“Look, Joshey! Our own place.” Claudia was pointing across the alley at a little ground-floor unit that jutted out like a stubby toe from a pile of shabby blue apartments.
“Oh no,” I said.
“What ‘oh no’? It’s perfect.”
We began unloading our soggy cardboard boxes, and Claudia grinned at our good fortune, repeating: “Perfect!”
Perfect was a relative term. The apartment was surrounded by muddy alleys and shared a tiny patch of grass with eight Mexican families living in a fourplex. The electric heating was on the fritz, a family of shaggy gray sewer rats ruled over a corner of the kitchen, and the bathroom stank like a Superfund site. But Claudia had a point. We were no longer living on a stump.
Compared to the stump, or compared to anywhere since San Francisco for that matter, we were doing all right. We had running water and electricity for the first time in four years, and we didn’t need to hitchhike anymore. Claudia had found a job taking care of an elderly Norwegian lady named Inga who lived only a couple of blocks away. We were walking distance to the library and a store. And, most importantly, I was only half a mile from school.
I celebrated my eleventh birthday with a long, hot shower, scrubbing the filth and sap out of my hair and changing into dry, clean clothes. I was drenched in rainwater by the time I made it to homeroom, but I was still clean.
“Oh, we are going to have fun together,” promised Mrs. King when I told her that I had moved close enough to stay after school for tutoring.
“I have a shower now,” I told her.
“I didn’t notice,” she lied. Then she spent the next three weeks showing me how to write in cursive and unveiling the mysteries of the multiplication tables.
“So the tables are just memorization?”
“It’s just memorization.”
“I’m good at remembering things.”
“Yes, you are. The key is to remember the good things.”
All that was new in Stanwood was good. But, of course, we brought the old with us. Still struggling to explain his near-killing of Crazy John and Erica, Leopoldo maundered around the new apartment like Dr. Jekyll waking to memories of Mr. Hyde. Gone were the days of blaming his violence on flashbacks from El Salvador. Now Claudia confessed to me that Leopoldo had a drinking problem. He had a sickness called alcoholism. “The good news, Joshey, is it’s treatable, but it will require a lot of love and support from us to help him through it.”
My mother told me she had invited Leopoldo to join us in Stanwood only because he promised to be on good behavior. If he messed up again he would have to move out. It took him a month before he did, but by then it was too late for us to kick him out. He had an immigration hearing coming up, and he needed our family to be living happily together under one roof to avoid his deportation back to El Salvador, where the death squads were presumably still waiting for him.
After such an ad hoc existence in the wilderness, I took comfort in the predictable certainties of life in town. The lights were bright and they were easy to turn on and off. The water flowed freely—hot when you wanted it, cold when you didn’t care. School was a regular routine: get up, shower, walk to school, survive, walk home. Even my home life fell into a grim sort of normalcy.
Three nights a week Claudia stayed with Inga. When she came home, we’d catch up over rice and tofu, and Leopoldo would sulk about one thing or another until his complaints became rumbling preludes to brutality. When the tension in the room became unbearable, I’d run for cover. I had my own room now, and I’d diligently lock my flimsy hollow-core door and hide under the blankets until the storm had passed.
The mornings after the storm, I’d awake to quiet. To absolute stillness. And I’d wonder whether it had all, perhaps, been another bad dream in a long series of them. And I’d go out to discover that it had been real. Claudia would have already cleaned up the apartment as best she could. And now she’d be reclining in the brown chair, holding ice or raw steak to her head and face. The full array of salves and herbal ointments would be jumbled out on the table. Her face would be swollen, shining in reddish lumps. Sometimes she carried blackened eyes, welts, cuts, and burns—cigarette and otherwise.
I’d get to work at once, helping her patch up. Sometimes we’d boil comfrey and measure out witch hazel for poultices to dress her wounds. These were my chances to be mature, to tend to my mother lovingly. I reacted with sympathy when she winced and sighed with satisfaction when she was soothed. I’d remark, “Oh, Claudia,” at each injury, and she would reassure me through busted and swollen lips, “It’s OK, I’ll be just fine, Joshey.” Sometimes I’d pretend to focus my imaginary third eye on sending healing energy to her the way she’d taught me.
When Leopoldo finally woke, the man who’d caused all this carnage was on his best behavior. He would be soft, moving slowly and tenderly. His face carried nothing but care and empathy for my mother. He’d speak quietly and sweetly. He’d shuffle around the room, halfheartedly straightening up. He was, after all, stoically nursing his own pains: a pounding headache from the hangover, swollen fingers, sometimes nasty gashes from having punched out a window or smashed through the sheetrock.
More than anything, he was sorry.
“Aw, baby, I’m so sorry.” Or, “Honey, my heart. It is a breaking to see you like what I done.”
Claudia remained impassive, emotionally distant.
Then came the promises.
“I make to you a promise that I will heal for myself. That I’m going to drop this drinking forevers.”
And then came the visions for a brighter tomorrow.
Leopoldo would get a real job, and we’d be able to save up for a real place. A clean place without rats dying on the living room floor. He’d tell her: “I don’t care about none of that macho shit no more.”
And then, slowly, my mother would let him back in. She thawed and she warmed. And by the end of the day, it would be like old times. Like back at the beginning of the relationship when he was a refugee and they were falling in love. Maybe this was going to be the man to build a family around after all. Maybe he really was going to be a father for me. We’d go out to eat in the Viking Village, and we’d walk together, talking and laughing. And Leopoldo would clown around and make jokes. And he’d pick me up and carry me on his shoulders. And he and Claudia would walk arm in arm across the parking lot to the Scandia Bakery for coffee and a Norwegian flatbread called lefse. And Leopoldo would be smiling. Even with the bruises, swellings, and cuts, doctored with salves, and masked with cosmetics, Claudia would be smiling too.
And then it would start all over again.
That winter brought wild storms howling in off of the Puget Sound, followed suddenly by calm and open skies. Like the alternating rhythms of rain and sun, I accepted the rounds of violence and reconciliation in my home as normal. Not ideal, not pleasant, but reliable and certain. The steady cadence of Leopoldo and Claudia marching together as husband and wife.
Home was bearable in times of peace, but in times of war I sought political asylum at the Stanwood library. There I began cruising the Dewey Decimal System for meaning and inspiration. But I didn’t just leap into the beige metal stacks with my eyes closed. I had a destination in mind—the neighborhood of call number 296. Judaism. Whatever that was.
My research was the fulfillment of a prophecy made back on Cultus Mountain, before the advent of Leopoldo. Climbing the trail one evening we passed the cabin of a neighbor named Ray and noticed it glowing through the darkening mist. Ray rarely ventured up from Seattle, so we stopped in to say hello. Ray looked like a fisherman from the back of a National Geographic map of Crete and exhibited an appropriately Mediterranean hospitality. He welcomed us in with one of those thick Back East accents that vaguely reminded me of Grandma Harriette.
He was originally from New York, he told us, and wanted to know where we were from.
“The Bay Area,” replied Claudia.
“No way,” Ray said. “I don’t beli
eve you.”
“Why not?”
“You’re Jews, right? Ain’t no lantzmen from San Francisco.”
Claudia laughed. “Yeah, we are Jews. How did you know?”
“Your kid’s got a rabbi’s nose.”
They laughed and spoke of ancient times. Places and people east of the Mississippi. Chicken soup and strange holidays. Ray’s whole body shook when he laughed, and he concluded his story with: “So I bet I was the only Italian kid in Brooklyn who had not one, but two bar mitzvahs.”
Claudia and I stepped back into the mist, and a faint light of recognition flared in my mind. We weren’t totally alone in this universe. There was a name for us. A name for why Grandma Harriette said “Who really knew?” when I asked her where we were from. A name for being Russian, Lithuanian, and German, but cringing at the memory of the Russians, Lithuanians, and Germans. The name explained why my grandfather was blacklisted by McCarthy and forced to drag his family from place to place. And this same name must be the reason we continued to wander, searching for a promised land, while we avoided Christians, read books, and gesticulated wildly with our hands. A name that explained it all. But I’d forgotten what it was.
“Claudia, what was that thing he said we were?”
“What thing?”
“There was something he knew we were. Because of my nose.”
“Oh, Jews?”
“Yeah. What is that?”
“I never told you we were Jewish?”
“No. What is it?”
“Jews, you know. Like Einstein, Freud, Marx.”
Being my mother’s son, I knew who those men were. But I didn’t see the connection. “Like we’re related to them?”
“Sort of.” And then she gave me a very Jewish answer: “You know, Joshey, I don’t exactly know what it means to be Jewish. We’ll have to go to the library and look it up.”
I was in the library now, riding the reading room through space and time, discovering that I was part of something. Something profound. I was the descendant of an ancient tribe that had emerged from the mists of prehistory to introduce the world to God, to write the Bible, and to shine unto the nations like a beacon of righteousness. We had been scattered to the wind, driven to the four corners of the Earth. Oppressed and demeaned time and time again, yet we wandered on, excelling in isolation wherever we went. We didn’t need to be normal like everyone else; we were Jews. When the library closed, I walked through the darkness, an only child no more. Now I knew I descended from the seed of Jacob, and somewhere out there were a million of my nameless brethren, clinging to diasporic rocks just like me, but thriving nonetheless.
“I was flipping through the pages,” I whispered to my mother in the rank, lutefisky darkness of Inga’s sitting room. “And there was a drawing of Maimonides. He looked just like me, but with a beard and a turban. The same face, the same rabbi’s nose.”
“He spoke to you across the generations,” Claudia assured me.
“Yeah… he did,” I agreed with her for once.
My mother whispered to me about our family. My great-great-grandmother Rivka was a folk healer in the forests of Russia. My great-grandmother Eta called the mounted police Cossacks and threw her body in front of the Nazi ships unloading in Boston Harbor in 1939. And then Claudia told me that somewhere out there I might have a half brother. When she was a teenager she’d dated a Colombian Marxist revolutionary and had gotten pregnant. She’d given the baby up for adoption in New Jersey and had never seen him again. It was 1987 now, so that would make him twenty-three. My mother shook her head and shrugged. It was all part of an old world she’d forgotten about so long ago.
But it was a brand-new world for me. I lay in bed that night still immersed in my voyage of self-discovery. Though I sojourned at the very end of the Earth, the blood of Abraham still coursed through my veins. And beyond the horizon, in the wilds of far-off New Jersey, that same blood might course through the veins of a brother as well. Maybe someday this brother would find me, grasp me by the arm, and pull me up out of this broken world where screaming and smashing were considered normal. Maybe I’d finally go home, wherever that was.
The buzzing of the mechanical bell dismissed the last day of sixth grade, and I trudged home half-satisfied with myself. I’d finished my first year of real school with a 4.0 grade average and had managed to make a couple of friends. But I still felt like an alien and was getting my ass kicked by bullies at least once a week. Now it was summer, and I took to wandering the dusty neighborhood on my new used BMX. But my days of cruising on my bicycle were cut short by a rock to the head. I crashed into a bush and rolled onto my back. What hit me? A bird? Two teenagers were peering down at me, laughing. They picked up my bicycle and began wheeling it away.
“Hey,” I yelped after them.
Now someone was standing next to me. A dark brown kid in a white tank top. “Oye, pendejos, give him back his bike,” he called after the bicycle thieves. They slowed to a stop. “Give it!” the kid called again. They looked at each other but then continued slinking off with my bike. “Oh, well. That’s some BS, right there,” the kid said, and he gave me a hand up.
“I’m Ervi.”
“Early?”
“Ervi, like Ernesto.”
Ervi Sánchez was an inch shorter than me but talked and walked like a man. His eleven-year-old face was pocked and pitted as though he’d already gone through a rough adolescence back when he was three. Ervi was the savvy, cynical anomaly that slipped out in the middle of his seven bubbly cheerful siblings.
“You gotta walk like this, man,” he schooled me, cycling his bare shoulders back and forth. “That shows the dudes you’re in charge. And you gotta wear a tank top to show off your guns for the honeys.” He was all about the honeys. And deals. “You have to meet people. Make connections. Then you can be the middle man, and make the deals.”
“What deals?” I asked. “Drug deals?”
“No, homie. Deals, just deals, man.” He didn’t know exactly what he was talking about, but he was sick of his parochial, hardworking family. “They think all there is to do is work. I hate them.”
I loved them. Ervi’s parents, four sisters, three brothers, and various other kin overflowed a small two-story house at the edge of town. His father was a little man but he paraded around the house slowly like a Mexican cowboy on market day. His mother was permanently affixed to the kitchen, where an endless train of savory dishes passed from her hands. Ervi’s father and siblings worked all day every day. The little kids tended a garden out back with their mother. The older kids toiled in the spinach fields with their father. The only exceptions were Ervi, who wandered around town with me, making connections and talking up the honeys, and his oldest sister, Rosa, who worked in the packaging plant at Twin City Foods. When Rosa discarded her hairnet at the front door, her raven hair leapt free and swirled around her copper face, inlaid with green eyes and pouty lips. Catching sight of me standing awkwardly next to Ervi, she sashayed over and placed her hand on my shoulder. With a toss of her gleaming hair she sweetly asked Ervi: “Is this the white boy I ordered?” And then to me: “Why did you take so long?” She was smiling seductively, staring right into my eyes. Everyone was laughing. “Ah, finally, the gringo of my dreams,” she sighed lustily in Spanish, and pressed me to her bosom.
No matter what I was doing, I tried my hardest to plant myself in Ervi’s living room at 6:00 p.m. on weekdays to provide his sister the comic relief she desired. Her hair tosses and chesty hugs became more exaggerated in time. Everyone enjoyed the act, but no one more than I, even though it caused a strange tightness in my pants.
Back at home, the boredom of being alone in the apartment was punctuated with explosive visits by Leopoldo, who had left to pick cherries and apples in Yakima in Eastern Washington. The agricultural work, he said, was tantamount to slavery. He did such a good job of re-creating that sense of oppression for us that I informally sought asylum with Ervi’s family. They didn’t ask any
questions when I became a regular in their dinner lineup. His mother just smiled and chatted with me in Spanish as she slid an extra bowl of rice and beans my way.
Dinnertime was sacred for the Sánchezes, and they gathered together around a collection of connecting card tables to share stories and interrupt one another with rapid-fire jokes that I didn’t quite understand. After dinner, the family got down to the business of playing a card game called Lotería that combined the artistry of tarot and the lyrical auctioneering of an open-air market in Guadalajara. What was not to love? I tried to play one round but was immediately shocked when Ervi’s brother called out “El Nigger” for the little black man with the cane who appeared on one of the cards.
“Hey,” I called back instinctively. “That’s racist.” That was apparently hilarious, and the whole table burst into laughter.
“That’s what the card says.” Ervi’s brother grinned.
“No it doesn’t. It says… El Negrito.”
“Yeah, it’s the same thing.”
“No, it’s not. That’s a really insulting word.”
“How’s that worse than little black man?”
“It’s just different. You can’t say it.” Ervi’s parents watched our verbal ping pong with amused interest, but Ervi had had enough.
“Come on, homes. This game is for sad old abuelitas in Mexico. This is America, man. We should be out there making deals.” I deferred the N-word fight to another day and followed Ervi down to the corner store, where we talked up some hair-sprayed girls in the parking lot.
When the last traces of dinner had been scrubbed away, Ervi’s parents slept on a fold-out couch in the living room. All the girls slept in one room upstairs, and the boys in the other. Ervi unfolded a spare cot for me, and I lay staring into the blackness, listening to him and his brothers breathe quietly into the dream world. They were probably even poorer than me, but happier. I wrestled with that irony and then succumbed to sleep myself.
Free Spirit Page 27
