Without a Net

by Michelle Tea

  “My mother said may we please borrow four slices of bread.” Then the next door.

  “My mother said may we please borrow four slices of baloney.” And the next.

  “My mother said may we please borrow four slices of bread.” Dinner was ready. Baloney sandwiches for four.

  Elsie would knock on one neighbor’s door with her well-rehearsed inquiry.

  “My mother said may we please borrow four slices of bread.” Then the next door.

  “My mother said may we please borrow four slices of baloney.” And the next.

  As much as Elsie loved telling a good story, she never talked about the murder. Details remained hidden behind veiled references, to be dug up decades later from media archives.

  Further statements from the newspapers: “In his first version of the shooting, police said Klock told them he came down the stairs after being awakened when his wife and escort entered the house.… He came down the steps into the unlighted living room—the gas and electricity were turned off… ‘I saw a shadowy figure… I thought he was putting his hand in his pocket to get a revolver. I fired at the shadow.’”

  But in an earlier statement, “Klock said his wife grabbed him by the hair while [the victim] beat him… Klock said he picked up a baseball bat, hit [victim] and broke out of his grip. The shooting followed.”

  Headlines from The Evening Bulletin:

  DECEMBER 14, 1946:

  “Woman in Shooting Free. Case of Mrs. Klock to Be Taken Over by Juvenile Court.”

  DECEMBER 23, 1946:

  “Woman’s Escort, Shot by Her Husband, Dies. Chester Man Faces Rearrest on Charge of Murder.”

  MARCH 26, 1947:

  “Killer of Wife’s Escort Is Freed. Chester Man Cleared Speedily by Jury.”

  Uncle Ed not only got off on self-defense, he got sole custody of the children, who had been relegated to a local Catholic orphanage. That’s when Aunt Marion left her hometown and started a new life as the only person I ever knew, “Aunt Marion, who lives in Florida.”

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1958, WHEN I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD, I heard my mother and grandmother talking about Marion coming up from Florida to spend the summer. She had decided on Atlantic City, New Jersey, for her summer stay. She would be close enough to the family to easily visit, but not too close to cramp her independent style. She was coming north to procure a divorce from Uncle Ed, having lived apart from him for ten years.

  My aunt settled into her Atlantic City life. She found a two-room apartment, got a job at a local diner, and reestablished a bond with her kids, by then in their teens and twenties. She sometimes borrowed a car and drove across the Walt Whitman Bridge to visit us on Sundays. She was full of stories that made us laugh, like the one about her parakeet that cussed.

  “My parakeet can say, ‘son-of-a-bitch’ and ‘goddam it!’”

  If there was no cold beer in our house, she used the Ladies Entrance at the Irish Pub on the corner and came home with two quarts. One summer Sunday, she proposed an idea to my mom.

  “Let me take a couple of the kids back to Atlantic City with me for a week.”

  Mom, having given birth to my youngest brother less than a year prior, never passed up the opportunity to farm out a couple of kids, and Marion’s troubles, except for her affinity for beer, seemed to be long past. So off I went with my next oldest brother, Mike, to spend a week in Atlantic City. No one thought to ask what she would do with us when she waitressed every day. Mom was just happy to have fewer kids to feed and watch after, even if only for a week.

  Aunt Marion left for the diner every day around noon. She told Mike and me to be quiet and not disturb the neighbors and when she got home she would take us to the boardwalk. Marion always kept her promise of a walk on the great Atlantic City boardwalk. But some of her troubled behavior was still in the works.

  One evening I was using the bathroom and discovered there was no toilet paper. Aunt Marion left to go to the store, leaving me on the toilet. She got sidetracked and stopped for a beer, or two, and it was quite some time that I sat there waiting for the toilet paper. Mike talked to me through the door, pushing funny objects through the inch of space between the bottom of the door and the floor to keep me entertained. I saw a safety pin, a roll of Tums, and a salt water taffy. Finally the door opened and Marion handed me a roll.

  Another day, she and the landlord got into a loud, outdoor argument because he claimed her lease didn’t allow for children and she told him she’d invite, “whoever the hell I goddam well please,” and started knocking on the neighbors’ doors inviting people to her apartment. It was the most fun Mike and I ever had packed into one week.

  We could hardly wait to get back to school and write our What I Did on My Summer Vacation compositions.

  At the end of the summer Aunt Marion’s business in the area was complete and she returned to Florida. She and the family had bonded again, and Marion would make a trip from Florida to see us every couple of years or so. She was no longer a funny story told around the dinner table. She was a real and permanent part of our lives.

  It would be several years before I learned about the family murder, but it didn’t change who she was to me. Until her death in 1991, she was one of the most beloved members of our family, and hands down the most colorful. As Aunt Dolly puts it, “My sister brought her problems on herself. But she was always the most generous person I knew. She didn’t have much, but christenings, first communions, and weddings never passed without a gift. She would give you the shirt off her back.”

  I often thought of Aunt Marion when I was a young adult, sharing an apartment with two women in West Philly and barely getting by. I remember mornings at my first job when I drank whole glasses of milk by the office refrigerator, milk that was meant for coffee. More often than not, I got to work on payday after handing the trolley driver my last thirty-five cents. At times when I felt the financial stress and hunger pangs of adult life with no one to call to borrow a buck, I thought about Aunt Marion, and how she lost everything, albeit by her own hand. Nevertheless, she picked herself up, replanted herself, and just kept going.

  In 1994, in a covert act she would approve, the family hid our aunt’s box of ashes in our grandmother’s coffin for a bargain burial.

  Today, more than a hundred years after she was born, family gatherings rarely take place without a story or two about Aunt Marion. She is never talked about as the aunt whose husband killed her lover. She’s Aunt Marion, who lived in Florida.

  WINGS

  tatiana de la tierra

  PLACING A PINK-FEATHER HEADBAND IN MY HAND, MY ABUELA BLANCA kissed me goodbye, crying. I cried, too. I didn’t know why. The perpetually gray Bogotá skies joined in, sprinkling us with cold rain. I ran up the narrow metal staircase as wind bit my wet cheeks, into an airplane that would take me and my family far from Colombia. It was May 1968 and I had just turned seven years old.

  Thick, warm Atlantic air greeted us as we clambered, wide-eyed, out of our metal cocoon. The air in Miami was nothing like the air I knew in the Andean mountains. But being yanked from the love and protection of my aunts, grandmothers, and great-aunts was the most momentous change. It was bigger than air itself. I walked to the market with them, chit-chatted on the sidewalk, made corn arepas at the crack of dawn, collected eggs in the morning, accompanied them in the evening for hot chocolate. They cooked for me, bought dresses for me, introduced me to all their friends. But in Miami, everybody was a stranger.

  At the airport I played with stairs that moved and doors that opened magically. A strange twig of a man who wore ripped denim and spoke halting Spanish greeted us. “Yo aquí para ayudarte,” he said, offering a warm handshake. Harvey was a friend of a friend of my dad’s; they embraced as if they already knew each other. My mom looked at him cautiously through her reddened eyes. Finally, she extended her hand.

  Everything seemed brand-new and shiny those first few days. All the blades of grass were uniformly green and stood properly on plush manicured
lawns. The clean-shaven policemen wore immaculate starched uniforms and drove sleek cars crowned with little blue and red domes that sometimes flashed and made wailing noises. Neat rows of containers housing exotic foods filled the spotless stores, where clerks counted crisp bills over Formica counters and gave back the change without stealing. Exquisite paintings graced cereal boxes and cans of soup, and luminous rays emanated from curvy Coca-Cola bottles branded with fire-red labels.

  My father took me to a 7-Eleven, where I marveled at the cans decorated with vivid color images of the foods they contained.

  “This one, Papi,” I said. We both scrutinized the can. It had a picture of reddish brown beans on the label. Beans, a mainstay of our diet, had to be soaked in water the night before and took hours to cook. Yet here they were in the palm of our hand, ready to eat. We went home with the can. My father opened it and heated up the beans with some rice. I could tell they were different; they were watery and didn’t smell right. Still, I brought a spoonful to my mouth. I gagged as the flavor hit my palate. They were sweet. Beans were supposed to be salty and spiced with onions, garlic, tomato, and peppers. They were supposed to be thickened with green plantains. They were not supposed to be sweet or watery.

  My mom, who disliked cooking and had little time for it, took advantage of the cheap and instant foods. She went grocery shopping and came home with Kool-Aid, white bread, processed cheese, frozen chicken potpies, sugar-coated cereals, and Hamburger Helper. The Colombian foods I was accustomed to—fresh blackberry juice, farmer’s cheese, Creole potatoes, tamales, and empanadas—quickly became memories.

  But my dad’s hunger for familiar foods roared incessantly. He enjoyed eating and cooking, and he went to great lengths to find magical ingredients. He discovered that you could find fresh coconut milk in the shell, ripe guanabanas, cumin powder, and plantains in bodeguitas like La Ideal and Los Pinareños. You could get an entire meal—a bandeja paisa with real arepas—at La Fonda, a Colombian restaurant. One day, my father took the bus and went foraging, his eyes bulging with visions of Colombian food. He returned late in the afternoon, his shirt splattered with drops of sancocho, his breath greasy from fried empanadas, his belly expanded with sobrebarriga, his fingers sticky with dulce de leche. He was beaming. He brought us avocados, coconuts, yucca, plantains, and Colombian delicacies.

  On Saturdays we took the bus to Miami Beach and went swimming by the pier, on the southern tip. There, I dug my toes into the sand and bobbed in the salty ocean. My mom, who was pregnant, sat on the beach and read a book while the rest of us played in the water. We ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and drank Kool-Aid. Once, as a treat, we went to Kentucky Fried Chicken after being at the beach all day. They had a special offer—two pieces of chicken with a biscuit and a small Styrofoam cup of mashed potatoes and gravy for $1.29. We got a special and sat down to share the food. I bit into a drumstick. It was good, crunchy and spicy. But as I swallowed I recalled what had happened the day before we left for Miami, and my stomach became queasy.

  We were in El Libano, at my great-aunt’s house. It was our last day there. I was in the corridor that faced the garden when I saw that Cuki, my favorite chicken, was being hunted down. “Run, Cuki, run!” I screamed as I saw a shiny machete swinging in her direction. I gripped the wooden porch railing as she ran, headless, fluttering her golden brown wings in a futile attempt to levitate. Cuki, who used to peck at my feet when I showered on the patio beneath blue skies, was our last supper. I missed her, and I missed the black earth that caked my feet when I played in my great-aunt’s garden.

  Our first home in our new world was a room in Harvey’s house. Blond, blue-eyed, and eccentric, Harvey slept on the beach, washed dishes for a living, and drank rainwater that he collected in an oxidized metal container in the back yard. He nourished himself on tropical concoctions, blending whole papayas with fish guts and honey. Restaurant napkins for toilet paper and roadside-discarded produce for dinner were his gifts. He taught my mom to walk on the grass to extend the life of shoe soles. He came home every few days to drink the rainwater, wash up, and change clothes. Harvey didn’t believe in pesticides so roaches crawled freely on the walls—and on us. He didn’t believe in banks or the government, either. His living-room library was stocked with books about politics, anthropology, and history. He let us live in his house for free, until we could afford to rent a place on our own.

  Another Colombian family soon joined us, moving into the room across the hall. The coziness of our home disappeared with the violent intrusion of our new neighbors. José Miguel was my dad’s military companion from Colombia. He was a construction worker, thick and muscular, who wore a constant snarl on his face and stank of liquor. His wife, Irma, took care of us while my parents worked. One day, my mom came home earlier than expected. My brother and sister and I were cowering in our room as José Miguel beat Irma. Their little girls, Nubia and Cacallo, were screaming throughout the house. My mom grabbed a broomstick and busted in on him. “Béstia!” she yelled, leading a sobbing Irma into our room.

  We walked around the neighborhood together, marveling at the gringo houses and the gringo lawns and the gringo postman and the gringo talk.

  The scenes repeated like tired reruns. When José Miguel wasn’t home we were free to run and play, but as soon as we heard his boots step into the house, we froze. “¡Chito!” we warned one another, walking on tiptoes, trying to be invisible.

  But not everything was bad, because I was with my brother, Gustavo Alberto, and my sister, Claudia. They were my only friends. The three of us walked around the neighborhood together, marveling at the gringo houses and the gringo lawns and the gringo postman and the gringo talk. Gone were the mountains that ringed Bogotá, the matriarchs in the countryside, the gamines who begged for money on the street, the fresh air. We didn’t understand why we had left Colombia or what the future held for us. So we did what we knew how to do, no matter where we were. We played. We ran and kicked bottles, climbed trees, played tag. We dueled as cowboys and Indians. I wore my pink-feather headband and protected my tribe. My brother brandished his miniature machete. My sister was the village elder, scheming to outwit the troops.

  In August, three months after our arrival, my little sister was born. Natasha came home in a white wicker crib that my mom had bought used for $1.50. Cushioned with a new white satin pad and lined with blankets, pink balloons floating on the flannel, the crib wobbled on uneven legs. Natasha, who was conceived in Colombia, was the only U.S. citizen in my family. She was a real gringa and even had golden hair. She was my life-size doll. I changed her diapers, prepared her bottles, and cradled her in my arms.

  My childhood had come to a close. Summer was ending and school was about to start. Irma found a job and couldn’t take care of us anymore. My mom worked as a maid in the Tudor Hotel in Miami Beach and my dad worked in a paper factory. I was the oldest, so my responsibilities increased. I began to cook, clean, and take care of my siblings. I became a miniature adult. “Wash that plate!” I scolded. “Clean up that mess!” I nagged. But I never got the response to my commands that I expected.

  If we hadn’t left Bogotá I would still have been wearing my gray uniform to school and learning to pray the rosary. I would have come home to my mom and played outside and done my homework and had arroz con lentejas for dinner. I would have been a seven-year-old girl just like all the others. But Bogotá grew more distant every day. After four months in Miami it seemed that we were there for good.

  School was an enclosed city surrounded by banyan trees and hibiscus bushes where I became indoctrinated into another culture. Gimnasio Palestina, my first grade school in Bogotá, was a private school in a small brick building. But Shadow Lawn Elementary took up an entire block. It was made of concrete and had dozens of classrooms, a cafeteria, a gymnasium, and a playground. In Bogotá my school had one class and one teacher, but in Miami there were hundreds of students, many teachers, and a principal. I was the only light-skinned girl in my class
and one of the few Spanish-speakers in the entire school. I couldn’t speak English and was just beginning to understand some of the words.

  I sat in silence at my desk with a thick pad of baby-blue-lined paper and a yellow No. 2 pencil that had been given to me for free on the first day of school. Mrs. Clara sent students to the chalkboard to write words that she dictated. She called on me; I stood at the front, looking at my feet, frozen. She read her list: ocean, river, stream. I fingered the chalk and she repeated the words, eventually chanting them as if they were commands. “Ocean! River! Stream!” I didn’t even attempt to write on the board; I went back to my desk, my fingertips dusted with white chalk.

  I dreaded those public moments that highlighted the fact that I was a foreigner. Sometimes I sat at my desk plotting my revenge. I would master the English language. I would infiltrate the gringo culture without letting on that I was a traitor. I would battle in their tongue and make them stumble. I would cut out their souls and leave them on the shore to be pecked on by vultures.

  One pivotal afternoon, I squirmed in my seat. I had an itch between my legs like a red-hot ant bite. Finally, I reached my hand toward the ceiling to ask for permission to go to the bathroom. Mrs. Clara looked at me; I knew no words to express my state of emergency. I pointed to the door; she stared back blankly. The whole class looked on. I grabbed my crotch, squeezed and grimaced. Finally, she understood, but as I darted out of the room, warm pee exploded between my legs, trickling into my socks and splashing in droplets on the floor. I ran out of school, my moist shoes pounding on the speckled tile, squeaky drumbeats echoing in the corridor.

  Past the banyan tree by the playground and through the neighboring streets, I sprinted as if I were being pursued. I ran with the insides of my legs soiled, wet, and sticky with urine, sucking oxygen into my bursting lungs with wrenching gulps. I wished that the stiff metal airplane that had ripped me from my home would take me back. Pumping my arms, I wished for silver angel wings that glided or long, broad eagle wings that soared. But I knew that my flapping was useless.