Breaking Night

by Liz Murray

  “I ate all my eggs,” I said, but no one was listening.

  Grandma, my mother’s mother, lived in Riverdale, across the street from Van Cortlandt Park, in a sixties-style old-age home where she smoked, prayed, and made pay-phone calls to our apartment daily. Apart from us four, she was the only family we really connected with. Daddy’s mom sometimes sent gifts from Long Island, but by falling into drugs, he’d become the black sheep of his middle-class family. My whole life, they never once visited; they never came to see how we lived in the Bronx. Although Ma had run away from home at the age of thirteen, she and her mother reconciled later in life. By the time Lisa and I were born, Grandma would visit once a week, on Saturdays, when she boarded the number 9 bus using her senior citizens’ half-fare card to travel to University Avenue.

  Before her visits, Ma sped across the apartment tucking sheets into the corners of beds and gathering plates into the sink and running hot water over them. She swept dust into a pile under the couch and sprayed air freshener over our heads minutes before Grandma was due to arrive.

  From the couch, Lisa shooed Ma away each time the vacuuming blocked her view of Video Music Box, a show that appeared in snowy grains on our TV only if Lisa turned the UHF dial around and around.

  On one hot summer afternoon, Grandma was expected to arrive at twelve sharp, but Ma—as always—waited until the last minute to do anything. The mist from the aerosol spray was settling over me in cold drizzles when Grandma arrived, dressed too warmly for the weather. She was wheezing heavily from her brief walk up the two flights of stairs, and the strong reek of cigarettes kicked up from her sweater when we hugged. Her hair was a tight bun of gray and silver. Her eyes were crisp and green, and her skin was wrinkled and tough-looking, with faded brown blotches of age. Lisa didn’t look up from the TV. For her, Grandma had to lean in to get a hug. I threw my arms around Grandma’s waist and asked how her bus ride—a pivotal part of her week—had gone. Her answers were always brief and delivered with a complacent smile.

  “Everything was simply wonderful, dear. I’m just glad to have been given another day from our Lord to come see my beautiful girls.”

  Grandma was deeply religious. In her tan pleather purse—which she held in the crook of her right arm wherever she went, even to the bathroom (a habit she attributed to “those filthy crooks at the home”)—Grandma carried a Bible—the King James edition—hair clips, Lipton tea bags, and two packs of Pall Mall cigarettes, her “smokes.”

  Usually, no one cared to have a conversation with Grandma but me. Ma said she was so lonely living in the home that she would talk anyone’s ear off who’d listen, her sole focus being religious education. Ma also insisted that I would eventually lose interest, just like everyone else had, when I realized Grandma “wasn’t all there.”

  “She’s not working with a full deck,” Ma would say. “I figure she couldn’t help the things she put me through. You’ll understand what I mean one day, Lizzy.”

  But I couldn’t imagine. Grandma was unlike other adults. She would indulge my every question, no matter how many I asked. My curiosities ranged from how rainbows were made to who looked more like Ma when she was little, Lisa or me. And Grandma came ready to offer answers to absolutely everything, drawing all reasoning from her pious know-how, assuring me that all mysteries of the world were God’s doing. From the doorway, Ma watched, commenting that we were a match made in heaven.

  Grandma set up station in our kitchen, offering tea and scripture to any takers. I liked the sweet taste of the tea after Grandma stirred in two sugars and some milk, which ribboned through the smoke curling from one of Ma’s cigarettes. I sat, my knees drawn to my chest, nightgown pulled over my legs, sipping the warm drink, and listened to her describe how sins kept the wicked from heaven.

  “Don’t curse, Lizzy. God doesn’t favor a foul mouth. Clean the house for your poor mother once in a while. God sees and hears all, and he never forgets. He knows when you don’t do right by others. Trust me, missy, there will be plenty of sinners who never enter the pearly gates of heaven into God’s love. Be careful, God is our Lord, and He is all-powerful.”

  The only other thing Grandma made conversation about, unrelated to religion, was what I wanted to be when I grew up.

  “A comedian. I want to tell jokes onstage,” I declared, recalling the nights I’d watched men on TV, wearing suit jackets, delivering nervous anecdotes to invisible audiences, their confidence mounting with each explosion of laughter. I figured Grandma would be as impressed as I was at the idea. Instead, she looked at me with concern and set her glass down to raise her finger to the sky.

  “Oh dear God, no, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Lizzy, no one will laugh. Sweetie, be a live-in maid. I became a live-in maid when I was sixteen years old. You’ll love it. You go to stay with a nice family and if you take good care of their kids, you can eat for free and make a good, honest living that God would be proud of. Doesn’t that sound nice? Be a live-in maid, Lizzy. Besides, it’s good practice for when you have a husband, you’ll see.”

  At my age, it was hard to understand what Grandma meant. I envisioned a wife and husband seated at a square table, in a large, square, white house. Their toddler, chubby and wailing, was waiting for me to serve him, along with the couple, whose faces were blank blurs. Grandma smiled reassuringly. I smiled back. Her vision of my future disheartened me so much that I decided that while I would outwardly agree to anything she said, secretly, I’d keep my true wishes private. I nodded and smiled, pretending to be as pleased with her advice as she was. Then I gave her an excuse about needing something from the living room and joined Lisa on the couch.

  But Grandma didn’t need me—or anyone, for that matter—to keep up a good conversation. If she was left alone in the kitchen for too long, she was just as happy to kneel on the floor and carry on a private dialogue with God Himself. Lisa lowered the volume on the television so we could eavesdrop from the next room on Grandma’s passionate repetitions of “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” She went on, over and over, clicking her rosary and murmuring until her speech was more rhythm than words. This meant that she’d made direct contact.

  Lisa snapped the TV off completely when Grandma’s praying got louder, her voice raised and deepened in a way I found frightening as she called out for guidance from above—her own sort of CB radio calling to the Lord. Grandma could lose hours in this trance, never moving, never opening her eyes while the sun set and darkened the room around her, the tea cooling in glass mugs on the table. The kitchen remained off-limits to the rest of us when Grandma was speaking to God.

  “Lisa, shhh, I wanna hear.” I believed she might truly be reaching heaven and strained to listen, through Grandma’s responses, to what God’s direct advice might sound like. Lisa twisted her lips into a smirk.

  “You’re so dumb,” she chided. “Grandma’s just crazy. Ma says she hears voices. She’s not talking to God—she’s nuts.”

  Many times, while Ma was busily cleaning in preparation for Grandma’s arrival, she told us stories about how her childhood was ruined by her mother’s mental illness. As a girl, Ma was forced to return home every day only minutes after school let out, many long blocks away from home. Grandma would synchronize Ma’s watch to their living room clock, and if Ma was late, even by minutes, she received a fierce beating. Grandma used anything from extension cords to spiked heels; all blows were delivered to Ma’s tender inner thighs until black-and-blue bruises colored her flesh from crotch to knee. In the middle of the night, Ma, her sister, Lori, and her brother Johnny were often shaken out of bed, pots and spoons thrust into their hands. They were instructed to bang hard, to make as much noise as possible, and to scream a phrase of Grandma’s devising: “Its-a-bits-of-para-kitus, Its-a-bits-of-para-kitus” over and over, until the voices that tormented Grandma were drowned out by the clatter.

  This is partly why, Ma said, she’d left home to live on the streets when she was very young and why she crie
d, listening to sad records in her darkened bedroom, remembering all the trouble she’d run into since.

  “A childhood like that can really mess with you,” Ma would say. “What’d she expect me to be after all that, Miss America?”

  A firm regimen of medication and talking to God kept Grandma tame later in life. Without that, Ma swore, the devil in her was easily provoked.

  “But you should know, it’s not her fault,” Ma once explained in a gentle voice that told me she loved Grandma. “It’s hereditary. Her mother had it, and her mother’s mother had it. And once in a while, pumpkin, I got a spell of it, but I was nothing like Grandma. With treatment, mine went away, one hundred percent. She’s always half in la-la land. She can’t help it.”

  The “treatment” Ma spoke about was two- or three-month stints in the psychiatric ward of North Central Bronx Hospital, after Daddy found her hallucinating and hearing voices. Before I was born, they tried a few types of medication before Ma was given Prolixin and Cogentin to keep her balanced. Daddy explained that more attacks were unlikely because this had happened years ago, and Ma had been all right since. Either way, I was convinced that Ma could never be anything less than one hundred percent herself, partly because the very thought of her being any different frightened me.

  Inside the kitchen, Grandma laughed knowingly to herself, in some private joke.

  “There she goes,” Lisa said, rolling her eyes at me and spinning her finger in small circles beside her head. Until Lisa and Ma pointed it out, I’d never once connected Grandma’s solo conversations with her insanity. I blushed at my gullibility.

  “I know she isn’t talking to God. What do you think, I’m retarded?” I snapped back.

  In the summertime, Ma bridged some of the gaps in our income by feeding us through other government programs, like the free lunch offered throughout local public schools. Lisa and I often had to coax her out of bed to dress us and ready herself, so we were almost never on time. Having waited until the last minute, Ma would rush around the apartment frantically, feverishly scrambling to make the cut-off time.

  “Just—sit—still! If you move around, it’ll only be worse.”

  My head jerked and swayed with the tug of Ma’s fine-toothed comb, which ripped fire like nails along my skull. “Owww, Ma!”

  “We have only fifteen minutes, Lizzy. We need to go. I’m being as gentle as I can. If you sit still, it won’t hurt,” she insisted, tugging my hair to prove her point. I knew from experience that this was a complete lie. From the doorway, Lisa poked her tongue out at me; her hair was manageable. My cheeks burned with anger. As I went to return the gesture, the teeth of the comb snagged an enormous knot. Without hesitation, Ma dug furiously, snapping the stubborn pieces like dry grass. I winced my eyes shut and grabbed the corner of the mattress beneath me to wrestle with the pain.

  “See. If you sit still, it’s not so bad.”

  I would rub my throbbing scalp for the rest of the morning.

  We were in danger of being given cold servings for the third time that week—or worse, there might be no food left at all. This was especially difficult when we were between SSI checks, and the free lunch was often our only full meal of the day.

  July’s intense sun broke the Bronx open, split it down the center, and exposed its contents. High temperatures drove our neighborhood’s occupants out from their muggy, un-air-conditioned apartments to crowd the cracked sidewalks.

  I waved hello to the old ladies who spent all day sharing gossip on lawn chairs, each claiming one full square of cement for themselves and their battery-operated radios.

  “Hi, Mary.” I smiled at the woman who gave me nickels to buy peanut chews whenever I saw her downstairs.

  “Good morning, girls. Good morning, Jeanie.” She waved back.

  Old Puerto Rican men played dominoes in front of the corner store on planks of rotted wood suspended over cinder blocks. Ma always called them dirty old men and said that I should stay far away, because they think dirty thoughts and would do dirty things to little girls if given the chance. As we approached the men, I tried to keep my eyes on my shoes to show Ma that I was obedient. They called things out to her that I never understood. “Mami, venga aquí, blanquita.” And they made whistling and sucking noises with their wet, beer-shiny lips.

  We passed a few of Ma’s friends sitting nearby, perched on stoops, eyes trained on their children, clutching overloaded keychains decorated with plastic Puerto Rican flags and smiling coqui frogs in straw hats. The plastic jumble of trinkets clinked with each disciplinary raise of the mothers’ hands. Children circled sprinklers and teenagers claimed street corners.

  The block thumped salsa as we crossed University onto 188th, Lisa and I tugging on Ma’s arms, helping guide her through traffic while she squinted.

  “Four more blocks, Ma, all right?”

  Ma smiled absentmindedly. “Yep, okay pumpkin.”

  The cafeteria was filled with the distinct smell of fish. I sucked up disappointment, grabbed a yellow Styrofoam tray partitioned into four sections, and got in line. I hesitated over the pyramid of fish cakes glistening with grease.

  “You got something better to eat at home?” the milk lady asked over the cafeteria chatter.

  “No,” I answered, hanging my head as I accepted the limp fish.

  “Then come on, keep it movin’.” I grabbed a pint of milk, the container slippery between my fingers, and tried not to let my Tater Tots roll off the tray as I went to sit on a bench connected to a long, crowded table.

  Lisa stabbed holes into her fish cake, drawing the bright yellow cheese filling from its center. I was staring at a faded poster of children raising their sporks—a cheap plastic spoon combined with a fork—to demonstrate the importance of proper nutrition, when a lady with a clipboard began talking to Ma.

  “So, how old are your children, ma’am?” she asked.

  “Seven, and the smaller one is almost five.” Ma squinted and smiled vaguely, but I could tell that the woman’s face was too distant for Ma’s bad eyes to see clearly. The woman wrote something down, humming a quick, “Mmm-hmm, really,” as though Ma had said something interesting.

  They talked for a while, the woman asking Ma a lot of personal questions about our family income from welfare, Ma’s level of education, and whether or not she lived with our father. “Where is he? Does he work?” and so on. I pushed the Tater Tots around in my mouth, breaking them into bits with my one front tooth. Still cold in the center, they tasted like cardboard moistened by freezer ice.

  “I see. So when do you plan on starting this one in school?” She pointed her finger at me. I slid closer to Ma. The clipboard woman spoke to her with the same voice adults used when they leaned down to tell me how big I was getting.

  “This fall, down the block at P.S. 261,” Ma replied.

  “Mmm-hmm, really? Thank you, ma’am. Enjoy your lunch, children,” she instructed us as she went on to the next parent.

  “My baby’s growing up,” Ma said, ignoring the woman’s intrusion and briefly hugging me to her side. “You start school in just two months.”

  I thought of the words growing up—grown up, I mouthed to myself. I looked at the adults in the cafeteria, searching for what grown up looked like, hoping to find some signs of what to expect for myself.

  I watched the way the clipboard woman interviewed the new lady, making her nervous as she leaned in to take her information. I didn’t like it when Ma smiled for her questions, just like when she was nice to the cold women who sat like royalty behind big wooden desks at welfare—the way Ma sounded like she was begging. I didn’t like being afraid of Ma’s caseworker and racing around the apartment to help clean for the in-home checkups, or having to be overly grateful to the moody cafeteria workers. It scared me that strangers had the power to give or take so much of what we depended on.

  The cafeteria rules stated that food was for kids only, but at Ma’s request, Lisa snuck her a piece of fish. Careful not to let the lunch
ladies see, Ma stuffed it into her mouth and had me scan the room to ensure that she had not been seen. Watching her and Lisa, I thought of Ma’s words, about the fact that I was growing up.

  I stared over at doorways leading up to stairwells that held so much mystery for me in the summers I’d attended P.S. 33’s free lunch program. I cherished the last few years when Lisa always went off to school in the morning, while I got to spend time alone with Ma. We’d wake up when we felt like it, and Ma would sit me down on the couch and if we had enough food, I’d get the rare treat of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We would watch the morning game shows; Ma would light up for Bob Barker and The Price Is Right. Ma said he was “one of the last real gentlemen around,” and she always sat extra close to the TV, squinting when his face filled our screen, his white hair perfectly neat, his suit freshly pressed. Together, we would bet on the “showcase showdown,” taking turns pretending to be contestants, winning boats, new living room sets, and glamorous trips around the world. I’d stand and clap extra loud for the contestants who won big. Ma sometimes vacuumed, humming smoothly while I was parked in front of the TV for hours, our apartment bright with the morning sun. It was a brief time when I felt that Ma belonged only to me.

  And then some days Daddy brought me to the library, where he helped me pick out books that were mostly pictures. For himself, he’d choose thick ones with photographs of contemplative men in suit jackets on the back, which he stacked around the house and never returned. He was always applying for a library card in a new name. Some nights, I liked to take one of his books and bring it to my room, where I would try to read it the same way Daddy did—held directly under the light of my bedside lamp, searching for any words that might be familiar to me from nights when Ma read to me at my bedside. But the words were too big and they made me tired. So I’d just fall asleep beside the book, smelling the yellowed pages, relaxed by the feeling that I shared something special with my father.