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was, in some substantial way, improving her. It’s not how a person would think of an actual friend, much less a potential girlfriend. This was the status I upgraded her to a few weeks into the school year. At fourteen, I figured it was about time I took the plunge. Everyone kept asking if I was going steady, or at least everyone creepy kept asking, particularly the men from the Greek Orthodox church, who’d refer even to newborn babies as “lady-killers” and wonder how many hearts they had broken. Like it wasn’t enough to be dating at the age of three weeks, you also had to be two-timing someone.
    To the other boys in my Sunday school class, it was “Who’s the lucky lady?” To me it was just “Find anyone yet?” And though at that age I never could have admitted it, I was as physically attracted to Delicia as I’d have been to any female. Her body was no less appealing to me than that of our head cheerleader, so why not have the two-hundred-fifty-pound girlfriend from the wrong side of town?
    The idea coincided with my Greek grandmother’s moving from our house into a new senior citizens’ apartment complex called Capital Towers. She was cruelly out of place there, the only resident who wasn’t born in the United States and who didn’t try, in that resolutely American way, to be gay and youthful. Where Yiayiá was from, old age was not something to be disguised or outrun. Rather, you embraced it, and gratefully, for decrepitude, in Greece, was not without its benefits. There, you lived in a compound with your extended family, and everyone younger than you became your pawn. In America, being old got you nothing but a spare bedroom that was painted purple and had bumper stickers on the door. Then one day your daughter-in-law decides she’s had enough, and out you go, not just to an apartment but to a studio apartment, which basically means a bedroom with a kitchen in it.
    Capital Towers was trying to get an activities program going. A social was to be held on a Sunday afternoon in early October, and that, I decided, was just the place to take Delicia on our first date.
    “You’ve got to be kidding me,” my mother said.
    “No,” I told her. “I think it would be interesting for her to meet Yiayiá.”
    “Interesting?” My mother allowed her tone of voice to do the heavy lifting, as unless you were making a documentary about gloom, there was nothing interesting about my grandmother. Or at least not to us at the time. If I could go back to 1972, and if I were able to understand Greek, she might have told me all sorts of fascinating things: what it was like to endure a loveless arranged marriage, to be traded away by your family and forced to sail to another country. From Ellis Island, she went to Cortland, New York, a little town in the western part of the state. There, she and her pitiless husband opened a newsstand not much larger than their cash box. What was it like to forfeit your youth? To be illiterate in two languages? To lose every tooth in your head by the age of forty? All I really knew was that Yiayiá loved us. Not in a specific way—she could no sooner name our good qualities than the cat could—yet still we could feel it. I’d occasionally allow her to stroke my hand. All us kids would from time to time, and all of us thought of it as work. Oh, how exhausting it was to let someone adore you.
    My Yiayiá was exactly the sort of friend I’d have liked as an adult, someone with an endless supply of hard-luck stories and no desire to ever write a book. At the time, though, she was just an obligation. If I had to go to the social, I figured I might as well get something out of it—hence bringing Delicia. All we’d have to do was walk in holding hands, and the old people would freak out, no one more so than my grandmother. “Who the blackie?” she’d likely ask, for that was the word she continued to use, no matter how often we shouted “Negro” at her.
    “I’m not having any part