Stand in My Window

Desahogar

VENT \ TO UN—DROWN \ HOME

When I was seven years old, my parents took us to view an apartment, just two or three out of us five kids, in the suburbs of Long Island. I don’t remember much about the place, but I do remember the rooms felt like cubicles, perfectly square windows with tiny sills, cupped and scuffed hardwood floors throughout. As we left and got out of earshot from the real estate agent, my mom said, “Daddy could do the floors!” It was all I needed to hear to believe that we could make the new place work for us if the landlords allowed.

My parents scurried ahead and started discussing logistics. Where I saw resistance in my father’s body, I saw excitement in my mother’s. Later, I got a whiff of a possible disagreement—bad credit, an issue with a family member—something that didn’t make sense at the time but in hindsight created an obtuse line between us being a family that could live in that house and one that couldn’t. At that point, it had been a few weeks of hopping around, my parents rotating children to see each new space (because no potential landlord wants to imagine five children in a house)—and we needed something, anything, relatively close to a place to call home.

I’m not sure why my mother’s words from that sunny afternoon stuck with me. Especially considering that for most of my life, home has been any place where my three brothers, my sister, my mother, and I resided together. I suspect the power was in the way she sounded so sure of herself. My parents’ credit issues, their many children, and even the house’s lack of rooms were not detriments to her. She saw something we could work with. Whatever seemed to be less than ideal, we would make beautiful.

Over the years, I learned that my father, a Panamanian man who migrated to New York City when he was a tween, was known for his ability to make an old floor look new. He had a buffing machine that stood half as tall as his frame and sounded like a car motor. A day of waxing, another day of sealing with a polyurethane wood finish, and the floor would look brand-new. Floors were one of his specialties. When my dad was estranged from us and we continued to move around, my mother would attack problematic floors herself, finding her own solutions. Her method was easier: a really good scrub with a mop—or better, on her hands and knees—a light screening, and a new coat of wax. We’d watch as she would transform the floors over the course of a day, leaning her pear-shape body into the pin-thin mop, stepping back to appreciate her work again and again. The coat would last for a year, and then she would return to the floor and do it all over again, perfecting her work with each pass. In every home, she did this, on her own. She never complained. Instead, her message was consistent: things would be taken care of if we took care of them.

My mother was in her thirties then, the same age I am now raising my two children, so my memories have the clarity of comparison. She must have felt then the same way I do now, because my grandmother was present with her, taking on the beauty of home with the same fortitude. My grandmother Bertha’s apartment was unchanged for seventeen years, save for the addition of an empty adjacent apartment once her neighbor passed away. My uncle, my aunt, and my baby cousin called the other apartment home. My family stayed there, too, when we visited Brooklyn.

And whenever a storm rolled in over Brooklyn during those visits, we were told to go to an enclosed room, turn off the lights, and sit in stillness while my grandmother prayed aloud about God’s timing and order. Despite her assertion that we should be, she was hardly ever still—even going so far as to lay red bricks on the wall of her living room with my uncle over the course of a few days. When the beautiful brick wall was done, she returned her attention to the objects in her kitchen that were meticulously arranged and dusted them with a thin piece of Bounty she had previously used, dried, and would reuse again if it did not tear.

My grandmother, like my mother, often made casual remarks about money, New York City, and living below one’s means, but to me, the way she lived was extravagant and abundant. The thrift store was an expensive department store, and that random chair from the garbage was a piece befitting a museum. “A shame someone threw this out!” These treasures were possessed of their own mysterious stories—just like my grandmother was, in my view, and even my mother. On paper, my grandmother loved Jesus, she was an impeccable teacher, a writer, and a deeply regarded member of her Prospect Heights community. Who she was off paper appeared in fleeting but massive moments of one-on-one time, in which a passive sentence became a narrative. Her possessions added to the secret story of who she was. She died when I was eighteen, and my family picked up this legacy.

The following year, my father passed away. I lost a grandparent and a parent in quick succession, and I watched my mother shrink as if two parts of herself had been carried off with them. My daughter was born soon after their deaths, and I entered motherhood myself while my own mother was reduced by her grief. I realize now that my mother and I were made the same, resolving our memory of the past while parenting into the future.

In those early years of motherhood, I pretended my father was just somewhere else, like Florida, changing the oil under the hood of his blue hooptie, his laugh rattling through the motor. And my grandmother I preserved in pieces, her possessions inhabiting my own tiny two-bedroom railroad apartment: a record player, a side table, an assortment of her ornaments. My mother visited my home back then, but where there should have been an intimacy in my newfound womanhood as a mother, there was a unique distance. Our relationship had changed. I tried to hang on to my childhood memory of her through her advice, taking care of something and calling it my own.

Throughout my childhood, my mother’s practice of making things nice maddened me, especially if we were in the middle of an eviction process. I witnessed what I felt to be her delusion carrying on right up until a scheduled court date or the night before an eviction. Then, with sudden urgency, she gathered us together to hurriedly pack or collect money for our temporary stay or new home. Still, there were group cleans and large meals on a Sunday when we made it. At other moments between, it was flipping through catalogs, where we could point to furniture we could customize, or planning layouts at Rent-A-Center, blasting the familiarity of Faith Evans from the front seat of the car with the windows down, or making sure our hair and outfits were never out of place.

Now I see that she did not allow us to be reduced to chaos; rather, she enabled us with a peculiar kind of magic. A magic that enabled my vision and fostered my need to inspect homemaking, homegoing, and this body—our bodies—with curiosity.