KarMel
Scholarship 2008
|
Fictional
Story “More
Than Word and Stone” By Rebecca
Mabanglo-Mayer |
Desciption of Submission: “Fictional Story of Jessie struggling to balance
the demands of her family of choice with her family of origin” - Rebecca
|
1:47. Her call came
at 1:47 in the middle of the dark. I know this because I
stared at those red numbers, 1 and 47, separated by two little dots as I
tapped the snooze alarm at first gently, then more insistently, until I found
myself sitting in bed, clock between my hands, squeezing it to make the
ringing sound stop. I felt confused, as the numbers changed to a 1 and a 48.
My clock had never rung like a bell before. It usually had an annoying
buzzing sound like a trapped bee using an amplified bullhorn. Maybe the
numbers had something to do with that spy dream I’d just been having. Maybe
they were red and glowing because they were for a bomb’s timepiece. “Do you want me to
answer that, Jess?” said a sleepy woman’s voice nearby. The bed rippled, and
a woman with long wavy red hair poked her head out from under the covers. She
looked familiar, warm, and I wanted to curl up next to her. But that ringing…
“The phone, honey,”
she yawned, “better get it before it wakes up Alex too.” I stared at the clock
for a beat and considered whether I believed this waking dream. No one would
call me at this time of night except --. I fell back and
rolled over onto my shoulder to grab the receiver. “I’m here, Nanay,” I said. “Is Tatay okay?” Somewhere in the
distance, my mother whispered. “Na,” I said,
pressing the phone to my ear. “Speak up. I can barely hear you.” “Shh, hiya,” she replied, her voice dropping
lower. “She will hear us.” Usually I can go
weeks without hearing the rise and fall of my mother’s accented English. I
could believe that I had been born without benefit of a family for those delicious days between her calls. I could
be like the island outside my bedroom window, tall and imperious, a force of
nature that lifted itself from the center of the earth to be known for
nothing more and nothing less than a woman of my own means. Then the phone
would ring like an ancient clock tower at midnight and I would be once again,
Jessica Aginaldo-Aniston, second child, first daughter, in a Filipino family
too large in its extensions. In the background, I
could hear my father’s lusty snores and I knew this was going to be another
one of those calls. I pulled the
covers over my head and briefly considered hanging up. Knowing it was useless
to ask her to call back later, it might have been easier to claim the line
went dead and apologize in the morning. But there was
something insistent in her voice that triggered the nine-year-old in me, that
begged for me to listen, as I had done so many times before when my father
was late coming “Na, speak up,” I
repeated. “Who will hear you?” “Auntie Lucy,” she
replied. I tried not to groan. “Shh! This must stop.
You’ve got to come, hiya. You’ve
got to make her live Lola’s house.” “Na --.” “No, listen. She
lived in that house ever since she came to “Can’t this wait --?” “When your Lola died,
she came here to live with us. She says if Lola gave you the house,
you should live there not her. She says if she cannot live with us, she'll
take her bags and live under a bridge!” “She won't do that,
Na --.” “I cannot even cook
in my own house! Your father --” “—won’t even eat at
the table,” I said, finishing the well-worn phrase. “Jessica!” Even in the darkness
70 miles from my parent’s house near “Okay, okay. If I
come down this weekend to look at the paperwork will you let me sleep?” “Tomorrow, eh?
Tomorrow you’ll come.” I could hear excitement warm my mother’s voice.
“You’ll bring Alexandra, huh? She can stay here, with us, while you get
things done. It’s the right thing to do. You’ll move here and everything will
be fine. You always loved Lola’s
house, mmm? Yeah, good night, Jessie. You go to sleep now.” With the click of the
line going dead, I slipped the phone back into its cradle. I looked over and
the numbers on my clock read 1:54. Somewhere in a beige split-level complete
with wood paneling and wall to wall carpet, my mother was turning my father
over to his side and tucking the blankets in behind her back. I knew she
would finally be able to sleep, having given me her message. For me, sleep
would be the last item on a long list of questions I would try to answer
before dawn. “Everything okay?”
Carly asked as she turned over to hold me, long lashes covering sleepy eyes.
I reached over and brushed a strand of her hair around the curve of her pale
cheek. “It’s nothing, cara
mi,” I whispered, tucking her hand under the pillows. “Go back to sleep.
You’re on shift soon.” She turned over
again, grasping my hand and drawing my arm around her. I held her close and
breathed in her warmth until I was sure she was asleep again. Rolling to my
back, I stared at the slatted moonlight on my ceiling. Somehow in the space
of my mother’s phone call, my usually roomy bed had become a vast island
where I felt small and very alone. Carly became a distant dream, a stolen
fantasy, severed from my reality by my mother’s call. I closed my eyes and
tried to listen for the sound of waves against the breakwater and instead
heard the wind rasping elm branches against the roof. Hope that roof holds until you can clear those branches. And while
you’re up there, you’d better check the chimney to be sure that flashing you
put in is still sealed. Oh, and moss. Remember what the guy down at the
library said about this house being a magnet for the stuff. It’ll start
eating away at the shingles and the next thing you know, you’ll have a mud
pit caving in the roof. Maybe you should move back to I opened my eyes and
tried to relax the muscles in my jaw. My mind had started working overtime
again, filling the space with worry. I wanted to wake Carly, but also didn’t
want to start old arguments with her again. This house is fine, I
told myself. I’ve worked hard to make this place work for us. New carpet, new
paint, new shower insert. I even fixed the hookups so we don’t have to drag
our laundry into town every week. Okay, I still have to work on the plumbing
in the kitchen and make a baffle of lilac trees to disperse the diesel smell
from the ferry dock. And there’s the addition I want to build along the length
of the house to make the bedrooms bigger than shoeboxes. Every house needs
work. Work and money, you mean. When are you going to start thinking about
starting your retirement or a college fund for Alex? And Carly? How are you
going to take care of her when you’re too long toothed to work? I tried to ignore the
bait my mind dangled in front of me. I've done right by them so far, and I'll
always do right by them. Beside me Carly
shifted and murmured in her sleep. I rolled over and held her in my arms, breathing
the cinnamon scent of her hair. I thought to myself,
what did my mother mean, ‘I always loved that house’? A brick house with too
many rooms in the middle of one of the worst neighborhoods in Seattle with
hardly a bit of yard, and what is yard is just those awful overgrown juniper
bushes that smell like overflowing litterboxes every summer. So what are you going to do about that house, huh? Six months you’ve
been dragging your feet about this. Do you think those lawyers are going to
let you drag this on for six more? Oh, they love it and
you know it. They get paid whether or not I decide what to do. And you love lawyers so much that you’d let them take your
grandmother’s inheritance away from the rest of your family. Those lawyers
did oh,
so much, for you when you divorced
Grant. I never divorced
Grant. It didn’t happen that way and you know it. But they almost took Alex away from you. The papers clearly said since
you're gay, you weren't fit to raise a girl child and the state should
consider giving sole custody to Grant. I turned over on to
my stomach and balled a fist beneath me. They didn’t take her away. Grant’s
parents never pressed the suit after he died. It all turned out okay. But that’s why you’re here now, isn’t it? So you could be who you are
away from them. The trouble with
having arguments with your mind is that they keep going on and on, not matter
how much you try and chase sleep. Why did Lola Cora do this to me, drag me into
this whole house thing? The house should have gone to Auntie Lucy. She was
the one who took care of Lola when
she was sick, not me. Why did she write in her will “Jessica must live in the
house or the house will be sold and the proceeds donated to Our Mother of
Perpetual Help Convent and Residence”? We’ve been through this before. Obviously she wants you to move back.
She didn’t want you to leave in the first place remember? I don’t even want the
house, and I don’t think my family will let me contest the will. So, let it sit in probate? Oh, good plan, then the lawyers and the
courts get half the money instead of the 10% they’re taking now. Let ‘em have it. I’ll
just sign the papers over to them and get this thing over with. Is that what you really want? What I want. I almost
laughed out loud. What I want? When has
this ever been about what I want? This has been about my loving grandmother
meddling once again in things she doesn’t understand. She did it when she was
alive and she’s doing it now that’s she’s gone. And as usual, she’s managed
to involve the whole family in the affair. How am I supposed to go down there
and tell them I’m not taking their precious family house, the first Aguinaldo
house on the West Coast? Why not just let some convent I’ve never heard of
sell it and do with the money whatever nuns do when they've sworn themselves
to poverty and chastity. That’s going to make me even more popular than I
already am. I balled up an extra
pillow into my chest and I tried not to think about how Grant would let me
talk my family out of my system. He’d watch me pace the floor, shake my fists
in the air, collapse on the floor in a puddle of tears, and just listen. It
was a kind of exorcism that he had the patience to witness until I could
finally fall asleep and face the morning fresh. He never tried to fix anything,
never questioned my decisions, but I knew he was there to back me up on
anything. But thinking about
Grant always led to thinking about Carly, and how she hated being compared to
him, yet tried to be him and herself all at once for me. Over the course of
the few months we'd been together, she tried to listen, tried to keep up with
my convoluted logic, even offered solutions, but eventually she would fall
asleep and I would be left with more questions than I’d had when I’d started.
Questions of family loyalty, identity, morality, each vying for a bit of
consciousness and ramping up my already heightened awareness. I’d have to
find my own way through the tired, jittery web encasing my body. In the pale light of
predawn, I threw on some sweats and a heavy jacket, then went outside to
split wood. I stretched my neck and shoulders and breathed in the cool
February air. For a moment, I closed my eyes and tried to hear nothing and
everything around me. Then, reaching for the axe resting against an oak wood
stump, I gripped the smooth wooden handle and held the blade over a seasoned
piece of fir. I lifted the axe, and envisioned the wood splitting cleanly to
either side of the blade. Thock! The axe plummeted
into the heart of the wood and stuck fast. “Damn,” I muttered,
raising the axe. Halfway down its length, the wood clung to the blade like
the moss that draped its bark. I tapped the fir wood against the oak stump I
used as a chopping block. With each tap, I watched the blade slowly separate
the fibrous wood into two pieces until the blade reached the stump. I pushed
the pieces aside and placed another piece of fir on the block. What thoughts I had
pushed aside for a moment, formed again hot and sticky against my tongue, and
I gritted my teeth against them. Instead of the silence I craved, the rasp of
maple branches against the roof and the drone of a distant foghorn grated my
ears. Instead of stillness, I felt the morning wind flutter my jacket and
unbind wisps of my long black hair into my eyes. The tips of my knuckles
shone white in contrast to my cinnamon skin and the dark wood of the axe
handle. My palms ached with the fierceness of my grip. Again I set the blade
a few inches away from the surface of the fir wood and moved my feet apart
into a simple horse stance. Again I breathed until the silence and stillness
filled me, then lifted the axe to see it split the fir in two. Shuck! I didn’t spare myself
a smile when the log split clean and my axe blade rested an inch deep into
the stump’s surface. I wanted this silence too much to let it slip away in
another moment of self-analysis. I tried to grip the stillness with my hands
as I pulled the blade free and reached for another piece of firt to place it
where the others had stood. You can’t expect her to live on the street, hiya! Thock! “Damn…” Your father won’t even eat at the table these days. Thock! Breathe. See the blow before you strike. Just like during kata
practice. Shuck! You must come soon or it will be too late. Thock! The house is yours now. Why can’t you just finally come Thock! “Who pissed you off?”
said Alex, her voice bright and cheerful. Thunk! I stared at my most
recent target, mute and unscathed, knowing without looking that the axe blade
was buried deep into the ground inches from my feet. I drew in a breath and
turned my head toward my daughter’s voice. Through the strands of black hair
tangled in my glasses I saw Alex leaning against the sliding glass doors, a
smile lifting the corner of her mouth. Part of me wanted to laugh out loud at
the eight-year-old’s ability to see right through her mother’s emotions. Part
of me was appalled that I could be so transparent. Mostly I wanted to know
where the hell she’d learned that kind of language. “And good morning to
you too,” I said pulling the axe out of the ground and setting it against the
stump. “Ready for school?” I gathered up an armful of firewood while Alex
stepped off the porch to gather kindling. I muttered something about putting
on a jacket over her pajamas or at least slippers before she stepped outside,
but she was already past me tiptoeing over to the splitting block, her narrow
back a sure sign she would not be listening as she gathered up large
splinters of wood. Once inside, I
dropped my armload of fir onto the floor next to the woodstove and began to
sift through the night’s ashes for still-hot coals. The smell of fresh coffee
and oatmeal filled my cold nose and I glanced up to see Carly dressed and
puttering in the kitchen. I heard the sliding door close behind me and looked
down to see Alex’s muddy pink toes near my own leather boots. “Better wipe your
feet, Alex,” said Carly, “before your mom catches you tracking mud all over
the place.” Alex curled her lip
into a half frown and rubbed her feet into the nap of yellow carpet scrap we
used for a doormat. As I gathered the coals beneath wads of newspaper, Alex
began shoving pieces of kindling between the logs. I tried to bat her hands
away from the hot edges of the stove, but she pulled away too quickly and
made on her way to the bathroom. I heard her hum to herself as the water ran,
the soft pad of her footsteps as she returned to her bedroom. There was a
faint rustling sound, and I guess she was looking for a clean pair of jeans
and a shirt to wear. At least I hoped they’d be clean. “So who called last
night?” asked Carly. She was peering into the pot of oatmeal she was making
as if trying to discern a fortune. She knew better than to ask, and I debated
whether to give her one of my usual non-answers. Why does my mother
only seem to call when there’s trouble in the family? “Oh, just mom worried about the house thing
again,” I replied trying to keep my voice light. Carly’s spoon stopped for a
moment, then continued it’s slow circle around the pot. I reached around her
and gathered the brown sugar and pecans. I waited for her to speak again, but
what calm I had gained from cutting wood had dissipated. “She wants me to come
down and do the final paperwork,” I said trying not to notice how her back
seemed to stiffen as I walked by. “Have you decided
what to do?” She turned and I felt
my cheeks redden when the liquid sky of her eyes came into view. I looked
away and made an elaborate show of taking dishes to the table. “Alex and I will be
gone most of the weekend,” I said. “I’ll call you from “I could come, you
know,” she said. “I’ve got time off coming to me and Glory has been trying to
get me to take it for awhile.” “No, it’s okay,” I
said too quickly. “I mean, we’ll go down there together sometime. Maybe in
the summer when the weather is better.” “You haven’t told
them about me yet, have you?” I leaned against the
counter top and folded my arms. “It’s complicated,
Carly. I’ve tried to explain--.” She turned away
shaking her head. “Yeah, sometime later.” She stopped short, her back
straight and narrow. “When can I be part of all your world, Jessica?” I looked down at the
yellowed linoleum and tried to form all the arguments I’d batted around in my
head since she moved in with me. All the lines of logic that would make her
understand how complicated her request was, how time was the strongest
pedestal we could stand on together. Even though I’d come out to my parents
even before I’d left Grant, it was easier for them to believe I was just
another grieving widow who hadn’t found love again. To be lesbian was one
thing, to have a relationship with a lesbian was out of the question,
especially where their granddaughter was concerned. We’d been through it all.
Wait, I’d say. For how long? She’d reply. I looked up again and
reached my hand toward her. “You are my world, cara
mi,” I said gently. “You and Alex are my family. We've built something
here I never thought possible. Down there with my folks, I get muddled trying
to figure out what every one wants from me. I don't like me when I'm
with them. I don't want you to see that. Alex is used to them, but you--” Carly didn't take my
hand and she turned away. The metal cooking pot clattered into the sink. “You don't think I
can handle it,” she said shaking her head. “When I came out to my dad, he hit
me hard enough to knock me out of a chair. I've spoken to hundreds of people
about being gay, some waving signs telling me I was Satan's mistress herself.
I think I can handle your family.” “I don't think they
can handle us as a couple, Carly,” I said quietly. “I don't think that they'd
see us as family.” I closed my eyes and
waited for the sound of her picking up her things and the slamming of the
door behind her, like had happened so many times before. Instead, I felt her
arms wrap round me and a soft kiss on my head. “My mom once told me
that a house is more than wood and stone,” she said, rocking me gently. “Just
like a family is more than blood and bone.” My ear pressed
against her breast, I listened to her heart and felt her warmth. Leaning
against her, the world seem to fall away with only peace left in its place. “Is that what you
believe too, Carly?” I asked, closing my eyes. She stroked my hair
and I felt her nod. “More than blood and
bone,” she said quietly. Maybe it was finally
time to have what I wanted. “Hey, Mom!” Alex
called from her bedroom. “Do ya think you can pick up my skates today? I
gotta game after school. Terry said I could center today if my skates are
fixed.” I heard her tromp
down the hallway at a quick pace. “You did remember her
game today, right?” said Carly as Alex sped past. I reluctantly moved
out of Carly's arms and watched Alex run around the room to peer under the
couch from various angles. “Looking for something?” “Gloves,” she replied
from somewhere under a cushion. “I put them in your
backpack yesterday,” said Carly as she reached for her medical files and
purse. “Great!” Alex darted
toward her room but before she could reach the hallway, I caught her by the
hand. “Bye, Alex!” said
Carly. “I’ll see you when you get back.” I reached out to
catch Carly with my free hand. I held the hands of the two most precious
people in my life and looked one to the other. “Wait, Carly,” I said
to her. “I need to ask Alex something.” Carly hesitated, an
unspoken question dancing in her eyes. “What’s up, Mom?”
asked Alex, bouncing on her heels. “How would you like
to see your Lolo and Lola this weekend?” I said to Alex.
“I’ve gotta go down and see Lola
Cora’s old house—.” “Cool! Maybe Lolo’s got that saddle done he’s been
working on for me!” she replied. Then Alex’s smile turned suddenly serious.
“Is Auntie Lucy still there?” “Yeah, ‘fraid so.” “Oh man!” “Now, Alex, Auntie
Lucy's just old and, ah, set in her ways. Just keep away from her and she
won’t bother you.” “Do I have to miss my
game?” Alex’s clear brown
eyes held mine for a moment. I’d hoped to leave early that day, even
considered pulling her out of school early so we could beat rush hour
traffic. “Nah,” I said. “I’ll
drop your skates off at lunch. I won’t be able to watch you play, but I’ll
pick you up at Nick’s before dinner. Then we can pack and get on the road,
okay?” Alex’s shoulders
straightened and her smile eased the ache inside my head. “Yeah, that's cool,”
Alex replied and she tried to bound away to her room once more. I caught her
by the shoulder and she turned with an impatient look in her eyes. “I want to ask you
something, Alex,” I said, kneeling down to her eye level and glancing at
Carly for a moment. “Can we bring Carly with us? Would that be okay?” Alex shrugged.
“Sure,” she said lightly. “Carly's cool.” In a flash, she was
skipping away from us, her hair swinging with every step. I straightened and
looked to Carly, my arms around my shoulders. “My mom is a pretty
decent cook,” I said to her. “She'll ask you if you want to eat every hour of
the day.” “I'll tell her I'm on
a strict diet,” Carly replied coming over to hug me again. I shook my head
and rested my body against hers. “No, better eat,” I
reply. “Or she'll wonder if you're sick or something. She'll never stop
asking.” Carly squeezed me
tightly. “I hope you never stop asking to share your life with me either,”
she said. |