Category: Leaking Coconuts

The heart of my writing: stories, twigs, and twiglets from those quiet corners of memory where imagination brushes up against truth.

Leaking Coconuts

The Stairs to Grandma

J. Angell

I’d take a colectivo from across the school, the one going downtown. I might hang around a little with a couple of friends, but never for long. The colectivo, a car that picked up as many as five passengers and stopped wherever someone asked, took me straight to Plaza San Martín. From there, I walked to my grandmother’s home.

It was maybe a fifteen-minute brisk walk, and I always arrived energized. I can see it so clearly now, though I hadn’t thought about it in decades. Downtown was crowded, as downtowns tend to be, and the walk was long enough, but I felt elated.

Every step brought me closer to her.

Rosa did not live in the usual apartment building. It was more like a two-story commercial building, with half-iron gates and steep cement stairs. There was no handrail or banister. Somehow, she had rigged a rope from upstairs so she could pull the door open without having to go up and down those steps. I still wonder where she hooked that rope.

I remember the joy I felt rushing up those cement stairs, already anticipating the moment I would step into her space: her living room, the old radiola on the left, surrounded by small decorative objects; a beautiful figurine of a doll in a flamenco pose. She displayed my school projects there, too.

Her old “colonial” golden furniture was a point of pride. Every piece was covered in thick plastic.

It was a modest home. But for a woman who, at fourteen, found herself alone in the big city, working as a domestic and impregnated several times by her employer’s son, it was an achievement.

Grandmother Rosa was fifty-five when she took me into her home, only weeks after her daughter Julia gave birth to me. No one asked her. She certainly did not have to do it, and realistically, she did not have the resources to raise another child.

But she chose to care for me.

She mothered me.

My very first memory of this lifetime is of her gently pouring warm water over me in a steel wash tub she kept only for that purpose.

She was the first person I called mother.

Until Julia insisted she be called Mamá.

Rosa was relegated to Mamama.

And then came the day I was abruptly taken away.

What I wish for now is to return to those same spaces with her. To be among her things again. The simple furnishings. The old radiola. The plastic-covered furniture. The place of comfort and safety. The simple joys she knew how to enjoy.

For the first five years of my life, that was home.

Leaking Coconuts

Mercedes

J. Angell
The girl who drew ethereal women

“Well, I don’t know about that, but I can’t take sides, so let’s just leave it like that. God bless you for your help…”

Mila had recently written Mercedes a letter which included a brief mention of how abusive Apophis had always been, not only to her but also to their father and, in later years, even to Julia, his most ardent admirer.

Her voice message, not even an “I’m sorry that happened to you,” sounded as though she wanted to maintain control but couldn’t.

Her anger came across loud and clear.

And it was precisely that repressed rage that brought back recollections of odd mishaps Mercedes had claimed happened whenever Apophis was mentioned.

Recollections from when Mila was five and Mercedes was a budding, rambunctious teenager, loud at school, emboldened by Yvette, her even louder best buddy.

At some point, still at the Salaverry house, Mercedes gradually went from a good-natured, at times unruly child, to spending time alone. She drew beautiful pieces of ethereal women, faces from somewhere only she could see. She collected fan magazines and stayed in her room for hours on end.

“There she is, laying down. That’s all she knows how to do!”

Julia’s words, piercing as a razor, echo in their mind to this day.

In between evictions, the children were thrown out of the fancy schools their father had enrolled them in. Mercedes withdrew into her room, bothered by the most mundane things.

It was all attributed to her being “difficult.”

One of the lasting memories Mila has kept of Mercedes all these years is of watching Yvette help her climb onto the open back of a Jeep, the two of them laughing, full of purpose and possibility, heading off in pursuit of their grand idea to finish high school at night.

Soon after that, Yvette was never mentioned again.

Mercedes became reclusive, was allowed to drop out of high school, the drawings eventually stopped.

Apophis, just one year younger, roamed the streets late into the night, dispensing unsolicited advice pertaining to masculinity and the inferior nature of women.

This he learned from Julia, who insisted, “El hombre cae parado en todas partes.”

A man lands on his feet everywhere.

Much like a cat, which, in her mind, proved the superiority of men.

“If I had a do-over, I’d be reborn as a man and never have fucking children,” she’d say.

Often.

No exaggeration.

So while Mercedes was labeled “mental” for her social withdrawal, Apophis was admired for roaming the streets, preoccupied with his own sexual proclivities and delusions of superiority.

***

Mila had been at the Salaverry house for less than three years when, inexplicably, she made up a story about a man coming into the house at night.

A wild story.

Mila started telling Julia and the siblings that a man had begun sneaking into the house.

“He comes from the Continental Bank building, that one,” she said, pointing to a tall structure. “He talks with me. He’s nice.”

As ludicrous as the story was, the moment came when Mila was told to repeat it in front of her father, while Julia and Mercedes stood around, listening.

The girl, feeling empowered, added a couple of details to the already unlikely saga of the nightly visitor, which must have amused her father greatly.

She was well aware of her own lie.

She was also aware that through it, she was being heard and seen, if only briefly.

Her father leaned on a short wall, listening intently, while Julia looked on with disgust.

As he headed back into the house, Mercedes blurted out:

“That’s true, because some of my stuff is inside out…”

“What? What did you say?” he asked, much to Julia’s consternation and Mila’s delight.

The girl knew instantly that Mercedes’ claim was as fake as her own story of the visiting stranger.

“Yes,” Mercedes said. “I’ve had my underwear on backwards sometimes…”

Neither girl understood the implications.

Was she, too, made to play along with Apophis’ nasty bouncing “game”? Did it escalate?

No one thought her comment relevant enough to ask questions.

Mila’s story of the friendly intruder faded and was never brought up again.

***

The lack of cohesiveness and supervision made for a pattern of risk.

There was Apophis, overtly favored and sexually preoccupied. Julia, mocking instead of protecting. Mercedes, withdrawing further into herself, parents too quick to dismiss potentially disturbing claims.

No direct accusation.

Mere speculation.

Mercedes, throughout her life, was labeled as the “mentally ill” one before anyone ever asked what she might have endured. Everything she said, remembered, or protested got filed under that label.

I still wonder what happened before the label hardened around her.

The Julia Series

The Exit

J. Angell

Epilogue

Julia sat in the nursing home room with the television on.

The sight brought back the memory of Julia watching television in her bedroom, back when HBO was advanced. How many times Mila had wished for an invitation to watch a movie from that old gray folding chair, the same one she slept on during the rare occasions she was allowed to spend the night.

The blue light from the screen washed over Julia’s face. Sundown fell across her knees and the nightstand, where a brush sat unused.

She always liked things to be looked after or, at least, to appear that way.

Mila paused at the door for a moment.

Neither to condemn nor to condone.

Not to embrace her. Not even to ask why.

Why did you have me taken away from my home?

You did not want me.

Why did you help the others, but never me?

Did you ever regret it?

No. Mila had not come for any of that.

***

Never flashy, Mila wore clean, pressed clothes. Moccasins. Clothes made well enough to last. A blazer that sat right on her shoulders. A shirt that fit just right.

She stood there in front of Julia in all of that.

Not fancy.

No pretense.

No submission.

Assembled.

Will you look into my eyes?

Julia’s expression shifted between fear and disdain.

And Mila wondered, absurdly, whether this would have pleased her.

Julia always noticed.

The gray chinos. The oversized, frayed red blouse with the tiny pocket on the left breast. The red flip-flops.

Always the red flip-flops.

“Did you notice she came in flip-flops? To my house?”

For days on end.

Her house.

As if lack of money were mud Mila had dragged into her apartment.

As if she had not known.

That one late afternoon, as they were about to settle in for an HBO movie and Mila was expected to leave, Julia got up to walk her to the front door. Quietly, she slipped a folded twenty-dollar bill into Mila’s left hand while the others sat nearby.

“Okay then, dear. Take care. Call me…”

Her face remained composed, frozen in a quarter smile, as if forced her into charity.

Mila took the money.

Of course she took it.

She needed it.

Another humiliation.

How Julia gave it.

That Mila had to take it.

For weeks, she wished she had said no.

Keep it. Keep your twenty and the little performance. Keep the satisfaction of seeing me degrade myself by taking anything from you.

But addiction has no dignity.

So she took it.

And Julia knew she would.

***

The old crime stories played on, but Julia no longer watched television. These days, it was only background noise.

Smaller now.

Not softened.

Just reduced.

There is a difference.

Her hands rested on the blanket. The same hands that had struck the face of a child for things like stealing cocoa or breaking a vase.

Mila stepped closer.

Julia glanced at her.

“Ah, I know you from somewhere. It’s these glasses…”

For that one second, Mila wanted it.

Not love. She knew better than to want love from Julia.

She wanted recognition.

Just that.

She wanted Julia to see. To know she had always been more than the child left standing outside herself. More than the young alcoholic in red flip-flops.

Mila wanted Julia to see that she had survived her.

And maybe not even that.

Julia’s eyes rested on Mila, the same lethal glare. But there was fear in it now.

Clothes.

Shoes.

Hair.

Presentation.

Maybe Julia was no longer capable of judgment. Maybe there was nothing left in her eyes but tired light.

Still, Mila felt it.

That old measuring.

And then she understood something she had not gone there to learn.

Even if Julia approved, it would not be the same as being seen by her.

Even if she looked at the attire and found nothing to criticize, even if she noticed the clean lines, the good fabric, and the woman standing upright before her, it would not be much.

It would only mean Mila had finally come to visit in a language Julia respected.

She stood there long enough to take in the moment, to let it fix itself on her. 

The television kept talking.

Someone laughed in another room.

Julia looked at her.

Maybe through her.

A confrontation would have been unfair.

There was no embrace.

Mila turned toward the door.

Behind her, the room remained exactly what it was: the television, the blanket, the fading sunlight, the woman whose focus in life had been to be admired for what she never was. The same woman who mistook coldness for refinement. The mother who never failed to notice appearances, yet never learned how to see what mattered.

At the threshold, Mila paused.

Not for Julia.

For the girl in the red flip-flops.

The one who had to take the twenty.

The one who swallowed the shame because she needed food, a way through the day.

She did not pity Julia.

Grandma Rosa came to mind.

“You come from good stock, Mila.”

***

I looked at Julia for the last time.

Then I left.

Not healed.

Not forgiven.

Gone.

The Julia Series

What Followed Her Out

J. Angell

Years have passed. The specter of Julia is buried, yet remains.

Mila didn’t know her. No one did.

She knew her arrogance. Her indifference.

Was Julia aware of who first opened that wound?

Her father’s wife ran a clothes-washing business and made Julia iron for hours on end while her father said nothing.

The stepmother had a teenage son who could do no wrong.

Young Julia could do no right.

“Baja la cabeza, mierda,” she would say, pulling the girl’s hair to avoid her stare.

That was life for young Julia: in and out of public school, back and forth between her parents, ashamed of her own social class.

Mila never knew what happened in that house.

She only knew what followed her out of it.

***

The first time Mila showed Julia a little piece she had written, they were on a city bus, of all places. Mila was in her early teens.

She had thought about it for days, whether to show it to her or not, then dared herself to do it right there.

“What’s this?” Julia said, unfolding the small piece of paper.

“Chip off the old block. Just like her father,” she said, laughing uproariously as she looked at it.

Mila smiled as if that had been the joke all along, folded the paper, and tucked it away.

Yes, Julia had once been a girl forced to lower her head and suffer indignities.

And no one came for her.

Maybe that was where the wound began.

She regretted having children, let alone motherhood.

No reproach there.

But it was still her choice to pass humiliation down to the last child she birthed.

No absolution.

Old age doesn’t exonerate her any more than sobriety exempts addicts from the harm they caused.

At dusk, Mila wonders if, in the recess of what is left of Julia’s mind, she remembers.

Hope not.

The Julia Series

Too Quiet Here

J. Angell

“Go turn the television on, one of you.”

That was Julia’s first comment when she came home from work.

Not that I was usually there. Once or twice she permitted me to wait for her, but that was definitely not the norm. If she invited me over, it was a charitable “come over, if you want,” she was already home.

Still, that line stayed with me.

Too quiet here.

Years later, as a social worker, I recognized something familiar with clients. Some insisted they needed sound constantly: television, radio, headphones, anything. I heard it said more than once that they were trying to drown out the noise of their own thoughts.

I am not saying Julia should have been a client.

I am saying there were things about her that looked less like personality and more like distress disguised as refinement.

Grandiosity. The bad manners hidden under refinement. The desperate desire to be counted among the elegant hostesses she admired. The way she berated my father, screamed at me, and spoke of “those inferiors” with a rage so thunderous there was nowhere for anyone to disappear.

And mental health care?

Julia would not have been caught dead walking into a clinic, even in a small, traditional city where those things were mostly for people with money and the good sense to suffer discreetly.

Or anywhere, for that matter.

Her refrain was always the same:

“Your father met me when I was very young, while I was working. He married me so I would be a housewife and a mother to his children.”

Not true.

But for a while, she made it sound as though my father had plucked her from a promising life and ambushed her into birthing children.

I used to hear that and think: here we go again.

Now I wonder.

How much of what I called arrogance was fear?

How much of what I called cruelty was untreated rage?

How much of her performance was just one long attempt not to sit alone in a quiet room with herself?

Funny, no?

Not funny.

Leaking Coconuts

Small Repairs

J. Angell

I dozed off early, feeling uncomfortably warm. I thought it best to lie the other way and asked my wife to turn on the fan.

I kept waking up freezing, even after she’d pulled a light cover over me. I assumed the cold air was coming from the window and said nothing.

Five a.m. rolled around and Storm demanded food. The fan was still whizzing nearby.

Just the sight of it triggered an instant rise of anger.

“You were up late. Did you not see me shivering under the covers, unable to sleep?”

I grabbed my things and slammed the door.

An interesting thing happened this time around.

I retreated to the living room, as usual. Boom. There it was.

I saw myself speed-walking to school in that short-sleeved uniform shirt, smelling like the Breck deodorant I used to roll onto my arms — the same arms that, back then, had noticeable hair, not bare skin like now.

I saw the days I pretended to wash clothes just so I could stand inside somewhere warm.

The winter days I sat unnoticed in an emergency room, figuring I could always say I was waiting for someone.

Then a pause. A whisper from within:

“You were neglected. You didn’t deserve any of that, Mila. You absolutely deserved to be cared for, as all children do.”

I wrapped that little girl in my arms and sobbed.

A little later, Iris asked, for the first time ever, calmly — not accusatory, not defensive, but as if she genuinely wanted to know:

“What’s wrong?”

“It was freezing all night. You could’ve turned the fan off. I couldn’t sleep. I froze all night.”

“But you’re the one who asked for it to be on.”

“Yes, but didn’t you even glance over and see that I was frozen under that flimsy cover? Didn’t it occur to you to check whether I was okay?”

“I am sorry,” Iris said.

No silly explanation. No deflecting. Just that again:

“I am sorry.”

Then, calmly, as she walked away:

“Are you hungry?”

It was five in the morning. And for once, what stayed with me was not the cold, but the small shock of having finally been noticed.

The Julia Series

Rooms to Rent

J. Angell

When Mila returned from Baltimore, she was no longer a child, though no one around her seemed prepared to notice. She saw herself as a young woman by then, worldly enough, having been to the US and back, and in her mind school was over.

“I’ll get me a job in no time, with my bilingual eloquence. Watch.”

The same aunt who had helped before helped again, feeding Mila lunch most days because food was scarce in the rented rooms. Whatever money came in came from her father’s hustling. Julia, meanwhile, spent her days dressed as if she might leave for work at any moment, in whatever fancy American clothes had survived the latest eviction.

One day, Julia became visibly agitated: 

“I can’t believe he’d say that, who is this piece of shit…and why is she even talking like she herself never needed MY help, anyway?” 

Vintage Julia.

Turns out her daughter in Baltimore and husband had strongly suggested her two sons, both in their early twenties, find work “someplace, anyplace, start at a gas station even.” Instead of everyone just waiting around for father to bring either money or food, seldom both. 

“My sons are not going to work at a gas station, not in this town.” 

One day Mila came home excited, carrying news of her first real job. What she thought she saw in Julia’s face was not pride exactly, but something close enough for the girl to mistake it for warmth.

It turned out to be a miserable commission job, the kind that paid almost nothing. Mila was still underage, and no matter how articulate or presentable she was, nobody else seemed eager to hire her. 

Once that job fizzled out, Julia found herself with Mila around all day again and suddenly rediscovered her parental authority. She enrolled the girl in a nearby school.

And so it went for months, until the day Mila returned from school and found their mattress propped against the wall out front, along with everything else. 

She found Julia speed walking her humiliation away. 

“Good for you,” she said to Mila, “you’re taking this stoically…” 

In short order, they were all trailing their father, literally walking behind him on the streets, in his search for rooms to rent. 

He found one for Julia and Mila, literally on a rooftop. Two men occupied adjacent rooms. One of them enjoyed curing antlers and skulls by drying them in the sun. The other tenant was an old, puny man who had the audacity to offer marriage to Julia, offering what he thought was a hand up. 

Julia felt wounded. 

“How dare you,” she told him, “this is temporary for me, how dare you, I’m a married woman!”

They were soon thrown out of the rooftop room, too. And, again, it fell on her father to venture out and find rooms. 

The day came when Mila spotted a want ad in a newspaper. A late night cocktail waitress job at a fancy bar in Sheraton Hotel. 

Her father rarely voiced his opinion but when it came to even applying for the job, he was against her interest in it, because it was a cocktail lounge, and Mila was underage.

Julia didn’t seem to care one way or the other. 

Mila got the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift.

From that point forward, her trajectory changed.

The Julia Series

The Return

J. Angell

During one of Julia’s visits to her eldest in Baltimore, we got an eviction notice. Father thought it best to leave discreetly in the middle of the night.

From the marble phone stand to the broken chair to wool blankets used as luggage, things got progressively worse.

We moved into a smaller but modern house in an upscale neighborhood near the beach. Without a penny to our name. 

Then a cheap two-bedroom in a “commercial” area. It was in that building that Mila came home from school to find everything out in the hallway, the refrigerator, the only table, all of it on display for strangers to gawk at.

Julia returned, business as usual. 

Not long after that, they moved into a large condominium in an elegant building: two units to a floor, servant’s entrance and exit, window walls.

“Just say we’re very selective about window treatments. It takes time when they’re coming from Europe…”

A glass house. You adapt.

One bright afternoon, Julia asked Mila, dryly: “And you, do you want to go to the United States?” 

Dad, sitting nearby, said nothing. 

“Yes, it’d be fine…” Mila answered nonchalantly, hiding her shock

It was, of course, her father who got the airplane tickets. Mila stayed with the older sister in Baltimore for just under two years. Julia visited at least once. On his dime. 

Some documentation error, presumably, was the reason the girl was put on the next flight back south. 

When Mila landed, no one was there waiting for her. She found a bus to a relative’s house, and from there called an aunt, who drove her to the street where she’d been told her parents and brothers lived.

“Look, my dear, I’d have to make too many turns to get to the house, you can just walk a straight line from here,” she said, pointing to a narrow, residential street. 

“They live at the end of it, on this side.”

And off the girl went, in the new orange turtleneck she’d managed to buy with babysitting money, not expecting a thing. Soon she spotted two vaguely familiar figures walking toward her along the same side of the street.

“Mila? Oh wow, it is you!” Julia offered a shallow hug, as usual, then mumbled something about a miscommunication over the flight delay.

“You’ve turned into a young woman,” said Apophis, leering at the girl’s emerging breasts. He had not changed. Julia said nothing. 

The orange mock turtleneck lingers somewhere in her mind to this day. 

There was no one to tell her the sweater had nothing to do with it. 

In the short time Mila had been away, they’d gone from the posh glass house into a series of progressively worse rented rooms. Mila found them in a corner house that had seen far better days.

It was a far cry from the days of drawn curtains.

The Julia Series

Dressed as Glamour

J. Angell

The clacking sound of high heels striking the floor still stirs something tangled in me, even if only for a second or two. I feared her. Still, I remember feeling a small, shameful pride when she dressed up, hair set just so, red lipstick, all of it in place.

She had the kind of arrogance a child could mistake for glamour.
And there was something almost amusing about it.

Clickety-clack clack…

On a good day, it preceded ice-cold silent stares.

Julia was one of Rosa’s first four children. Rosa, a young mestiza woman with little to her name, still managed to provide a home. Two more children came after that, and Julia, already ashamed of who and where she came from, hurried toward work and toward men she thought might offer a way up.

Two men seemed to offer escape. One belonged to a wealthy family. The other, Fernando, was a handsome thirty-year-old from a family whose money had faded, though its name still carried itself like royalty.

Three years later, in some remote town up north, Julia gave birth to a girl.

Gustavo came to see her soon after, carrying what her sister would remember decades later as “the largest, most beautiful roses I’d ever seen.” It made such an impression that she remembered it all those years later. Julia never mentioned it at all.

She went on to have three more babies within five years. Five years after that, another pregnancy. By then, Fernando had succumbed to her insistence and married her, much to the dismay of his parents.

For reasons never spoken aloud, Julia made sure the girl knew she had never been wanted.

Mila was Julia’s last child. When she was born, Julia had pneumonia, so Rosa took the baby home. Five years later, unexpectedly, Julia pulled the girl out of Rosa’s house and into the old one where they all lived on the bare minimum.

Other than sliced bread, margarine and canned milk, there was no food. I recall them referring to days without food as detoxification, half jokingly. 

It went on until our father either borrowed money from a friend or got food on credit. He would come in late at night, intoxicated, carrying bags of takeout.

“Wake up, Mila, come to eat…” one of the older siblings would say.

Both Julia and Dad enjoyed pretense. They sent their children to private schools even when they could not pay for things like First Communion gowns, field trips, or tuition. Three of the children eventually dropped out.

Mila was shuffled from one pretentious school to another.

We were told never to open the living room windows, lest someone notice how bare the room was: an ornate mahogany chair with half its back torn off. The front door had to be opened just so, too. The foyer held nothing but a telephone on a marble table.

“Your daughter has a beautiful voice,” one of the nuns had said of the eldest. Julia pressured her husband to come up with at least the tickets to send her to a well-known music school.

He got them airplane tickets. On credit.

They had heard it was freezing up here, so they arrived with two large bundles made of wool blankets. That was the luggage.

Julia went back and forth many times after that. On his dime. Each return announced itself the same way: heels on the floor, lipstick in place, damage entering dressed as glamour.

And to Mila, her arrivals brought both awe and dread.

Leaking Coconuts

Way Off

J. Angell

Mila was late to school again. It mortified her, having to knock on the front entrance of the director’s office. Tuition was probably late again, and old Ms. Blanco liked to send teachers into the classroom to remind her, right in front of all the other girls. Mila had learned to spot them ahead of time so she could run and hide in the bathroom.

“I’ll just say my dad dropped me off at the wrong spot. Or that the bus broke down… even better: it’s part of my new exercise regimen, and I intended to miss my stop or…”

She missed her stop by a couple blocks. Again.

She wasn’t late often, just enough to feel it. Especially after switching to the public bus at eight, no more pre-class fun with friends who rode to school on the yellow bus. 

There was that one time, though. Mila missed her stop, got off at the next one, and sat on a bench to, what else, come up with something clever to say.

That’s when a teacher from the school spotted her, scooped her up, and drove her straight to the dreaded director’s office.

“I found this girl by the shopping center, way past the park, ” Ms. Duran reported. “Imagine, had it not been for me, no telling where she’d have ended up!”

Mila had been sitting on a bench at a bus stop four blocks away. She didn’t even know where the mall was.

No one asked her a single question. Just condescending looks. She was never late after that, afraid Ms. Duran might find her again and make up something worse.

“It’d sure be easier if I could still ride the yellow bus,” Mila thought. Her parents couldn’t afford the service past first grade, so by eight or nine, the girl had no choice but to take the public bus to school. 

“Dad says we’re saving to donate more to the poor…”