Getting what you wanted, I always thought, was just a matter of setting your eyes on the prize and refusing to surrender. The fictional women of romantic literature that I taught in my classes never seemed particularly over-the-top to me. Emma and Cathy and Lily Bart just didn’t take no for an answer. Of course, I understood intellectually that ambitious people could sometimes make a very hard landing. But I didn’t feel that. What I felt was insulted even at the idea of accepting defeat. I guess that came from my father, who bucked the odds all his life.
My parents gave us a good life, as owners of a successful stationery store in Arcadia, a ritzy little suburb north of Milwaukee. But there were few extras for my sisters Amelia and Phoebe or me. I worked in the store from the age of fourteen and then, during summers in college, I worked the overnight shift at a local paper factory, cleaning the slurry out of the machines. It was disgusting, backbreaking work, and probably dangerous despite the mask and protective suit I wore. But the factory paid well, although it took what seemed like a month every fall for me to get the paper residue out of my hair. In truth, I probably really didn’t need to work those jobs. But both my folks were disposed to think of diligence, even a little desperation perhaps, as good for building character. As tired as we got of hearing his origin story, our dad never got tired of telling it.
Until I was born my father, against all odds, was a respected photojournalist. He freelanced all over the world, often with my mom along （who now had to be cajoled into leaving her screen porch）， exploring Antwerp, Nairobi, Delhi and Saigon. Over the years, he had gifted each of us with a few discreetly-framed copies of the photos he made for Life magazine and the holy grail, National Geographic. One of mine, of a little Afghan boy laughing in a field of opium poppies, had won my dad an international award. But when he became a family man, my mother let it be known that it was time to stay put. He got a position working for the state, then privately. Later, together, they opened Demetriou’s Papierie. My father still took photographs, of course: Photos of us growing up and the ones he took of us with our own children were far beyond anything we could have commissioned.
He also gave each of us daughters copies of two photos he had not taken himself, but which he prized. They represented the two sides of his life—the Greek side, the arrivers, and the American side, the strivers.
The first pictured my father’s parents on their wedding day, walking home from church through the narrow streets of Nafplio, outside Athens. Papu wears a dark blue suit; Yaya, a white dress embroidered in red and gold with a thick white veil that falls from a golden band. Not long after that day, my grandparents and their brothers and sisters all came to the United States. Friends of theirs lived in Milwaukee, and there was a strong Orthodox presence there. My father grew up in Arcadia, Wisconsin, a suburb, but his father and uncles worked in a run-down rim town near the Milwaukee airport where Greeks ran all the restaurants, even the food trucks, and where Papu and his brothers built the best hotel. When my dad moved to Madison to study photography at the state university instead of working his way through all the stations of the cross at Cosimo’s Restaurant, Papu probably expected him to fail. But Dad did just the opposite, in part because he grew up well-connected, although he would not ever have said that.
That was what the other picture was about. Taken many years after the first one, it symbolized my family’s American side.
In the gauzy bokeh foreground, my mother and Wisconsin’s former first lady, Alma Romero Hodge, are tossing handfuls of petals into the air at a victory celebration for Malachy Hodge, a two-term governor and my father’s closest friend since high school. But the focus isn’t on the jubilant adults. Instead, it’s on me and the Hodges’ eldest daughter, Alice, called Alzy, peeking out from under a long table. Aged about five, both Alzy and I were guarding the laps of our white dresses which we had filled with dozens of small wrapped chocolate bars.
When he would later lecture my college-girl self, my father would point out that, for the men and women who worked beside me on the line of vats and molds at the paper factory, this was their life, but for me it was only my start. On the other end of that scale were the Hodges, his best friends, and we were not the same as them, either. If I envied the Hodges too often or too openly, it made my father stern. In any event, while I never listened to my father’s litanies as devoutly as he wanted me to—what girl does?—I did grow up with the awareness of being both things: I was a full college professor now, but I was still the teen who worked at the paper factory whose parents had paid a teacher to teach Greek to us and our cousins from kindergarten through high school so that we might never forget who we were.