Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(53)

I went into my room, lay in bed, and read classics the librarian had loaned me indefinitely—To Kill a Mockingbird, The Secret Garden, and The Giver. But by my twelfth year on earth and my ninth in the mansion, even the magic of books had started to fade. It was not that their power had diminished, but that my ability to see wonder in the circus had begun to wane. Every breath, every turn of the page, had become a possible moment of surrender. I reread the same section twice, thrice, and by the fourth time, dog-eared it, and switched to another title. I fell asleep like that, with books dog-eared and left open around and on me. I dreamed of running and tripping, and startled myself to a state I then called “falling awake.” I went in and out of consciousness, lids fluttering open and closed, the heat and humidity causing me to stir. I hovered in this state between sleepiness and sleeping.

I heard noises from downstairs: belching, chortling, mumbling. I heard jokes about taxes, commies, and the missus. I heard cards shuffling and being slammed down onto tabletops, and a battery-powered radio sputtering the local news and a jingle for Chiclets gum. I heard men, drunk and maudlin, serenading their call girls, whom I guessed were, like on previous nights I’d been spying, sitting or gyrating or panting on the men’s laps.

I fell asleep again and then woke up again. I heard scuffling down below. Uuunhh and thud and thunk echoed from over there to right here, through the perfect acoustics of our house that was once as grand as a symphony hall. I could hear a number of men wrestle each other on the main floor. They kept at it until Mama said, “Who wants a tour of the mansion?”

Norman and Mama gave their guests a tour to view the house’s good bones. The men walked through the arched entryways and under the puzzle of mirrors, their whores’ arms hooked around theirs. They examined and prodded the architecture. They speculated its history. Mama played tour guide and boasted about the mansion’s past: how it had been the venue of many champagne-toasting parties, the set for many films, the stage for the latest fashions, the site at which many business deals were made. She took them around the gardens, the ballroom, the disco, the breakfast room, the master bedroom, the lanai, and the bar, but never upstairs.

But that didn’t mean they never came.

I entered sleep again.

Close to midnight, the air in my bedroom changed. The door parted and a breeze cut through, and the atmosphere went from simply being quiet to somehow being discreet, controlled, restrained: a secret. The dankness in the room filled with smells of whiskey and gin. I felt someone cross along the footboard of my canopied bed and along its side, but I remained unsure of whether I was dreaming. The midnight ghost waved the canopy aside and reached in. In mid-slumber, I felt his hot breath on my face. I heard sighs and rasps alternate with shushing and the jingling of a watch. Sheets first rustled, then lifted off the bed and off my legs. I still had the fork under my pillow, but in sleep could not motion my hands from my sides up to where I had kept my weapon. I only fathomed that the tracing up, down, and between my thighs, the finger snaking around my baby breasts, the caress on my neck and mouth were really happening when all the petting and playing was over. I was caught in a death trance, running—and I’d never been a runner, but still, I tried. Pearl-and-oyster marble cemented my feet. My mind told my legs to move fast, fast, faster!

Keep the bottle closed, don’t let your perfume spill. Run fast, fast, faster!

Wake up!

My eyes opened, my sheets were moist.

And then nothing—nothing but darkness.

The next morning, I woke up and went straight to Diyosa’s old room. I curled up in her cot and stared at her left-behind shrine: her upturned tin, pocket mirror, flamingo-pink blush, peacock-colored eye shadow, Revlon stick, and her farewell note to me. I crawled to her makeshift dresser and picked up the note and read it, read it again, then set it down between the mirror and blush. Then, as if warped out of time and thrown back in, I searched for her perfume bottle, forgetting that she had taken it with her. But I looked under the cot, felt around it, scoured around the perimeter of the room, looked inside closets, looked between stacks of yellowing paper, and peered through holes in the wall. I panted while I rifled, ransacking the room until I remembered that Diyosa was no longer there and neither was her essence.

And neither was mine.

I crossed the terrace back to my room and pulled Tachio’s swaddle out of the drawer. I rolled it into a baby and cradled it. I patted its bottom, just as slightly and rhythmically as my yaya used to do to help me sleep.

“Shhh. Don’t cry,” I said, blowing gently onto its face. “I said don’t cry! It’s just milk—just spilled milk!”

I rocked it harder, swinging myself side to side so fast that the hem of my skirt lifted up into a parachute. “Shush! Stop crying! It’s just spilled . . . spilled . . .”

Spilled perfume. I couldn’t say it.

I went about my day with a stomachache and a side cramp and soreness in parts I would rather have ignored, parts I would rather have not had. I took Rollerblade Barbie, her clothes now all gone but her lighter skates still on, and plunged her into the ice-cream bucket of water to drown her. The skates stopped sparking, the fire quenched by my ration of stagnant water.

I abandoned books altogether. I refused love in this way. Instead I drew on Papa’s old ledgers, heavy-inking over tally marks and net profits and claims. I etched bodies, hundreds of them, at times whole, but many times dismembered. I wrote my name over and over in curlicue calligraphy, then crossed out every C, every I, every N, every E, and every L. I dragged the black pen across my name, etching, engraving, lines through the letters with which my parents had christened me. I also wrote on myself—my thighs, my wrists, my palms. I impressed black over my birthmark, my stigmata, my Lucky Star. I drew X’s and O’s wherever I had an inkling of being touched. XOXO. Hugs and kisses. Death and dark wishes.