Familial

Papp dropped her off at the diner at a quarter to four. Despite his best paternalistic intentions, begging her to instead come home with him, she swore that her sister would pick her up from the diner on the way to her Big City Office Job. But Eva didn’t have a sister, or a mother for that matter, and she preferred to forget her father. Besides, now she had a new one—a tubby middle aged white man who wore neither his age nor his fat well. His jowls kept time in jiggles as the van pulled into the diner’s parking lot, empty but for three scattered cars, waiting eerily in the neon glow of the restaurant’s sign like abashed solicitors outside a peep show.

The Big City lights did not reach this far out into the hills, and the fluorescent diner burned brightly, attracting road side night dwellers as insects are drawn to street lamps in the dark. Papp became suddenly aware of the advantages of the darkness as the headlights switched off and he smiled, his neck fat stretching taunt across his chin, making his wide grin look shallow and his lips thin. She looked away from his bared sallow teeth, feeling devoured by his gaze. Her stomach was grumbling but Papp was drunk and she knew that even if she turned away and ignored him she would soon feel his grubby fingers on her skin, reaching through the sticky space between them and finding their way to her hipbone. An unreciprocated yet delighted giggle bubbled deep from his stomach, followed by a ghost of that evening’s brandy, dead and fermented yet haunting his chest cavity. She waited for the worn cotton of a five beneath the elastic on her underwear, then sprung into the neon night, leaving Papp alone in the dark to his own devices.

“Daddy loves his Baby Girl!” cried Papp from the window of the van with a brandy-scented hiccup.

Leaving Papp, Eva tried to dismiss the incestuous hunger she saw in his jaundiced eyes, bulging as though strangled about the neck. But behind every incest lies a kingdom waiting to be inherited, robed in red but built on the prophecies of gods. When she felt most violated, most polluted, she fancied herself mythological. If Oedipus had been a girl, Eva mused, her mother would have perished of utter shame, wagging her mournful head the whole way to the grave, and her father would have fucked her with disturbing desperation each night in the wide backseat of a van. To the unimpressive soundtrack of squeaking springs and skin sticking to fake leather upholstery, Whiteness overcame Blackness, and Lightness consumed Darkness. Eva longed for the day that Papp, upon the sickening realization that he had railed his Daughter, would hang himself with a stiff rope, fulfilling at long last the tragic, Oedipal prophecy. Granted, Oedipus gouged out his own eyes, disgusted and ashamed at what he had done, but at least this would save Eva from the sight of her shambled life and the bruises on her thighs. Faint hints of predawn light teased the black horizon with blotchy, yellow fingers, and Eva scuttled across parking lot wishing for blindness.

Eva’s mother had, in fact, died prematurely, although not from shame of her obstinate daughter. Her eventual demise was hardly anything to merit mythological retellings. She simply withered away from overwork, worn away year after year by the demands of far too many hungry boys, so that by the end of her slighted days she was a frail and osteoporotic skeleton, threatening to break beneath the increasingly heavy demands of her men. Eva’s father was ashamed of his wife’s emaciated form.

“Don’t you ever go hungry, you hear me Baby Girl?” he preached endlessly, thrusting the rough wood of a hoe into her hands, forcing his daughter to work even before she could properly walk. “Hunger is the worst of all earthly ills,” he believed, “because if you’re hungry, it means you’re lazy. And God won’t save the idle.” And so Eva worked, but tonight her stomach growled nonetheless.

From the darkness of the diner’s doorstep, Eva could see Màna strutting in the fluorescent light with her tray in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. Her smile evoked an innocent pride, as though she were a maître d’hôtel in a lavish restaurant, and as though the mounded plates of sweet potato fries she was balancing on her elbow were no less than tiramisu. Eva was glad to see her. The rotund Greek woman had a ringing laughter that was disproportionately delicate compared to her thick body. She looked toward the diner’s door at the sound of the dinging bell with the same eager expectancy of a mother awaiting the late return of her wayward daughter.

Màna rarely asked questions of Eva, she just brought her a plate of grits with melted cheese, and asked if she’d like some coffee. Eva nodded, not looking her in the eyes. On weekdays when Eva had slow nights, Màna wouldn’t make her pay. When the girl insisted, the Greek matron would protest, and if nothing else, slip a handful of after dinner mints into her pocket or an apple in a brown paper bag for Eva on the way out the jingling door. Màna joked, “You’re too thin, Baby Girl,” placing her hand on Eva’s cheek, dwarfing her chin and cheekbones alike with a single olive palm. Though touched, Eva would slink away, as though shame were a contagious and fatal disease that could be spread upon the slightest contact. Eva was afraid that if she allowed Màna to pity her, she would infect her with indignity.

The evening had been for the most part slow; before Papp had come to pick her up, she had but a sole client. He was a sturdy man that reminded Eva of her brothers, with dirt beneath his fingernails and grease smeared under his chin, as though he had worked his way out from under the body of a car and slid right under her own black underside. He paid well, and Papp had been drunkenly gracious and generous. Tonight she would pay back Màna in full. Màna would be proud of her Baby Girl, strong and self-sufficient. Eva drank her coffee in silence, listening to the faint click of insects zooming to their death in the fluorescent lights above.

The door chimed with the entrance of a new customer, and both Màna and Eva looked up with anticipation. Sometimes she dreamed that one day a real-life sister would walk through the door on the way to her Big City Office Job, with soft, slender hands, a modest, grey pencil skirt, and perhaps even a fashionable bob haircut. But Eva did not have a sister. Instead, she saw the visage of her brothers, the same slicked back hair and skin blackened under grime. Eva quickly averted her eyes, looking into the neon night, avoiding yet again the wide grin of a drunken man, the taste of his yellow teeth familiar to her tongue. A pair of grease stained mechanic’s overalls sauntered past, and Eva could not bring herself to lift her fork to her mouth. Màna had disappeared with a pot of coffee, attending to her men. Eva left without paying, hungry.