by Hank Quense
I will not tell you how old Irene was when she died because I am still afraid of what a can of whupass blurting out her age to a crowd might unleash upon me. But she wasn’t very old.
In the interest of time I won’t even tell you about the hurt she experienced in life because truly you could not even fathom it—anyway, why would you want to imagine a pedophile father who beat her with rose stems and fed her boiled flour for lunch while he allegedly ate steak and raped her brother? I won’t describe how hard she sometimes laughed or with what angst she cried when she told these stories.
I will not try to tell you how much she wanted to please the Almighty God, one she seemed to have created in her own image—yes—her own image—but despite being His creator, so to speak, oddly, she was still unable to please Him. I'd better not go into how much she mistrusted everyone, including that very God at times.
I won’t tell you how many things my mother feared (from witch doctors to amulets), nor the extent of the loneliness she felt (because she was so self-centered everyone eventually left). For if I told you all that, to be fair, I might also have to consider telling you how she crushed my soul, bruised my skin, and left me to fend for myself more often than not. How she dated a man who pissed on my teddy bears, and drank herself able to stand in line at the welfare office with me, skinny, white, as bait for compassion. I would have to tell you the whole story and there is no time.
There really is no time, nor are there sufficiently eloquent words to lend credence to the picture I would like to paint. That picture would have strokes of fairness and impartiality that I cannot even hope to achieve. It would have explanations and rationalizations, excuses and opinions that would lead to forgiveness or hatred.
I will tell you, however, that she loved Fado music (from Lisbon). My mother sang like the great Portuguese singer Amália Rodrigues. She loved her grandchildren and she loooved seafood. She had to have her food her way, preferably in large quantities, and drank her white wine from a straw. "The Bible said St. Paul drank, Cindy, it’s fine as long as you keep it to one or two," she usually said as she served herself a third glass.
She wore blouses with a turned-up collar like Elvis Presley's because "Nobody needs to see moles," and had several red lamps because if there was dust on the furniture it became less noticeable under a dim red light, and if a man caller should come by, that light would certainly be more flattering.
She loved her family as best she knew how, which, honestly, wasn’t all that well. She complained about everything and everyone, even about those she loved most, and was convinced they all were out to get her. “They’re a bunch of jealous sons of bitches,” she said.
I can tell you that she made children laugh and spun wonderful tales on the days when she was neither sad nor angry: so few of those. She made annoying sounds, yodeled and danced. Much as it got on my nerves at the time, I mourn all those songs and dances, now long lost, but for this checkered memory I attempt to recite.
I can tell you she was far more loved than she knew she was, and it seems impossible to me to bear the pain of how much I miss her now.
But I didn’t know then how much I would miss her, because when I was young our life was a Latin novella, filled with intrigue, fights, and a series of obstacles that always seemed insurmountable along the way. There were abusive boyfriends, food stamps and alcohol, late nights, music and madness. It is true, I hated to love her and at times ... I just hated. But then for every time she slapped me, abandoned me, or hurt me, there was another time when her incredibly sad brown eyes silently conveyed how deeply she loved me, and sometimes I would spot a single tear that spilled her secret down her face—that she did not know how to love me any better.
I’m no Houdini but I have been searching for the trick to survive, to not be buried alive by the pain of my past. Perhaps it’s simple. Stop trying to understand! Perhaps my energy is best used forgiving others and myself, for this life is an open-ended, ambiguous story and we arrive into it as fast as we depart, answers notwithstanding.
I carry my mother in my heart, in my genes, in my fears, in my melancholy, and in my ridiculous sense of humor. I know my mother knew how much I loved her. On the phone with me on the very day she died, she said, crying, "Cindy, you are everything to me, like your father once was—that lousy bastard."
And so, as I walk through what sometimes feels like a tundra of discontent, I stop to appreciate the smallest seed of joy along the way, and I water that seed with all the care, hope and faith I can muster, so that maybe my children will remember our life as at times imperfect, but mostly hopeful and beautiful, and know I behaved as best I could and they were loved as exceptionally, superbly and passionately as ... well ... as I knew how to love them. At the time.
A Long Island Girl
By Heloise Ruskin
I was a Long Island girl. Not much of a setting to produce a different bloom amidst the row upon row of pale daffodils. Yet it happened. In my tale I will try to unravel for you this mystery that unfolded within the confines of a suburban garden.
I, Heloise Sokoloff, was born on Feb. 12, 1943. So I grew up in the post-war 40’s and 50’s, in the heart of the new washing machines and dryers, the car in every garage, the lawn mowers keeping every blade of grass on every lawn the same length as every other one. My family’s house in Cedarhurst was two stories and white stucco like all the others on the straight street. Every house was filled with a family, a father who worked in the City (New York), a mother who drove him to catch the train at 7:30 and picked him up every day at 6 o’clock. One car families, two child families, dog and cat families, fathers in their uniforms of a dark suit, white shirt, navy blue, brown or black tie covered in triangles, or paisleys, and felt hats covering balding heads and pleasant smiles surrounding pleasant teeth.
I don’t know if all the mothers worked at the same jobs but I suspect so, the job of shopping almost daily at the grocery store and then beginning in around 1954 at the new, very small by today’s standards, super markets. Frozen food was not invented until the early 50’s: no frozen broccoli, fish sticks, Swanson frozen dinners from which the children would eat a slice of Turkey with brown gravy, a tablespoon of mashed potatoes, and soggy carrots, all saturated with salt. Moms drove the Chevy, the Buick, the Ford or Dodge to the store for their vegetables and cans, so many and so heavy, of wax beans, corn, tuna, beets, and jars of applesauce.
Then on to the meat market. Seeing the butcher was a chance to have some conversation and it never failed that the butcher Al told every mother, every three days, when she would come in and look through his shiny glass case at all the choices, “Mrs., I have a great cut of prime beef just for you today. I cut it this morning. Chuck roast.”
All of the children on the street, Oceanpoint Avenue, were fed the same breakfast: Kellogg’s Corn Flakes or Rice Crispies. By the late 40’s these had begun to replace oatmeal and cream of wheat. Those were still made for them only by their grandmothers, who usually lived very nearby. They ate their cereal, drank their orange juice and glass of milk, which was no longer delivered to the door. The Moms kissed them goodbye and stood outside while each house on the street disgorged its children for their five-block walk to school.
Now the mothers were alone. But the black phone was always nearby. I know the other mothers led the same lives as mine did because when I was sick one day and got to stay home, I heard Mom on the phone calling other mothers and being called by them on and off all day. And I heard what they talked about.
My Mom called Ruth Hecht and told her that their friend Anna was sick again. “And you know Ruth, if she doesn’t lose weight she’ll always be sick. “
“That’s for sure, I always see a bowl of chocolate covered cherries on her coffee table with plenty of empty wrappers,” Ruth wryly replied.
A bit later Mom responded to someone else’s call. “No, you really are telling me that Joan wouldn’t let the kids see that new Esther Williams movie on Saturda
y?” Mom asked Denise.
On and on the gossip went and filled the day on and off. It was only broken up when I was home sick, with Mom taking my temperature, bringing me my lunch of peanut butter and grape jelly on Wonder Bread, just like I liked it, and even driving down to the candy store to get me my favorite comic books, Superman and Archie and Veronica. But when I wasn’t home, Mom and the others, besides shopping for food and gossiping, talked “business” and met with other Moms who were trying to raise money for Hadassah, or planning a Sisterhood lunch. They were Jewish Mothers like mine. The Catholic Moms—there weren’t many Protestants in Cedarhurst—I knew from my friend Ann, were planning prayer meetings, and fund raisers for the needy in the parish.
Then the children came come. At 3:30 all the Moms were waiting. “Here, have a glass of chocolate milk and a cookie.” I would gulp it down and run over to my friends, Caroleen’s or Harriet’s, or to the vacant lot next door to play with the Stein boys, Gerald and David. We kids had a great life after school—school itself was a blur. I guess I learned to read (suggest deleting this sentence). After school, we all did the same things and those things were fun. It was jump rope with the girls, right in the street! The mothers were all home so there were no cars in the street. It was hopscotch on the sidewalks! It was cowboys and Indians imitating The Lone Ranger with the Stein brothers! And it was even what I now know was normal, when we girls couldn’t go out in the rain, it was playing “Doctor” when we would say, “and he put the thermometer in her tushy” and feel very naughty, and maybe ashamed of these secrets which we would never tell another girl and of course not our parents.
Was this “playing doctor” my first deviation, my first straying from the straight and narrow? No. There had been another before this with Caroleen. Caroleen’s house was a different world from mine. It was not on the straight Oceanpoint Avenue but around the corner on busy West Broadway, with two lanes of cars and a lot of them. Her house was red brick and had bushes in front of the lawn that hid it from the road. It was not open like mine, close to the street and close to the neighbors. And Car’s life was not like the others of us. For she didn’t have a mother. She had a “housekeeper,” Francis, because her mother was dead. I met Caroleen and my mother met Francis because, when I was four, she had me walk up to Car’s front door alone. While she waited at the end of the lawn, she had me ring the bell and ask if there was a little girl there for me to play with. Francis invited me right in to play after my mother had walked up to introduce herself. I then played with red-headed Caroleen every day—I had Jet black hair and later we were called Car the little angel, and me the little devil. And that is how my earliest deviations began, with Car to accompany me.
Until I went to school, my mother gave me over to Francis to watch almost every day. Francis was not my babysitter. She wanted me there with Car, in the house. All the jump rope and hopscotch and “doctor” came later. Until then, until the first grade really, I stayed inside at Car’s a lot, only sometimes venturing into her backyard. She did not want to go out and play much. And what did we do for all those hours? We played with a house we built with toy bricks and furnished with the first plastic toy furniture that existed and little rubber dolls. This was our own world, cut off from Francis and unknown to Mom.My first deviation was an extension of that world because it was me and Car together. One day, when we were five, we ventured out alone from Car’s back yard—I don’t know how Francis didn’t see us—walking block after block away from Car’s house. I did not stay in my prescribed space, I did not do what other children of five do. I stole flowers. I had Car steal them too. We walked into two yards and broke off the flowers from their stems. But this did not feel naughty to me like “playing doctor” later. This felt exhilarating. I was a little girl high on breaking the rules. I did not feel ashamed or guilty. This was a secret pleasure inside me. Yes, this first early exhilarating secret was the beginning of my adventuring into the unknown.
Then after this, and after “playing doctor” came another kind of deviation altogether which was to leave a lasting impact on me and greatly color my adult life up to today. By the time we were eight and in third grade, Car and I, two Jewish children, played on Oceanpoint Avenue with two Catholic kids, Ann and Roger. Their house looked just like mine, but something inside smelled different. It had kind of a smell-less smell. And Ann’s mother never kissed me hello.
These kids were different from me. They were Irish and Catholic. I noticed that they never played on the street after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Instead I saw them walk quickly down the street toward West Broadway on those days.
One Tuesday, when I asked them, “ Where are you going, why are you leaving?” I learned a whole new word, “Catechism class.”
“What is that?” I asked Ann.
She became very serious in the midst of our hopscotch. “It is my Catholic school.”
I didn’t understand. She had a school, my school. “How come you have another school?” I asked her.
Ann explained a little more of this strange puzzle to me. “We go to the church school after regular school to learn about Jesus and Mary to become good Catholics because we don’t learn about them in regular school.”
I thought about what I already had learned about Jesus. I had once heard my Dad mention a “Catholic” man he sold textiles to. When I had asked him what “Catholic” was, he told me that it was a religion, like being Jewish was, but different.
He said I needed to understand this. “There are many people in this country who are Catholic.“
Dad continued, “They believe that God came to earth and became a man who helps anyone who believes God sent him. That man is called Jesus Christ.” He didn’t explain why this happened or how it happened.
I was in the dark even concerning “God.” In Temple Israel Sunday School I learned nothing about who He was. I only learned that a very long time ago, when people had no telephones, radios, cars or the new television which I watched at Car’s, this God told a man called Moses to lead the Jewish people, which was me somehow, out of Egypt.
So I had already found out that there was another God and that I was not in this Catholic world that believed in this God-man. I asked Ann if Car and I could go with on Thursday. Playing “house” by third grade had ended and Car had come out of the house.
Ann didn’t think about it at all before answering, “Yeah. I’m sure it’ll be ok with the Sister. But I won’t tell my mother you’re going. She always says no to everything.”
As I said, this was a different family from my family. My Mom always said yes. But this time I did not ask her. I just knew that this was a path I had better take without my parents knowing.
I knew I shouldn’t tell Mom or Dad about this walk I was about to take the next day to meet the Sister and Jesus Christ. I knew Dad wouldn’t want me to meet him and be in this school. But now I can call this deviation what it was. It wasn’t stealing flowers. It was much bigger than that. This was my first turning toward “the mystery” that I found nowhere in my familiar everyday world. It felt “forbidden” then, at eight. But later, when I sang Protestant hymns in camp at ages eleven, twelve, thirteen; when I saw God take shape in a tree; when I danced with the voodoo priestess in Haiti in my late twenties; when I forded rivers in Haiti to meet voodoo artists in my forties; I knew that it was the mystery beyond my world that I was pursuing and absorbing. Attending Catechism class was my first leap over the bars of my Long Island world.
Playing Host to my Countrymen
By Nimfa Gehman
One of my college professors once said, “Only the rich can afford to indulge in the arts.” She was a remnant of the Colonial era—white skin, pointy nose, fake blond hair—more comfortable talking in Spanish and English than in the native Tagalog. Just like her forebears, she tended to look down her long nose at the brown-skinned Filipinos. “Art, for the average Filipino,” she theorized, “is not a priority because he is too preoccupied eking o
ut a living.”
Her statement must have colored my own judgment, for why else would I feel so skeptical when informed that Arti Santa Rita, a Filipino theater group, is coming to the Big Apple to do a musical entitled Let’s Rendezvous in the Past.
Encouraged by its success amongst Filipinos in California, Arti Santa Rita wanted to bring it to the Filipino audience in New York City. Although the group is well-known back home, I wondered if this humble group of artists was ready for the world’s center of culture. The fact that the show was done in Pampango, our local dialect, did not help ease my qualms.
My ties to Arti Santa Rita were through Andy Alviz, founder and artistic director. He wrote, directed, and choreographed, composing some of the lyrics of the show. A few years back while I was at a party in Manila, I heard his name mentioned as a brilliant choreographer who worked with Cameron MacIntosh of Miss Saigon fame. I did not know Andy on a personal level. The only thing we had in common was that we had the same great-grandfather. If family lore is to be believed, this great-grandfather, in a sudden twinge of conscience, gave away hectares of family land to his poor tenants. No doubt feeling noble and enlightened, he reasoned that no one man should own so much land. We, the fourth generation who got nothing, thought him a fool for his misguided benevolence.
I kept a low profile when I heard that Arti Santa Rita was looking for host families in the New York/New Jersey area. I had reasons for not wanting to get involved. I was too busy and was worried about taking complete strangers into my home. The group however was having great difficulties finding enough volunteers to host them for an entire week, and so I was conscripted by Andy to host at least a few members of the group.
Among Filipinos, it does not matter how distant your bloodline is—a second cousin is considered an immediate family. As every good Filipino knows, one does not say “No” to a relative, so I reluctantly said “Yes, for Andy's sake.”
“No! No! No!” Andy insisted, “You are not doing it for me! You are doing it to help promote your cultural heritage.” The man was intent on a mission to promote Filipino culture. I begged to be given only four cast members. I ended up with nine! The truth is, I felt guilty for not wanting to open my home to them. Coming from a nation of migrant workers, it was my obligation to show hospitality to fellow countrymen who needed my help in a foreign land. Duty beckoned, and so I became a reluctant host.