Nikandros told the clerk that he would take Kristina’s last name instead of vice versa.

“Now Nikandros,” the clerk said, “you and the bride have to apply for the license using your current legal names and then the form says that the bride’s name will be your name. See the blank where we fill that in.”

WITH HER EAR PRESSED TO THE EARTH BY ROBERT EARLE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 19

Nikandros told the clerk that he would take Kristina’s last name instead of vice versa. He held the counter with both hands in a way that suggested he meant to impose this proposition, just as he insisted the marriage take place in San Francisco. To Kristina, San Francisco was full of buildings that could crumble at any moment as they had in 1906, crushing her parents. She assumed she survived only because she was so small, a baby. She had many pictures in her mind of squalling in the rubble. But they couldn’t be real memories. Her real memories of earthquakes came from the verses her Uncle Alexei came across in the Bible when he read it out loud at night. The Bible was full of earthquakes. Every one of them presaged the end of the world and the Judgment.

“You’d be Nikandros Theodore instead of her being Kristina Popandropoulos?” the clerk asked. She was a middle-aged woman, with dewlaps and a doughy face, who seemed wary of Nikandros. Everyone in the birth-marriage-death-citizenship office knew him. He came in all the time, often straight from his father’s boat, bossy and temperamental, to take pictures of ceremonies and events with his prized Speed Graflex camera. But she didn’t know Kristina, standing behind Nikandros as if she were next in line waiting for a separate marriage license. Kristina wore a white cotton Mexican dress with red and purple anemones brocaded across the bosom. She held a bouquet of daisies, tiger lilies, and black-eyed Susans Nikandros had picked on the way to the farm to get her. A friend of his loaned him a truck for the ride to the Tiburon landing, and then another friend took him, Kristina, Alexei, and her Aunt Grushenka across the bay from Strawberry Point in his motor skiff. Meanwhile Nikandros’s mother and father had the curtains drawn in Sausalito, mourning the fact that he wasn’t marrying a Greek girl.

Kristina had a long, straight nose barely fluted at the nostrils, a small mouth, and a small chin. She was 29, but everything about her looked younger: her blonde hair, her creamy skin, her delicate bones. When Nikandros told her about the name, she liked the idea of remaining Kristina Theodore but didn’t feel comfortable with him becoming a Theodore, even if the name was Greek—gift of God—which is why her Uncle Alexei had picked it and abandoned the Russian name no one could pronounce. Started with K.

“Now Nikandros,” the clerk said, “you and the bride have to apply for the license using your current legal names and then the form says that the bride’s name will be your name. See the blank where we fill that in.” She showed Nikandros the form. He told her it was a form, not the law. She asked if he wanted her to consult Magistrate Wycoff. He said yes.