| I. The Bedroom The best sleep I’ve ever gotten was in Grandma's room. Maybe it was the ode the fan hummed with its flat metal wings. Or the blubbery warmth of pinoy snores, my grandma's soft sighs that were heavy with years of maternal fatigue. Light used to fall in the most perfect places, as if her window had conscious glass, like the kind in churches that guide the sun so that it lands on the praise of Clay idols, and so on. I used to peer over the fuzz of my cheek at how it kissed her candles, the ones painted with Virgin Marys and baby Jesus’. Bits of dust from the vent breathed in the eye of the beams and sung me from going back to sleep, every morning. No matter the season. It made the lining in the wallpaper glow, and I know now the flowers I used to turn over and trace were Sampaguitas. Beauteous white blooms, stuck in infinite spring, blessed with ignorance and naivety of youth. Engraved in walls that’ll be permanent to my mind. II. The Hallway I used to lay in that bed awake for hours. I’d listen to my Grandma, paying close attention to how her lips shuddered when she breathed. Then at some brave moment I’d lift my heart from the springs of the mattress and toe to the door. I knew she’d ask me where I was going, given that I made too much noise. So I’d whisper little promises to the door knob, broken cherry stems, coins, bowls of milk. Then I’d slip through the crack; it’d open, and I would pad away into the hall. There was a mirror at its end and a mini bouquet of Sampaguitas right off the bathroom. It was the beginning of the dingy brown carpet that crawled around the house. The kind that clung to the sweat between your toes, and slowed me down as I passed the other two rooms near Grandma’s. I never liked my airborne uncle's room, with its dark green walls and bloody picture frames of forgotten saints. My grandpa's office wasn’t necessarily kind either. He had a bed shoe-horned in one corner and his workspace thronged opposite of it. There was a lion blanket on the bed that used to smell like heat and musty plastic, and it only added to the suffocation the room caused. With its beige walls, Venetian masks from festivals in Italy. I despised it. I could never breathe, and I wonder now if it was because it was so enclosed or if it was because of all the weight the ceiling had to hold after counting the heads of visiting women: Tammy, Melissa, Jennifer. All putting their necks out like moles waiting to be whacked with Vicodin, Suboxone or money. III. The Living Room It was the biggest room in the house. With its ten foot oak threshold, cadent sofa with dirty cup holders, the box TV, the entirety of the dining room. The photos from 2006 where we looked like a put together family, adjacent to the front door. A clock ticked consistently above it, and it was the first sound heard when I would emerge from the hall. Some days, I’d feel unrealistic, almost surreal, as if I were a ballerina in a Salvador Dali painting. I’d twirl the frills on my chiffon cerise nightgown, to the steady pulse of the clock, watching it melt down the wall as time dissolved. Almost scared somebody would catch me and question what dream I was living in. Most days I’d trundle onto the viridescent couch and feel pristine in the balmy umaga light. It would dab the curtains Grandma had up and, if God allowed it, would pierce through to coddle the painting above the dining room table. Made of some ancient, aging wood, complete with wobbly chairs that groaned when you moved them. I remember I’d fawn over how the brush strokes soaked up the rising sun with Popeye playing in the background. The monochrome layers would sing harmonies, portraying a beautiful snapshot of some terracotta vase of greying Sampaguitas. Then I’d hear the rustle of some waking family in the hall and creep into the burrow under the table. Made with plastic, lace mock placemats and bits of rice from pretty bowls. Locked by porcelain pieces, the testimonies of lolas, whom I cry for when I hear Bahay na Pula respire. My corner of the world flooded with tepid amniotic fluid so comforting that when I got in place, I fell asleep. IV. Jasmine House Tita Jasmine had a large house an hour out from ours. A little corridor made up the bones of the porch. Tita kept the evergreen bushes that lined it neatly trimmed, even in colder seasons. And with some pinched magic, kept the flowers in everlasting prime. My favorite was the Majolica pots that she kept on both sides of the door, with modest viridity even when rain slicked the busts. There was one particular night we went to visit. It was just beginning to pour steadily, and as we waited for her to answer the door, I noticed her Sampaguitas drooping over the rim of the vases. Their white petals leaden with some foreign invader, embracing the lips of their robust homes as a final goodbye. I remember hearing the creak of the door, slow and eerie like a horror film, and my grandma disappearing into the house like a black hole taking her into the unknown. She started yelling out into the halls and the kitchen, “Jahs-min?” and I followed behind her, closing the door. The only lights were the candles that were burnt down to the cores of their wicks, just barely flickering beneath the high ceilings. I started to wander around the kitchen, looking for Tita’s small white dog, Tallo. He was comforting and yappy, and loved to lay in my lap despite hating everybody else. But there was no sign of him. No bit of bark or whine or long nails against polished hardwood. Tita had paintings of fancily tall houses, white like Jasmine blooms, vases of jade in low lit rooms, smiling filipinas clad in their Maria Claras. In the shade of Katmon trees and the shadow of the painter. They were my favorite. Behind them were fields, men in white shirts plucking with reddened palms. Aeonian skies so richly blue they could quench thirst and dissipate worry. But as I searched the eyes of those sun kissed girls I felt the draft of some open window. With it carried the chatter of low voices, hushed anger between understanding and insistence of change. I peered into the hall as a nosy kid would, and glossed over the rushed image of Tita vigorously explaining through oppressed pain. One hand kept an ice pack to her blackened eye and the other was flat, knuckles white and facing the floor in an attempt to voice her message without any more vocal strain. Then the two got quiet, and my grandma hastened our leave. I waved to Tita as we left, but she only watched me in solemn defeat, the drooping Sampaguitas at the foot of the glass. I remember thinking it would make a beautiful painting. Maybe in a surrealist style, with the moon behind Titas head, awaiting her in the dark. At some point Titas husband passed my mind. I never saw much of him, save for days he’d sit with me on the enclosed porch at the back of the house. We’d play Chess sometimes, others we would play Mancala, Shielded by the netting around us. V. Aloespring It smelled like baby powder, the feeling of always being unclean. The first time I went I felt ridiculous, so out of place I considered waiting for my dad and brother outside. Hearing my Grandma ask for me broke my heart more than second long embarrassment, so I walked the hallways in false confidence and tended to the things I would talk to her about. 1215 introduced the deteriorated version of her that I’d be seeing. Typed out on brown construction paper so last names would be easy to change when occupants switched, were released or passed on from Aloespring. How lucky they were to live in intangibility, somewhere where their oxygen was fresh and existing was not stagnant and depressing. My Grandma had always been a talkative one, as if she was speaking for in the tongues of all the women before her, in anger, excitement, boredom, or otherwise. The crust of age had seemed to break that. Instead of asking questions with no time to get proper answers, inquiries rolled from her mouth like popped tires. She was confused more than all knowing. Her hair was silvery and wild, branching out around her, reaching out to the lolas occupying the planes that work around us but aren’t overt. More aware of the world than she had become. I could see the glossy emptying in the whites of her eyes, like delicate pearls, on the verge of breaking. I went to see her often after that first time, looking through photos her sister had sent from Mactan. Frail great- grandmothers I had yet to grow fond of, aunts whose names I couldn’t place. Wilted petals of pressed Sampaguitas were stuck to some of the pages, offering sweet, wasted aroma. She had sent letters to my Grandma too, typed and printed out in english, by her or some outside source I wasn’t sure. I knew the look on my Grandmas face was devastatingly debilitated, sinking with longing, as she pointed at the children she baby-sat when she was nine. She laughed at the memories she was losing touch with, and laid down by seven. She’d pat the spot next to her, and I’d lay with a fear that if I let myself relax too deeply I’d crush her weak chest. But she wouldn’t worry, just scratch my head with her inch long nails in endearment. I knew then that it wasn’t the fan that put me to sleep all that time ago; rather, a gentle love, as stout as her, born in the quarries dug in her sternum. How she locked me away from the big hands of bad men, though I believe she felt they were all born some sort of bastard. I wished for immortality at that moment. Willing a timeline where I didn’t have to separate from her side and could live in the depth of her care. Willing that by some fate God would dip us in wax, amber, bury us in quick, loving death. A cellophane shell, blessed with kisses and a prayer to St. Rose. Wrapped by soft hands and sealed with wooden, beaded rosaries. VI. The Basement The last time I saw her I relished in a newfound comfort. Derived from the realization that my ties to her bedroom, the living room, that house on Lowes Street, were finite. Brittle in comparison to who I am as Silver’s granddaughter. I am not the stripped wallpaper, the stale air, the chill of the basement floor when I creeped to mom’s bed. My sole reason for ever having gone into the basement. Before we moved in I’d stand at the metal trimmed threshold. As if it gave me security, something sturdy to grip before plummeting or fighting the grab of the Boogeyman. I would have nightmares of men at the backdoor, in the pitch of midnight, pressed to the glass in invasive craving. I hated the basement for a different reason then than I do now. Now It seems like a black hole, an ocean eddie, never releasing what it has swallowed. In the same sense, an escape, an end that can never be undone. When you burn bridges ashes still remain, when the unknown cradles you into uncured spaces, nothing of you is left in the places you once nested. I remember how cruel the world sounded when it spun around me. CPS and policemen in the crevices of what I thought of as personal, sacred space, scratching away the fools gold, revealing gilded ages. So I cut my hair. The knots from prolonged silence, the dead ends from others' malice. I took nothing and crawled down those stairs, their blocks of mildewed carpet, past the Arizona Tea jugs of piss, the burnt spoons, the syringes pinned on the women, beneath the green blanket in place of privacy. The bed, sunken in, grey with use, filled with the dead, curled petals of Sampaguitas, piled on top the sheets. They felt cold against the back of my neck, stark, refreshing. The walls collapsed, slowly, like they were made of sand. That room, that house, fell to its foundations around me, caving in on itself as it had done me. The void opened its mouth in solidarity. In understanding, and rocked me as it subsumed that old crumb of earth. |