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Xplayer -> Hogar (6/8/2010 14:04:35)
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Hogar
On a night in the middle of February as the snow swirled outside my window, I had a dream of an island inhabited only by green trees and wild plants just off the eastern shore of the United States. Its shores were laden with jagged grey boulders instead of the soft fine sand of beaches. Some of the rocks were covered with seaweed, which grew underwater when the tide was high enough. The wet leaves of the seaweed were as slick as oil, so I stood on a firm, dry rock well above the water. The sky was devoid of clouds, and the sun had just begun to slip behind the distant horizon. Standing on the rocks, I could see the shore of some east coast state, Maine or Massachusetts probably, but I didn’t hear the sounds of civilization I was used to. As I gazed at the waves crashing upon the shore, I realized that I was alone, perhaps the last human on Earth. Yet in this solitude, I felt the presence of another living being. It wasn’t the feeling of someone watching over me, but rather that of a companion sitting next to me. In the silence, I could almost hear it’s thoughts and emotions relayed into my mind and heart. The presence was lonely and needed a friend to stay with it and comfort it forever.
I turned around abruptly and saw a young Mexican girl no more than ten years old crying on one of the rocks. Between sobs I heard her say the words “Mama” and “Papa.” I carefully jumped from rock to rock until I stood on the slippery grey boulder on which she sat. I brushed away the beautiful brown hair that covered her face and said, “It’s okay. I’m here.” She stared into my eyes with a look of unconditional trust as if I were the one she was looking for.
“¿Está mi mama?” she asked me in a voice sweeter than honey from the comb. The girl entrusted her entire existence to me in that one simple Spanish sentence. Yet, there was nothing I could do but console her. The tragic end to our tale was inevitable. The island could not sustain us forever, and there was nothing to return to on the shore.
We stood on the rock together, stared at the abandoned coastline of the mainland, and cried while we held each other in a tight intimate embrace like that of a true mother and daughter as we watched the dream slip away before our eyes.
This is the world that had ended. This is the dream that faded away.
It was Saturday. I woke up to the blaring of my alarm clock at 6:30 in the morning because I was stupid and forgot to turn it off the night before. The only thing worse than getting up early on a Monday morning after a nice weekend or vacation is getting up early when you don’t need to. I wanted to go back to sleep, but the cold air in the row home kept me from drifting back to my lucid dream. The temperature in the room was probably less than 55 degrees; I wouldn’t know since my aunt and uncle either didn’t believe in the concept of thermometers or were just too lazy to get one from a hardware store. Why would one go into a store just to buy a thermometer anyway? In my uncle’s mind, there were only two temperatures in the world, too hot and too cold. So I threw my heavy blanket on the floor and got out of my old hand-me-down bed. One of the legs was shorter than the other three, so the whole bed rocked towards the short leg when I got out. My uncle isn’t very handy, and getting a new bed “in this economy,” as he often said, wasn’t going to happen. Why they had the bed in the first place I don’t know. It was clearly a child’s bed, but my aunt and uncle never had children. As my bare feet touched the cold wooden floor, a shiver went up my spine, through my whole body, and out to my extremities. The water in my breath condensed in the cold winter air forming a misty cloud above my head.
“That’s not good,” I thought. “Maybe I should turn the heat on. Oh wait, my hardworking aunt and uncle forgot to pay the gas company this month, so no heat for us.”
Perhaps my assessment of my adoptive parents isn’t fair. My uncle, the sole source of our family income, was laid off from his job as a construction worker about two months ago. However, I can’t say that he’s made a valiant effort in trying to find a new job. Government assistance was “sufficient” – not to mention free. Hurray for safety nets.
I walked over to the other side of the small room and flipped on the light switch. The single light bulb sticking naked out of the ceiling turned on, but it gave a dim, anemic glow almost as if it too didn’t want to be woken up so abruptly and unexpectedly. I walked back to my bedside table on which were my only two possessions of any value, my wooden chess set and my black leather wallet that contained my library card. In second grade, my biological parents gave me the chess board, which came with hand carved wood pieces from Mexico. It was several years before I actually learned how to play the game, but the chess board and set are something I will always treasure as a memento of my real mother and father. My library card was my key to my world away from the world, the world of cliché romance novels. I opened the drawer in the table and took out my latest reading excursion entitled Let Love Be Your Last Battlefield. I turned to the last page and read the last line.
“True love always triumphs,” I read aloud to myself quietly so that no one else in the house would wake up. “I wonder why I even bother to read this junk. I must be some sort of a masochist, convincing myself that this kind of love exists in the world.”
As I reopened the drawer in the bedside table, I was tempted to just carelessly drop the 250-somthing page novel into it, but my better judgment prevailed as I carefully and respectfully laid the book down in the drawer. I took out another book entitled Definitive Master Chess Games II and flipped to page 1, the introduction, which I hadn’t read yet even though I had checked the book out about a week before. It read, “‘Chess is life,’ said former world champion Bobby Fischer. Parents and chess coaches teach children aspiring to learn this ancient game because they believe at least in part in this statement. Chess provides opportunities for critical logical thinking and lessons in patience and planning. It teaches children to pursue a single objective, even though there may be many paths to that objective.”
“If life were that simple,” I muttered to myself, “we’d all think like computers or something. Unfortunately, life isn’t so black and white.” I chuckled at my own pathetic joke.
I picked up the pawn in front of the white queen and moved it two squares forward. The wood was still in good condition after ten years; it retained its smell of freshly cut pine. I picked up the oak king’s knight and moved it in an “L” like I was taught towards the center of the board. Soon, without thinking, I was moving pieces all over the board to the point where I did not even know how the game was going to continue. After about the twentieth move in the game against myself, I stopped. It was a pointless pursuit. The game would end in a draw. There is no purpose in playing against yourself; you will never win.
I gazed at the clock on the table, which read 7:00. The sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon and shimmer on the morning snow like it would on an ocean of water, light reflecting off of pure white. The snow was still neatly layered on the sidewalk outside our rowhome, untouched by human boots and snow shovels. It was like a blank canvas that covered the whole landscape. However, the roads were salted the night before, so their black pavements were spared from the blank whiteness that covered nearly everything else. I closed my eyes and imagined that from the sky the roads would be like black lines on the white paper of the fallen snow, creating some sort of intricate symbol. Birds certainly have a nice view.
I remember a time when I was younger – about five or six and still living with my biological parents. We had a small home with a fenced in yard on the fringes of the city where trees lined the streets and each of the houses had only one bathroom. Our yard was tiny; if you took about ten steps straight from the back door you would hit the white wooden fence. On the first snowfall of every month, I’d get up an hour early and bundle up in all the snow gear I had until every bit of my coffee brown skin was covered from my wool hat to my leather boots. I’d then open the back door and dive face-first into the snow, shattering its purity. I’d make snow angels as I gazed at the gray cloudy sky. Before I went back inside to get ready for school or whatever else that day would bring, I’d always find a place in the snow that was still untouched, and with my glove covered index finger I’d write my name, Maria Jesus Jose.
I reminisced about my golden years, seemingly long behind me though I was only eighteen years old. I felt a tingle of nostalgia, which grew into a wave of inspiration. That day, I did not care what my aunt and uncle thought; I was determined to revisit the “good-old-times” of my childhood by playing in the freshly fallen snow. Even the wildest ideas in the world can make sense given the correct circumstances.
I grabbed my snow pants from their hanger in the closet in my room and put them on. I dressed in layers of long sleeve shirts topped with an undersized white sweater. I crept out of my room and quietly snuck down the stairs – “like a ninja” some people from my school might have said. As I passed my aunt and uncle’s room, I heard my uncle’s loud, deep, rhythmic snores. His name is David, but almost everyone calls him Dave, including me. I refused to call him Dad or even Father, just like he refused to call me “daughter.” Besides, I wasn’t even related to him by blood. Maybe being the younger brother made my uncle more prone to jealousy of what he didn’t have, such as a child of his own. I don’t know; I can’t get into that man’s head.
Once I got to the bottom of the stairs, I took my heavy red winter coat out of the downstairs coat-closet. After putting it on, I took my pair of store-bought black gloves from my pocket and slipped them over my hands. I had to rummage through the box of winter clothing on the floor of the closet to find my wool scarf and hat. These seemingly ordinary pieces of clothing had as much value to me as my chess board and library card. Unfortunately, I can only use them during the cold, lifeless half the year. When I was in eighth grade, my mother knitted my hat, and I tried to knit the scarf. My dexterity is terrible, so the scarf fell apart after a few days. Surprisingly, my father was able to knit me a new one. I remember the look of shock on my mother’s face when she saw the red and gold scarf with the letters MJJ stitched into it. She didn’t believe that men were capable of such artistry outside of the garage.
After wrapping the scarf around my neck and putting my hat on my head, I realized that my feet were still bare. I ran upstairs again and put on my thickest pair of socks and another pair on top of them for good measure. Deftly dashing back down the stairs I took my shoes out of the closet and realized that I had to remove my gloves before putting on my boots. I always seemed to do that, put clothes on in the wrong sequence or the wrong way or put the wrong clothes on at the wrong time.
I was now ready to face the perils of nature – or so I thought. As soon as I opened the door, the wind cut through my layers of protective clothing and blew snow from our front step across the threshold of our door. The sheer force of the wind took my breath away, and it felt as if all the warm blood inside my body was replaced with the cold winter air. As quickly as it came, the wind subsided, and all was still.
And there was silence.
Across the street there are other row homes that mirror ours, one bathroom complexes that are poorly maintained and have their heating periodically shut off. I was always surprised that despite many of the houses having holes in the roof, broken windows, and peeling paint, nine out of ten of them had a satellite dish. People’s priorities are something to this day I fail to understand.
We don’t have a yard, not even a driveway. Our car is parallel parked in front of our house, and we are responsible for maintaining the sidewalk even though it is not technically part of our property. I noticed that only portions of the sidewalks were clear. People would only shovel and salt the area in front of their house, accurate down to the last millimeter. The sidewalk looked silly; patches of it were shoveled but there were long stretches of untouched snow.
I walked out onto our front step. My boots made a crunching noise in the newly fallen snow, which glittered like tinsel on our Christmas tree. Actually, our “family” doesn’t even have a Christmas tree. My uncle and my aunt hate Christmas. I’ve never been able to find out why. In the patch of untouched snow on the sidewalk in front of our house, I knelt facing the street and drew my name in the frozen water crystals, Maria Jesus Jose. I put two lines under my surname for emphasis; my uncle’s last name is Stevens, a name I refused to take. So my action was really out of spite; I just didn’t want to acknowledge that I was such a hateful person.
The sun shined brightly on the snow, but the air remained cold and bitter. It was almost as if nature liked tormenting people with its gusts of ice cold wind and didn’t want to change into the warm comforting air it was made to be. With no heat, the snow would remain on the ground forever. Without the movement of particles, everything in the world would be rigid, stable. The ice wouldn’t melt anytime soon.
I was on the verge of total bliss, perhaps finally achieving the sublime that philosophers talked about in their really long books and poems. Suddenly, a black Chevy Malibu turned from the corner onto our street. It was going fast – too fast. There was no way that the force due to friction between the wheels and the road was enough to overcome the force required to make that turn. The car would skid; the driver would have no control over it. Then a terrible shattering crashing sound would fill the air, breaking the silence. If the driver were particularly unlucky, his engine would explode in an awe inspiring fireball.
People say that before you die or undergo some traumatic experience, scenes of your life flash before your eyes. At that moment when the Malibu began to skid, visions of my life’s story whizzed by so quickly my mind couldn’t even recognize them. However, as if my mind wanted to torment me one last time before my “death,” the flashbacks slowed down enough for me to witness the scene of an old station wagon smash into a tree, killing the driver and front seat passenger. A little girl cried on the ambulance ride to the hospital calling for her mother and father louder and louder until she had to be sedated by the paramedics.
Stop!
That’s all I could manage to say, loud enough so that those down by the river could probably hear a faint whine. My vocal chords burned with passion; my eyes burned with tears. I stood up and prepared to run across the street to the location where the car would surely hit another house. A thought ran through my mind that I might somehow be able to stop the car with my bare hands.
The car managed to recover from the skid; the driver was skillful enough so that the car didn’t go into a tailspin. The car almost clipped our parked pickup truck on the recovery, but the power steering was just enough for the driver to avoid a collision. The world seemed to spin around me; I think I was hyperventilating. The lack of oxygen to my brain began to shut down my senses; I was faint and weak. I remember my face hitting the black pavement, hard.
A small girl woke me up on the side of the street, poking me. “Excuse me, are you alive?” she kept repeating over and over again. Her appearance reminded me of a rag doll I had when I was little, braided black hair and a dark Latin American face. She looked dirty, as if she hadn’t taken a bath in weeks, but I think that’s just her natural skin tone. Her accent was…foreign, Cuban I think; I’m not very good at identifying dialects and accents. She wore a white coat with a pink scarf and hat that made her look like a huge marshmallow dipped in strawberry frosting.
I was so dazed that I couldn’t even respond, so the girl continued to poke me at a steady rate of about twice a second in the same spot in my right arm. She stopped repeating her request to wake up and said something to the effect of “Perdóname. ¿Comprenda inglés? ¿Está viva?”
I pushed myself off the ground and brushed myself off. I felt a trickle of blood run down my face. My forehead was bleeding, great. As I pressed my hand against the cut on my forehead, I turned to the confused girl and said, “Soy viva…I mean, yes, I speak English, and I’m alive.”
Then, unexpectedly, the little girl hugged me. My face heated up faster than a frying pan on a 300 degree oven, but it was nice to feel warm in such a cold and desolate place. As she held me she said hastily, “I’m glad you’re alright. I saw you in the street and thought you were dead so I kept poking you and poking you and you weren’t waking up so I kept asking you ‘will you please wake up’ but you weren’t answering so I thought that you were an immigrant like me and didn’t speak good English and so I asked you en español and you answered.” She took a long breath after that.
I had never seen the girl before in my life. I thought I knew all the neighborhood girls, even the youngest ones, but this girl was certainly a new character I’d never been introduced to. So I asked her, “What’s your name?”
She looked at me and recited, as if she had learned it by rote, “Mama says never give your real name to strangers because they can use it against you in the future. So if you must call me by a name, you can call me Pequi.”
“Pecky?” I replied. “That’s a strange nickname.” I stopped and mumbled to myself, “You should really be called Pokey because you poked me about a hundred times before I got up.” My arm was actually slightly sore. After someone touches you in the same spot many times, it doesn’t matter how lightly they do it. That spot gets sore. “So Pecky, where are your mother and father?” I asked.
Surprisingly, Pecky replied with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen on anyone’s face, “They’re in heaven.”
“So you’re an orphan.”
“An organ?”
I shook my head. “No an orphan, as in a…” I couldn’t remember the Spanish word for orphan. “An orphan is a person whose parents…both went to heaven.”
Pecky grinned. “Let’s go to the park together. Then we can play in the snow together, as fellow organs.”
I was taken aback. I put my gloved hands on my hips. “How did you know I was an organ…I mean, orphan?”
Pecky’s face became uncharacteristically serious. A temporary aura of wisdom overshadowed her little body. “I don’t know. I think it was just the fact that you seemed very sad and that when your eyes were closed you kept saying ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa,’ as if you wished they would come back to you. I’ve done that too,” she said solemnly.
I stared at her in amazement. “Who is this girl?” I thought. Grinning, I rustled her braided brown hair. “Okay, I’ll take you to the park, but only for a little bit. Your guardian might be worried about you.”
“Mama always said that your guardian angel is always with you,” Pecky said.
I took her by the hand and walked down our street towards the park in silence. Pecky had to skip just to keep pace with my much longer strides. I felt the cut on my forehead. It wasn’t bad; at least, I didn’t think it was.
The park was really just a fenced in playground with a slide, swings, and a see-saw. Mulch covered the pavement underneath to cushion the falls of little children all over the neighborhood. The equipment was old and rusty, but no one was ever scared to use it. It had a rustic, yet reliable quality about the playground that kept it from being turned into another slum home by now.
“We’re here!” Pecky shouted as we approached the playground. She dashed ahead of me and broke my grip on her hand. She got about ten small steps ahead of me before tripping over her own legs and falling face-first into the snow.
I couldn’t help but laugh at her misfortune, and I felt bad about laughing at her at first. Then she started laughing with me and making snow angels in the sidewalk across the street. I ran across the street to help her up. Once I opened the gate to the playground, she darted toward the swings and began to swing higher than I’d ever seen a girl of her size.
Her back and forth motion on the swing set must have had a hypnotic effect, because I started to imagine a crazy fantasy of a life as a recluse with Pecky by my side. I could sell my chess board and take whatever savings I had as start up money for a journey across the country to nowhere in particular. We could beg, swindle, or steal for money; we could sleep wherever we laid our possessions. Every day would be a new day, a new adventure. Sure, the essentials of survival would be hard to come by, but at least we would have each other and feel loved. Yes, we would feel loved. Perhaps along the way we would find other orphans in our situation who are fed up with their lives with people who don’t care about them. As our group grew, we could get money and food more easily. Perhaps we could establish a base of operations in some city where we would share communally and work together towards a common goal. It would be a life fit for a classic Dickens novel. A household will be built, and love will be plentiful.
My fantasy was broken by a voice crying “Pequi! Pequi!”
I turned around and saw a woman in a long furry overcoat sprinting towards us at full speed with fear in her eyes. Once she saw Pequi on the swings having the time of her life, her face lit up, and she jumped over the small fence to get to her.
Pequi laughed. “Catch me mama!” she said. She jumped at the top of her arc and the woman caught Pequi in her arms, completely undamaged. Tears were streaming down the woman’s face.
“Oh my baby, I’m so glad you’re alright!” the woman cried. “Don’t you ever scare me like that again!”
“Did you see me mama?” Pequi said. “I went this high!” She waved her arms wildly above her head trying to demonstrate just how dangerously high she flew.
All of this seemed like a blur to me. I asked the mother figure, “How could you let her go out on her own like that? Don’t you care about her? Did you just come after her because you were afraid of what the government would do if they found out you misplaced your foster child?”
The woman, who was probably just as shocked as I was, didn’t say anything. She gave me a look, actually more of a glare, which I will never forget. Her eyes showed confusion, then anger and seemed to change color as her stare became more intense. She scanned my whole body with her eyes from the now clotting scrape on my forehead to my snow covered black boots. Her eyebrows elevated in confusion, and her whole head pointed towards mine as if she were staring over an imaginary pair of eyeglasses.
The woman said to Pequi, “Let’s go, honey.”
Sorrow and regret usually go hand in hand like two peas in a pod. That day, the two very separate emotions seemed to synthesize the most painful, heartbreaking, cruel emotion ever conceived on earth. I stared at the woman and Pecky holding hands and they walked down the snow covered sidewalk. Before they passed around the corner, Pecky turned around, still held tightly by her mother’s hand, waved to me, and smiled. I raised my gloved right hand and hesitantly waved back. The connection between us, so evident only a few moments ago, was breaking like a spider web, which is strong for its weight, but still can easily be broken by a stick. Just as she disappeared from sight, I heard Pecky say, “See you later!”
My heart skipped a beat when those words reached me. I knew our reunion was unlikely; she didn’t even know my name. The responsible adoptive mother would never allow her child to play with a crazy kid such as myself. Despite the glaring reality of the situation and the distance between our lives, I still felt a tingle of hope. Both of us searched for companionship that day in February, and both of us found it in the middle of a city sidewalk. Our meeting, at least, proved that we were not alone, that suitable companions do exist somewhere out there. While the household of which I dreamt crumbled as Pecky turned the corner, the foundation remained.
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