Breaking Night (4 page)

“Just a minute,” Daddy answered. “Just wait a
minute
, let me get settled.”

While Lisa sat watching TV, Ma and Daddy busied themselves in their bedroom. Off to the side, I watched them from the edge of the doorway that provided the only separation between my room and theirs.

Ma sifted through their stack of records in the closet. Since she was with Daddy, she wasn’t going to play Judy Collins; she was in a good mood, so it would be something light. Together they worked a two-man assembly line with some mysterious purpose. Daddy sat on the edge of the bed, sorting through something that looked like dirt, which he pinched between his fingertips and, carefully, spread on a
New Yorker
magazine taken from the squeaky nightstand drawer that was on his lap. Ma then rolled the gathered bits into an onionskin paper and licked the ends before twisting them tight. Ma raised her lighter, sparking it several times before it fired up, her eyes directed at the cigarette. She took three labored pulls and passed it to Daddy. I’d never seen Daddy smoke a cigarette before.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked, unable to help myself. I questioned them about everything from “Why are you making cigarettes if Ma has some ready-made ones right on her dresser,” to “How come they don’t smell like cigarettes?”

Their nervous laughter told me I was being lied to.

“Liz, enough,” Daddy managed, through his giggling with Ma. I got the feeling that I had said something naïve, and the thought embarrassed me. I could feel myself begin to blush.

“Enough for now,” he said.

Strange smoke filled the air and I tugged my shirt collar over my nose to avoid inhaling the foreign smell. They were in their own world, and not one of my attempts could penetrate it. I stood, seeking Ma’s eyes in the hope that she’d let me in on their secret, but she didn’t look at me. On the bed, the
New Yorker
sat open to a typed page sprinkled with their cigarette filler.

“Are we ever going to eat anything?” Lisa bellowed when the credits from her show began to roll across our small television screen.

“Sure, honey,” Ma replied smoothly. Unsteadily, she rose to enter the kitchen, moving her legs in large strides, like an astronaut venturing onto the moon’s surface. The awkwardness of her movements went unnoticed by anyone but me.

Soon Lisa and I sat at the living room table to a dinner of scrambled eggs and ice water. The fight began as soon as Ma set down our plates in front of us.

“Why do we have to eat eggs
again
?” Lisa complained. “I want chicken.”

“We don’t have chicken,” Ma answered flatly before walking back over to Daddy to take another puff.

“Well, I want
real
food. I don’t want any more eggs; we eat eggs every single day, eggs and franks. I want chicken.”

Daddy could hardly get over his laughter to speak. “Think of it as a small chicken,” he said.

“Screw you!” Lisa snapped.

“It tastes good,” I said, hoping to make things better.

Lisa whispered across the table, “
Liar.
You hate this crap as much as I do.”

Lisa detested my urge to be agreeable, regarding it as the threat to her ongoing campaign of demanding better from our parents.

I stuck my tongue out at her and dumped globs of ketchup on my eggs to drown out the bad taste. Lisa was right; I did hate eggs. On television, a picture of Donald Trump shaking hands with a city official flickered and crackled into static. I ate hurriedly, hoping to get rid of the hot mush by forcing down large mouthfuls. I ran my truck around and around my plate, making sound effects that shot wet bits of egg onto the table and onto Lisa.

Back and forth, I watched her argue a losing battle. If there was nothing but eggs, then we had to eat them. It seemed simple to me. At least if Lisa was quiet, we could all get along. But I was also grateful that she was demanding, because it gave me a chance to be agreeable. I would be the easy-going daughter. I didn’t need to look into mirrors; I wasn’t vain or girly. I liked trucks, and I ate my eggs.

Lisa went on until she’d worked herself up into tears. When she was sure of the dead end before her, she screamed, “I hate you!” at both of them. But, from the smoke-filled bedroom, which was heavy now with slow guitar music and a man’s singing, neither of them responded.

Lisa always seemed to be pulling her standards from some higher place, apparent only to herself. If I had to guess now where her resistance to being shortchanged came from, I’d say it had something to do with the year before I was born.

When she was pregnant with me, Ma had what she called a nervous breakdown. With Daddy in prison, Ma had trouble managing her mental health while caring for Lisa at the same time, and Lisa was placed with a foster family for nearly eight months.

The couple who cared for Lisa were wealthy and could not conceive children of their own, so they treated Lisa as a permanent fixture in their family. They lavished so much attention and care on her that when Ma got well and came to get Lisa, she protested by locking herself in the closet and refusing to leave. Ma had to pry Lisa out of the house and drag her back to University Avenue, both of them in tears—which, it seemed, Lisa never got over. From then on, Ma said Lisa was tough to please. It appeared she had developed a sharp sense of what was owed to her, and she was quick to put her foot down whenever she was presented with less—which was nearly all the time.

Lisa screamed a final “I hate you” from the table, folding her arms over her chest, staring back at the TV. “And,
I’m
not poor—
my
daddy’s Donald Trump!” she shouted.

“Well then, go ask Daddy Trump for some chicken, why don’t you?” Daddy said. Ma buried her laughter as Daddy howled at his own joke openly, clapping his palm over his knee.

Abruptly, Lisa clanked her plate into mine, which tipped, scooting my eggs into a pile. She stomped off and slammed her door, hard. The noise faded into the blare of pop music from her distorted speakers. Ma and Daddy had taken over the living room, two tired bodies sprawled over the cushions, limp as cooked noodles.

“I ate
all
my eggs,” I said, but no one was listening.

Grandma, my mother’s mother, lived in Riverdale, across the street from Van Cortlandt Park, in a sixties-style old-age home where she smoked, prayed, and made pay-phone calls to our apartment daily. Apart from us four, she was the only family we really connected with. Daddy’s mom sometimes sent gifts from Long Island, but by falling into drugs, he’d become the black sheep of his middle-class family. My whole life, they never once visited; they never came to see how we lived in the Bronx. Although Ma had run away from home at the age of thirteen, she and her mother reconciled later in life. By the time Lisa and I were born, Grandma would visit once a week, on Saturdays, when she boarded the number 9 bus using her senior citizens’ half-fare card to travel to University Avenue.

Before her visits, Ma sped across the apartment tucking sheets into the corners of beds and gathering plates into the sink and running hot water over them. She swept dust into a pile under the couch and sprayed air freshener over our heads minutes before Grandma was due to arrive.

From the couch, Lisa shooed Ma away each time the vacuuming blocked her view of
Video Music Box
, a show that appeared in snowy grains on our TV only if Lisa turned the UHF dial around and around.

On one hot summer afternoon, Grandma was expected to arrive at twelve sharp, but Ma—as always—waited until the last minute to do anything. The mist from the aerosol spray was settling over me in cold drizzles when Grandma arrived, dressed too warmly for the weather. She was wheezing heavily from her brief walk up the two flights of stairs, and the strong reek of cigarettes kicked up from her sweater when we hugged. Her hair was a tight bun of gray and silver. Her eyes were crisp and green, and her skin was wrinkled and tough-looking, with faded brown blotches of age. Lisa didn’t look up from the TV. For her, Grandma had to lean in to get a hug. I threw my arms around Grandma’s waist and asked how her bus ride—a pivotal part of her week—had gone. Her answers were always brief and delivered with a complacent smile.

“Everything was simply wonderful, dear. I’m just glad to have been given another day from our Lord to come see my beautiful girls.”

Grandma was deeply religious. In her tan pleather purse—which she held in the crook of her right arm wherever she went, even to the bathroom (a habit she attributed to “those filthy crooks at the home”)—Grandma carried a Bible—the King James edition—hair clips, Lipton tea bags, and two packs of Pall Mall cigarettes, her “smokes.”

Usually, no one cared to have a conversation with Grandma but me. Ma said she was so lonely living in the home that she would talk anyone’s ear off who’d listen, her sole focus being religious education. Ma also insisted that I would eventually lose interest, just like everyone else had, when I realized Grandma “wasn’t all there.”

“She’s not working with a full deck,” Ma would say. “I figure she couldn’t help the things she put me through. You’ll understand what I mean one day, Lizzy.”

But I couldn’t imagine. Grandma was unlike other adults. She would indulge my every question, no matter how many I asked. My curiosities ranged from how rainbows were made to who looked more like Ma when she was little, Lisa or me. And Grandma came ready to offer answers to absolutely everything, drawing all reasoning from her pious know-how, assuring me that all mysteries of the world were God’s doing. From the doorway, Ma watched, commenting that we were a match made in heaven.

Grandma set up station in our kitchen, offering tea and scripture to any takers. I liked the sweet taste of the tea after Grandma stirred in two sugars and some milk, which ribboned through the smoke curling from one of Ma’s cigarettes. I sat, my knees drawn to my chest, nightgown pulled over my legs, sipping the warm drink, and listened to her describe how sins kept the wicked from heaven.

“Don’t curse, Lizzy. God doesn’t favor a foul mouth. Clean the house for your poor mother once in a while. God sees and hears all, and he never forgets. He knows when you don’t do right by others. Trust me, missy, there will be plenty of sinners who never enter the pearly gates of heaven into God’s love. Be careful, God is our Lord, and He is all-powerful.”

The only other thing Grandma made conversation about, unrelated to religion, was what I wanted to be when I grew up.

“A comedian. I want to tell jokes onstage,” I declared, recalling the nights I’d watched men on TV, wearing suit jackets, delivering nervous anecdotes to invisible audiences, their confidence mounting with each explosion of laughter. I figured Grandma would be as impressed as I was at the idea. Instead, she looked at me with concern and set her glass down to raise her finger to the sky.

“Oh dear God, no, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Lizzy, no one will laugh. Sweetie, be a live-in maid. I became a live-in maid when I was sixteen years old. You’ll love it. You go to stay with a nice family and if you take good care of their kids, you can eat for free and make a good, honest living that God would be proud of. Doesn’t that sound nice? Be a live-in maid, Lizzy. Besides, it’s good practice for when you have a husband, you’ll see.”

At my age, it was hard to understand what Grandma meant. I envisioned a wife and husband seated at a square table, in a large, square, white house. Their toddler, chubby and wailing, was waiting for me to serve him, along with the couple, whose faces were blank blurs. Grandma smiled reassuringly. I smiled back. Her vision of my future disheartened me so much that I decided that while I would outwardly agree to anything she said, secretly, I’d keep my true wishes private. I nodded and smiled, pretending to be as pleased with her advice as she was. Then I gave her an excuse about needing something from the living room and joined Lisa on the couch.

But Grandma didn’t need me—or anyone, for that matter—to keep up a good conversation. If she was left alone in the kitchen for too long, she was just as happy to kneel on the floor and carry on a private dialogue with God Himself. Lisa lowered the volume on the television so we could eavesdrop from the next room on Grandma’s passionate repetitions of “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” She went on, over and over, clicking her rosary and murmuring until her speech was more rhythm than words. This meant that she’d made direct contact.

Lisa snapped the TV off completely when Grandma’s praying got louder, her voice raised and deepened in a way I found frightening as she called out for guidance from above—her own sort of CB radio calling to the Lord. Grandma could lose hours in this trance, never moving, never opening her eyes while the sun set and darkened the room around her, the tea cooling in glass mugs on the table. The kitchen remained off-limits to the rest of us when Grandma was speaking to God.

“Lisa, shhh, I wanna hear.” I believed she might truly be reaching heaven and strained to listen, through Grandma’s responses, to what God’s direct advice might sound like. Lisa twisted her lips into a smirk.

“You’re so dumb,” she chided. “Grandma’s just crazy. Ma says she hears voices. She’s not talking to God—she’s nuts.”

Many times, while Ma was busily cleaning in preparation for Grandma’s arrival, she told us stories about how her childhood was ruined by her mother’s mental illness. As a girl, Ma was forced to return home every day only minutes after school let out, many long blocks away from home. Grandma would synchronize Ma’s watch to their living room clock, and if Ma was late, even by minutes, she received a fierce beating. Grandma used anything from extension cords to spiked heels; all blows were delivered to Ma’s tender inner thighs until black-and-blue bruises colored her flesh from crotch to knee. In the middle of the night, Ma, her sister, Lori, and her brother Johnny were often shaken out of bed, pots and spoons thrust into their hands. They were instructed to bang hard, to make as much noise as possible, and to scream a phrase of Grandma’s devising: “Its-a-bits-of-para-kitus, Its-a-bits-of-para-kitus” over and over, until the voices that tormented Grandma were drowned out by the clatter.