form of bread. Having sneakily befriended every young Jew I’d set my eyes on, I’d wait, eagerly and greedily outside of the Jewish Studies classroom to collect their challah on their way out. Revelling in each bite of the sweet bread and thanking my lucky stars that they were saving their appetites for the tastier loaves their mothers would be serving that evening during Shabbat.

      Meanwhile, the struggle back home for Old Lass, trapped in the two-bedroom flat, a newly single mother, was to find an escape. Let your children go. Start smoking pot more regularly. Wait for them to come back. Let your children go. Attend a rave and drop some E with your best friend. Wait for your children to come home. Let your children go. Experience the recklessness you never allowed yourself to have in your twenties. Wait for your children to come home. Get stoned.

      I still dream of that every-second-weekend house, the house My Father until today continues to share with his mother. Brown bricks. A glass front door, warped, all the better to see silhouettes approaching. Over the years, I have avoided that house by all means necessary. When excuses evaded me, in I’d walk and greet my demons before melting to my knees. As a child, I never knew how to walk through the carpeted halls of this place. I would run. There goes the hairy Greek girl – see how she gallops. With astonishing clarity and considerable heartbreak, I remember racing through the dark passages of my YiaYia’s house, tears in my eyes, tearing from one room to the next, trying to outrun something I couldn’t see but could feel breathing down my neck.

      When Protector & Soul wasn’t near me – God forbid she had left me in our shared bedroom alone – I would stand at the doorway. Minutes and lifetimes passed as I’d work up the courage. To outrun nothing and everything. To flee invisible demons and into the arms of tangible ones. To seek out my sister, to play Lego, to drink sweet tea. I always felt lonesome in this. Lonesome and ridiculous and furious with my sister for bravely walking without me. Years later, I asked Protector & Soul if she remembered how I would run through that house, envious that she’d been a ‘normal’ child, one who was able to walk. I asked if she knew why I did this.

      ‘I don’t remember exactly. I used to force myself to walk through it, though. If I ran, I felt like I was admitting defeat.’

      CHAPTER

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