After I was born, my family uprooted and moved to East Texas. The city was no place to raise a child, my dad repeatedly told my mother during one of his “moments” as my mother used to say, speaking about my father’s so-called brilliant method he used to justify all of his actions via clichés. My mother, being non-confrontational, agreed and packed our belongings into a moving truck. The home we moved into was modest and had a well-kept yard, which was identical to the picture my father had found in some family magazine to which he had subscribed the moment he saw that I was more than just two blue lines on pregnancy test. His favorite attribute of our new home was an old oak tree that divided our yard from our neighbor’s. The tree reached far beyond the roofs of its two owners, and its limbs with all of their leafy glory formed a canopy that provided shade in the summer, which saved on electricity so that I could have a college education someday (as if the savings were that astronomical). More importantly, however, was the habitat this tree became for me when I craved an escape from reality.
Why, you might ask, would I want to escape reality? My family, though not dysfunctional, was, well, lacking function, at least in a familial sense. My father worked. His life revolved around “making the world a better place to live in”--cliché--by researching, and/or trying to locate a cancer-causing agent supposedly found in crude oil. He was determined; therefore, I remained nothing more than his basis of justification. He was, you see, doing this all for me. My mother, unfortunately, remained non-confrontational--rather catatonic, so I became an introvert who frolicked about in the world of literature in search of a ‘Stepford-free’ realm. She never questioned my new existence, as she was busy with her perpetual tidying, and my father took the credit for my ability to read such fantastic novels, though he had not even the slightest idea what books I was reading.
By the time I was ten, I had traveled to Russia via Tolstoy, Ireland via Joyce, and South America via the unforgettable poetry of Pablo Neruda “Y fue a esa edad … Llego la poesia.” For it was, as Neruda said, at that age that poetry came into my life. Poetry was not, however, the words on my pages, but instead the tree’s first owner. Poetry became the words of an elderly woman who, I thought, could not have been younger than forty. I would learn later that she was closer to eighty. My visions of older people within the literature I read never exceeded the age of my neighbor, so it was at that moment that I realized, or rather my father informed me, that I was oblivious to anything beyond my imagination. Virginia was her name. Her favorite author was Daniel Defoe; she said she was a regular Moll Flanders during her youth. This confused me until I found a novel on her shelf with the same title by Mr. Defoe himself. I read the novel, and wondered immensely if that was why I never saw any pictures of children in her home, or a husband for that matter. Had she given all of her offspring away to continue her search for the next man who might provide her with better, more expensive amenities? If so, it had not worked to her advantage, obviously, because her clothes were threadbare, and her appendages were certainly not draped in gold.
In any event, Virginia, regardless of her past, or at least the past I had imagined her to have, became my confidante the summer before I entered sixth grade. My father, who said I would never “fit in with the crowd,”--cliché--if I continued to keep the company of an old woman, marched me downtown one day to join the Girl Scouts. My mother, of course, nodded sadistically in agreement. Fall approached, as did the inevitable school year, and, too, the day I would walk from door to door donned in a brown uniform with a matching woolen beret selling cookies to elderly people and parents with spoiled, already sugar-induced children. But instead of mimicking the door-to-door salesman, Virginia rescued me and purchased every box of cookies I had been tugging around in a red wagon my father had purchased in one of his memory lapses where he thought I was still three years old. Virginia did not eat the cookies, mind you, she donated them to some children’s home on the East side of town; their parents, I interpreted from Virginia’s description, were identical to mine, except theirs were gone physically, while mine were simply gone mentally.
One day in early November after school had dismissed, I jumped off of the school bus and headed straight to Virginia’s where I knew, as habit would have it, a hearty sandwich and an even heartier tale awaited me. Instead of seeing Virginia, though, I saw my father’s unusually red and glistening face. He was pointing to, what looked like, a tree devastated by a twister, and yelling at Virginia’s front door. Turns out, Virginia had taken a chain saw to the old oak tree. Well, it was not her, per se, but some “overgrown brutes.” Whoever the culprits were, my father now supposed my hopes of a real education were pretty much null and void. Ultimately, he blamed Virginia. And ultimately he moved me and my mother back to the city. I had passed the vulnerable age, and besides, my father had come to the conclusion that it did not matter where a person lived, there were crazies everywhere (referring to Virginia, of course).
Nine years later, one year after I graduated from High school and my father had died, I enrolled in a community college located in the same town where I was raised, or where I raised myself. My mother had been hoarding part of my father’s paycheck since the day I came home from the hospital, and after he passed away, asked a friend, who had been an accessory to this act of humanitarian thievery, to send the money. I guess part of her psyche was not as psychotic as I had previously assumed. It was this same year that I saw Virginia again. Her appearance had not changed much, aside from her choice of attire. Unlike her previous just-below-the-knee navy blue skirts, white button-up blouse, grey cardigan, and house slippers, she now wore a longer, more flared skirt, a kimono style blouse, and moccasins. Brown, lace-up moccasins just like the Indians wore on the picture of a bookmarker she once gave me that advertised a newly revised The Last of the Mohicans. I ran up to her and embraced the figure that had molded me with the assistance of numerous authors. Virginia did not respond, but pulled away and wandered around aimlessly until a grey-haired man hooked his arm through hers and led her away. I would later learn that this man was her son who had recently meandered back into her life after having been raised by his father.
I wrote to my mother that night and told her of my encounter with Virginia. She wrote back a week later, and enclosed in the envelope was a withdrawal slip with Virginia’s name on it that equaled my tuition. Virginia and my mother, it turns out, were in cahoots. My mother knew I was different. Not different in a negative way, but gifted. She, too, as a youth, had befriended an elderly woman who changed her life. Her hideaway was an old barn with tunnels she made from hay. The barn had burned to the ground one night, but back then, investigations were not practical, or even heard of for that matter, and so the ashes remained, as did my mother’s visions of my grandmother with soot on her face and the old lady with the smell of gasoline on her hands. Unfortunately, my mother did not have the privilege of ever acquiring a decent relationship with her father either. Her father, with whom she just could not connect regardless of her mother’s desires, forced her to marry my father; he was a “good Christian man” with the same addiction to clichés as my grandfather. Anyway, Virginia, when she had the tree cut down, had, along with my mother, an ulterior motive. She thought that she could capture my father’s attention: lose the tree, lose the one thing that I hid behind to escape my father’s presence, and gain a father/daughter relationship. My mother wanted desperately for me to have what she had lacked, and what her mother, in a fit of desperation, had tried to create. Virginia wanted to help. The three women, my grandmother, my mother, and Virginia learned that it was not always a material object--whether it is man-made or natural--that hindered relationships. Sometimes it was merely fate.
No comments:
Post a Comment