THE EDUCATION OF A QUEEN
555
the Dirty Dozen with their flies open, for Aggie's idiot counten–
ance--sorrow and doom dimly smeared across it like a double–
exposure, for my thirty-four years and the refuse of all our pasts
and my own death, for the beautiful, simmering, chocolate eyes
of Mr. X.-his sweet smile madly calm-his timid, pale, long
girl-fingers insanely sure as he delicately places the green pipe–
stem gate
in
the wooden box and matter-of-factly swings it to.
I first met Mr. Joshua X. the way I met anyone worth–
while or peculiar at all-through my family. I loathed my
family, of course, but I was shrewd enough even then (I was
twelve) to know that rather than sneak off to Hollywood to be
adopted by Jeanette MacDonald, I'd better hang around the
house and see the world come by.
It was 1937 and the war hadn't yet jerked us up out of the
Depression. My father was still piping home strays-usually
Greek, but sometimes Negro or Jewish: anybody with a real
or manufactured right to pity. We had a table with food on it,
even if it was in the kitchen. We had a rusty iron cot in the
basement, but the blankets were still warm in spite of great age,
"and they bore our proud, mad, double-family crest like a brand,
branding with our mixed blood, irrational phobias, and rash
hopes anyone who slept under them. 1833 said the red, white,
and pink "Lemon Star" quilt: the year Oberlin was founded
and my great-great grandmother Otis drove a wagon, all alone,
from Barnstable on the Cape to the new one-room farmhouse
in
north-central Ohio. But the harsh, iron-woven blanket with
its queer, lowering, iconic colors and its surface like John
the Baptist's hair shirt was dated in stilted, twisted, gothic nu–
merals 1897: my father's mother, Anastasia Karamoulis, had
woven it with thumb-pricks, tears, and hate for her husband to
keep himself warm and uncomfortable with in steerage on his
way to make a million grass-green dollars in the States. Green
fell for the parched, tawny hills of
Griechenland.
(Not that
many of his few hundreds ever traveled back home. The barren
slope, the empty pot were all that Anastasia got, which
is
why
