Tag: life

Leaking Coconuts

Three Bic Pens

J. Angell

It was a school day. There was barely any cash, so most days I either had to walk or sneak through the back door of a bus.

We had been staying at Dora’s house, well into the better part of town.

“This is just temporary for Mila, this shit school—we might see the principal out here sweeping the sidewalk,” I heard my father say from the front seat.

Dora smiled. Never an unkind word from her.

She had graciously driven me to the very front of the school.

She had a daughter named Elena, about my age. Predictably, I thought of myself as not only an adult stuck in a child’s body, but also an intellectual, busy with the scholarly pursuits of my own mind.

Years later, I realized Dora was my father’s love interest. She was, factually speaking, his mistress, since he and Julia were emotionally, but not legally, divorced.

None of that mattered to me. I was thrilled my father was there to see me off, that Dora had a fancy car and all. The visual fit the yarn I had spun at the rejects’ school.

And I had my BIC pens.

I’d discovered them at the Chinese bodega where I bought cookies by the pound.

Shiny new BIC pens, right there under the glass counter. Dark blue, with a cap that covered nearly half the pen. You had to pull it off and slide it over the other end to reveal the clear plastic barrel and ink stick inside.

Nothing fancy. But to me, they were beautiful.

A red one, too, sometimes, whenever I had a bit extra.

And since I had to wear that hideous uniform—a gray skirt with suspenders over a white blouse—I might as well show off my BICs, clipped right into my blouse pocket.

I felt like the Hemingway among all the kids in the rejects’ school.

I was bilingual, too, which naturally placed me among the more distinguished scholars in their midst.

Nobody ever commented on my pens. I attributed this to their inability to approach someone of my obvious sophistication.

I once saved enough money to surprise Julia for her birthday. I went straight to the Chinese bodega and bought three BIC pens, one each in blue, red, and black.

Three!

I didn’t even have three for myself.

I asked the Chinese man behind the counter if he could wrap them. He reached under the counter, produced a square of wrapping paper from somewhere, and rather quickly wrapped my little gift.

It wasn’t particularly neat, but it was nice of him to do it.

I can still see myself, almost skipping with excitement, carrying those three pens I would have loved to own myself.

Julia was sitting at a table when I presented her with the somewhat haphazardly wrapped package.

“¿Y esto?”

I was certain she would be overwhelmed by such a thoughtful gift. Perhaps even faint.

She opened it.

“Ahh, lapiceros. Gracias.”

She smiled wryly.

I knew that grimace.

I wanted the floor to cave in and swallow me whole. I had been so proud of those pens, so certain she’d appreciate them.

“Mila showed up with her gift, pens”

I felt humiliated.

That was the day I found out the BICs were nothing but cheap plastic pens.

Later, I plotted to steal them back.

I was certain THREE BIC pens, prominently displayed in my blouse pocket, would impress those school kids awash in ignorance and inferior writing instruments. 

But I never found them. 

I would love to have one now.

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.

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.

Reflections

In Each Other’s Way

J. Angell

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

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…”