Tag: fictionnotfiction

The Julia Series

The Exit

MyFathersMirror

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.

Reflections

In Each Other’s Way

MyFathersMirror

I had been living with Manzoor for a handful of years.

Not the kind of living people imagine when they hear that. He had a place, and he had found a couple of roommates to help pay the bills. A generous if frugal man, Manzoor had never asked me to contribute a dime. He saved every penny, cooked for both of us on weekends. Meanwhile, my days were spent drinking alcohol, smoking and watching reruns on the portable black-and-white screen. Kindly put, mine was a numb existence. 

“You know the electronics store on 96th and Broadway? I got a job there,” I told him.

He was getting ready to leave for a month-long trip back to his country of birth. I was annoyed by it, though I couldn’t say exactly why. I had always known he was married. That he had children there. None of it had mattered to me.

If anything, it felt oddly flattering when he told me he wanted to take me as his second wife.

At the interview, I sat across from two managers and told them, without hesitation, I was there for the assistant manager position.

Looking back, one of them must have mistaken my naivete for chutzpah. They gave me a job behind the Walkman counter.

It definitely wasn’t chutzpah.

Soon after Manzoor left, I met Joe. And Rita.

That’s when things began to tilt.

A couple of months in, Joe called me one night to declare his undying devotion, insisting he was done with Claire. As in completely done.

Claire, however, had not received that update and firmly believed she was about to become his wife. She didn’t take kindly to me moving into his apartment, just a few blocks from where I still technically lived with Manzoor.

It was wrong, but I did not even pause to question it.

Around that same time, Rita started working the register.

I remember the first time she looked at me, it was not in passing, not the way coworkers do, but with a kind of quiet insistence, like she had already decided something. 

She didn’t rush it. I pretended not to notice her subtle approaches, building a kind of anticipation I hadn’t felt in years.I was flattered. 

And little by little, she made her way into my days, and then into my thoughts, until there was barely a moment she didn’t occupy. 

The day came when I saw Manzoor off at the airport and, as we embraced goodbye, I cried uncontrollably. I remember his face, the way he looked at me. I think he believed it meant I loved him.

As I write this now, I hope he didn’t.

Because what followed doesn’t match that kind of love.

By the time he called me, as he promised he would, I felt… nothing I could name. I spoke to him easily, kindly, but without longing. Like speaking to someone just a few doors down. 

I cried when he left. I didn’t miss him when he was gone.

What unsettles me now is not that I left. It’s that I had already left before he ever boarded the plane.

So while Manzoor was away, impulsively, I packed my few belongings, met Joe downstairs and off we went to look at hues of sunset off the brick wall out his kitchen window. 

Joe, to his credit, not even once tried to force things between us; we just settled in like two old beer guzzling buddies while I fantasized of Rita’s fragrance and how it would all be like. 

We found a rhythm. It didn’t last.

Rita got fired for theft and I made an ass of myself by staging a ridiculous, pompous exit, right there in front of everyone. And within minutes, there was Joe running down Broadway: 

“Hey, hey, wait for mee!” as though unhinged.

What can I say, three clueless people just going about aimlessly. 

Not long after, we were behind.

Claire was ecstatic.

Rita soon asked me to move into her small apartment, much to the displeasure of her teenage son whose opinion was never even asked. 

We lasted ten years. 

Leaking Coconuts

Ropero

MyFathersMirror

On Sundays, they gathered. The place was cramped, never fancy, except for her old “real wood” furniture and that ropero, her secret altar. Inside, neatly folded linens she barely used, reserved for special occasions. Bottles of perfume, half evaporated, some in their original boxes. Jewelry that, surprisingly, was not fake but rather old, striking jewelry pieces she had gracefully accepted from the many suitors of yesteryear.

I’d sneak a peek now and then, but she never let me hold any of her things.

One day, I took something, out of sheer curiosity and to take to school the next day. Not out of need, not even desire, I just wanted to hold something of hers and, yes, show it at school. It was a thin, gold chain. I just grabbed it, unaware of its significance.

Some relatives were visiting and they all tended to linger in the bedroom where I was, transfixed. The chain had crumpled into a knot and, panicked, I imperceptibly dropped it into a glass jar nearby, coughing nervously to cover what I was sure would cause an earsplitting noise.

“No one noticed. I’m good,” I reassured myself, a bit shaken.

Half hour passed.
“Mila, come to the kitchen at once!”

She was standing near that huge, cheap wall calendar.
April: Grand Canyon National Park.

There’s a place grandmother could not even fathom.

The glass jar sat on the kitchen table.