Tag: love

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.

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. 

Reflections

Anyone from New York?

J. Angell

It had been a couple of years since I’d seen Carlos, an old acquaintance from my days of daze.

“Here, use my screen name, someone will reply!” Carlos insisted, confident that his idea was the solution to my solitude. I had told him that yes, I’d been looking to meet someone, although not necessarily for romance—more along the lines of companionship.

Not a single reply.

We soon parted after the minor disappointment, Carlos assuring me no one replied because I was online under his screen name. “Next time you come over, we’ll set you up with your own,” he said warmly. I never saw him again.

This was in the early 2000s, when AOL chat rooms were still a thing.

Life went on with its frequent struggles and detours until I had the funds to buy myself a desktop. A used one, refurbished by Per Scholas. After a lifetime in the stupor of addiction, this was among the first significant choices I made for myself.

The desktop turned out fine for my purposes, which were essentially to stare at it after work and figure out how to do things. One evening I remembered Carlos and his much-touted AOL chat rooms, though not his screen name.

I eventually got bold enough to go from lurker to occasional chatter, and while there were a few fun conversations, most people seemed interested in casual encounters.

Many chats later, I’d grown tired of them, mostly for that reason. Things were gradually improving for me. I’d started looking for an apartment, still worked for a well-known nonprofit, and had begun college as an adult student.

My sobriety date came around—no one with whom to share the suffocating July heat. It was still just me in that basement room with the small rectangular window that looked out onto gravel and the feet going in and out of the driveway.

“Let’s take a look at the chat room,” I told myself, looking to lighten the day.

The chat was much as it had been in prior weeks: the regulars, their childish cliques, their conversations peppered with the same old obscenities. Shortly after, I turned the desktop off, in a weird mix of disgust and loneliness. In retrospect, the mix of emotions was more than I could explain even today: I found myself covering my face with both hands, sobbing, asking Spirit for someone for me. The intensity of that moment surprises me to this day.

In late July, I typed: “Anyone from New York?” in a cute blue font, no less. The old refurbished desktop wobbled on the box it had come in. Maybe good things do feel fuller when shared. 

“Hi.”
“I’m in New York.”

After a few pleasantries, I cut to the point.

“Do you have children?”

“Yes, they live with their father and they’re big… is this a problem, sweetie?”

“No. They’re not that small, and they don’t live with you.”

“I have a second question: do you cook?”

“What? I can make you a meat stew that’ll rattle your bones, the best pork chops you ever tasted,” her excitement practically jumped off the screen.

Wouldn’t you know it? We met just a couple of weeks later, and not long after that, she showed up with a tray of the most delicious baked ziti. She brought it to our spot in the nearby park.

That was part fun, part embarrassment, because I lived in a basement room, but it really turned out to be a lovely afternoon. She even let me keep the leftovers. In retrospect, that day, her gesture, us sharing a homemade meal for the first time, right there on a bench in Bronx River Park, was a gem of a moment.

We’ve been together for over twenty years, not only each other’s spouse but each other’s person.

in that basement room, I had asked Spirit for someone for me. I still wonder if that blue-font question into an AOL chat room was only me reaching out or if something had already started reaching back.