Fish Out of Agua:. Michele Carlo
She asked me where my mother was. I told her my mother was in Kittenworld. She went to play with the kittens.
“Don’t you see the yarn? She’s playing, we’re all playing with the kittens. We smell good. We play nice. We have fun. No one ever gets hurt in Kittenworld.” I want to go back there, I tell her. “I want to go home. I want to go home!”
I woke up. It was dark and I could hear my mother pacing the apartment talking under her breath. I am home, in the apartment my father had once lost the keys for, apartment 5C. Four rooms: two bedrooms, one medium sized with a false wall my father built to divide it in half. This is what my brother Kevin and I share. He has the side by the window; I have the side by the door. There is another, much smaller bedroom, where my father and mother sleep. There’s also a bathroom, a large living room with two big windows, and a small, boxy foyer opposite a long narrow kitchen. That is where my mother stops pacing.
I don’t know what she is going to say tonight. Sometimes it’s from the Bible. Sometimes it’s in Spanish. Sometimes it’s something about a test, a parasite, and a plot. Sometimes it’s just screaming out a window, “I hate you, I hate you, I haaaate yoooou!” over and over, and when someone yells at her to shut the hell up, she just speeches louder. Speeching. That’s what she calls it.
The next day, Titi Dulce and Cousin Ray-Ray, who was just beginning to walk, came over. After three tries, Dulce had finally been able to produce a live baby, a sturdy little boy with almond-colored skin, straight brown hair, and hazel eyes. Her present, she calls him, since he was born just two days after her twenty-third birthday. I’m glad she has Ray-Ray to keep her from being lonely because Uncle Raymond is away again.
After we finished eating, my mother and Dulce sat in the kitchen having coffee. Kevin, Ray-Ray, and I were sitting on the floor in the living room watching Batman. Kevin had a Batmobile with action figures, and he and Ray-Ray were playing with them. Ray-Ray put one of the toys in his mouth; Kevin took it out. They both shrieked with laughter. Between them and the trains rumbling past, I could hardly hear my favorite villain, Catwoman, purr.
Then all of a sudden I heard Dulce say loudly, “Como? Lucy? I can’t hear you. What? Ay, por que do you have to whisper to speak Spanish in your own house? So your ‘I pretend I’m Italian’ husband doesn’t hear you?” My mother said something back I can’t hear, and Dulce came into the living room, scooped up Ray-Ray, and left, slamming the door behind her. My mother and Dulce almost never fought, not like she and Ofelia. I wondered what started it, but my mother stayed in the kitchen and I knew better than to ask.
My family was the first and only Puerto Rican family ever to live in our building. “We’re Mayflower Puerto Ricans,” my father said. “Pioneers.” But the Sabellis, Kirchbergers, and O’Gradys weren’t exactly welcoming until they got to know my dad. He was St. Peter’s Avenue’s Jackie Robinson, the icebreaker, the “credit to his race” the example that made it easier for those to come. Plus, he told everyone we were from the “Italian part” of Puerto Rico. And now they all greeted my father whenever we’d walk into the corner candy store or the ice-cream parlor.
“How about those Mets?” they’d say.
“They suck!” my father would say and talk about the rookie pitcher Tom Seaver, the pheenom who would one day make the Mets not suck. And then Kevin and I would get a free Chunky bar or extra ice cream in our black-and-white ice-cream sodas.
My father could go anywhere and make anyone like him. It was a gift. But my mother wasn’t like him. She stayed in the apartment except for taking me to school or going shopping. Then she’d spend hours getting ready, putting on a full face of makeup, a dress, and her high-heeled shoes. She looked like one of the pictures in her movie magazines, even at home when she was wearing slacks and a sweater and her pink slippers with the little heels, chancletas, only she never called them that. She always looked perfect, but not like someone you could talk to or touch. She stared straight ahead when we walked, almost never answering if someone spoke to her. If Kevin or I ever stopped, she pulled us along and kept going.
We did have fun though, sometimes. I remember one day at the A&P, we were wheeling Kevin in a shopping cart and the Beatles “Fool on the Hill” started playing. My mother liked that song. I remember her smiling and softly singing along, wheeling the cart along with the music until another shopper passed us by, and she suddenly stopped and put her blank face back on. I wished that person had never come so she could have kept singing.
Besides her movie magazines, she also liked to read books by people with names like Carl Jung or José Ortega y Gassett. She’d get excited when she found something she liked, and she’d write stuff down on little index cards. I wanted to see what made her happy, so I tried to read those books too, but I couldn’t understand them and put them back down as soon as I opened them. Most of the time, though, when she wasn’t doing housework or physically taking care of Kevin or me, she’d pace the apartment until she found a comfortable spot to stop and speech.
When my father came home from work it was getting dark. He worked double shifts most days, sleeping for a few hours and then going back out to work again, but this day he was home early. Kevin and I were still watching TV, or trying to. My mother was yelling out the kitchen window while she reheated the pots of instant mashed potatoes, hot dogs, and frozen corn.
My father peeked into the kitchen, came back into the living room, and motioned me to follow him. He led me up the stairs to the roof and pushed open the unlatched creaking door. There were TV antennas whooshing and clotheslines flapping, and it was a little scary. I heard little pops of noise, then bigger hissing and booming ones. We walked over to the edge where there was a small wall and a rail even with my head. He picked me up and balanced me against him, my feet on the edge of the wall. He pointed into the growing darkness and said, “Look.”
I followed his finger and saw little points of light streak through the night sky. Some of them trailed away. Others burst into flashes of colors and trickled down toward the ground. They were all very noisy, and I could smell smoke and burning, but I wasn’t scared. I was with my father.
“You know what today is, little girl? It’s July fourth and these are fireworks. They are for you. They know your birthday is coming. Six more days and you’ll be seven.”
He pointed out bottle rockets, four-ounce rockets, Roman candles, pinwheels, and fountains for a few more minutes before we walked back down to the apartment. He sent me back into the living room, then went into the kitchen again, and came right back out. He let out that same breath he always did when he didn’t know what to do, the long whistle with no music in it. But when he looked at us, though, there was a smile on his face.
“Who wants ice cream?” he asked and took Kevin and me down to the parlor. I had a cherry-lime rickey—my new favorite. My dad and Kevin had black-and-white ice-cream sodas. When we got back to the apartment my mother was still speeching.
My father put us to bed that night, something he rarely ever did—and that was all he did: watched us brush our teeth, put our pajamas on, and climb into bed. No jokes, no reading. He had a strange, half-sad, half-mad look on his face as he told us good-night.
I could hear my mother pacing in the living room. She stopped by the window on the other side of the wall from my bed. I closed my eyes and waited for the kittens to come. They wouldn’t always, but when they did, it was a place where no one was yelled at, no one was hit, no one ever cried. It was a place where your mother didn’t take a lot of medicine that made her too tired to either play or talk or the exact opposite, running from room to room through the apartment, yelling out the window, threatening to get the “parasites, the scum of the earth, the filth…”
As my mother’s voice rose, the kittens came. Sometimes they spoke to me, but tonight they just snuggled next to me on my pillow. As I lay between them breathing in their soft fur, listening to their purring, it drowned out her words and I fell asleep.
The next morning Kevin threw the entire Batman collection out of that same window, and my mother sent me down to the alley to pick them up. When I got there, I looked up and she was standing at the window watching me. As I climbed back up the five flights of