by David Leite
5
MOVING ON UP
Pride radiated from my father like an aura as he stood at the edge of the road waiting for us. He wore his blue work uniform, with its knife-sharp creases and the white patch over his heart that spelled “Manny” in red cursive stitching. When we pulled onto the chewed-up ground of our new lot, he trotted to the car and opened the door for my mother, who was clutching an unopened bottle of wine. After a few steps she pitched back, losing her balance. “Manny!” she yelped, and grabbed harder on to the crook of his arm. They laughed as her high heels kept sinking deeper into the soft earth.
“Have everything, Son?” he asked over his shoulder. I held up a cross, a dollar bill, and a loaf of bread. He nodded toward the loaf: “No funny business, right?”
He was referring to the time Vu Costa and I had gone to a Portuguese bakery for a loaf of hot, crusty bread. Afterward, Vu swung by the market, the one with sawdust on the floor, big bins of dried beans that felt like jewels running through my fingers, and planks of bacalhau (salt cod), with its suffocating smell.
“Queres vir comigo?” Vu asked. Do you want to come with me? I shook my head. The car was filled with a seductive yeasty scent. While he shopped, I poked my finger through the bottom of the loaf, pinched out a puff of cottony, warm bread, and popped it in my mouth. Mistake. Widening the hole, I plucked out more, and more. I pulled out as much as my stubby fingers could reach. At dinner that night, when my father broke into the loaf, it cracked like an egg, most of its guts missing. Me and Flickering Jesus had a lot to talk about that night.
We made our way around piles of lumber and upended tree stumps and over rocks to the corner of the wooden form, which was filled with the cement that would hold up our living room. The masons climbed down from their trucks and leaned against the huge wheels to smoke. When my mother looked back, her head low like a bull’s so they could see her eyes over her clip-on sunglasses, they ditched the cigarettes, then cupped their hands in front of them. She nodded her approval.
Holding on to my father to steady herself, she crouched down and pressed the bread, bottle of wine, dollar bill, and cross into the wet concrete. We clasped hands and lowered our heads. As my father said something about God allowing our new house always to be filled with food, drink, prosperity, and faith, his voice kept hitching, causing him to stop for a moment and clear his throat. Me, I squinted my eyes and stared at the dollar, sending invisible rays into it so that it would multiply and become a buried treasure.
When we were done, my father turned from the men and pulled out a handkerchief, then wiped his eyes and mouth. My mother leaned in, her fingers threaded through one of his belt loops. “You’re a good man, Manny Brown,” I heard her whisper. That was her nickname for him. Manny Brown. He nodded and kissed her, then motioned for the men to finish pouring the cement and bury our offering.
A carpenter for Laflamme Brothers, my father built our house on Sharps Lot Road, in Swansea—on the other side of Mount Hope Bay—by himself. He did it in less than six months, working at nights and on weekends, all so I’d be able to start first grade in my new school, in our new town. The house, a modest ranch, was four miles but a lifetime away from Brownell Street. It was in the middle of the country, surrounded by farms and endless acres of woods, where there were no tenements or fractured sidewalks or women in worn housecoats screaming over fences.
We had to move, because in several years our old house was to be reclaimed by eminent domain and demolished to lay Route 79, a shortcut through the city to Boston. Vu sold my parents two half-acre parcels on the edge of a swath of land that ran the length of the street and deep into the woods. Over the years, Vu had slowly bought up land throughout Swansea and Somerset as investments, but after he’d seen the kind of craftsman my father turned out to be, he’d hoped they would develop it together. The two plots—one for us, one for me when I married and had children—was all my father was willing to take. My guess is he didn’t want to be indebted. Even though my father was too big for The Strap, Vu had other ways to punish.
Throughout the summer and autumn of 1966, as my father erected the shell of the house—first as ribs of a giant living creature, then as skins of plywood, plaster, and wallpaper—I wandered through the rooms, running my hands along the walls, across faux-marble Formica countertops, around shiny doorknobs, over shellacked moldings, as if they were Braille telling me of the new exalted life that awaited. This was nothing like our tenement. Everything was new, and in the air hung the sweet smell of sawdust, the smell of progress and promise, which I have forever associated with my father. And we would live alone.
By November, we had a gigantic, gleaming kitchen; a dining room; three bedrooms; a living room; and our own bathroom, with a tub and a shower and a shiny faucet that looked like the stick shift in one of Paneen’s stock cars. Downstairs my mother led me around the bright, freshly poured concrete basement. “Over here,” she said, unfurling her hand toward the area just left of the stairs, “will be my kitchen.” Every self-respecting Portuguese mother has a working kitchen in her basement, so the show kitchen upstairs never gets dirty. It’s the cooking equivalent of plastic slipcovers. “And over there will be Daddy’s workshop, and in the other corner will be the washer and dryer.”
“Where’s my space?” I whined.
“Where would you like it to be?” she asked, sitting down on the stairs and pulling me between her legs, one step below. I leaned back against her chest and placed my elbows on her thighs as I surveyed my new kingdom.
“There,” I said, pointing to the right.
“And there it will be.” She kissed the top of my head and led me up the still banister-less stairs.
My bedroom was as big as my ambition. Long windows that were too high for me to look out of flanked two walls, but I remember my father saying something about the southern light being good for me, and that’s why he put me in the back of the house. My room would never be dark again. Earlier in the week, my father had finished putting up the wallpaper—an antique-cars pattern my mother had let me pick out of a giant storybook of designs. Alone in my empty room, I took a pencil and wrote on the arc of some of the black tires in slivery letters that could only be seen if they caught the glare from my father’s work light. This is my room. This is my room. This is my room. I wanted the walls to absorb me. I wanted to belong to this home, this pristine beginning.
Our new life was delivered unassembled and wrapped in plastic. The furniture was upholstered in champagne, tan, and a staggering number of beiges (my mother’s favorite color), plus mustards, browns, oranges, and umbers—raw and burnt. Big men with shirtsleeves rolled up over their muscles and tattoos carried a low couch, a club chair, and an upholstered rocker with a base that looked like something out of The Jetsons into the living room. The coffee table was even lower and almost twice as long as I was tall; I lay on it to check. “Scandinavian design,” the man at Stafford Furniture had boasted to my parents. When the moving men weren’t looking, I stuck my nose in the carpets and breathed in their synthetic smell—validation of our newly minted status.
We didn’t have a kitchen table. Instead, my father built a jazzy snack bar, like the kind at Al Mac’s Diner. He and I would sit on one side, my mother on the other, the side toward the kitchen, and for years I’d imagine I was a bored movie star sitting at some restaurant, waiting for my fried eggs or French toast before I began filming for the day.
A white ranch with brown shutters and new plantings in the front yard looked like the kind of house people on TV and in magazines lived in. And Sunday suppers in that kind of house meant pot roast or tuna-noodle casserole or chicken à la king (or, if someone had been a very, very good boy, Manwiches). The families in those houses weren’t eating carne assada or salt cod—that I was sure about. And, I pleaded with God, neither were my neighbors. To make sure, I jumped on my new bike, the one with the banana seat and high-rise handlebars, and rode up and down the street, sussing out the names on the mailboxes. F
reeborn. Goode. Jennings. Chase. Sweet. Only Miranda, an old farmer whose skin matched my mother’s burnt umber drapes, was Portuguese. He and his wife didn’t have any kids my age, so I could ignore them. “We live in the suburbs now,” my mother told me, standing on a chair to hang a sunburst clock in the dining room. I looked up the word in my dictionary. I was pleased.
Even though we weren’t far from our old Portuguese neighborhood and its markets, my mother loosened her grip on our food. She began shopping at supermarkets that had entire aisles devoted to crackers and cheese-in-a-can, snack bars with waitresses who stuck pencils in their hair, and bakeries that sold donuts and crullers and Fourth of July cakes.
“Hey, Banana, c’mere and help me!” she’d shout every Friday afternoon. I’d tear down the hallway and carry grocery bags in from her car, digging through them to look for booty. As soon as I’d pull out a box of chocolate Pop-Tarts, Chicken in a Biskit crackers, Hostess cupcakes, or Pepperidge Farm apple turnovers, my mother would yank it out of my hand and hold it way over my head.
“No,” she’d say as I jumped up. “Not until after supper.” And then began our pre-dinner dance.
“Please?”
“No.” Her lips overemphasizing the word as if I were deaf.
“But you don’t understand, I’m starving.”
“Then have some fruit.” Now it was my turn to see if she had an axe sticking out of the back of her head.
In time, oatmeal and some kind of horrid hot white mush were swapped for cold cereal for breakfast. I propped a box of Cap’n Crunch or Apple Jacks or Cocoa Puffs in front of me and read the package again and again and never got bored. Through it all, my favorite breakfast was still peanut butter and banana on toast. Waiting for me every morning, when I pulled out the beige pleather stool from the snack bar, was a banana with my mom’s ornate cursive on it. Depending on what was happening that day, she’d written, “Do well on your test!” or “Don’t forget to take out the trash!” or “Happy birthday!” (My mother believes in the power of exclamation marks.) Regardless of the message of the day, it always said, “We love you!” on one end, and “God bless!” on the other. To make the breakfast, she’d smear Skippy peanut butter on hot slices of toast, carefully cut the banana crosswise, position both halves on one slice, and cover them with a second.
“Ready?” she’d ask, sliding the sandwich across the counter to me. I’d nod, then smoosh it with my palm. I couldn’t eat it if it wasn’t smashed.
But for years, whenever my father’s family invaded from Boston for Sunday lunch—what we called “dinner”—everything slipped back, and our yard turned into an old-fashioned Portuguese festa. Aunts opened the trunks of their cars and enlisted husbands and kids to carry pots, pans, Tupperware, bags, and boxes. “Toma cuidado!” they screamed. “Ay, ’pa! Toma cuidado!” as small kids half the size of the pots they carried lurched their way to the grape arbor my father had built in the backyard. Underneath, two or three tables were pushed together, mismatched plastic tablecloths billowed smooth over them. My mother, Vo Costa and Vo Leite, and my four Boston aunts tried to outdo one another. My mother opened with her kale soup, which I passed on for obvious reasons; Aunt Irene countered with her livid purple octopus stew, suction cups and all, which I also passed on, for even more obvious reasons. Vo Costa put her pink chicken soup up for contention. No one knows what made it pink—paprika, a blush of wine, the reflection from the pink flowers on the bowl? It was bursting with shredded chicken, hunks of potatoes, and rice that looked like Xs, the grains having split from soaking up so much broth. It was so good, my cousin Mark had eaten thirteen bowls one Sunday. It was my favorite, too, and Vo knew it. “Coma mais, querido,” she said. Eat more, sweetheart. And as I held up my bowl for seconds like Oliver Twist, I looked over at my mother, her veneta idling.
Next, the women carried platters piled with boiled salt cod and roast pork, chicken, and beef that had been rubbed with pimenta moída, a salty, mildly hot pepper paste, through the backyard. Their house slippers slapped against their feet, sounding like yapping dogs as they rushed to beat one another to the table. They’d bend over, bosoms squashing against my head as they placed their dishes in the middle of us all with a loud fanfare. Chouriço, linguiça, and morçela (the trinity of sausage in our family: pork, spicier pork, and blood, respectively) usually anchored one end of the table. Bowls of rice the color of terra-cotta from the sausage drippings, tender potatoes blushing from the wine they were roasted in, and my mother’s famous baked beans held down the other end. Everywhere were baskets of papo secos, crusty rolls that looked like two ass cheeks of a baby. Salad was conspicuously missing; my people don’t eat salad.
With all twenty-one of us reaching over one another, the women would crouch down beside us kids, the seams of their dresses screaming over the expanse of their thighs, urging us to try their specialties. Beneath the table, Paneen would tip the big green gallon jug of wine into a Flintstones jelly glass and pass it down to Barry and me, the two oldest. The conversation floated on the wind—loud and gregarious—sounding like a boxing match to anyone whose last name didn’t end in a vowel.
6
SANTA CLAUS IS A HEAVY BREATHER
That filthy thing is not going up in this house.” My mother stood at the top of the basement stairs, a washrag in hand, blocking my father’s way. She was pointing to the box he was hauling up from the basement. “Deluxe Aluminum Christmas Tree Set,” it read along its side. It was early December, and we’d been in the house for about a month. The scents of Glade Evergreen and new shower curtain mingled in the air.
“Well, what am I supposed to do with it, Elvira?”
“Throw it out for all I care, Manny Brown.”
Although I was as eager as my mother to ditch any evidence of our previous life—for different reasons: she, cleanliness, I, class—I was oddly nostalgic for that old tree. I knew some kids in school whose families wore matching reindeer sweaters while threading strands of cranberries and popcorn to hang on a real tree. But I didn’t care. My fake tree had frilly silver spikes for branches, with big silver pom-poms on the ends, that stuck out from a silver-painted pole. A creaking color wheel turned the tree lurid colors. When we had lived on Brownell, I’d wriggle underneath; it was like being inside a giant Christmas snow globe. The needles sparkled and fluttered from the heat of the radiator. As the tree turned from green to blue to yellow to red, I imagined days were passing in fast motion, hurtling me closer to the night Santa Claus would visit us.
At the top of the stairs, I pushed past my mother, who was still blocking my father. “Can I have the color wheel?” I asked him. “Please, please, please?”
“Fine,” he said, handing it to me, “but I don’t want to trip over this thing in the basement.”
That weekend, a formidable new seven-foot artificial tree stood in the bow window. My mother had spent all afternoon punctuating it with a million lights and satin balls, “because they’re so much prettier than those old glass ones, don’t you think?” The secret to a gorgeous tree, she said as she stood back surveying her work, was to plunge lots of lights deep inside to give it depth. Her goal, I eventually figured out, was to leave no green showing—anywhere. Holidays is what she called those few naked spots of fake needles, “and holidays are for lazy people!” To fix that, she unplugged the Christmas lights and walked around the tree, inspecting. Every once in a while, she’d shove in a small bit of gold garland to cover a bald spot. When she was done, the tree was as shiny and glittery as our old one, and I loved it.
“Son, put your boots on,” my father said when we were done decorating. My mother flicked off the room lights, and we tromped through the snow to the front of the house. The tree took up most of the window and was so bright, I could see the beach mural on the wall behind the couch. To the right of the porch, lit by a spotlight, was a giant picture of a waving Santa my mother had painted on a sheet of plywood. The midget shrubs my father had planted that summer were speckled with outdo
or lights, making them look in all that snow like scoops of vanilla ice cream with rainbow jimmies on top.
“And you’re sure Santa will find us?”
“Banana, you could see this from outer space,” my mother said. I looked up the street to see if we were being outshone by anyone. She was probably right.
Every night leading up to Christmas, I’d switch on the color wheel in my room; it was my holiday decoration, along with the Advent calendar taped to my door. From a box in the closet, I’d fish out the microphone from my parents’ old reel-to-reel tape recorder. I’d stand with my back to the light and watch my shadow as the wall undulated red, then green, then blue, then yellow. “Ladies and gentlemen . . . Sonny and Cher!” I took a deep breath, turned around, and began swaying, eyes closed, as I mouthed “I Got You Babe,” pretending I was starring in my own Christmas TV special.
As my room whirled in fun-house colors, I heard something. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, so I cocked my ear toward the door to hear if it was either of my parents, but they were watching TV. I turned off the wheel, which wheezed to a silence. There it was again. Heavy breathing. Distinct heavy breathing, like the room was gasping for air. I wanted to bolt, but I was supposed to be asleep. Fear began snaking up my spine. Maybe it’s me, I thought, and I held my breath, but after several seconds I heard it again. I flew into the den.
“What’s the matter?” my father asked.