Snow

When I was was nineteen, Pinckney Benedict  handed me a copy of Joyce Carol Oates’ story “The Fine White Mist or Winter.”   “She grew up near where you’re from,” he said.  “She wrote this when she was just your age.”  Back then I was so skiddish that I couldn’t look him in the face.  Instead I watched his five pale fingers tap the office desk between us.  I carried the story back to my dorm room and held it as I looked out my window at the Blue Ridge mountain shelf, a smoky landscape that never brittled with cold. 

In workshop, Pinckey spoke slowly; his voice was higher pitched than I expected and he  peered at each student with patient, piercing eyes.  He had an acrobat heart, scaling the scaffolding of each story until he found its tender, terrifying core.  Look, he would say, pointing a pale finger: here is the story.   

After workshop I’d walk through swirling fallen leaves and think about snow.  He was looking at the snow, the crazy whirling flakes, writes Joyce Carol Oates in the story Pinckney gave me.  They looked like a constant shuffling and reshuffling of the same flakes, the same specks, gleaming back like little white eyes in the glare of the headlights....  At night I drove my old Toyota up winding mountain roads stalking the end of Virginia Autumn; back home snow was already falling.

A blond girl named Molly Atwell was up for critique in workshop.  In her story, a teenage girl and her widowed father struggle to sustain a faltering farm.  There was a lot of dialogue and domestic details including an extended description of a teapot her mother left behind.  In a section rendered entirely in italics, the girl sleepwalks into the cow pasture and presses herself against the flank of a dairy cow.  The cow groans; the night sky heaves.

Pinckney didn’t say anything nearly thirty minutes.  He sat still while we debated whether the pasture scene was supposed to be a dream.  “I don’t get it,” one girl said.  “It’s like an acid trip.”  After a while we all fell silent. 

Pinckney folded his hands across the paper.   “Get rid of everything but the section in italics,” he said.  “It’s not a dream sequence: it’s real.” He covered his brow with his open palm.  “If you are going to be a writer," he said, "you must trust the words to show you how beautiful and devastating the world actually is."

After class, I walked up the hill to the very edge of campus and looked at the line of mountains separating me from home.  I couldn’t begin to imagine what lay beyond them, couldn’t discern the slopes and low places between the person I was in that moment and the person I would become.   

Along the mountain ridge, slanting italic snowflakes began to fall. 

Masks

In a favorite essay of mine, Mario Vargas Llosa describes the most charismatic and influential teacher of his life as “a small pot-bellied man with a large forehead and a pair of blue eyes that became impregnated with malice every time he mocked someone.”  Porras Barrenechea was a lecturer who filled his university halls with standing-room-only crowds by transforming the dry catalogue of history into “anecdote, gesture, adventure, color, psychology.”

Last Thursday, the day Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, I told all of my Spanish students to Google him and print out the funniest picture they could find.  “One with a mustache," I said, "or caterpillar eyebrows."

My seventh graders were game.  “Look Señora!” one of them shouted, loping into my classroom and nearly catching his foot on the chord of the projector cart.  “I couldn’t find one with a mustache, but look!”  He ran his finger across the photo.  “How do you say sideburn in Spanish?”  The photo was mask-sized, and I cut out the mouth and eyes and had students take turns standing up on their chairs and putting the paper over their face.  “Quién eres?”  I shouted at their blinking eyes.  “Yo soy Mario Vargas Llosa,” they shouted back.  “¡Soy de Peru!  ¡Tengo setenta y cuatro años!"

The Porras Barrenechea  essay aside, I don’t like Vargas Llosa all that much.   I heard him interviewed on public radio a few years back and found him fair-minded and eloquent, patient and eminently likable.  For some reason it offended me.  I’ve tried to read The Green House at least a half a dozen times, but the baroque descriptions put me off.  Or maybe it’s his prolificacy that bothers me; he’s written more than thirty novels and seems to keep the door between his outer and inner life endlessly open.

The slightest breeze slams mine shut.  At 19, halfway through War and Peace, I not only stopped writing, but could no longer read.  Driving, I would replay the last scene I remembered: Prince Andrei lying in a wheat field, staring at the stars. I carried those stars with me for a long time.  They were with me the first time I fell in love, and out again.  They were watching as I gave birth to a dark-eyed baby boy.

When I brought my son home from the hospital, I set him down in a basket full of wrinkled laundry and pulled out the copy of Goodnight Moon that my mother had tucked into his layette. The pictures alternated between black and white ink sketches and orange-tinged oils that turned small rooms into worlds.  At the end of the book there is a drawing of a white horizon punctuated by six large stars.  “Goodnight stars," whispers the text.  "Goodnight air."  When I look at my son, my life becomes a tiny, incandescent room.

In his essay, Vargas Llosa concludes that the life of his beloved teacher is “a tragic story” because he dies without ever writing his magnum opus--a definitive and evocative history of Peru.  “When he was perfectly ready to embark upon it,” writes Vargas Llosa, “pressing on with assurance through the labyrinthine jungle of chronicles, letters, testaments, rhymes, and ballads of discovery and conquest that he had read, cleansed, confronted, and almost memorized, sudden death put an end to his encyclopedic information.”

I think he had already embarked.  Face to face with his students in the dank and crumbling lecture hall,  Barrenechea donned the mask of history.  Each testament and rhyme and ballad and letter lent another surface to his conjuring, rising and rising until the walls around him dissolved into an echo of silent sky.

Meeting Baba Yaga at the Public Market

In every Spanish dictionary before 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are considered separate letters of the alphabet.  For example the word cha, instead of following the word cetro, came after cuyo under a new letter heading at the top of its own separate page.  I remember in sixth grade the gleeful twist in my stomach when I flipped past those two-letter letters in the classroom dictionary: tongue trumps eye, I thought.  Letters derive from sounds, not the other way around.   

It was my mother's tongue I pictured when I thought this--pressing against the front of her palate, flipping and thrumming behind her teeth like a fish against a dock.  Even at twelve I could remember a time when she was my only medium to a world I preferred--one where dwarves spun straw into gold, where frozen bears turn into princes and golden fish grant wishes in exchange for throwing them back into the sea.  I would press my ear to her shoulder and listen to the words echo through her clavicle.  Even when I knew how the story ended, the sound of her voice made me hold my breath.

The Cyrillic alphabet, used across Eurasia, represents many of these sound blends by single letters instead of digraphs.  The "ch" sound is indicated by an an upside-down, lower-case h, the blend "zhe" is depicted by a letter that looks like a beetle with four protruding legs, and the sound "ya" is a leaning backwards R whose edges curve like sled blades.  These were my favorite letters by far.  I wrote them over and over on the special three-lined paper my high school Russian teacher passed out to our class.  To practice the looping letter that made a "ya" sound, we copied the name of the popular Slavic folk character Baba Yaga.  Баба Яга, I wrote, Баба Яга, Баба Яга.

Drawings of Baba Yaga invariably show a crone with wide eyes and tangled, windblown hair.  She is similar to the hag in Hansel and Gretel, except that she is almost always depicted with her torso protruding from the roof of a house, the eaves where her hips should be.  The house stands on a pair of  giant dancing chicken claws that make the structure nearly impossible to enter.

I hadn't thought of Baba Yaga in years, but on Father's Day weekend as I shopped at the Rochester public market, a voice came over the loudspeaker.  It was a familiar voice--crackly and playful, deep but with feminine effusiveness like a drag queen's.  I expected the usual warning to the owner of an illegally-parked red Honda or maybe a summons to the relatives of a lost little boy or girl.

"Hapy Day-Before-Father's day," the voice crooned.  "Remember to pick up something delicious for that special father or grandfather.  And don't forget to honor the babkas--that is, a woman that fills the role of both father and mother in child's life."  I tried to keep my face impassive as the farmer from Bushart's hoisted a half-bushel basket of cooking onions into my arms.  I tipped the onions into my bag, but my arm shook and one of them rolled under the table and came to rest against the arch of his work boot. 

When I got home, I set down my bags and googled "babka."  Nothing.  Then, remembering my Russian class, I googled "Baba Yaga."  On Wikipedia I found the following:  Baba Yaga is sometimes shown as an antagonist, and sometimes as a source of guidance; there are stories in which she helps people with their quests, and stories in which she kidnaps children and threatens to eat them. Seeking out her aid is usually portrayed as a dangerous act. An emphasis is placed on the need for proper preparation and purity of spirit. The keyhole to her front door is a mouth filled with sharp teeth; the fence outside is made with human bones with skulls on top, often with one pole lacking its skull, leaving space for the seeker.  The hut does not reveal the door until it is told a magical phrase.
 
On Father's Day Max came home from his dad's angry and despondent.  Watching his reflection in the rearview mirror, I could see him scrunching his face together to keep himself from crying.  When we got home he fell apart.  "I want to go back to Daddy's," he said, tears spilling over.  He pushed his forehead hard into my chest and squeezed the cloth of my shirt so hard his knuckles turned white.  As I held him, I closed my eyes and imagined myself standing at Baba Yaga's gate.  I listened to the skulls clattering on the fence posts and studied the gambolling chicken legs, but I could not guess the magical phrase.

Max cried for a long time and I did not try to stop him.  I waited until the last sob sighed through his lungs and reached for the Captain America comic on the coffee table.  "Let's do the fight scene," I said. 

In our version, I read the dialogue bubbles while he shouted the sound effects that zigzag across the page. 

"OK," I said.  "You ready?"

He nodded.       


"You owed my father a debt, and I'm here to collect," I said in my best tough-guy voice. 

"KA-RAAASH," Max shouted, slicing his arm through the air.  "KRRNSH!  WHAAM!  WAPAAW!" 

Telemundo

In high school, I used to go to my best friend Susu’s house and watch “Cristina” on a tiny TV next to the parakeet cage in her bedroom. Cristina was the latin diaspora’s version of Oprah-- an exiled, Cuban, bottle-blonde with a sugary voice that could turn stern if the occasion demanded. She was the benevolent-but-tough older cousin that every woman needed to teach her how to handle “Mothers in Law from Hell,” how to cook “Fat-Free Flan and Other Guiltless Pleasures” and how to answer the question “Is He Cheating?”


Susu’s Spanish was better than mine because her father was born in Panama, but after watching so many hours of Donohue and Sally Jesse Raphael, I could follow the general gist of things. Cristina was fairer than my mother. She favored two-piece business suits in tropical colors and chunky necklaces that matched her lipstick. Her sensationalism was always saturated in the pretense of self-help. “Today on ‘Cristina,’” she would say, staring at the camera as if it were a long-lost sister, “teen pregnancy disasters: tips for saving our daughters.”

Back then, “Cristina” was a somewhat kitschy and exotic escape from my white-bread existence. The Mexican Telenovela stars that she often interviewed, with their over-plucked eyebrows and skin-tight blazers, seemed far away from the kind of woman I would become.

Ten years later, I studied Cristina and her guests for the key to being the perfect latina mujer—how much adobo to shake onto the chicken breasts, how not to char the arroz con gandules, the ideal method for folding boxer shorts. I tuned in every day, settling back into the couch and resting my hands on my expanding belly as I waited for Junior to finish the evening shift at the factory where he worked.

Sometimes, between “Cristina” and “En Rojo Vivo,” I would go to the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror. My mother had recently decorated my father’s study with old pictures of his ancestors, and there was an 8 by 10 photo of my great grandmother, who grew up in Ireland and died in New York, in all her matriarchal glory. Her eyes, I noticed, were just like my father’s and mine: large and green with a slight bloodhound droopiness at the corners.

The baby liked to turn summersaults while I lounged on the couch. He had started kicking so hard that the skin of my stomach bulged with his extended foot. I kept thinking of the scene in “Alien” where the bloody spawn cracks out of that man’s chest, but Junior’s mother assured me that the kicking was normal. “If he’s anything like his father,” she said, “that will be the least of your worries.” I thought of the pictures I’d seen of Junior as a boy in Puerto Rico. His wooly hair, trimmed short at the sides, stood up from his head and his wide eyes stared dark and flat as mahogany tabletops.

Every night in the last months of my pregnancy I tuned in to a Mexican telenovela called “Betting on Love.” It was about a powerful gambling landowner’s attempt to tame a dark-haired woman who everyone in the town called the Black Philly because she was so beautiful and difficult to break. The eight o’clock hour was the highlight of my day

All of the leads in the show were light-skinned with narrow European noses. Occasionally a Mexican with indigenous features made an appearance as a maid or gardener. There was also a subplot involving an hechicera who looked like a Mayan princess and spent her time boiling herbs in a cauldron. Her assistant, a dark-skinned man with wooly hair whose accent gave him away as Caribbean, had large blue eyes that glowed eerily long after the set lights had dimmed.

When Max-Yamil was two, I moved out of the apartment. I didn’t have cable anymore, couldn’t watch Cristina or Jorge Ramos or Don Francisco on “Sábado Gigante.” I put my TV in the basement and began reading long Russian novels in the evenings.  I spent a lot of time scrubbing conditioning powder into the fibers of my new townhouse rugs to keep them crisp and white.
                                                                  *

After he realized I was gone for good, Junior signed himself up for child- support collection. “So I don’t get behind,” he told me. As we sat waiting outside the courtroom, a Cuban woman in a bright yellow two-piece suit introduced herself. “I’ll be your translator,” she said to Junior. “When we go into the courtroom, I’ll tell you everything that the judge says.”

I thought of the doctor’s appointments I’d gone to with Junior, sitting in the chair next to the examining table as he had me explain where it hurt or how long it had been since he’d slept. I thought of family dinners at my parent’s house—the things I’d chose to translate, and the things I’d left unsaid. I thought of the two of us sitting in my therapist’s office as I made myself translucent and parroted Junior’s words: “Lindsey just doesn’t understand me. I feel so alone.”

Most of all, I thought about the girl on the couch with the rounded belly bathed in blue Telemundo light. I thought of her stubbornness--the pots and pots of rice that came out soggy or charred every time. And I thought about the somersaulting baby inside of her, his wisps of wooly hair, his otherworldy, emerald-city eyes.

Black Cardigan

When I was nineteen, I spent a summer in New York City interning for Francis Ford Coppola’s magazine Zoetrope: All-story.  It mostly entailed trying to strike a dignified pose in hose and heels while draped across the office beanbag chair reading through the slush pile.   

I bought new clothes for the endeavor.  I ordered them from J-Crew which, at the time, seemed an appropriately classy cover-up for my provincial upstate pedigree.  It also meant I could avoid the department stores that brought back traumatizing memories of my mother pulling back the dressing room curtain to check my pants and skirts for roominess in the waist.  I did buy one thing in person: a black cardigan with vertical grooves and funky brown buttons that caught the light just-so.  The sweater fell past my hips and, when I fastened only the third button, made my boobs look bigger. 

I lived in a closet-sized dorm room without air conditioning on the Upper West Side. At 5:30 every morning the traffic screeches and the breezeless humidity wafting though my open window woke me up, whereupon I would brew myself a cup of instant Folgers and watch a group of Falun Gong do their morning exercises in the courtyard below.            

The building was populated by Columbia undergraduates doing summer internships for Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs.  Girls were few and far between and we regarded each other with suspicion; I began applying concealer and a thin snake of eyeliner before walking down to the communal bathroom to brush my teeth.  The interns left the building one by one every morning in their freshly pressed shirts and incandescent ties.  They all looked the same to me except for DaeKwon, who was black and sported a fade so retro it looked hip. 

The first Saturday I’d encountered Justin in the kitchen wearing Nike athletic shorts, Adidas sandals and no shirt.  He was making himself a protein shake in a miniature blender.  His pecs were at my eye level, but I forced myself to look down.  “Cat got your tongue?” He asked.     

After that I stayed in my room reading Janet Frame and doing stomach crunches.  Except that corn-rowed Latrell Sprewell was leading my New York Knicks to their first post-Ewing NBA finals and listening to the games on the radio just wasn’t cutting it.  On the evening of elimination game five against the San Antonio Spurs, I began pulling outfits out of my closet.  This one was too formal.  That one made me look fat.  I finally settled on the black cardigan, third button fastened over a tank top, even though it was a solid eighty-five degrees out.

The interns were crowded together on the lounge couch, but they looked strange out of their suits, except for Justin whose shoulders bulged from under his tank top like two perfectly risen Pilsbury rolls.  DaeKwon was there too sitting stiff as a bookend on the edge of the couch.

“Dude,” Justin said, “I just can’t get behind the Knicks this year.  I mean Latrell Sprewell is a straight-up thug.  Choking his coach?  I can’t believe they gave him another NBA contract.”

DaeKwon stiffened even more and began to bite his thumbnail. 

“Now Allan Houston,” Justin said.  “There’s a cat I could get behind.”

“Allan Houston’s overrated.” I said.   

A smirk played across Justin’s face.  “Hey,” he said, looking at the guy next to him.  “A chick who thinks she knows sports.”

DaeKwon stood up and looked at me.  “Come on,” he said.  “I know somewhere else we can watch the game.”

He took me to a McDonalds in Harlem where we walked through the drive-thru and got super size orange drinks and a twenty piece box of chicken nuggets.  “Extra sweet-and-sour please,” DaeKwon said to the woman behind the window. 

“Sure hon,” she said.  She dropped some extra packets into the bag.  “Girl, ain’t you burning up in that sweater?”

Fifteen feet away a group of men stood with their faces pressed against a storefront window.  They roared as Sprewell slashed through the lane and dunked over Jaren Jackson’s outstretched arms.  “And the foul!” one of them yelled, pounding his palm against the glass.

The sweater survived another seven years until the night of my first real date with Mike.  When we got back to my house, Mike sat on the end of the bed as I slipped off the sweater and draped it over the bedside lampshade to dim the light.  I was afraid he’d see the pouch of wrinkled stretch marks around my belly button from when I was pregnant with Max-Yamil. 

Mike ran his hands up and down my bare arms.  He kissed my collar bone and curled his fingers around the bottom edge of my tank top.  “You look like a countess,” he said.  Behind us, a corner of the sweater that had fallen against the light bulb began to smolder and smoke.

Commencement

I bought my cap and gown today: $62.50 plus eighty nine cents on a Hershey bar in which I hoped to drown my impending dread. I am a thirty-year-old single mother graduating into the worst economy since the Great Depression with a Master’s degree in English.  Google will not be pounding on my door with a six-figure offer any time soon.

The lilacs blooming outside my kitchen window are indifferent to my predicament. Instead of hoarding boxes of discount pasta under the sink, they are spending their nutrients on a profligate display of color and scent.

The purple flowers always remind me of my first date with my boyfriend at Rochester’s annual Lilac Festival in mid May. “It wasn’t a date,” Mike still insists. “A stroller was involved.” He told me later that my habit making eye contact while changing lanes on the expressway terrified him. “I kept thinking, there is a two-year-old in the back seat. Why doesn’t she keep her eyes on the road?”

My son turned six last month, and I still like to watch him sleep. Sometimes, when I stare at him, I think about the great white page in front of me. The cursor blinks; Max-Yamil’s eyelashes flutter.

When I found out I was pregnant, I was a single, twenty-four-year-old college dropout living in a shoebox apartment and making minimum wage. I did not want to tell anyone, especially not my parents. But I did tell the baby’s father, and he told his.

Max-Yamil’s grandfather called me one afternoon from Puerto Rico. “My name is Israel,” he said in a crackly voice that made me feel calm. “You’re carrying my grandchild.”

Israel is in a hospital in San Juan now. He has congestive heart failure and his lungs are filling up with water. The white space in front of him is larger than any page. 

“Remember,” he told me that afternoon as I stared out the window at a flat, gray sky, “this is a blessing. This child is a blessing from God.”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and prepared myself to begin.