Tag: writing

Reflections

The Girl Who Drew Women Who Floated

MyFathersMirror

At the Salaverry house, Mila was sometimes allowed to share Mercedes’s room, though Mercedes made her dissatisfaction known. She had misgivings about the child.

Rock music would blast from Mercedes’s room. Then she’d appear nonchalantly where Mila was minding her own business.

“You can come in, if you want.”

Those rare invitations into Mercedes’s private space felt almost unguarded. The Beatles played loud as she flipped through her prized collection of fan magazines.

The nostalgia of dusk brings those moments back now, their significance only recently understood.

Mercedes had an innate ability to draw women whose forms seemed almost ethereal. She would spend hours alone with all sorts of pencils, charcoal, ordinary pencils, whatever she had, always drawing women’s faces with a variety of expressions, women in flowing gowns that seemed to move, on sketch pads, notebooks.

One afternoon, right after coming home from school, Mila heard a terrifying scream followed by a terrible crashing sound.

It was the first and only time Mila ever saw Juana sob.

Julia had taken Mercedes’s entire collection of magazines and thrown them all out.

Mercedes crashed every dinner dish in the bathtub.

Of course, the story was revised afterward. Then it became that Mercedes had gone off in a rampage. The magazines, supposedly, had taken up too much space.

After that dramatic episode, Mercedes was observed rather than seen.

Mercedes and Mila were never close. There were a few years between them, and by the time Mila was placed at Salaverry, Mercedes was almost a teenager.

Still, they both existed in the same sick environment where Julia ruled, and where girls were treated as more of a nuisance than anything else.

***

Years passed. In time, Julia rented an apartment in Queens and allowed both Mercedes and Stuardo to move in with her, apparently on the premise that they would eventually split expenses with her.

Stuardo seemed absent. He began speaking of delusions. He often smoked, drank to excess, and had started acting erratically in the community.

Mila offered to take him to a local psychiatrist, chosen right out of the Yellow Pages.

“What did the doctor say?” Julia asked anxiously.

“That Stuardo has schizophrenia. He’s got to be on medication from now on.”

As dry as it sounds, that was the extent of it.

***

Jobs didn’t always come easily for Mercedes, whether factory work or part-time hours at the mall. She held on to the Alexander’s job the longest.

She became Stuardo’s caretaker.

After a few years of watching over him, Mercedes sought mental health services. What no one spoke of was the tremendous toll that sitting all day in the apartment with Stuardo had taken on her.

The story got edited to shame Mercedes for seeking help.

And wasn’t she lucky to have a place to live?

Mercedes was used by Julia as a caretaker for Stuardo for about twenty years, then discarded when she was no longer needed, just when Mercedes herself needed a hand.

Not that anyone ever admitted it.

That is how Mercedes’s whole persona disappeared into one billable psychiatric label and endless medications.

“Yeah, I told you, she’s always been weird,” Julia would comment to whoever asked.

Mila was in her own turmoil by then, descending further into addiction. In between binges, she clipped a few classified ads to encourage Mercedes to look for her own space.

“Listen, Mila, we buy The New York Times here, so don’t send me any more clippings,” Mercedes said hastily, almost offended.

And not long after came Julia’s warning:

“Stop telling her she could rent an apartment on her own. She might end up believing you!”

Two decades went by. Julia retired, got a mortgage, and moved them all into a house in Hartford.

The Apophis-approved tenants didn’t pan out. Julia grew desperate.

In short order, Julia sold the house, made a financial agreement, and moved to New Jersey.

The agreement did not include Mercedes.

Julia told her to leave.

Next thing she knew, after twenty years as an unpaid caretaker, Mercedes was on her own.

Her mental health began to spiral, yet she still managed to find services. She rented rooms at the Y. Eventually, she was referred to a subsidized housing program, which led to a studio.

A relapse led to conservatorship and, subsequently, placement in a facility.

***

Years later, Mila understood something she could not have known as a child: not being invited into Julia’s household may have saved her.

As a young woman, she had wished to belong there, or at least to be allowed to stay. But looking back at Mercedes and Stuardo, she saw the bargain more clearly.

Julia did not offer shelter.

She assigned roles.

Stuardo was protected.

Mercedes was used to protect him.

And when Mercedes herself needed protection, there was no role left for her.

The girl who drew women who seemed to float right off the paper.

Julia made sure she went nowhere.

The Julia Series

Too Quiet Here

MyFathersMirror

“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

MyFathersMirror

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

MyFathersMirror

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

MyFathersMirror

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.

Reflections

Apophis

MyFathersMirror

You’ve met men like him. Maybe only once. Maybe just long enough to feel the air change.

They enter rooms already convinced of their own importance, head high, chest lifted, reading every face as if the world were a mirror. Apophis was that kind of boy. He grew into the kind of man people excuse too easily and remember too late.

From early on, he worshipped one thing: himself. He mistook being male for being superior. He handed down little pronouncements as if they were law: “men wear T-shirts like this!” to girls half his size. To him, women existed mainly as proof that he was not one.

There was always something foul beneath the swagger.

Indulged for no better reason than having been born male, Apophis learned early that he could move through a room and leave no trace but the damage. He slipped through back doors, grinned through lies, stole from the very people who fed him, and treated shame as something for other people to carry.

Some of his “games” were not games at all.

He used to grab me and place me on top of his narrow frame, bouncing me up and down while he lay flat beneath me. I was too young to understand what I was feeling, only that it was wrong. Uncomfortable. Strange. I would stare at the ceiling, as if there might be something written there I was supposed to understand.

There was nothing written there.

One afternoon we heard my mother’s heels striking the parquet floor. Apophis froze, then flung me onto the other bed so fast I barely had time to register it. I landed quietly. He straightened himself. By the time she entered, nothing had happened. At least nothing that could be named.

That was his gift.

To do what he did and leave silence holding the bag.

Later he stole from his father, passed out in a room that always seemed stained by drink and neglect. He stole his mother’s cheap jewelry to impress whichever girl he was after. He took money from the same woman who defended him, spinning talk of “investment,” then shrugged when it vanished.

Years passed. Apophis married. Cheated. Married again. A daughter was born along the way, though he always seemed more interested in sons he could imagine as extensions of himself.

Now he is older, stiffer, better dressed. He stops by the rest home where his mother sits and spends more time on his phone than in her presence. He leaves before her tea cools.

Age has changed the angles of his face, but not the nature underneath.

Apophis is still Apophis.

Reflections

It Wasn’t a Start

MyFathersMirror

I had not been in a classroom in years. It was the fall of 1996, and there I was, bright and early for some free short term course that was supposed to lead to a job.

The crowd was exactly what I’d expected: older, unemployed Latina women. One requirement for admission was fluency in Spanish. I sat in the front beside an older woman named Miledys.

We exchanged the usual pleasantries: had either of us worked as aides before, where were we from, that sort of thing.

Then came the standard speeches about caring for people with disabilities and all the rest.

A couple of weeks later, I overheard one of the women say:

“She’s gotta speak Spanish. It’s required to get into the course.”

Miledys and I mostly kept to ourselves, swapping stories in Spanglish. Then one day at lunch, a woman called out:

“You do speak Spanish, right?”

She was talking to me.

She was heavyset, with a forceful way about her. I was drawn in by her obvious interest, her kind hazel eyes and yes, by her nice ass too. What can I tell you?

“We were just talkin’ about you in the back,” she said. “I was tellin’ them you gotta speak Spanish to be here, right?” Then she added, by way of introduction, “Regina.”

Not long after that, I got thrown out.

In a drunken stupor, I made some dramatic confession when my live-in girlfriend asked about Regina. From there, my life tipped fully into chaos.

Regina told her father about me, and he graciously agreed to let me stay with them for a while. That didn’t last.

By then I had started seeing my ex-girlfriend again, if only to spend hours snorting cocaine together. Regina saw things differently. Still angry, still hurt, she nevertheless found us a room and even bought decorations for it.

I can still see her pretty face, beaming as she said,
“It’s a start. Our first little place together.”

I am ashamed to admit I lied to her too.

A few months later, she dumped me.

One of the best things that happened to me.

After that came a couple of rooms, a couple of evictions, and then the truth stood there plain: it was down to a park bench or rehab.

I’ll never know exactly where the idea of rehab came from.

But I chose recovery.

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

Way Off

MyFathersMirror

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…”

Reflections

The Nitwitzes

MyFathersMirror

“I want a baby,” Meera announced.
Randolph blinked. “Now? Meera, we got bills. I’m still in school, remember?”

A month later, he strode into work, grinning like he’d won the Pick 5.
“Yo, imma be a dad!”

Silence. Stares.
Then, from the back of the office:
“Uh… congrats, man,” someone mumbled, the enthusiasm flatter than a DMV clerk’s stare.

At some point, Meera called her mother to inform she’d be moving upstate for the rest of the pregnancy for “support.” That lasted five weeks, which exceeded everyone’s expectations. By mid-trimester, she was back in the Bronx.

She and Randolph headed straight to his mother’s housing project apartment, where his older brother had been scrounging off their mother for years. The guy somehow got partial custody of his kids on weekends, so the place was already bursting. Randolph—the only wage earner in the whole setup—was crashing there too. Now Meera sat like a queen on the couch, either unwilling or unable to navigate social services for assistance.

Randolph’s grin was long gone. He seemed equally unwilling or unable to grasp what was really coming.

Much could be said about how society romanticizes childbirth and motherhood. And yes, indescribable admiration goes to women who choose to become mothers. But honestly, some of what goes into the process can be flat-out traumatic. Maybe both things are true. Maybe it can be both, traumatic and beautiful.

Still, here they are, the two nitwits in over their heads and at the center of it all, a baby.

Randolph’s latest mission? Buy a couple dozen cupcakes from the bakery down the street. The kind with blue and white filling revealed when bitten into, an ultra low-budget gender reveal.

Meanwhile, Meera, still in a kind of stupor, struggles to navigate even state medical coverage, let alone housing or other basic resources.

And yet, somehow, the baby’s coming anyway.

The baby is coming.