Barnacle Love (12 page)

After their offerings were placed on the bed, the younger women returned to the hot kitchen, whispered and laughed. The older women were far more reserved as their offerings and duties were performed.

The evening had been soured by what Maria had said. The women felt it in the air. It wasn’t until midnight, when a few of the red-faced men came dancing into the kitchen, propping each other up, trying desperately not to topple onto the kitchen table, that the mood changed into what it was meant to be. Carmen remembered the older women halfheartedly trying to shoo the men away. Some women grabbed tea towels or the corners of their shawls to taunt them like bullfighters or flick them across their jowls or near their groins. Manuel came next, dragged on his back across the kitchen floor. Aunt Louisa recalled how Manuel’s head would fall hard on the ground, but his smile was never erased. They dragged him into the bedroom and strained for the strength to swing him on top of the right side of the bed, the man’s side. There wasn’t even
the slightest protest. Manuel had raised his head slightly from the floor and smiled dumbly. “Where’s my wife-to-be?” Georgina found herself stifling her warm laughter. Some of the younger women, including Aunt Louisa and Carmen, gently led her to her side of the bed. Everyone had already crammed into the small hot room. The men finally found enough momentum to rock and swing Manuel into the air before flinging him onto the bed. At the same time, the young women pushed Georgina and she too fell backward, smiling, onto her side of the bed.

“The look on your face, Georgina,” Carmen said. “The instant your body sunk into the mattress, your face twisted in pain and horror.”

“It all seemed to happen so fast.” Georgina’s mouth trembled.

“What happened,
Mãe
? Who hurt you?” Antonio caressed her soft cheek.

“Shhhh, no one.” She pressed his head close to her, kept her hand over Antonio’s ear and began to rock gently.

“I remember Manuel smiling at me, ready to kiss me. But every slight move cut and tore at my back and legs. That feeling has never left me—the more I turned, the more I tried to contort my body and get up, the deeper I felt the fine pricking of my skin.”

Her mother, Theresa, was the only one who recognized that something was not right. She dragged her daughter off the mattress. Georgina flopped to the floor on her knees and dropped her face into the expectant lap of her mother, who wrapped her arms around Georgina’s back and muffled her sobs with her chest.
The bloody streaks that stained the sheets and blotted Georgina’s new dress had silenced the room.

In horror, Manuel clumsily tore at the shredded sheets that covered the mattress. It was littered with what looked like smashed shells, glistening green shards of glass, and barnacles. Grandmother Theresa stroked her daughter’s hair as her eyes searched for and landed on Grandmother Maria, who met her challenge for an instant and then sheepishly turned away. Without looking at anyone else in the room, Theresa rocked Georgina and moaned. “Get out!” she repeated. “Get out! Get out!”

After the bewildered throng spilled onto the dirt road and into their houses, Theresa spent the whole night tending to Georgina.

“She washed my back as I stood in a metal basin. She cut into her aloe plant and gently rubbed the juice on my broken skin, all the while blowing her cool breath. She hummed the same song she hummed when she used to bathe us as children, let me see, it was an old fado …” Here, Georgina tried to catch the first few notes of the song. Her voice cracked as she bent over and rubbed the back of her legs, where varicose veins were beginning to bud. “My mother patted dry the backs of my legs and my heels. And then she lightly wrapped my body in moistened cheesecloth, shrouded me.”

The women all remained silent. Antonio did not want to move but a fly had alighted on his brow and he moved his hand slowly to brush it away and slid down his mother’s legs.

“There were no words. I sobbed, still shocked at the horrible turn in the evening, as my mother dragged the damp cloth along my torn body. It’s the song I can’t seem
to hold on to, the one my mother hummed as she took care of me by the flickering candle.”

Antonio had lined up all his marbles in the grooves between the cobbled stones when Terezinha skipped up to him in her bare feet and nudged his legs. There was a choral sound of clicking glass as the marbles spilled across the square. Terezinha squatted in front of Antonio and helped him gather them. She brought Thumbelina out from under the bench, picked up a pebble and dropped it into one of her doll’s legs. There was a rattling sound against the doll’s hard plastic.

“We’ll fill her up with rocks and then we’ll bury her in the ground.” Terezinha smiled at her idea. Antonio found a pebble under his shoe, reached over and dropped it into her doll.

“Make holes in her hands,” Antonio suggested.

Terezinha looked pleased and began to gnaw away at her doll’s fingers, tore at the loose plastic before spitting it out. “Now we can fill up her arms too.” They began searching for pebbles. Antonio made sure he didn’t venture too far from his mother; he didn’t want to miss a word.

Aunt Louisa continued with Georgina’s story, picking up seamlessly from where her sister had left off.

“The next morning, we all awoke before the cock’s crow. There was such uncertainty about the day. My mother and I were both afraid to enter her room. I had tried earlier and the door had been locked. I remember my mother saying, ‘She’ll be fine.
We
always end up fine,’ and as if on cue, Georgina opened her door and stepped into the kitchen with her wedding dress half on, the bodice flapped in front of her like a bib.

“Georgina reached into the flared sleeves of her dress, turned her back to us and said, ‘
Mãe
, help me pull up the dress.’ Her back was covered … we looked down and saw that some of the blood from the backs of her legs had already been blotted by her white nylons.

“‘Oh,
filha
, this can wait. Things have changed and you … ’ my mother cried.

“‘Nothing has changed.’ Georgina turned her face toward us and smiled. I’ll never forget it.”

Carmen looked at Georgina and made the sign of the cross. The bells of the church began to ring. Antonio looked at his mother just as she remembered the first few bars of the fado and began to sing.

Don’t cry my little one
,

your pretty friends of glass and clay

sit on your windowsill at night
,

playful in the day.

The other women now recognized the lullaby. They smiled and joined in the singing.

The winds may blow
,

sending them tumbling down
,

but the love I have
,

the love you need from me
,

will always be there.

Even Terezinha dropped her doll. It was as if the whole square had stopped, frozen in space and time. Antonio shaded his eyes from the brilliant sky and saw
his father shift awkwardly and move in their direction. Antonio tugged at his mother’s dress, tried to warn her of his father’s advance. She knew. She saw.

“‘There’s nothing for you here!’ my mother said. It was with those words that I took my first step into the church and then the next step. I saw the woman who was to be my mother-in-law at the end of the aisle and I fought my pain. I held on to my mother’s hand and we walked toward the altar together, toward Manuel.”

Carmen now reflected on what she had seen. “We were all so quiet, the church was so silent. Frankly, we couldn’t believe what we were seeing. You were smiling and you walked so gracefully, as if hovering across that aisle toward Manuel. I think we felt shame for what had happened. You passed with your proud mother, Louisa here was crying as she held your long beautiful train. And then we were silenced. It was only when you passed that we could see the traces of blood through the fabric of your dress; red blotches covered your back and legs, seeped through the satin and lace.”

Carmen looked down at Terezinha, who sat beside her now, and whispered, “Your mother was a vision—so beautiful.”

Terezinha nuzzled her cheek against Georgina’s arm. Antonio stood in front of his mother and faced his father’s shadow as it blocked the sun.

“Georgina, what is all this prattling so soon after my mother’s death. Laughing and singing, have you no respect?”

Antonio noticed how his father’s buttoned white collar stood in sharp contrast to his red neck and face.
Georgina raised her arms slightly before anyone could protest.

“I remember looking to my side, seeing that woman, Maria Theresa da Conceição Rebelo. Padre Jose opened with an invitation for the family blessing. Manuel kissed my mother and asked for her blessing. My mother later said she had seen into his eyes saw how genuinely sorry he was and whispered, ‘Never come back. Take my
filha
, but never come back.’ Remember, Manuel?” she asked.

Manuel stood defeated.

“Manuel looked at me then and I smiled at him. Without hesitation, I turned toward his mother, who refused to rise from her pew. The congregation held its breath. I bent down low to meet my new mother-in-law and her smell of mothballs. I held my breath and kissed her on both stone cheeks, then held her tight in an embrace.”

Georgina raised her face to meet her husband’s. He bowed his head.

“‘He’s dead to you.’ I whispered it so only she could hear. ‘As God is my witness, you will never see your son again. He’s dead to you.’ And I smiled. I remember hearing the roar and the applause that filled the church. I straightened, my stiff dress shifted across my cuts, pulled at my searing wounds. I held on to Manuel’s hand. I turned my crimson back to the crowd, to this backward little village of Lomba da Maia, and I solemnized my vows.”

But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage

can seldom see through his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing …

The caged bird sings with fearful trill

of the things unknown but longed for still

and his tune is heard on the distant hill

for the caged bird sings of freedom

Maya Angelou

MY FATHER DEMANDED WE
all speak English. “We is in Canada now. We speak Canadian in this beautiful country with many beautiful things,” he’d say. He was so certain of his chosen land that I couldn’t help but love him. I just wished he would use a word other than
beautiful
, which he pronounced
bootiful.
He had been promising to take the family on a cross-country train ride for as long as I could remember—to see the country as he had. He was proud of his early days working on the railway, walking the lines like the Johnny Cash song he couldn’t stop humming. My father never stopped talking about lakes and rivers with long Indian names. My mother tried unsuccessfully to pronounce some of the places—Chilliwack, Coquitlam, Saskatchewan—all in the hopes of pleasing my father.

The nuns who ran St. Michael’s Hospital and who first hired my father told my mother how impressed they
had been with his valiant attempts at English and his determined work ethic, not to mention his blue eyes and long lashes. “Too gorgeous,” they would say to her, “to be placed in the head of a man.” The nuns chose to hire him without any experience. Under Sister Ophelia’s tutelage, my father mopped, scrubbed, and disinfected for only a short while before he was proclaimed supervisor of the hospital’s housekeeping department. It was a meteoric rise, or so my mother would proudly say. He had an office. It was located in the basement.

“Remember, I is a supervisor,” he’d announce, puffed chest and all. It was made clear to us that if ever asked we were never to reveal what exactly he was a supervisor of. It was a family secret, just like all the employee evaluations he could never fill out for himself. Misplaced glasses or a terrible headache would always lead him in our direction. My sister would roll her eyes as she typed up the forms. My father pretended not to notice. My mother would take us aside and again remind us, “What happens in this house, stays in this house.”

I was struggling with her shaky rule about keeping things within the confines of our home when I caught my Aunt Louisa smuggling piecework—stacks of pockets to be sewn on the backs of jeans—upstairs, into my mother’s workroom. My mother shushed me. “I’m helping your
tia
,” she said. “We need the extra bit of money.” I proudly skipped downstairs and whispered what my mother was doing into my father’s ear. His feet hammered up the stairs. He reappeared at the top of the stairwell trailed by my mother, who tugged at his shirt with one hand and
with the other hand tried to grab the jumble of jeans he carried in his arms. My mother flung the jeans she had managed to tear from his grasp over her shoulder and bent to pick up the pants that had fallen.

He went outside, red-faced and barefoot in the snow, and threw the jeans into a heap, kicked at them to pile them higher. He disappeared into the garage and, when he returned, squirted barbecue starter fluid all over the mound. My mother tried to drag what she could away before he lit a match and flicked it on the pile. She shielded her face from the ball of instant blue then orange flame. In front of the blazing pyre she stood, panting with strands of hair lodged in the corners of her mouth. My father stood behind the flames, his torso and face awash with a warm glow. My mother turned. She zipped her housecoat up and down so fast her fist blurred. She stopped, caught me looking through the screen door. She allowed her eyelids to shut, then tilted her chin to the sky.

My mother and what seemed like most of my family worked at St. Michael’s Hospital, amid the glass buildings in the center of the city. Every time I entered the building I would go directly to the statue of Michael the Archangel and sit under his large stone wings. The nuns who ran the hospital had told my father they had purchased the marble statue for forty-eight dollars and that it was carved out of the same marble as the
Pietà.
“That statue is in the Vatican,” my father would say. The statue of Michael stood in the hospital’s Bond Street entrance—
“the urban angel,” that’s what they called the hospital. I liked to think people called it that because of the statue that looked down on everyone who was rushed through the corridors strapped to their blood-soaked gurneys. Almost every drug overdose, stabbing, shooting, or attempted suicide was brought there first. I liked to think it was Michael that decided who was worthy of getting fixed—who deserved a second chance.