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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780930324674 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wings Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2001 |
| Series: | Complete Works of Cecile Pineda series |
| Pages: | 116 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.38(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Fishlight
A Dream of Childhood
By Cecile Pineda
Wings Press
Copyright © 2001 Cecile PinedaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60940-185-6
CHAPTER 1
My father always believed in memories. Memories live in the places they happen, he explained to me. That's why you always have to be very careful where things happen to you. The winter before my father had to go away, it was always snowing and it never ever stopped. My mother said it was the worst winter New York ever had. Anywhere else they would be sending out the Saint Bernards to rescue all the people that got lost in the snow the way they did in Switzerland when she was growing up. My mother and father said when they were growing up people always got tuberculosis. They were always scared I was going to catch cold. They said I was delicate. That's why they made me wear high shoes all the time and eat my supper in bed, even on the days I had to go to school. At night when she helped me to undress, my mother told me all about Babette, her baby sister, and how she got so sick nobody could even hear her crying, and how her older sister, Blanche, kept asking for oranges, only when she got diphtheria, it was winter, and where they lived they didn't have any oranges.
My mother used to light the lamp and tuck me in, and let me sit in my pajamas looking at the picture books my father always brought me, or coloring with my crayons while she was getting supper ready. Or I played with my lotto game and matched up all the animals and birds. Sometimes if I got sick and didn't have to go to school, my mother took her special book down from where she hid it in the closet. Its cover was all shiny, like patent leather shoes, except you could see the weaving underneath. All the writing had fancy curlicues and bubbles popping everywhere and tiny spurs on it my father said were serifs. Inside were pictures of things like roots, and the cells plants have that look like little boxes, and all the hungry baby lips leaves have to help them breathe, and branches with numbers on them so you could tell where all the stems and leaves were going to pop out, and flowers like daisies and eglantines and pinks. My mother even glued an edelweiss inside and when you touched it, it felt all soft and velvety. She said it grew high up on the mountain where she climbed to pick it once. Then came the silver apples and golden pears, but I liked the plums best of all, all purple and frosty with summer bloom, and the sunlight shining through the leaves just like it did the day long ago when my mother painted them in her mother's orchard. They pushed my mother's writing way into the corner. Maybe that's why after the plums, the rest of the book was empty and my mother didn't write in it anymore. When my mother brought me my tray with my supper on it, I had to close the book and give it back because she didn't want me getting any sticky stuff on it. She said I had to eat without spilling anything because cockroaches were always hiding in the walls, just waiting till they could jump on any stray crumb. After she put the light out, I would lie in bed shivering, worrying that maybe some tiny crumb escaped. All the spots on the wall started to jiggle, like cockroaches running everywhere, hunting for the greasy thumb-print my mother said was all they needed to live on for a year.
I lay in the dark waiting for my father to come home, listening to the cars chugging up the hill, fanning light beams across the ceiling, counting the footsteps ringing on the sidewalk, and hearing the street doors squeal open and bang shut and the scrape of garbage pails getting put out for the night. Sometimes I got out of bed so I could see way down the hill outside, but the window curtains gave off a rusty smell, and when I pushed them aside, pieces of soot scattered all over the window sill and got stuck under my fingernails. I would stand a long time by the window, watching the snowflakes flutter and swirl like moths trapped inside the street lights, but when I heard footsteps coming down the hall, I jumped into my bed and threw the covers over my head and breathed loud like people do when they're supposed to be asleep. Out of the corner of one eye, I could see the door opening, and the shadow of my father looking at me in the doorway. After a while he would tell my mother I was asleep. Elle dort, he would say and he would close the door softly. Underneath the blankets, I could feel my cheeks get fat because, maybe in the daytime my mother still used to call me baby names like Fifinette, or Babette, or even Cecilola, but at night, when they thought I was asleep, they called me elle. It made me feel grown up, almost like I didn't belong to them at all.
One time, my father caught me standing barefoot at the window sill. He said I was supposed to be asleep, it was cold and drafty in my room, and if I kept getting up like that, I might catch cold and have to stay in bed. He said if I ever tried getting up again, he was going to have to smack me.
That's when he first told me about memories. Memories live in places where they first happen to you. Some memories could stay long after you jumped inside the covers, maybe even for years and years, my hand brushing aside the window curtains for example, or the sound of my bare feet. But when you least needed to remind yourself, there came the dusty smell that warned you that a memory was about to replay itself and that's how he could always tell when I wasn't in my bed, because he could still hear the slap of lost footsteps on the floor or even the sound of a misplaced cough. He said there were no secrets, no way of hiding from him because there wasn't any kind of box, or place — not even where we lived in our big apartment house — where you could lock a memory away safely enough to make sure it wouldn't come back some time and give you away.
* * *
Where we lived, the corridors were long and twisty, and the doors on every floor had letters and numbers mixed up on them. There was a big brick courtyard way inside, where nobody could see it from the street. In the winter afternoons, old men would come in ragged coats and mashed in hats. Way down in the courtyard, you could hear their footsteps shuffle in the dust. One scratched away at an old violin; one even blew a smashed up trumpet, but most of them just sang songs about mountains, or rivers, or maybe even lakes, places they came from, or places they lost, or maybe the places lost them, and when they finished, you could hear a hush come over the courtyard. Then people slid their windows open and started throwing money out. Sometimes they wrapped the money in little bits of paper so the man down there could get it where it fell, but other times you could hear the pennies bouncing and rolling all over the ground, and he would have to stoop and bend down to look for them.
Mostly it was ladies that threw the money down — all except Madame D'Eau. Madame D'Eau just opened her window and leaned way out over her geraniums and alligator pears and called Bravo! Bravo! and clapped her hands. The singer would bow and tip his hat and he would say thank you over and over till he made sure he thanked all the ladies that threw him all the money, and then his footsteps went away and you couldn't hear them anymore because they all got sucked up in the basement corridors. Once I asked my mother where the money came from all the ladies got to throw. She said they got it because their husbands went to work same as my father did.
Summertime when the air got hot, my mother let me stay up late and look out the window. In the courtyard people opened up their windows wide. The air simmered like soup, and all the noises got mixed up inside it, all the barking of dogs and the mewling of cats and all the people saying things. When it got dark where you couldn't tell color anymore, you could see people taking off their underwear before they got in bed.
I kept wishing I could have a pet, but my mother said dogs were too much trouble because you always had to feed them and you had to take them out. My father said anyway dogs were unhappy all cooped up in the city, but I said how come if they were that unhappy, all the dogs where we lived always looked so jaunty — even Snow White, the dog who belonged to Madame D'Eau. His tail was cocked sharper than a sickle and he was just as old as she was. You could tell because her hair was all white and wispy like cotton candy, and Snow White had all white hair around his muzzle, just like Madame D'Eau. Maybe that's why she called him Snow White because everywhere else he was a black dog. Madame D'Eau was all hunched up and her thick cotton stockings were always bunched up around her ankles. Every time she took Snow White out for a walk, she used to rock from side to side. My father said she had to walk that way because her legs were bowed. Once I asked her how come her shoes always looked chewed up. She said it was because Snow White always stole them before she could get out of bed to stop him. When I went to visit her, she let me give him dog biscuits, but his teeth scared me every time. They looked just like my mother's pinking shears but Madame D'Eau said he wouldn't ever bite, except when he jumped on me and knocked me down, Madame D'Eau had to help me get up. She had two angora cats, Mouche and Meez, and sometimes when I pet them, I could make them purr.
My mother hated cats even more than dogs. She said cats were dirty. They did something nasty. She said that's why Madame D'Eau's house always smelled so bad because they were always spraying, but when my mother let me play down in the courtyard, the minute she wasn't looking all the cats came out, white cats and tabbies and ginger cats and pintos. I liked to pick them up and rub my cheeks against their fur because it felt all soft, and they liked to rub up against my leggings. I liked when they made cat noises because I got to make cat noises back. Sometimes they even stuck their tails up against the wall and made them shake and shimmy and I got to watch them spray.
My mother liked me to stay down in the courtyard because she could hear me better down there. Every time she had to tell me something, she could shout out the kitchen window. My mother always said we had very nosy neighbors, never to talk in front of anybody about 'family matters'. I couldn't tell exactly what 'family matters' were supposed to be, but when my mother opened the window and screamed "It's supper time," I could hear her very well, and so could all the neighbors.
* * *
My father always said that eating and singing makes people crazy. El que come y canta, loco se levanta, he used to say. But my mother couldn't talk Spanish and he wouldn't ever tell her if it's supposed to make the person singing crazy, or just the person listening. Or maybe the person gets crazy eating and singing at the same time, or maybe people get crazy watching the person trying to sing while he's eating or maybe eating while he's singing. Or maybe the people go crazy because they're all trying to eat while the person is singing. Or maybe they're trying to sing while the person keeps eating.
Every night at the dinner table, my mother always said the same things. "Sit up straight, or you know what will happen."
"What?"
But my mother just said, "eat with your mouth closed so people can't see what's inside."
"But what's inside is just the same as what's outside and everyone can see everything outside, all they have to do is look."
"Now it's not time for impertinence. Now it's time to eat your supper."
Then my mother would start humming.
"¡El que come y canta, loco se levanta!" my father would say.
My mother didn't like it when my father talked Spanish. She said he was making fun of her. She would go in the bathroom and shut the door. But you could hear her in there, even when she made the water run. She was screaming and screaming. I kept looking at my father, but he wouldn't say anything. He just went on eating his Portuguese sardines.
* * *
One time I asked my father how come people always had to have a mother. My father said that everyone in the world has to have a mother and father, but in former times, that wasn't always the way it was.
"Because in former times, they didn't have to have a mother?"
"No. Because sometimes people didn't know why they had a father." Because he said in former times, people didn't have any books or letters or even writing, so no one could ever really find out what they thought all the time because everything they used to think or do was buried underground, and if you had to find out what it was they thought or did the only way was to go and dig it up. For instance, how did we know that people ate? Because when you dig in certain places, you find pots and pans and dishes. But he said people just left them underground when they went away to die.
Children didn't have fathers the way they do now because in former times, people didn't always know you needed them, and that's why children had to live with their mothers, except when they got older, boys got to go hunting with their fathers and play games.
"But how could they tell they were the fathers if people didn't have to have them?"
"Because they were men," my father said. But he said even so, sometimes there were mix-ups because people didn't always know exactly when they were born, or even where they came from, and that's why sometimes they got mixed up because they really came from somewhere else, only they got brought up by people who were different from their parents. My father lowered his voice so much I almost couldn't hear.
"Everyone could have a double somewhere, everyone in the world." But just as he was going to tell me about doubles, my mother came in, and my father got quieter than a stone.
I could tell about my father but maybe my mother was someone else and not the one she said she was. My father was home, and sometimes he was somewhere else. I didn't know what the other place was like and why he had to go there all the time, but I could tell he was real because he always helped me cut my meat. I don't know why my father never said anything about his brothers and sisters in Mexico or any of my cousins. Maybe because then there would be very bad problems explaining about the doubles. Because if there could be a whole family of doubles, would they all be doubles together, or would they have to be separate? And if they were doubles together, wouldn't it have to be in the same shape house? And if it was the same, wouldn't it have to be on a different street so people didn't get mixed up? Or maybe that's why they had apartment houses like the one we lived in so you could have doubles in the same apartment, but on a different floor, except if they bumped into each other in the elevator, then everyone would get mixed up because how could they tell if they were the same doubles or different doubles? Then I started thinking how people couldn't tell if they got mixed up because everyone would look the same, only they wouldn't be the same. They might get stuck with the wrong mother, only nobody could tell, because people would think you were the one they thought you were and not the other one. Then I started thinking maybe some people already got mixed up, only they didn't even know it, or maybe sometimes they could tell, only they pretended they forgot.
Once, when my mother couldn't hear, I asked my father if someone's double had to be a girl. That's when my father told me about mummies and mummy cases. He said in former times, when people got dead, they liked to put them inside a box with turned up toes on it so the people lying down inside had plenty of room to let their feet stick up. Then they would put the box inside another box, and that box inside a great big crate. Except sometimes they would put the wrong person inside the box and sometimes now, when people dig them up, they find a man inside a mummy case with the picture of a lady on it, or they find a lady inside a mummy case with the picture of a man. My father said that is why even to this day, sometimes people are one thing on the outside and another thing on the inside, and when I got older, I would understand.
My father hardly ever said anything about any of his friends, except once he said they liked to run around in the woods where nobody could see them, and they didn't have any clothes but when I started to think about all those people running around like that, they had to hide behind tree trunks because they didn't have any clothes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fishlight by Cecile Pineda. Copyright © 2001 Cecile Pineda. Excerpted by permission of Wings Press.
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