My Baba’s Idea of Sexy
by Eleni Zaptses
When Baba asked me to come to her annual eye exam, I should have been suspicious. My mama and Teta Maria typically handled all health matters concerning Baba. I wasn’t the first, third, or even seventh person who was called for help. I preferred it this way. When my family learned you had a practical skill, you were appointed as the family specialist. I didn’t need that additional expectation in my life.
Baba professed each letter on the lowest row of her eye exam with the bravado of a politician. Despite her seventy-six years, Baba didn’t wear glasses. It was a fact she used as a justification against her other ailments, like the double knee replacement surgery she’d been putting off for the past year. When she was finished, Baba leaned back from the phoropter. Her legs dangled off the examination chair, her hand-knitted slippers not quite reaching the footrest.
Baba’s new optometrist, Dr. Katz, flicked the light switch. He couldn’t have been more than two years out of optometry school. His thick black hair flopped over his forehead, too short to pull back in a bun, but long enough to demand a haircut. His button-down shirt couldn’t hide how his shoulders jutted out in sharp edges, liable to nick someone. I wasn’t feeling too confident in his expertise.
Dr. Katz opened Baba’s retinal image file on his computer. He clicked on her optic disc that glowed like a golden egg, then double-clicked the red veins that branched out from it. He zoomed into different parts of the retinal image to check for abnormalities.
“Your eyes are in excellent health Mrs. Petro,” Dr. Katz said. “No stigmatisms or degeneration in either eye.”
He pointed at his own hooded eye behind his glasses and traced a trail with his index finger to his temple, a simplified explanation of how the images we see are sent to our brains. Baba nodded along with a polite reverence. His patient explanation may impress Baba, but it didn’t impress me.
“What canna’i say. I still see everything,” Baba said with a shrug.
“I bet nothing gets past you, Mrs. Petro.”
Baba smiled, appearing flattered, and bowed her head in agreement with Dr. Katz’s assertion.
“My granddaughter Marina come with me today.”
Dr. Katz closed the retinal images, revealing a desktop background of evergreen trees on a foggy fall day. “You’re very lucky to have such a caring family, Mrs. Petro.”
“She a very good girl. The best! You know, she wanna be eye doctor too. You help?”
My crossed legs squeezed together like a coiled snake tightening its grip. I tried leaning back on the hind legs of my chair, to dip away from Baba’s request, but its sled legs were nailed to the grey speckled carpet. I was trapped.
Dr. Katz’s attention blinded me like a retinoscope. “You want to be an optometrist?”
His question prodded at an invisible scar near my chest. I instinctively reached out to cover it.
“Oh, that was a few years ago. I’m in pharmaceutical advertising now.”
He reached over his space grey counter for his business card, which was clear of any signs of life. Not one family photo, vacation souvenir, or even a cactus plant lined the counter. It was likely a professional choice, but it made me think of unbuttered toast. Rough and dry.
“I almost gave up too, but my waitlist turned into an acceptance.”
“How fortunate.”
“It was. They told me I was the last person who got accepted.”
The back side of his card displayed a detailed charcoal phoropter sketch. His name and list of esteemed accreditations followed on the other.
“You wouldn’t know that now,” I said, pointing to his accreditations.
“True, but I always will.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked back on the heels of his suede Nikes. “If you change your mind, let me know.”
Baba clapped with glee when Dr. Katz left the room to end the appointment.
“Very funny, Baba. I know what you were trying to do.”
Baba feigned innocence. “Do what?”
“You just set me up with your optometrist.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I know your little maneuvers, and it’s not going to work.”
I crumpled his card and stuffed it in my jacket pocket.
Baba sighed and shook her head. “It not just eye doctor who can’t see.”
-o-o-o-
Baba’s matchmaking began a year after Dedo died. For that first year, Baba mourned his death with a fervent worship. Baba wore the same black sleeved shirt and slacks, and forwent wearing any jewellery, even her favourite pearl clip-on earrings, insisting that it was an unnecessary indulgence. Incense perfumed her home from a blood red votive candle. Once one candle was almost burned through, she transferred the flame from one wick to the next.
Baba even asked Mama to print an assortment of family pictures. Instead of Christmas garland glittering the mantle that year, pictures of my baba and dedo lined the mantle like an altar. After fifty-two years of marriage, three daughters, and seven granddaughters, Baba was determined to die with Dedo. But an almost mystical calling wouldn’t let her.
Baba finally conceded to transfer the deeds and estates to her name, and it was my cousin Stelly who drove her to that appointment. At the accountant’s office, Baba came alive for the first time since Dedo’s death, greeting the front desk staff with a wider selection of English words Stelly had never heard Baba use. Baba revived with fervour when a junior accountant held the door for her. His name was Mike, and Baba introduced him to Stelly. They’ve been married for six years now.
As a thank you for introducing them, Stelly and Mike knocked on Baba’s door the week of their wedding and presented her with a gift: a new pair of shoes. A long-held, but often elusive Macedonian tradition, the shoes were the matchmaker’s reward for their vital contribution to the wedding.
We weren’t entirely convinced of Baba’s abilities after her first match. Some thought it was purely coincidental. I thought it was a fluke. I’ve known many friends and relatives who tried and failed to match people in our community, fuelled by the reward of a new pair of shoes. It wasn’t until Baba’s third match, it was my cousin Lena this time, that we started to believe.
Her record now stood at five marriages, only one ended in divorce. We were becoming more and more convinced she was a seer of a marriage oracle. I often imagined her concocting potential meet-cute scenarios while stirring a pot of boiling bop.
Her talents of matchmaking also meant that Baba stopped mourning. She wore colour again. She donned her favourite jewels including her clip-on pearl earrings. She even indulged and got manicures with my sisters and I in the summer. The photos remained on the mantel, a time capsule instead of time encapsulating.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that Baba would try to match me. Out of the seven granddaughters, I was the only one unmarried. I was an outlier, a project that was incomplete.
-o-o-o-
A year ago, I thought I was on the well-worn path to marriage. I met Zach at a mutual friend’s twenty-first birthday party. The party was in a dank basement bar on a rainy Monday night, and we had most of the bar to ourselves. What started with a small group of eight soon grew to fifty by last call.
As the thumping bass vibrated in my chest on the dancefloor, the only clear image I saw in my drunken haze was Zach’s shadow. He stood on the edge of the dancefloor, wearing a tight white t-shirt, hair gelled in messy spikes. He scanned the dancefloor, pausing when he reached me, and I winked at him with a level of courage only alcohol could give.
My relationship with Zach was casual at first. Our drunken kisses that night tasted like a shot of sweat and tequila. After the party, we flirted back and forth through text for weeks and later hooked up while watching Zoolander 2. We then went on dates occasionally to his favourite sports bar for wings. I took him to the university’s observatory to see the super blue moon up close. It wasn’t until our last semester of university that we defined our relationship.
We drove out to the West Coast after graduation to see Lake Louise and moved in together shortly after, much to the disapproval of my family. My parents liked Zach well enough, not that they’d admit it now. Zach had an unfettered optimism about the world. He approached life with his arms outstretched and often walked into situations without thinking of consequence. It was a radical optimism that my wary family found mistrustful. At the time, I found it inspiring.
That inspiration would eventually turn into resentment when I was rejected from optometry school for the second year in a row. Any optimism or hope I had in my dream to be an eye doctor was drying out, and it was time to consider alternatives.
My life as a student didn’t prepare me for the stress I would feel after I graduated. The uncertainty. The need to be hitting milestones to keep up with my peers. The crippling fear of failing my dream and then having to tell my friends and family. The daily reminders on Instagram that I was not maximizing every minute of my diminishing youth. I wasn’t eating well enough. I wasn’t exercising enough. I wasn’t hustling enough. I wasn’t enough. By twenty-four, I was the end of a frayed rope.
Zach said I overthought things. If I wanted my dream enough, I needed to grind it out and do whatever it took to get it. He didn’t understand that I was an empty motor, an outdated computer that struggled to start.
While working myself up to apply to optometry schools in the States, I asked him, “If I have to move for school, will you move with me?”
He flipped the switch to his crypto mining rig, the motor booting up like an airplane taking flight. “Have you applied or is this theoretical?”
“I don’t think that matters. Will you move to whatever school would take me?”
The rig’s flashing green light stopped, and the fan slowed to a halt. Zach cracked his knuckles and began fiddling with the wires.
“Why don’t we wait to talk about this until you have an offer?”
Several restless months later, I put my dream of becoming a doctor to rest. I picked up a full-time job at a pharmaceutical company finding ways to sell more drugs to doctors. Zach and I continued the well-worn path we were taking together, but our paths soon diverged.
Zach worked longer hours claiming he needed to hit his sales targets. Our date nights were less frequent, often in front of the TV watching the Bills. We began snapping over small things like how he never put his shoes on the shoe rack, or I didn’t clean enough of my hair that had fallen in the shower. The closest thing to intimate contact we had was when he’d slip into bed late at night, his back facing me.
When Zach came home smelling like a potpourri of nicotine and tequila after a night out with the boys, he asked me, “Are you happy, Marina?”
A couple days before, I had told my family that I no longer wanted to be an optometrist. “I’ve been happier.”
“We should take a break. Find what makes us happy again.”
It took a couple months to extricate our lives from each other. We broke our lease four months before its renewal, but we still lived with each other for a couple weeks after the breakup. We tiptoed around each other to avoid the creaks and cracks in our relationship as we negotiated who took what. He got the TV, and I got the Nespresso machine and toaster oven.
The well-worn path I’d been walking on had suddenly become a dead end. The vision I had for my life was now fuzzy, out of focus. My family assured me that I had options, yet I struggled to decipher them at a distance and up close.
-o-o-o-
I moved into Baba’s house after the breakup, and the conveniences of the arrangement were plentiful. I feasted on my favourite homemade Macedonian meals like pastrmajlija or tavce gravce. My fresh laundry smelled like lavender and was pressed in uniform piles on my bed. I had my own bathroom where I could spread all my cosmetic products from edge to wall. We spent quality time together, discovering a shared passion for jigsaw puzzles. But every arrangement had a trade-off.
“Where you go last night?”
“I went out for ice cream with Stacey and Talia.”
Baba clicked two puzzle pieces together. Most of her progress was in the bottom corner where a dark turquoise sea would soon join the rudder of a boat.
“What for?”
“To catch up with my sisters?”
Baba made a hmph sound and swatted her hand at me. “You talk on phone every day. You should be going out. Meet new people.”
The trade-off of my living arrangement was that I had to tell her where I was going and when I’d be home every day. Although I didn’t have a curfew, Baba remained awake in her bed until she heard the rumbling of the garage door, announcing my return. I felt like I was a teenager again.
“I done understand. You young, smart, beautiful. You have good job. Good family. You should go out more. When you do, you should, how you say, feel sexy!”
I grabbed the ear of her chair and guffawed. Baba giggled at my discomfort.
“Is’a that how you say?”
I have never, in my twenty-seven years, heard my baba use the term sexy, or anything remotely adjacent. The only evidence of my baba’s sexual activity was confirmed by the existence of my mama and teta. Sex in my family was an elusive topic. It happened in discreet acts, never discussed.
“What do you mean by sexy?”
She tsked and picked up her latest matchmaking gift: a pair of black kitten heels.
“Remember the story of when I visit Solon for the first time? The big city?”
It was the story Baba told us whenever we were acting ungrateful. It was the story of Baba leaving her village for the first time at fifteen years old. She took the bus with her tate for three bumpy hours, one way, the rotting stench of pesticides from the passing farms making her retch in a paper bag. Another passenger, startled by the flickering lightbulb at the front of the bus, jumped up and swatted at the bulb. He had never seen a lightbulb before and thought it was an open flame that needed to be put out.
When Baba arrived at the Aristotelous Square, she walked in her father’s shadow. The towering Byzantine architecture, honking cars, and salty smell of the Aegean Sea overwhelmed her. A crowd of communist protestors carrying red banners marched the square. A teenage boy holding a KKE flag said she was walking in the wrong direction, and she should turn around to join them.
What Baba recalled the most from that story was the shoes. The variety and volume. How everyone who walked past her wore a different pair. She stood outside the shoe shop in the square, the display case an exhibit. Loafers, high heels, sandals, tennis shoes, and slippers, all polished to a bright shine. She had one pair of mud brown loafers then, worn thin at the heels.
Baba vowed that this was the moment when she decided that she would leave the village. See more of the world. Live a life in a place that was different than what her family had ever known.
“Everyone was dressed up there. Bright colours. Big hair like beehive. Indulgences everywhere! And they wore these shoes with heels that look like needles. Shoes you could never wear in the village. When I wear shoes like that, I feel sexy.”
Her story swerved in a newfound direction. The regular conclusion of her story was that we should be grateful for the opportunities and access to resources we had in Canada and make the most of them. That it wasn’t a right but a newfound privilege to our family. It unsettled me to hear a story so integral to our family lore be revised so casually.
“What make you feel sexy, Marina?”
I thought the answer would be instant, intuitive. But feelings weren’t ideas. Feelings flowed like water. They were the antidote to quench an acute, thirsty desire. But they also had the power to drench you, making your wet clothes chafe your skin, leaving you sore and raw. I had felt that soreness for so long that I forgot what it felt like to feel desire for myself.
“I can’t remember.”
Baba blew out the votive candle on her stove. “You don’t need to remember. You feel how you feel now.”
-o-o-o-
I learned of Zach’s engagement on Instagram. I didn’t expect a phone call, a text. He never answered my happy birthday message from a couple months ago. When I saw the collaborative post, his fiancé’s hand glittering, the scar leftover from our relationship felt sore, like a bruise resurfacing.
He proposed to his fiancé outside the fountain entrance of Casa Loma. It was a rainy spring day, so they held bubble-shaped umbrellas. They gazed lovingly into each other’s eyes, and embraced as if they were fused together. I didn’t like the post.
I knew he had moved on, dated other people. His engagement brought a finality to our relationship, extinguishing an ember of hope that I kept alive like the votive on Baba’s stovetop. I didn’t hope that we’d get back together. I wasn’t that deluded. I hoped that the calm wisdom of knowing what I wanted in my life would return.
Both of my sisters called to ask if I’d seen the post. I assured them I was fine with it. And I was fine with it. Until I zoomed in to see the ring. It was an exact replica of the ring I pinned on my Pinterest board. A solitaire with a gold band and twisted shoulders.
I pulled an ironed sweatshirt by the sleeve from my bed and cried into the cotton fabric. My cries were first from frustration. Then they were for sadness, longing, and loneliness. Self pity and loathing. We’ve been broken up for a year now. There shouldn’t be anything else I had to cry about.
When I was done wringing myself out like a sponge, I opened my shell-shaped jewellery box, a relic from when I used to sleepover at Baba’s house in my childhood. I rifled through the box, past the tangled necklaces and earrings with missing backings. At the bottom of the box was a mood ring I picked out at Claire’s when I was eight. I was impressed that a piece of jewelry could detect how I was feeling. Its gold band had dulled, the mood gem set to black.
I held the ring out to myself, a proposition. I slid the ring onto my finger and held it out toward the mirror. The gemstone turned from black to gray before eventually settling on a calm, sky blue.
-o-o-o-
I received an email reminder that I was due for an eye exam a couple months later. Unlike Baba, I wasn’t blessed with twenty-fifteen vision. My stigmatism in my right eye was acting up, and there weren’t enough eye exercises or eye drops available to correct it. An upgrade in my contact prescription was imminent.
My eye degeneration could have been prevented if I hadn’t boycotted the eye doctor. After getting rejected from optometry school for a second year in a row, it was too painful to be so close to my now decomposing dream.
I put off the reminder for a week. Until a collection of ChapStick tubes, a couple wrapped mints, and a crinkled business card were piled at the foot of my bed. I popped one of the mints in my mouth and unfurled the business card. A crease sliced across Dr. Katz’s name, and I couldn’t help but laugh, concede.
I called the business number on Dr. Katz’s card, which took me to the reception desk at his office. I paced with my head down, my free hand in my pocket. As the dial tone rang, I lifted my chin up, and my strides became longer, surer. The receptionist asked if I had a preference on which doctor I’d like to administer the exam. My hips suddenly swayed more, like a paint brush marking a bold, curved line on a new canvas.
“I’d like to see Dr. Katz, please.”
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Eleni Zaptses is a fiction writer from Waterloo, Ontario. She is also the Managing Editor of The New Quarterly and Festival Manager of the Wild Writers Literary Festival. @elenizaptses on Instagram. elenizaptses.com