Tag: writing

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 Scooter Had It In for Me

J. Angell

Aunt Vicky came to pick me up on weekends, often bringing clothes she’d made for me herself.

I lived for Saturday mornings because it meant I got to go home to my grandmother, even if only for one night.

One day, Aunt Vicky took me shopping for a scooter.

To me, this was roughly equivalent to getting my first car.

I got the ugly wooden one.

From the beginning, I mistrusted the thing.

Not that this stopped me from boasting about it. I took off on it straight toward la quinta around the block.

“You can borrow my bike, too,” some kid from the next unit called out.

I pretended not to hear him.

I rode the scooter up and down, but cautiously, mostly in front of the house and as far as an old garage up the block.

Until one day Mila felt inspired to throw caution to the wind.

She pushed off from the garage toward the house as fast as that hideous scooter would carry her, fully intending to impress any passersby fortunate enough to witness her skill.

Halfway down the block, the handle came off.

Mila went one way.

The scooter went another.

I ended up on my rear end, half upside down on the sidewalk.

Two American Jehovah’s Witnesses happened to be passing.

“Are you okay? Which one is your house?”

I knew that hideous thing had it in for me.

“I’m fine. Just a scrape. My house is right there.”

I answered with what little dignity I could muster, considering they had just seen my underwear.

They walked me home.

Julia first cracked open the door, then opened it wider.

All I remember is the flowing dress, white with some red in it, and her black hair swept up into some elaborate style.

“So grateful to you for bringing her. I was just going to go get her for dinner.”

Well, at least she opened the door.

YOUR TURN

Did you ever desperately want something as a kid, only to discover it was a complete disappointment?

A bicycle, roller skates, a toy, some piece of clothing everybody else had, anything you were convinced would improve your life until reality hit.

Share your story.

Use your real name, initials, a nickname, or make one up. We’re interested in the story.

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

The Girl Who Drew Women Who Floated

J. Angell

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

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.

Reflections

Apophis

J. Angell

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

J. Angell

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.