Month: May 2017

Or, On Choosing My Pen Name

My given name isn’t Alysia. Well, not technically: it’s not my given first name, not the name by which most friends know me. It’s my middle name (the one trace of my Greek ethnicity given in my moniker). And Constantine isn’t my given last name, but it’s a pared-down version.

My Father-the-Greek originally had a 16-letter last name, but changed it when he immigrated to America so that American Bureaucracy could handle it. Most American forms weren’t built, at least in the 1960s, to accommodate such a ridiculously long (by American standards) family name. They expected Miller or Jackson, maybe even Kuntz, but certainly not LotsaSyllablesadopoulos. So he shortened it from 16 letters to 4 letters. A simple spelling. De-ethnicitized. Which, apparently, most Americans can’t figure out, because it gets mispronounced or misspelled on the daily.

My given first name isn’t Greek. It isn’t even Scottish, which is my mother’s heritage. It’s not “American,” either (whatever that would be). It’s German.

Which means my full given name is German NoEthnicity and, along with the fact that I’ve colored my hair lavender-on-white, means I really have little trace of either ethnic heritage–neither my mother’s muddled Scottish-American-mix nor my father’s You-WILL-Go-to-Greek-School-Twice-a-Week-Immigrant-Greek.

I feel more Greek-American than Scottish-American, in large part because, culturally, our family lived as Greek-Americans. We ate Greek home cooking. I went to Greek school (my dad actually was one of the teachers.) We spoke a Greek-English pidgen at home. Many of our family friends were called Mrs. Thea or Mr. Yannis (Greek kids respectfully call familiar adults Mr./Mrs. Firstname). There was more than one thing in our house emblazoned with the Greek flag. (That may have had something to do with the fact that the Scottish part is several generations back, but my dad immigrated in his twenties from Greece and that whole side of our family is still there. Plus, my dad is olive-brown-skinned and heavily-accented, and nobody ever discriminated against my mother for being ethnically Scottish (a concomitant discrimination based on being ethnically Greek has been happening to my dad since he immigrated in the 1960s. Although it still happens now, the treatment of my father has become less about job and social discrimination than it has about finding him delightfully “ethnic” and asking his advice about to which Lebanese restaurant one should go (I know he’s not Lebanese, but apparently, to many Americans, swarthy people are all the same.).).)

In school, we read non-white/non-American stuff for “color,” as a kind of sauce-on-the-side addition to the Real Stuff. (I know even including the “color” was progressive back then.) But the Real Stuff, the stuff the SAT and the GRE covered, was written largely by white American and British men. Though it sometimes involved a character who was, like my dad, “ethnic,” that character usually Meant Something. (And although this condition was common for “swarthy” folk, it was far more common for ethnically-more-othered people who did not pass as white. (I was, depending on the occasion, sometimes treated as “ethnic” and sometimes as white, and usually had the option to pass, especially if I could avoid giving my name or introducing my dad.) It was a problem which was more pervasive and more insidious for my friends who were racially marked in a way I was not. How tiring, always to have to be Significant or else be invisible.) My education, and the subsequent testing thereof, in large part, was entirely “Call Me Ishmael.”

Before you ask, since you’ve probably seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding, no, we did not have a thing about Windex. Except for cleaning glass. (I have been asked that at least once a month since that movie came out, and just found out the joke, having finally watched it just two weeks ago.)

All this is to say that, while I identify as first-gen and grew up very “ethnic” (please hear me laughing as I use that Whitebread Nose-Wrinkling Euphemism for “Not Us”), you wouldn’t know it now. Not by my name, not by my appearance. Maybe by my cooking. Maybe by the tiny Greek-New Yorker inflection that happens to my speech when I talk fast. But not by my name.

I know they say that a rose by any other name would smell as Greek, but that’s not true in my case. So I decided to take the pen name I did because I wanted to re-Greek myself, to undo in a small way the efforts of my father to fit in as an American which, in the 1960s, meant erasing a large part of his identity. Since I’m not having children to carry forth the Greek bloodline (for shame, this is a horrible thing for a Greek-American girl to do), I wanted, at least, to do this.

See, by attempting to Americanize himself, my dad, who is by American standards “swarthy” in sunless winter and nut-brown in summer, only called attention to our difference. The kids at school, the neighbors, storekeepers at the mall, everyone looked at us as the “No Cigar” family (as in “close, but no cigar”), a mild version of Homi Bhabha’s “not quite/not white” (I say “mild” because, while our ethnicity made us “not white” in most neighbors’ eyes, we were still considered–and treated as–“more white” than my ethnically Asian or South-Indian or Black friends). We were the Mockolate of American families.

I grew up, as a result, with a “thing” about authenticity. I received daily messages that I and my family were not “real” Americans (read: white), and yet many of the Greek kids didn’t consider me “Greek enough” because of my white American-born mother. I was constantly trying to prove myself authentic to both camps, shuttling between them, trying to be both Greek enough and American enough to get by. (It may be why, in part, I resisted coming out as a lesbian until I was out of that awful midwestern whitebread neighborhood, because that would have been just one more strike against me, and to boot, would have fulfilled the Amazon/Lesbos stereotype.)

Now, older, settled into both my ethnic mixedness and my queerness (and most every other -ness I’ve got going on), I’m pretty sure I could handle those whitebread ninnies. They don’t hold power over me any more. And I’m less worried about critics trouncing my work as a novelist. Plus, most people know both my given and pen names anyway (I guess I still shuttle between identities). People often use the metaphor of “embracing” to describe that process of accepting (and even celebrating, promoting) something, but I feel like that doesn’t quite do the trick. I don’t want to say I’ve “embraced” my ethnicity or my queerness like it’s some homeless guy one charitably agrees to hug or some smelly leper-cat one loves anyway. I’ve come to love myself because of my Greekness and queerness, rather than despite it.

So come correct. Don’t be the American asshat who, upon hearing I’m Greek-American, asks me about that movie, or wants to know about whether we had a thing for Windex. We used a K-mart off-brand, and it wouldn’t really live up to the hilarious “ethnic” stereotype.

And call me Alysia.

When I was 15, I was, like many a teen girl in the ‘80s, a babysitter. My regulars included a family who lived down the street, the D— family, whose children were John, Stevie and Diana, ranging from 8 to 3 years old. This essay is about the night John, the older boy, almost died.

They were good kids: nice, friendly, smart, and generally pretty well-behaved. Generally. Because watching three kids at once is… a tougher job than most 15-year-olds should handle. On the night in question, I’d shoveled them all into footie pajamas, gotten teeth brushed, and herded them into bed on schedule, then settled myself on the living room couch to do homework and wait for their parents to come home. I was probably struggling over some math or other, probably something with triangles or exponents, though I have no memory of it. I had probably poured myself a glass of contraband Diet Coke or Tab and curled my socked feet underneath me and snuggled back into the cushions. Not twenty minutes passed, however, before the night collapsed into chaos.

John came thundering down the stairs and asked me, clearly trying to sound casual, what you do if you swallow poison.

Now, let me tell you, no babysitter wants to hear that question (it’s right up there with where do babies come from?). Though the kid insisted he had simply had a bad dream, it was immediately clear that it was a question motivated by some poison-swallowing event. To my credit, I only freaked out on him for a second before calling the poison control hotline (thank goodness the family had a magnet on the fridge with the phone number). While on hold, I managed to get him to admit the story: he’d had what he thought was a toothache and had snuck out of bed and gone rooting under the sink in his mother’s bathroom for a cure and had come up with her smelling salts, which were wrapped in gauze, leading him to believe they were some sort of dentist-related treatment, since the dentist seemed fond of gauze, and John had put one in his mouth and bitten down, thinking this would treat his toothache. (In case you have never been near smelling salts, they are usually made of ammonia, the strong smell of which is designed to jolt someone back to consciousness and, in this case, were in gauze-wrapped capsules to be snapped open for use, which does NOT involve putting them in one’s mouth, but simply holding the ammonia-leaking capsule under the woozy person’s nose.) When he bit down, he cracked open the capsule and tasted something caustic (ammonia, one assumes) and panicked.

By this time, the Poison People had answered the phone, and helped me determine that the smelling salts were probably old enough that the ammonia had sufficiently weakened so as to be smelly but relatively harmless. Had they been fresher, he could have gotten chemical burns in his mouth and throat, the Poison People said seriously.

So, the aftermath: I told the parents everything when they got home, and they continued to hire me for babysitting even after this. Not much, in other words, changed. I remained the industrious teen with a paltry social life, a high GPA and a savings account of earnings earmarked for college who went to art school on the weekends and played, very seriously, classical violin in a state symphony (this is all to say: NERD). But thirty years later, I’m still remembering John and his terrifying question: what do you do if you swallow poison?

I was the daughter of an American farmgirl and an immigrant Greek man, both of whom had gone through lots of higher education and worked their butts off enough to land us in a middle-class neighborhood with two malls and a conspiracy of racially-gerrymandering real estate agents past which my swarthy and heavily-accented father managed somehow to slip. This was probably not the best place for anyone, but surely not a fat, only-half-white-American, not-so-rich, smart queer girl. There was nobody, in the early 80s in gerrymandered middle-class Ohio, with whom I could commiserate. Or, at least, nobody who wanted to commiserate with me. (Oh, dear, the day I wore the skirt my dad’s sister sent from Greece, the one with the traditional embroidery and fringe, I endured SO MUCH fun-making from the Whitebread Racist Dicklords of that school… how did I not see that coming? How was I such a persistent nerd with an allergy to fitting in?)

My solution was to be a Good Girl: favorite student of every teacher, the Good Listener among my friends, and a parents’ well-behaved and well-closeted dream. It was the 80s, and it was Ohio. I really didn’t know there were other choices. I just wanted to survive high school and go somewhere better if I could find it.

Now, sitting happily in my own sunny little farmhouse home just north of NYC, still fat, still bookish, still queer (ish… I mean, I married my wife when it got legal, and that seems less queer, but still lesbian, I guess), still an immigrant’s daughter. Still, for all intents and purposes, a nerd, but proud, now, of the ways in which I’d not fit easily into that Whitebread middle-class Ohio Jerk-Factory neighborhood (I can boast the same great taste, now with 100% more walking cane). Still, I don’t have that fantasy some people have of going back, knowing what I know now, and showing them all (though Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion remains one of my all-time favorite films). I’m just glad I got out of there before the cruelty and ugliness of that place overwhelmed me.

It took me many, many years to understand myself outside the context in which I was raised, to be proud of my family’s ethnic difference, to call myself queer, to be brave enough not to need the validation of a husband and 2.5 kids and an SUV and a middle management job at Borden if I didn’t want it, to be okay with eating food in public instead of skipping meals (because that’s what Good Fat Girls do). I tried super-achieving, tried bulemia, tried therapy, tried activism, tried self-medicating, tried legally-prescribed medication. In the end, I think it was just a matter of time.

(It was a matter of aging into a phase in which nobody pays me much mind at all. This is the paradoxical freedom of being an American woman over 40: you’re no longer sexually objectifiable to the majority of straight culture, so almost nobody even sees you anymore and you gain the kind of freedom from surveillance that some people enjoy from birth. Of course, once almost nobody sees you anymore, then people look past you as if you’re not even there. It’s a choice, for many of us, between being too constantly visible or invisible.*)

(* This is the paradox with which I struggled a bit in Olympia Knife, my second novel. The two queer women at its center face this problem: Olympia, whenever she feels strong emotion, has bouts of invisibility, and Diamond, once she ages into love with a woman, loses gravity and starts floating away. Still, their relationship can happen in nearly total freedom because nobody really sees them when they are together.)

It took a lot of years, in other words, to detox from the American Dream in which I was raised and all the hateful messages I swallowed as a young, fat, queer, first-gen smart girl as a consequence. It took a lot of thought, therapy, distance, and work.

I know all of this storytelling fits together somehow, but I’m not sure how, exactly. I’m torn between thinking of little John’s smelling salts as a metaphor for something to wake me up, or the caustic thing that could have killed me. Either way, I think it’s his panicked question that rings relevant for me: What do you do if you swallow poison?

REVIEW: Ghosts and Ashes by F. T. Lukens (March 9, 2017); 258 pages. Available from Interlude Press here.