by David Leite
Lost in an episode of The Soupy Sales Show, I didn’t feel her nudging me with her foot.
“Hey, Banana? TMT.” That was family code for “touch my toes.” As we lay there, I ran the back of my fingernails up her soles and over the tops of her feet. Every once in a while, she jumped and dug her heel into my butt because it tickled. “You’re doing that on purpose!”
“Uh-uh,” I lied, looking her right in the eye. She had taught me well in the Art of the Straight Face.
The only room that doesn’t thrum with memories is my bedroom. In my mind, it’s always dark, the only light coming from the devotional candle with the glittery image of Jesus, his great, kind heart exploding from his chest. A Venetian blind covered the window on the far wall. Sometimes I’d part the metal slats and, while peering out, absentmindedly lick them. I couldn’t help tasting and smelling everything. It made objects more real to me, kind of like creating an inventory of sensations.
I don’t recall anything that ever happened in my room. Friends never wanted to play there the way we did in the empty attic apartment, even though the linoleum was a grid of board games: checkers, chess, backgammon, bingo. Yet my cousin Barry’s room, one floor below mine and just as dark, was a magnet for activity. We napped there, played War and Go Fish there, were punished there. And when Dina found Barry with his hands down his underwear, rooting around in his butt crack, she dragged him there, took a flashlight, and peered into his spread cheeks for tapeworms. Apparently, not even parasites found my bedroom hospitable.
While our rooms on Brownell Street were bereft of anything approaching beauty, they were bursting with people who looked like movie stars. My father, with his ruddy cheeks, warm eyes, and shock of light brown hair pushed back off his forehead, had the Jack Kennedy look before Jack made it popular. And my mother, after she became thin for the first time, could have been a stand-in for Ava Gardner, especially when she tilted her head back and let loose one of her big, explosive laughs. Paneen was all Marlon Brando, darkly handsome with a hard, lean body. He worked road construction, and on weekends raced stock cars over at Seekonk Speedway. He was fond of walking around the house in just his jeans, with the top button popped open. A smoke line of hair from somewhere deep inside those jeans curled up to his navel, riveting me. Even Vu and Vo, with their Old World demeanor, made a good-looking pair. Only Dina, with her hangdog face and housecoats, was out of place.
I couldn’t connect all the dots back then in that kid head of mine, but I knew that out of everyone in our Cavalcade of Stars, something special, something amazing, was going to happen to me. I had no idea what or how, so I turned to what I did best: waiting. I always got what I wanted, if I waited long enough. Standing patiently in the billows of the sheer drapes, watching the street corner, always brought my father back from work, squinting against the setting sun as he waved up to me. No matter how much she tried to ignore me, my silently looking up at Vo like a pobrinho—poor little thing—always made her laugh and lunch appear. And sitting in the dip of the worn wooden steps of the side porch, crying and waiting for my mother to return—from where? someplace called Errands—always led her home to me.
This time I waited for photographers to discover me. On the side porch I posed, for a while sitting erect and cross-legged with Tiny, Vu and Vo’s Chihuahua, in my lap. Then slouching, with my legs stretched out in front of me. Sometimes I’d stand against the wall, my hands in my pockets, waiting for the inevitable pop of flashbulbs.
“There he is!” one of the photographers would shout, pointing at me, as they rushed the yard. And I’d tilt my head and grin, not the gummy smile of my relatives—dentes de cavalo, my mother called them, horse teeth—but rather her famous Courtesy-Booth Girl smile, the one she’d perfected for work at Fernandes Supermarket. And then I, too, would be far away from that big armpit and on TV with my friends Annette and Cubby and Jimmie, as the youngest member of The Mickey Mouse Club.
2
SISTERS OF THE SPATULA
My church pockabook” is what my mother called it. Her shiny black patent-leather purse she used only on Sundays. I loved that purse. It hung from the crook of her arm, level with my head. I used to imagine it was my own personal TV screen, and I’d yammer to myself all the way to St. Michael’s and back.
“What are you doing?” she’d ask.
“Playing priest on TV,” I’d say, pointing to my face reflected in the glossy blackness as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Well, knock it off, Banana, that’s blasphemous.” At church my father would often have to separate us in the pew.
The way we all tell this story, burnishing it each time to make it shine ever brighter, on the day before I started kindergarten, my mother was ironing my brand-new clothes, including the T-shirts and underwear. “No kid of mine is going to school in slouchy underpants that look like he has a load in them,” she said, pointing the iron at me. The excitement and confusion of the day must have caused me to flip out, because suddenly she clutched her breasts together, looked toward the ceiling, and let out an exasperated “Ay!”—something she did whenever she was riled up, which back then was often. She ordered me to fish her pockabook out of her closet and find her change purse amid the wadded-up Kleenex, the Sucrets cough drops that I spat out when she wasn’t looking, and her rosary.
“Here,” she said, digging out some quarters and slapping them in my hand, “go buy us some donuts.”
School might have been darkly unknowable, but donuts I understood.
According to the Sisters of the Spatula, my name for the flock of women who ruled my childhood, donuts were lice control—anytime they wanted us kids out of their hair, they’d dole out money and tell us to go to the Terminal Bakery around the corner on Davol Street, buy some donuts, and make sure to get lost on the way back.
The mothers of our neighborhood—mine, Dina, Joanne Martin from across the street, the loud woman from next door who wore nothing but housecoats and everyday hollered over the fence for her kids, and my mother’s best friend, Jackie (who technically didn’t live in our neighborhood, but had the same smoker’s rasp and smart-ass sense of humor)—all parented with a kind of benign neglect and mock cruelty. Dina’s nickname for me was “Ugly,” and I ate it up. Anytime we kids bugged them, especially on hot afternoons when they were crowded around Dina’s table, fanning themselves with a section of the Herald News or a stray electric bill, one of them would look at us with the most serious of expressions and yell, “Will you please go play in traffic?” Only then would we meep with delight and run outside, looking back to see them cracking themselves up. It was our way, and we didn’t feel loved without it.
I took the change, tore down the stairs and out the side door. I started goofing off, singing and hopping on and off the curb like I saw the kids do in The Sound of Music. For my big finish, I flung my hands in the air, accidentally sending the change sailing into our neighbor’s hedge. Mortified by the thought of what would happen if I returned home empty-handed, I slithered on my belly beneath the bushes, ripping out handfuls of shiny green weeds, until deep inside I found the quarters.
Long, sleek cases lined three sides of the enormous Terminal Bakery, all filled with the kind of Technicolor pastries that showed up at neighbors’ houses after major life events: births, deaths, weddings, divorces, parole. Or on Dina’s table on Sundays, where she, Paneen, and Barry licked sugar from their fingers, and my mother swiveled my head away from the open door as we filed righteously past on our way to church. These weren’t the flat Portuguese donuts called malassadas, or the eggy, sweet bread known as massa souvada. No, these were real sweets, like the kind on TV. Crullers and jelly donuts that dandruffed my clip-on tie and the Charlie McCarthy–size version of my father’s suit. Éclairs so big it was impossible to suck out all the cream before being seduced by the chocolate icing. Cookies practically the size of my head.
I picked out a couple of donuts, paid for them, and raced back. My mother had hung up my
clothes, and we sat at our green table, tearing into the bag. As I regaled her with my story of the Lost Coins, she covered her mouth with the back of her hand, laughing. The dirt and grass stains on my clothes were forgiven by her appreciation of my performance, and when we were done she hid any evidence before my father came in from the garden.
Sweetheart, time for your first day at schoo-ool,” my mother cooed, rocking me awake. I rolled toward her, eyes closed, trying not to let sleep leak out. And then it started, that long, piercing air-raid alarm that begins high and ends impossibly higher: “MAAAAANNNNNY!” From the kitchen floated the low rumblings of my father as he tried to calm her. When he came into my room, they just stood there, blinking at me.
As she peeled off my pajamas with just her fingertips and slathered me in calamine lotion, she explained I must have yanked up piles of something called poison ivy from under Mr. Jeff’s hedges looking for the change. Once I was dry, she hiked me into a pair of pants, like a pillow into a pillowcase, and dressed me in a long-sleeved shirt, instructing me to keep the sleeves down no matter how hot it got. She also put a bow tie on me for good measure. Maybe she thought the tie would seal in the rash.
At Carroll School, my mother went up to the waiting teacher and introduced me. I extended my hand, as my father and I had practiced, but my mother batted it away and rolled her eyes. She leaned in and whispered something, and the teacher squinted down at me, a tiny O forming on her lips, and nodded. With that, my mother knelt down, gathered me in her arms, and, after failing to find a pustule-free zone on my face to kiss, planted one on the top of my head.
“Everyone, can I have your attention, please,” the teacher said, clapping her hands at the class. “This is another student, David. Can you say hello?”
“Hello, David,” they droned.
Then she added: “Whatever you do, do not touch him. He has poison ivy.”
For the rest of that day, I was marooned at my desk while everyone else got to push theirs together into little islands of learning, jabbering with one another. “But look, my sleeves are down,” I’d say to my teacher whenever she made wide circles around me. All I got was a pitying look and a shake of her head. By story time I’d given up, and as they all tried to clamber into her lap, I spent my time smelling my new crayons, wondering why my orange Crayola didn’t smell like an orange.
The next morning, my mother awoke me again. I have to go back? This wasn’t a one-off, like a bad birthday party or a visit to my great-aunt Tia Escolastica?
“Look,” she said.
“At what?”
“Me!” She pulled me into the light of the kitchen. Her arms and face were covered with poison-ivy rash. She then jutted out her lower lip. The bumps were creeping their way into the lining of her mouth.
“Maybe God didn’t want us to eat those donuts?” I offered. She cocked her head as if to say, Maybe the kid’s got a point. She laughed and reached out to hug me, but thought better of it.
Food. It was one of the ways we bonded. But this shared passion was something collusive and secretive—just between us. Let me illustrate: My mother was never a baker. She wasn’t about to let some damn recipe, with its scant teaspoons and delicate dustings, boss her around in the kitchen. My mother doesn’t understand scant. Instead, several times a week she’d buy a Table Talk pie that came in those red-and-white packages, because my dad liked a little something sweet after dinner. Those pies were some of the only American foods I was allowed, for which I never failed to thank Jesus and his bursting heart every night after prayer time.
My mother was a rapacious eater, and her joy of food was infectious. Yet each night she’d serve my father, me, and herself a modest one-twelfth of a pineapple or apple or blueberry pie, and my father would smile and pat her arm. What he didn’t know was that the following afternoon, she and I would often polish off the remaining three-fourths of the day-old pie, plus a quarter of an identical one she’d bought that morning, so that it would look to my father like his wife was a model of restraint.
When he was out one night, my mother and I lounged on the nubby red couch, watching TV. “Wait right here,” she said, squinching up her face as if to say, This is gonna be good. I squirmed in anticipation. A few minutes later, she tiptoed back into the room, making believe she was trying to hide from my grandparents downstairs. In her hands was a plate filled with Sunbeam bread, toasted, buttered, and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. I adored her completely at that moment. When the toast disappeared, she made more. And then more, and still more. We scarfed down the entire loaf, and I have no idea how much butter, before my father came home. When he did, the empty bag was safely hidden in the bottom of the garbage, where my mother had plunged it. The plate had been washed and put away, and we sat there practicing the Art of the Straight Face.
Just for kicks, my godmother liked to chap my mother’s ass by seducing me with her food. It was a battle of wills with those two. “Hey, Ugly!” she’d shout up the stairs. “I just made some French stuffing.” Dina’s stuffing, a classic French-Canadian dish, which never saw the inside of a turkey, was whipped potatoes studded with a combination of beef, pork, and chopped cooked onions, and seasoned with nutmeg. I loved it. It was nothing like Vo’s Portuguese stuffing—a rich muddle of stale bread that had been soaked in water, squeezed dry, and then mixed with sautéed onions and garlic, tons of chouriço, and parsley, all turned a burnt ochre by her heavy hand with paprika. “Okay, then,” she’d taunt. “Maybe I’ll see if Barry wants it instead.” I’d look at my mother pleadingly until she relented, then I’d scamper down to their apartment. Dina would wait until I was seated at the table, then heap a mound into one of her white milk-glass bowls with the little bumps on the outside. I’d demolish it while she looked on dreamily, a Lucky Strike cocked in one hand, a cup of coffee garlanded with half-moons of red lipstick in the other.
“Hey, Ellie! I think your kid’s half French!” she’d bellow, victorious, to the ceiling, scraping my curls out of my eyes.
“That’ll be news to Manny,” my mother yelled back, adding a stomp of her foot for emphasis.
While eating defined my relationships with my mother and Dina, cooking is what I shared with my Vovo Costa. Often when she was preparing dinner, she’d scrape a kitchen chair over to the stove and put one of my grandfather’s shirts on me backward, like a smock. I’d climb up, and she’d hand me a spoon to stir. One day it’d be a pot of rice, the next beef stew, or maybe onions in a skillet. Once on a stifling summer afternoon, she was poking at chouriço in the cast-iron fry pan with a big metal fork. On the linoleum-covered counter was a jar filled with table wine. She nodded, and I splashed some into the pan, causing little clouds to rise up. The brown radio with buttons that looked like big, tan caramels played her favorite Azorean program. She sang along in her thin, reedy voice to the plaintive songs of the Old Country as she fussed, the loose skin under her arm swinging like a hammock. Every once in a while she couldn’t resist and gathered me in her arms and covered the crown of my head with kisses, making those big, dramatic smacking noises that made me giggle and butt my head against her chin like a cat, asking for more. Nestled there, I’d breathe in her scent: baby powder and Jean Naté.
When the sausage was cooked, she slid the pan off the burner to cool. She pointed to a heavy carved chair on the other side of the room and said, “Help me pick this up,” in Portglish, our personal patois, a mash-up of English and Portuguese I was innocent enough to assume only we understood. I lifted the front end; she heaved up the back. We weaved across the one room that was their kitchen, dining room, and parlor. The chair listed left and right until Vo chose a spot by the window, in the shade of our cherry tree.
I stood behind and fanned her with a magazine as she set to work making fava-bean soup. It’s a simple dish, a peasant dish, really, that I liked. Fava beans and chunks of chouriço were simmered in a broth filled with garlic and onions. The chouriço would stain the liquid orange. Sometimes she’d put green peppers i
n the pot, but I preferred it plain.
She lugged over a crate of fava beans my grandfather had bought at one of the local farms and kicked a big, white enamel bowl into place between her feet. Even though she sat there in just a slip, with her stockings rolled down her huge pink legs, she looked like an empress to me. The work began. Thick, fibrous pods were slit open with one quick zip of her fingernail. A flick of her thumb sent the beans inside plonking down into the bowl, over and over, until the crate was empty. When she was finished, she placed the white bowl in the middle of the kitchen table and opened the door.
“Elvira!” she hollered up the stairs, which in Portuguese sounded like El-vee-da. “Vem aqui!” Come here!
My mother shuffled around, then closed the door and clomped down. We sat around the table in the sweltering heat, pinching the favas from their soft, satiny inner skins. My mother and grandmother used small knives to nick the coverings and squeeze out the brilliant green beans, while I was allowed only to pick at them with my fingernails.
“Hey, kiddo.” My mother pointed to the growing pile of emerald nuggets in front of her. “This is what you call ‘piecemeal.’” What I heard was peace meal. After that, any time they served fava-bean soup, I assumed it was their way of calling for a time-out, like a referee sending our three families back into their corners. All the usual scrapes of the day forgotten as we came together at the table.
3
WHAT BECOMES A LEGEND MOST
My mother is a bloodhound for Jesus. She can sniff out sin before it happens, the way some people smell burnt toast before a seizure. Legend goes I was about six years old and sitting on a kitchen chair, banging my shoes on its chrome legs like clappers on a bell. For more than an hour my mother and I had been at a standoff over the cold bowl of Portuguese kale soup sitting in front of me. I had my head down, avoiding her gaze. I knew she could tell I’d been silently breaking the commandment about honoring your parents, because I’d been wishing every horrible, mean, hateful thing I could dream up would happen to her. My face didn’t slide off into my bowl, so I took that as a sign from God that I wasn’t going straight to hell.
