12-07-06

“Boys are strange,” she told me. She had a particular smell and that smell was a thousand flowers dripping with honey, a tiny hint of fairy dust. She could charm me and my sister into doing anything for her one minute, and anger us into taking her lipstick and scrawling YOU’RE A SELFISH BITCH XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (we had no idea what the X’s meant but for some reason whenever we were mad, we slashed X’s to emphasize how crazy raging mad we were) onto her dresser mirror in the afternoon when we were alone, and then guiltily wiped it off with Fantastic minutes before she came home, hastily throwing the lipstick out the window and feigning ignorance the next morning when she got up to do her make-up for work.
“Once, there was this rascal,” my mom continued as she covered up her hands with lotion, “who only had a father, no mother, which was why maybe he never understand the psyche of a woman, and he would follow me home every afternoon. From the minute class was let out to the moment I walked into my apartment, he would stand five steps behind him, taunting me, calling me names, threatening to push me into the mud, making fun of the way I walked, making fun of my long neck,” and she craned her neck up and measured it with her thumb and forefinger to show me, “making fun of the color of my hair, which was really quite red when I was younger, making fun of my parents, my mom, my dad, my brother, my friend who I walked home with, and I thought for sure he hated me, but I didn’t know why. I had never talked bad about anyone behind their backs or to their face the entire time I was growing up. I don’t think I even talked to this boy in my entire life, until he started following me, and even then I never really spoke to him. I just ignored him and wondered why he hated me so much.”
“Mom,” I started to say.
“But it turned out he was in love with me. He was in love with me and the only way he could express it at that age was by teasing me, throwing things at me. Once he even threw broken glass at me and my friend ran up to a police officer to tell him to arrest the kid, but those were corrupt days. The police officer only arrested kids if they were the kid of a professor. They left the poor ones alone to terrorize the city.”
“Mom, of course he liked you. It’s so obvious. Did you really not have any idea that he liked you?”
“I had no idea,” she said. “I had no idea whatsoever. I just had no idea whatsoever. You’re better than me when I was your age. When I was your age,” and she pulled in close to me and bent her head down low, “I thought maybe if I sat close with another man, it would get me pregnant. Your father took me to sit underneath a treat in the shade one summer and my hands wouldn’t touch his hands because I was shaking and sweating with fear. I thought I had gotten pregnant just from him looking at me. Can you believe your Mommy?” she asked me.

In school the next day, the other kids asked me why I ran out of gym, and some kid, Sophia or something pushed me and said I made our team lose, and I pushed her back and said, “So freaking what?”
“So that’s so uncool of you Celia. If you were going to run that fast out the door, you should have at least stayed and helped out the team first.”
“Leave me alone, you’re worse than a mosquito.”

My mother was the type of beautiful that I only read about later in books. I felt a startling alliance between the stories I read on the page and the stories my mom told me. When I read a 100 Years of Solitude by Marquez, I pictured my own mother floating into the air, a halo of picked flowers, of hummingbirds humming a lovely song not too high, not too long, around my mother as she ascended, and I imagined that was the reason why sometimes I could tell she was not seeing us, my sister, me, later on, my brother. Sometimes, we were obstacles and we blocked her from the things she was interested in, whatever they were, we sometimes stood right in front of it, or our shadows cast a darkness, a sourness over the things that set her alight, glittering in the middle of winter when we were all gloomy, and she was just a momentary sprite of a thing that we tried to catch. What was the point? Our efforts were in vain. Our mother, herself, was vain.

What I mean, primarily, is that my mother grew up spoiled, used and inured to the idea of being a spectacle. Starting in the fourth grade, she no longer needed to do her chores. There was always someone to do them for her. The boy who wore his hair greasy and parted in the middle liked how long and shiny my mom’s hair was, and he offered to paint the fence around her parent’s tomato garden in exchange for ten strands of her hair wrapped in a small paper bag. After he painted her fence, my grandmother invited the boy up to their apartment and fed him a boiled tea egg and a soup with plenty of green onions.
“You’re young. You have your whole life to live. Don’t choose to waste it on painting fences for other people’s daughters. This one,” and my grandmother pointed sternly at my mother, “is not worth your time.”
At school the next day, my mom gave him ten strands of her hair, and he wanted her to promise it was her hair by letting him twist her arm behind her back but my mom refused and he couldn’t do anything because their teacher was watching, and in fact, my mom hadn’t give him ten strands of her own hair, but a strand of hair from each of her ten closest girlfriends who dared her to do this over hiccupped giggles.
The boy came to her the next day and thrust the bag of her hair into my mom’s face and yelled out, “You’re a goddamn liar.” It turned out he had memorized the smell of her hair and when he got home to smell the strands of hair he had walked home with, he realized immediately that she had played him.
“Mom,” I said to her, after hearing this story for the first time, “do you know what you’d say if you had been living here at the time?”
“No, what?”
“He’d go like, can you give me some of your hair for being your bitch slave, and you’d be like fine, and then he’d go on and be your slave and do your chores and you would give him the hair, and a minute later, you’d be all like, I told you I’d give you some of my hair………….. SIKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
My mom really had no idea what I was talking about.


The reason why my sister thinks she’s going blind is because she can’t see her boyfriend’s face anymore. She calls me in the middle of the night and wakes up the entire family with her call. My dad emerges from his room and I have to finally admit this: he’s getting old. The lines around his eyes are beautiful when he smiles. He looks like a man who could seduce a much younger, much more beautiful woman than my mother, the kind of man who girls look at and think, “he’s got sad eyes,” and it would have been a compliment. When he’s angry, or tired, like he is tonight, they look drawn-in, faked, as if someone went in and penciled lines of deep irritance right onto his face. It scares me.
“Who is it, Celia?”
“It’s just Cindy.” “Schhuhhh.” That’s the sound he makes when he wants to evoke a certain emotion and judgment. The sound of him shaking his head at me, or the sound of him seeing the things I do as ridiculous and illogical and only possibly tolerated by someone who has not suffered for the past twenty years and continues to suffer to this very day, this very exact second.