Cut Flower
by Xeni Fragakis
It’s a real thing, I’m told, the father who leaves the house for cigarettes one afternoon never to return. My father, though a smoker, opted for more forthrightness when he decided to abandon our family.
“I’m moving to Greece,” he told me and my mother. “And I’m never coming back.”
I can’t say I was surprised. My father had been bitching about the United States for as long as I could remember. He found the climate miserable, the culture anti-intellectual, the people sex-obsessed and prudish at once. That he was right on every count didn’t make it any less wearying to hear. Did we know that capitalism was a con, the prison system an obscenity, Henry Kissinger a war criminal? We did, we did. We knew, too, how much he hated his job at the local factory, where he spent two decades trying to decide what he liked least about his co-workers: their casual racism or how obligingly they let themselves get shafted by management. I had asked him once, when I was a child, “Papa, are you what people call a Pinko Liberal?” and he had answered, more impishly than was probably wise at the height of the Cold War, “Oh, no, Xenoula. I’m what people call a Red.”
And, yet, for all his antipathy toward the United States, he had moved here not once, but twice, first illegally after jumping ship in the sixties, then again after marrying and summarily knocking up my mother in Greece. He had applied to become an American citizen as soon as he was eligible, allowing my mother, when she was asked at my father’s naturalization hearing whether he had ever spoken ill of the US government, to prove herself a quick thinker under threat of perjury by answering,“Hasn’t everyone?”
It would not be long, though, before he started floating the idea of returning to Greece. The first of his plans was proposed when I was still in elementary school, the penultimate one when I was just out of college. There were others in between too hare-brained even by my father’s generous standards to garner more than a brief mention. All of them required money my father didn’t have, licenses he was unlikely to get, the cooperation of a wife and child who made it clear they considered America their home. My mother and I lived in terror of these schemes but sometimes years would pass between them, and we’d be lulled into believing he’d finally been made a convert to our country. My mother had called me up to declare him “finally an American” when, after twenty years of deriding us as “not real Greeks” for swooning in ninety-degree temperatures, he acceded to our entreaties and bought an air conditioner. My hopes had been raised much earlier. Among “real Greeks,” it was not uncommon to consider cats at best a step above vermin, but my father loved them unabashedly. “Look at us,” he’d say, meaning humans. “Just a mop of hair up here”—he palmed his own head—“a tiny patch down there,” the hand now waving sadly at his crotch. “But look at them”—beaming, he would point at one of our cats—“they’re perfect.”
The one he considered the most perfect of all was Babs. She was seventeen years old, a white, fluffy Vegas showgirl of a cat with an arthritic hitch in her slinky walk. She liked to speak to humans and to no one more than my father. When he got home from the factory each night—Babs would be at the front door before his engine had turned off—his first words were always to her, and we were able to infer Babs’s half of the exchange from my father’s cooing replies: “Yes, yes, I’ve missed you, too.” “No, I love you more.” The rest of the conversation, once he’d gotten out of his uniform and they’d retired to a secluded spot in the TV room, was harder to make out but, we assumed, involved a lot of admiring of one another’s good looks and commiserating about having been born for better things.
The last decision my mother and father made as a couple before his departure was to schedule Babs for a surgery to remove the lump—a malignant tumor, it would turn out—I had detected through the cottony fur on her back. When, on my father’s last day before his flight to Greece, I saw him and Babs on the couch, I heard him tell her she was going to be just fine. And then I heard him ask her: “Am I doing the right thing?” I brightened at the possibility that he was doubting the wisdom of his plan, but Babs must have affirmed his choice because the next day, carrying the bags he had somehow conscripted my mother into packing for him, we headed to the airport.
At JFK, my mother continued fussing over his luggage, apologizing in advance in case she had forgotten anything. I hugged my father and wept. He comforted me, telling me it would all be okay. As upset as I was, he was uncommonly relaxed, loose, his the lightness of a man finally able to make his exit from a party for whose entire length he had been furtively checking his watch, wondering how early is too early to leave.
My father called the next day to say he had arrived safely and that he would likely not be in touch for a few days. My mother and I might have been more bothered if Babs, post-surgery, hadn’t promptly fallen ill.
My mother took Babs, her chest rising and falling far too rapidly, to the emergency veterinary clinic, where she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure brought on by the stress of her otherwise successful surgery. On the weekends, when I was visiting from New York, I helped my mother with Babs’s care. As my mother held her down, I’d pry open her mouth with one hand and squirt the medications in with the other, an effort that usually ended with some small portion of the medication going down her gullet and the rest of it action-painted on her white flanks.
I was again in Connecticut when my father called.
“Your girlfriend is sick,” I heard my mother tell him, and after a brief back and forth, she handed me the phone.
“Your mother is mad,” my father said.
“Why shouldn’t she be?”
“She could have come with me.” At one point, quite belatedly, a pro forma offer had been tendered to my mother to accompany my father to Greece.
“She didn’t want to leave me behind,” I said.
“But you’re grown!” he said.
“She didn’t want to leave her family behind,” I said.
“But I’m her family,” he said.
“Well, I am, too!” I said.
“Vre, Xeni!” he said, letting me know he had had enough of these semantic games.
It would be by trial and error, the doctor told us, that we’d eventually find the right ratio of heart medicine to diuretic for Babs. In the interim, we were instructed to bring her in each time her heart rate exceeded sixty beats per minute. My mother spent the next two months ferrying Babs to and from the emergency clinic, once at high noon on one of the hottest days of the summer in a black Honda Civic bought by my parents when my father still didn’t believe in air conditioning. Babs was panting furiously in her carrier, and at every intersection, my mother got out of the car, opened the back door and swung it as far as it would go on its heavy hinges in an attempt to simulate a breeze.
When my father next called, my mother refused to speak to him.
“He doesn’t love us. Maybe he loves you, but he doesn’t love me.”
“He loves us both,” I said, although this love felt ill-defined at the moment.
“Does he say he misses us? You never say he says he misses us,” she said.
And then, as if trying to marshal yet stronger evidence of his disregard: “I bet he doesn’t even ask about Babs!”
My father accepted that my mother wouldn’t speak to him even as he sounded increasingly lonely.
He had traveled to Greece in late July knowing the country went on collective holiday in August. “No one’s around,” he said. “Everyone’s away.”
He was having the same arguments at the local kafeneio he had at his stateside kafeneio. Apparently, some of the Greek Greeks were as skeptical of evolution as the American Greeks. “They look at the monkeys, and they think, ‘I didn’t come from that.’ I look at a monkey, and I think, ‘My brother!’”
“August will end,” I told him. “Your friends will come back.”
He said he knew, but he didn’t sound as if he believed it.
By now, Babs had stabilized. We had gotten better at administering her medicine or had accepted that a good portion of it would miss her mouth. The doctors felt confident she would live to an old age even more ripe than her current one.
My father called.
“I’m coming home,” he told me.
“Really?” I said.
“Tell your mother I need her to look into a return ticket,” he said.
I don’t know if I hung up, but I should have.
My father, once home, promptly resumed his life. He started looking for a post-retirement job. He went to the kafeneio and complained about its denizens. He whispered sweet nothings to Babs. He acted as if the trip to Greece was, indeed, just an errand he had run and from which he was now back.
But I remember him, a day or two after he arrived, sitting on a tall kitchen chair, his body slumped over its back, arms encircling it in a weak embrace. He looked as sad as I’d ever seen him, as he’d ever allowed himself to look, his unhappiness no longer cloaked in the cover of superiority and purpose. Something in him seemed withered, and I wondered whether it had always been. “Your father was like a cut flower,” my mother would say much, much later, long after Babs had died and my father was several years into the dementia that turned Greece again into an obsession and then into less than a memory. We had been discussing the immigrant Greeks we knew, wondering why some thrived and others failed to. “He couldn’t put down roots, here, there, anywhere.”
Whatever despair I sensed in my father that day, even if it never resolved into contentment, didn’t last for long. Later that evening, he was in our den, sitting on the couch with Babs.
Watching from the doorway the two of them chatting away, I summoned my mother to join me.
“What do you think they’re saying?” I asked. Surely, surely, I thought, he was happy to be home. I didn’t let myself think what was too painful to consider: that it was us he had left behind, not the United States, that it was us, in some real way, he had rejected.
“Oh, I know exactly what they’re saying,” she said, needing no time to answer, already walking away as she did. “‘You don’t know what these two bitches put me through this summer.’”
“I’m moving to Greece,” he told me and my mother. “And I’m never coming back.”
I can’t say I was surprised. My father had been bitching about the United States for as long as I could remember. He found the climate miserable, the culture anti-intellectual, the people sex-obsessed and prudish at once. That he was right on every count didn’t make it any less wearying to hear. Did we know that capitalism was a con, the prison system an obscenity, Henry Kissinger a war criminal? We did, we did. We knew, too, how much he hated his job at the local factory, where he spent two decades trying to decide what he liked least about his co-workers: their casual racism or how obligingly they let themselves get shafted by management. I had asked him once, when I was a child, “Papa, are you what people call a Pinko Liberal?” and he had answered, more impishly than was probably wise at the height of the Cold War, “Oh, no, Xenoula. I’m what people call a Red.”
And, yet, for all his antipathy toward the United States, he had moved here not once, but twice, first illegally after jumping ship in the sixties, then again after marrying and summarily knocking up my mother in Greece. He had applied to become an American citizen as soon as he was eligible, allowing my mother, when she was asked at my father’s naturalization hearing whether he had ever spoken ill of the US government, to prove herself a quick thinker under threat of perjury by answering,“Hasn’t everyone?”
It would not be long, though, before he started floating the idea of returning to Greece. The first of his plans was proposed when I was still in elementary school, the penultimate one when I was just out of college. There were others in between too hare-brained even by my father’s generous standards to garner more than a brief mention. All of them required money my father didn’t have, licenses he was unlikely to get, the cooperation of a wife and child who made it clear they considered America their home. My mother and I lived in terror of these schemes but sometimes years would pass between them, and we’d be lulled into believing he’d finally been made a convert to our country. My mother had called me up to declare him “finally an American” when, after twenty years of deriding us as “not real Greeks” for swooning in ninety-degree temperatures, he acceded to our entreaties and bought an air conditioner. My hopes had been raised much earlier. Among “real Greeks,” it was not uncommon to consider cats at best a step above vermin, but my father loved them unabashedly. “Look at us,” he’d say, meaning humans. “Just a mop of hair up here”—he palmed his own head—“a tiny patch down there,” the hand now waving sadly at his crotch. “But look at them”—beaming, he would point at one of our cats—“they’re perfect.”
The one he considered the most perfect of all was Babs. She was seventeen years old, a white, fluffy Vegas showgirl of a cat with an arthritic hitch in her slinky walk. She liked to speak to humans and to no one more than my father. When he got home from the factory each night—Babs would be at the front door before his engine had turned off—his first words were always to her, and we were able to infer Babs’s half of the exchange from my father’s cooing replies: “Yes, yes, I’ve missed you, too.” “No, I love you more.” The rest of the conversation, once he’d gotten out of his uniform and they’d retired to a secluded spot in the TV room, was harder to make out but, we assumed, involved a lot of admiring of one another’s good looks and commiserating about having been born for better things.
The last decision my mother and father made as a couple before his departure was to schedule Babs for a surgery to remove the lump—a malignant tumor, it would turn out—I had detected through the cottony fur on her back. When, on my father’s last day before his flight to Greece, I saw him and Babs on the couch, I heard him tell her she was going to be just fine. And then I heard him ask her: “Am I doing the right thing?” I brightened at the possibility that he was doubting the wisdom of his plan, but Babs must have affirmed his choice because the next day, carrying the bags he had somehow conscripted my mother into packing for him, we headed to the airport.
At JFK, my mother continued fussing over his luggage, apologizing in advance in case she had forgotten anything. I hugged my father and wept. He comforted me, telling me it would all be okay. As upset as I was, he was uncommonly relaxed, loose, his the lightness of a man finally able to make his exit from a party for whose entire length he had been furtively checking his watch, wondering how early is too early to leave.
My father called the next day to say he had arrived safely and that he would likely not be in touch for a few days. My mother and I might have been more bothered if Babs, post-surgery, hadn’t promptly fallen ill.
My mother took Babs, her chest rising and falling far too rapidly, to the emergency veterinary clinic, where she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure brought on by the stress of her otherwise successful surgery. On the weekends, when I was visiting from New York, I helped my mother with Babs’s care. As my mother held her down, I’d pry open her mouth with one hand and squirt the medications in with the other, an effort that usually ended with some small portion of the medication going down her gullet and the rest of it action-painted on her white flanks.
I was again in Connecticut when my father called.
“Your girlfriend is sick,” I heard my mother tell him, and after a brief back and forth, she handed me the phone.
“Your mother is mad,” my father said.
“Why shouldn’t she be?”
“She could have come with me.” At one point, quite belatedly, a pro forma offer had been tendered to my mother to accompany my father to Greece.
“She didn’t want to leave me behind,” I said.
“But you’re grown!” he said.
“She didn’t want to leave her family behind,” I said.
“But I’m her family,” he said.
“Well, I am, too!” I said.
“Vre, Xeni!” he said, letting me know he had had enough of these semantic games.
It would be by trial and error, the doctor told us, that we’d eventually find the right ratio of heart medicine to diuretic for Babs. In the interim, we were instructed to bring her in each time her heart rate exceeded sixty beats per minute. My mother spent the next two months ferrying Babs to and from the emergency clinic, once at high noon on one of the hottest days of the summer in a black Honda Civic bought by my parents when my father still didn’t believe in air conditioning. Babs was panting furiously in her carrier, and at every intersection, my mother got out of the car, opened the back door and swung it as far as it would go on its heavy hinges in an attempt to simulate a breeze.
When my father next called, my mother refused to speak to him.
“He doesn’t love us. Maybe he loves you, but he doesn’t love me.”
“He loves us both,” I said, although this love felt ill-defined at the moment.
“Does he say he misses us? You never say he says he misses us,” she said.
And then, as if trying to marshal yet stronger evidence of his disregard: “I bet he doesn’t even ask about Babs!”
My father accepted that my mother wouldn’t speak to him even as he sounded increasingly lonely.
He had traveled to Greece in late July knowing the country went on collective holiday in August. “No one’s around,” he said. “Everyone’s away.”
He was having the same arguments at the local kafeneio he had at his stateside kafeneio. Apparently, some of the Greek Greeks were as skeptical of evolution as the American Greeks. “They look at the monkeys, and they think, ‘I didn’t come from that.’ I look at a monkey, and I think, ‘My brother!’”
“August will end,” I told him. “Your friends will come back.”
He said he knew, but he didn’t sound as if he believed it.
By now, Babs had stabilized. We had gotten better at administering her medicine or had accepted that a good portion of it would miss her mouth. The doctors felt confident she would live to an old age even more ripe than her current one.
My father called.
“I’m coming home,” he told me.
“Really?” I said.
“Tell your mother I need her to look into a return ticket,” he said.
I don’t know if I hung up, but I should have.
My father, once home, promptly resumed his life. He started looking for a post-retirement job. He went to the kafeneio and complained about its denizens. He whispered sweet nothings to Babs. He acted as if the trip to Greece was, indeed, just an errand he had run and from which he was now back.
But I remember him, a day or two after he arrived, sitting on a tall kitchen chair, his body slumped over its back, arms encircling it in a weak embrace. He looked as sad as I’d ever seen him, as he’d ever allowed himself to look, his unhappiness no longer cloaked in the cover of superiority and purpose. Something in him seemed withered, and I wondered whether it had always been. “Your father was like a cut flower,” my mother would say much, much later, long after Babs had died and my father was several years into the dementia that turned Greece again into an obsession and then into less than a memory. We had been discussing the immigrant Greeks we knew, wondering why some thrived and others failed to. “He couldn’t put down roots, here, there, anywhere.”
Whatever despair I sensed in my father that day, even if it never resolved into contentment, didn’t last for long. Later that evening, he was in our den, sitting on the couch with Babs.
Watching from the doorway the two of them chatting away, I summoned my mother to join me.
“What do you think they’re saying?” I asked. Surely, surely, I thought, he was happy to be home. I didn’t let myself think what was too painful to consider: that it was us he had left behind, not the United States, that it was us, in some real way, he had rejected.
“Oh, I know exactly what they’re saying,” she said, needing no time to answer, already walking away as she did. “‘You don’t know what these two bitches put me through this summer.’”