Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(69)
He said, “I want to be your friend forever.”
Only Elma had ever pledged such a declaration, a commitment, to me and because of the life I had lived and the evil I had seen, I’d been wary of anyone who’d tried to get close. I had made myself as interesting as possible—fashionable, literary, artistic, musical—so that both strangers and friends would become so caught up with my present that they would be uninterested in my past. But in him, I sensed Elma’s spirit: able to bend and sway, able to wait, able to laugh through hardship, and whose boil inside explodes to—and only to—protect me.
“Tell me everything,” he said, in his rolled-up khakis and slim-fit, sky-blue oxford shirt.
Over a shared Wendy’s Frosty or a rice bowl from a hole-in-the-wall at St. Mark’s Place, I recounted my childhood in the big, bad, bloody, beautiful mansion. I told him, most times through tears, about the forts I had built with my brother, bedtime tales my father shared, my mother’s basement closet and parties, the ladies of the evening, Norman’s goons and guns, my pets, the chickens, the pozo, Diyosa, and Elma.
“You two are so alike,” I said. “Funny how you were born to different families, different worlds, and yet have the same heart and spirit. It’s like my old friend is right here with me.”
He went back to South Carolina at the end of the summer. We kept in touch, in love, through email, text messages, letters, and phone calls. Once he had unlocked the metal gates to my past—one uunnkk-uunnkk at a time—little could be done to stop the flood, the monsoon, and its relentlessness.
“I am breaking,” I said.
“You’re becoming a new kind of beautiful,” he replied.
He sent me CDs: compilations of hip-hop, R&B, pop, and indie tunes he liked. “Listen to these when you get scared or sad.” Just like my brother, he believed in the healing power of music, in how a rhythm or a lyric can redeem a day.
He asked me what I wanted to do with my life.
And I said, “I want to write.”
“Then go write. Write it all,” he said.
By encouraging me to put pen to paper, he walked me back to and through the past and into a new time: the season of the sun.
We dated long-distance for three years until I followed him to the South, to pink-and-orange Carolina skies, to water. And from there, we started a family. We flew back to New York on Labor Day weekend for a fifty-person wedding at Central Park, where we vowed our love and loyalty to God, to each other, to the arts, to academia, and to becoming a well of love, light, and kindness to those around us.
I married him and gave him stories. He married me and gave me two things: a mother and a daughter.
His mother’s name is Mary, like Mara, the sister I never met. But also like Mary, the mother of Jesus, the unassuming virgin, the nurturer. Our Lady of Peace and Voyage. She sends gift cards for coffee and gas; stocks our pantry with peanut butter, crackers, noodles, and grits; shares my affinity for local honey and homemade soap; checks up on our dog and our succulents; and takes me out to lunch so she can listen to my stories.
“Had I been there, honey, I would’ve held you,” she says every time. “I am so proud of all that you’ve done and all that you have yet to do.”
She introduces me to neighbors and coworkers as “not my daughter-in-law, but my daughter.” She links arms with me and rubs my upper arm when we walk through Belk department store, asking, in her midland dairy-farm accent, “You okay, honey?”
She, too, has endured hardship, the quiet southern gothic kind, and so can sense when the tremble in my voice comes from something other than strong coffee. On my birthday and on holidays, when I think of Mama, Papa, Paolo, and Tachio the most, she sends cards with cash folded in, for a most beautiful outfit for the most beautiful daughter, or an owl-shaped soap, or a bag of granola and a magazine clipping with a note penciled, Read this. Made me think of you. I hope writing is going well.
Mary was there, the only one permitted by us to come, at the birth of our daughter. Mary stroked the hair off my face as I moaned in pain and pushed in the birthing pool. I chose to deliver this way because I was, still am, most comfortable in and around water. Anika Louise was born the week of Thanksgiving 2011, into a ninety-six-degree aqueous environment. I scooped her out of the pool and to my chest, whispering, “My baby, my sunshine.”
She nuzzled into my bosom and suckled to feed without any coaching or coaxing from me or the delivery staff. She knew her way to my breasts, her sustenance, and knew her place in my arms. My husband cut the cord and Mary washed the baby. The first and last time I had seen an infant so fragile, lips still puckered, and flesh still wet and fresh from the sac was the night of my third birthday—Tachio’s coming and going. But this baby, whom I had carried for thirty-six weeks and four days and had labored to meet for over forty hours, was plump like a mango and, like the fruit, bursting with brightness, sweetness, and color.
We christened her with her two names because of what they mean: Anika, Hebrew for grace. And Louise, a variation of Louis, which means strong warrior.
Grace and strength. Blessed warrior child.
She is almost six now. And I am teaching her how to read by having her sound out letters from Pablo Neruda’s Love Poems and E. B. White’s Here Is New York. Like my mother, I call out words to the air. It is how we teach our daughters to love language.
“Sonnet!”