“I once had Black friend too,” I hear Mami say. Oh shit! Only Mami can say something so inappropriate! As if she came from a different planet! Altă planetă.
“Yes,” Mami carries on, oblivious to the fact that she just set herself up for one of Rachelle’s tirades about race. I wonder what she’s gonna add now, to make matters worse. “She was my first friend in United States. I watch her kids for her.”
“You watched her kids?” Rachelle retorts. The hostility in her voice is obvious. I wish I could think of a good way to extract Mami from this conversation.
“Oh, yes,” Mami continues, unaware that she’s treading on thin ice. “I watch her kids. It was my first job in United States. I was like baby-sitter, during the day, when she was working.”
I run the water on high so that the noise will prevent me from listening further. I remember Mami’s friend, Josephine, and her two children. Alex and I used to go to her place after school. I remember sitting on a nice couch, watching TV, lots of TV.
When I finally dare abandon the kitchen, I’m bracing myself for an uncomfortable situation. To my surprise, Mami and Rachelle are sitting next to each other, seeming to have a pleasant conversation. How on earth did this happen?
As I place the flowers on the coffee table, Rachelle turns to me and says:
“L, honey child, why don’t you cut up that nice cake and put on some tea? Your mother is going to think we don’t know how to treat a guest.”
As I serve tea and cake, I realize my mother is having a good time. She and Rachelle are talking about food, Mami’s favorite topic besides books. She is instructing Rachelle on how to make the perfect apple pie. Plăcintă cu mere.
“I make very easy crust with butter and sour cream. Equal measures. Is easy to make, and I usually make twice that I need. It freeze nicely, wrapped in paper from butter.”
She seems utterly satisfied with herself, and Rachelle follows her every word as if she were saying something truly important. Of course, knowing Mami she will not stray too much off the safe topic of food, although to tell the truth, her reminiscing to Rachelle about Josephine was surprisingly forthcoming.
It takes me a while to figure out what made them bond so fast.
“You have to learn to cook tasty and nutritious meals cheaply when you are mother like us,” Mami says. “In this city are children who starve.”
Rachelle nods her head emphatically.
“And other children who get way too fat.” Mami sighs. “Mothers like you and me are in very special category, very difficult to manage, because our children are in danger of both. You’d think is spoiled rich kids who get fat. But really, I look around and I been thinking of it for years. Is poor children, who eat crap who are most in danger. Most of cheap foods have little nutrition and lot of crap. Fatty meats, processed carbs, corn syrup, nitrate, MGS, and all junk. Is hard to come up with balanced meal, all the vegetables, all the vitamins, on a budget.”
Rachelle nods. It suddenly occurs to me that she is just as obsessed with Jurron’s proper nourishment as Mami was with ours. No wonder they get along! Listening to them, I feel ashamed and guilty, thinking of my own eating habits, the gallons of fatty cream cheese, and the dozens of bagels I’ve been subsisting on.
To my horror, Rachelle seems to be thinking of exactly the same thing.
“So how come you never thought L how to cook?” I find this an inappropriate question, asked in a rude tone of voice. But Mami laughs.
“L never show much interest. And I figure, let her study. After all, college degree is hard to get. Cooking is easy. And L likes food. So I thought, well, if she’ll be hungry, she’ll figure it out. And if she can’t, she can always come back and ask me to teach her.”
Mami takes another sip of tea from her little cup. Ceşcuţă. I guess I should have asked her to teach me. Not just to cook, but to magically transform a few measly dollars into proper meals.
“Much more important get college degree, don’t you think?”
I only wish college had taught me how to avoid subsisting on bagels.
After cake and tea, I show Mami my room. Her face stays bright and hopeful as she surveys the emptiness. If she’s horrified, or at least disappointed, she doesn’t let it show.
“So clean, my sweetie. Very nice.”
She touches the sheets, rubbing the fabric between her fingers.
“This cotton?” she asks.
I nod, and Mami declares herself satisfied. “Nice color. You know, I brought you more sheet and towel. I show you.” Then Mami starts unpacking all the wonders she brought from home. They smell like her closet: a mix of soap, loving care, and lavender satchels. Lavandă. I suddenly miss home.
15
Long Lost Friends
Maria changes into sneakers in the elevator. She’s going to walk back to Queens across the pedestrian bridge, then get on the subway once she’s had enough exercise. Walking through the projects doesn’t faze her. It’s a nice, sunny day, and she’s in a decent mood, although the visit to her daughter made her nostalgic.
She feels silly having mentioned Josephine, her Haitian friend, to Rachelle. After all, other than skin color, the girl has nothing in common with her former friend.
Maria met Josephine in her aimless days of wandering through supermarket aisles, trying to avoid being home with Victor, and trying in vain to prove to herself that shopping and cooking were as useful to her family as taking on that stupid job at the bakery would have been. Her self-esteem was so low, she would not speak a word to anybody. Most cashiers knew her by now, and scanned her food without asking questions.
But every now and then there’d be a new person behind the register, one unfamiliar with Maria and her ignorance of the English language. How she hated the attention such situations brought her! If the cashiers asked her a question, they usually spoke way too fast. She’d try to convey this in her broken English, or she’d try in vain to communicate through gestures. The salesperson would generally repeat the same question, louder and louder, as if Maria were deaf, not foreign. By now, other customers would stare, and she’d be so embarrassed she’d just want to disappear. One time she actually ran out in tears, leaving her groceries on the counter, the labor of hours spent scanning labels, and comparing prices.
To survive these moments of humiliation, Maria created a persona. Whenever people kept addressing her louder and louder, whenever they displayed impatience with her lack of understanding, she would answer in French. This threw them off, and it made her feel better. It restored a little bit of her pride to remember, and let the world know, that, while in the English-speaking world she was a total idiot, she was fluent in French, a language these people did not have the vaguest notion of. Or so she thought.
One day, as the cashier kept asking louder and louder about her choice of paper versus plastic, and Maria replied, once more in French, a voice from behind her offered graciously:
“Peut-etre je peux vous renseigner, Madame?” Maybe I can help you?
She turned around, and, to her surprise, she saw a tall Black woman, in her early thirties, looking sharp in a well-tailored coat. This was Maria’s first meeting with Josephine. It was also the first time she actually talked to a Black person. She felt curiosity mixed with awe. There were no Black people in her home country, and she had never met one before. She’d seen them, along with people of all ethnicities on the streets of New York, but she never had the chance to interact with them. The only people she had actually had any dialogue with in New York, were members of the Romanian community, a world she found more and more confining.
Stunned by the novelty of the situation, she accepted Josephine’s invitation to coffee. It was the beginning of a friendship Maria would come to cherish.
Josephine was Haitian, and spoke fluent French in addition to English and Creole. She had two children, and was raising them alone, with occasional help from her sister. She took to Maria immediately. She was excited to meet someone with older children. Th
e fact that they were neighbors facilitated the friendship.
Josephine worked all day, selling gloves, scarves, and wallets in a chic department store in Manhattan. But she was always happy if Maria came by, in the evening, for coffee or tea, and a chat, while Victor did the homework with Alex and Lili.
Maria’s first trip by herself on the subway would be to visit her new friend at work. It was a terrifying trip, one she hesitated taking, but she was too embarrassed to admit to Josephine that in spite of her carefully written directions she was still afraid. She managed to not get lost, and finding the store was one of her early little victories over life in the new country. She felt excited and energized, having had a small adventure all by herself. She brought Josephine homemade chicken sandwiches, which they enjoyed on a bench in Central Park. It was the first time Maria saw actual beauty in New York, beauty she could relate to. Until then, the city had seemed hostile, dirty, and cruel. She never understood why the world celebrated it. But sitting in the park with Josephine, the buildings and trees looked beautiful, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, she was in awe of her surroundings.
Before Josephine she had been hopelessly lonely. Now she finally had someone who would listen to her complain about her new life, about her husband and her children, and about how useless she felt. Josephine tried to convince her, that even without a job, she was useful to her family.
“You watch the children. You shop. You cook. You keep the place clean. You do laundry. Why do you think these things are useless just because you don’t actually get paid for them? Do you know how much one would have to pay to have somebody else do all that? How much would you have to pay for a cook? Or a cleaner? Or a baby sitter? Or to drop off the laundry somewhere?”
Maria did not confess that in Romania she had people who did just such things for her. She started feeling a little less useless. She began feeling unappreciated instead.
Josephine did not just try to boost her self-esteem. She actually helped her, by giving her her first job. It was a mutually advantageous situation. Josephine stopped taking her children to daycare, which was expensive, and Maria began spending her days at her neighbor’s house, watching the children, whom she could thankfully communicate with in French. Josephine did not pay her much. In fact, she made less than minimum wage, something she did not question until much later. She made next to nothing, but it was still an amount she could shove proudly into Victor’s face.
More important, still, she finally had a refuge. She’d spend hours on Josephine’s comfortable couch, watching TV, while the children were coloring, or napping. Josephine had all the premium channels. Some days, Maria was too depressed to do anything other than lose herself in shows she did not really understand.
Josephine was a good friend in many ways. But like any friendship, theirs had its shortcomings. During their three years of knowing each other, Josephine would let Maria down on more than one occasion.
Josephine was the only person she told about her failed attempt at leaving Victor and the children. She didn’t tell her before the fact, though she did let her know she had a problem and wouldn’t be able to babysit anymore. When she returned, she did not explain, and Josephine did not ask. Things went back to normal. They were friends, and Maria continued to look after the kids. But after what she’d done, normalcy did not suit her. She needed to confess to someone. She hoped that if only she could bring herself to tell Josephine, and if Josephine would be even a little sympathetic, she’d begin to forgive herself.
It took her months to bring herself to tell her what really happened when she disappeared, to confess that she had actually run away, trying to leave her husband. As soon as she said it, Josephine grew animated.
“I knew it! I knew it!” she screamed. “I knew that creepy bastard hit you! I just knew it! Oh, Maria, I wish you’d told me sooner. You always acted so withdrawn…”
Maria tried to protest, tried to argue, to explain that Victor had never in his life hit her, that he would never do such a thing. Actually, if there was a perpetrator of violence in her household, it was her. But she could not bring herself to tell this to Josephine.
The more she protested, the more Josephine grew convinced that Victor beat her, and that Maria was too scared to tell anyone, too embarrassed to tell even her closest friend.
“I know women don’t tell anyone. I know it. The girl across the hallway, that tiny little thing, her husband choked her and threw her down the stairs. Me and my sister heard her screaming, and he was cursing at her and threatening. But after the cops came, she said he didn’t do it. She had blood running down her chin, and bruises on her face, and she still said he didn’t do it. She said she fell!”
Maria did not want to continue the conversation. She couldn’t stand the shame. That battered woman had stood by her husband, and she, Maria, whom Victor had never dared lay a finger on, had tried to abandon her husband and her children. She realized she could never tell Josephine the truth. She felt sorry that she had even tried, because now, she felt even more ashamed than before.
A few days later, Josephine gave her a pamphlet on a women’s shelter. Maria didn’t protest, thanked her, and put it in her pocket.
Later that night, locked in the bathroom, she read it. She tore it to pieces and threw it in the toilet. She wished she had never seen it. What those women had suffered disturbed her on so many levels. She wondered if she herself would have been able to survive.
She also felt a new wave of appreciation for her husband. After all, the issues she had with Victor were minor compared to what these other husbands had done to their wives. She felt heartsick at the thought that she had a good man, yet that she was not able to appreciate him. Years later she would marvel at her own stupidity in thinking those thoughts. If not beating her was her criterion for judging a good man, than she sure as hell had low standards.
In any case, her appreciation for Victor came at a time when their relationship was no longer salvageable. She’d felt it for a long time. But on a cloudy Sunday afternoon, she finally learned for sure. He was no longer hers.
They were at a party in the ‘community.’ On her way to the bathroom, she overheard two women gossiping.
“They sleep in separate beds, in separate rooms. He sleeps in the boy’s room in a twin bed, and Lili sleeps with her in the bedroom. Lili told this to Dana. And don’t you see how she acts? I’m telling you, they are done.”
At the same party, she noticed a woman flirting openly with Victor. It wasn’t unusual. Women always liked him. Maria never minded before. Before, it was harmless, a game, a joke, nothing for her to be concerned about. But that day it was different. She could feel it. The little hairs on her arms stood up at the sight of that woman sitting next to Victor. They were talking about something, and the woman was laughing and looking at him affectionately. She even reached over to straighten his hair, and picked up a little piece of meat from her plate, picked it up with her fingers, and fed it to him, directly into his mouth. In that small gesture, Maria knew. There wasn’t just flirtation there. There was intimacy. Her husband, and that woman, they had slept together, or if not, they soon would. She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She had to summon all her self-control not to lunge over and grab the other woman by her hair.
That night, she told Victor:
“I will never go see those people again. None of them. You can go with your children if you wish. But I will never go there again.”
She became more and more isolated. Her only friend was Josephine.
Which was why, when Josephine announced her departure, Maria was unable to conceal her disappointment. She didn’t even manage to fake excitement when her friend described the better life she would have in Chicago.
“Please write!” Maria asked, in tears. Even as she said it, she knew letters would be little consolation. What she really wanted was for her friend, her only friend, not to leave her.
“Maria,” Josephine insisted. �
��Get real. You know I’m not going to be your pen pal. This is life. People move, things change. I’ll always think of you fondly, but I’ll be in Chicago. I’m not going to pretend I’ll send cards and make phone calls. I’ll be busy with my new life, and you should be busy with yours. You should be making new friends, girl. You finally got yourself a real job!”
As part of her moving preparations, Josephine had pushed Maria to interview for her old job at the department store, arguing that by now her English was good enough. And it was. She got the job immediately, and was quite happy, proud, and thankful. But she did not want Josephine to go, and she could not conceal it.
Josephine got angry with her.
“You need to learn to let go, girl. There’s too much nostalgia you’re dragging around! If you want to make it in this world, you need to learn to let go of people and things of the past. Like that friend of yours who died, the old lady. How long are you going to cry over that one? She was old, she was sick, and now she’s dead. That’s life. You’re a young woman, and really, if you had dropped dead one day, that old woman would not have cried half the tears you did. You need a thicker skin, girl. This life’s not meant for the sentimental kind!”
Mrs. Stoica’s passing had shaken Maria deeply. Her own grandmother’s death the year before, had not affected her as much. Unable to be there, and not being confronted with the unequivocal presence of a dead body to bury, Maria had not been able to mourn. When Mrs. Stoica passed, however, it was as if the grief for the two deaths, combined, erupted inside her. She felt as deeply bereft as after leaving Romania. Once again, she thought she would never stop crying.
Mrs. Stoica was the only person in the community Maria felt close to. And although Mrs. Stoica herself chose to be isolated from her compatriots, she deeply disapproved of Maria’s choice to do the same. The two women shared a dislike for having to adapt to a new country and a new environment. They shared nostalgia for the lives they left behind. But Maria had been wrong to assume that they also shared the same hostility towards the community. Mrs. Stoica didn’t want to associate with people, mainly because a lot of them talked too much about new things she didn’t understand, and this made her tired. She was old and had already learned enough about life. She was now due some rest. However, she thought Maria ought to make an effort to be friendly, and to fit in. She owed it to her children to get along with people. This is what Mrs. Stoica thought, and she never hesitated to say it.
Dogs With Bagels Page 14