HOW YOU SEE IT
Joanne Orion Miller
Copyright 2012 Joanne Orion Miller
This story was previously published in Carve magazine 2009

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My mother’s favorite story was about me and a dog--it happened when I was four years old. They had all heard it at the nursing home. I remember the story very well. It was the last time I saw her.

We lived in New York City, on the upper west side, mama, pop and me. Our big gray apartment house was in the middle of 107th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, but my mother never walked me down to the bodegas on Amsterdam towards the park, because that was officially Spanish Harlem. We walked the other way, towards Broadway and the fancy apartments on West End Avenue. On the north corner of my street and Broadway, there was a liquor store encased in a black metal grate, and on the south corner, the Tip-Top Discount store, with plastic lace doilies and panties embroidered with fancy sayings taped to the windows.

In the summer when I was really little, one of the wiry Puerto Rican men (who always seemed to have a bright-colored plastic toy tucked under one arm) would wrench open the big bolt on the top of the fire hydrant for us kids. We would scream when we ran through the cold jet of water, and there was always somebody sitting on the stoop to make sure we dodged the cars cruising slowly up our street. It was often my pop; clutching me by the hand, talking to the neighbors and laughing, the men tipping golden cans of beer to their lips, the women scurrying up and down the block like worker bees in a cement hive.

When I was four; my mother put me in a HeadStart program, where I was watched over by a gaggle of kindly women so she could go to her job. Mrs. Hong would wait for us by the door, and help each of us take off our coats when we came in, making sure that we hung them on the right pegs, the ones with our names on them. Mrs. DeSantos--who spoke to us in Spanish--would come a little later and make sandwiches with peanut butter or orange cheese, and celery sticks and hot chocolate. We were always in a rush, my mother and I--she worked for a company downtown that imported fancy dolls. When she was pushing-dragging me to the little basement school down in the upper 80s, I’d squeal, “Mommy, stop!,” half out of breath, and she would say, ’I’m going to lose my job if I’m late. You like to eat, don’t you,” then she would stop, close her eyes real slow, wipe her light curly hair back from her face, and say, “C’mon honey, mama’s got to hurry.” I’d walk a little faster, to please her; anything to please her. The stained sidewalks always stunk of bum piss and ripe restaurant garbage, but all I noticed was the slight smell of peppermint from her mouth, and the swish of her nylons as we walked side by side.

She was really in a hurry that day, the day of the story. She steered me down the sidewalk with her hand at the back of my head. For years, I couldn’t stand to be touched there. A lady was walking toward us, a lady in a fancy suit with a little fluffy dog on a leash. Just as we came up to each other, the dog ran in front of me, and I, pushed forward by my mother’s hand, tripped over the leash and fell flat on my face on the dirty sidewalk.

“Pim Pim!” the lady shouted (I still remembered the dog’s name; how can you forget a dumb name like that?). She hustled after the bewildered dog, gathered him up in her arms and started screaming at me, “You stupid little girl!” Then she turned around and yelled at my mother, “If my dog is hurt, you’re going to pay!”

My mother started screaming right back, “You got some nerve yelling at my kid! You and that excuse for a dog! Who do you think you are?”

“What a cruel thing to say!” The lady began stroking the dog frantically, making kissing sounds with her mouth. The dog’s eyes were pulled wider with every stroke, making him look even more startled.

“Well, what about my kid? I ought to sue you, you snotty bitch! Care more about a dog than a kid!” I had never heard my mother say the “B” word before. There they stood, on the curb, surrounded by leaking black garbage bags, threatening each other with the full majesty of the law. Furious, speechless, the lady hugged her dog to her and charged up the street. My mother grabbed my elbow and jerked me to my feet. “There better be blood,” she said. “There better be a reason for all this.” She hustled me down the block, and left the cleaning, bandaging and tear-wiping to Mrs. Hong. The last I saw of my mother was her hunched-over back, hurrying out the blue-painted door, fake Chanel bag swinging behind.

Pop picked me up after school. When we were walking home, we stopped in at the Ideal and he bought us each a mango shake, a real treat. As we sat on the cracked red stools at the bar, he stirred his shake with a straw and looked into it. “Your mama has to go away for awhile,” he said quietly.

“What do you mean, go away?”

“We won’t see her for a little while,” he said. “She’s gonna’ go live someplace else.”

With the surety of being four, I nodded. Then I said, “When’s she coming home?”

He looked at the tropical mural behind the bar. Multicolored parrots peaked out of palm tree fronds. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Not long.” He looked at me and put his big hand on top of my head, “Don’t worry Marcelita, it’s going to be OK,” and he smiled a big smile, and I believed him.

Every day after that, Pop took me to HeadStart in the morning and picked me up in the afternoon. He took his time in the morning to walk me to school, and always gave me a big hug when I got out. He would speak quietly with Mrs. Hong and make Mrs. De Santos laugh when he spoke Spanish to her. I missed my mother. When I would turn to him with a question about her, it was almost like he could tell it was coming, and his face would get sad. After a while, I knew better than to ask.



Our street, once filled with shrieking children, grew silent in the winds of autumn. The fire hydrant was crowned with a patch of grayish snow, and then the sweet yellow blossoms began to come out on the bushes in the corner park, where none of us played because of the needles. I learned how to read. And she still didn’t come back.

“She don’t like New York, your mother,” he said.

“Why can’t we go where she is?”

He’d shrug and say, “It’s not a good idea.”

A little later, he said, “Your mother is not coming back. We don’t need her. She wants to be somewhere else. Let her. ”

“But she’s my mommy!”

“Sometimes grown-ups decide it’s better to. . .not be together. It doesn’t mean anybody’s wrong. Or that she doesn’t love you.” But I knew that wasn’t true. If she loved me, she would have taken me with her. We would all be together. I pulled the beautiful Japanese dolls my mother gave me out of their cases and ground their porcelain faces into the rug with my heel. My father never said a word. He got the sweeper out of the closet and ran it back and forth until not a trace was left.



Pop was never a strong man. He had scarlet fever as a kid, and waxed and waned like the bit of moon you could see through the narrow airshaft between our building and the next. He worked when he could, and he still stood vigil out on the stoop until I was no longer one of the wild children riding the jet streams of city water. We did fine on our own. We didn’t need her.

As I grew older, I was proud I could work and help out. I clerked at the fancy grocery store all the yuppies went to on 72nd Street when I was in high school, and put myself through NYU, living at home the whole time. I met my husband in school. When I got married and moved to Jersey, Pop wanted to stay in the city--he was too stubborn to give up the rent-controlled apartment--“You might need to come back,” he said, “you never know.” By then, the neighborhood had come up; the upper west side had pushed the barrio farther north. There was a Starbucks where Tip Top discount used to be. It was a good thing. I didn’t worry about him so much. All the familiar faces were long gone; people seemed to flow in and out of our building like it was a bus station. And nobody wanted to talk to an old man they didn’t know.

I came to see him every other week, sometimes with the kids; we brought him groceries, and took out his laundry. I couldn’t leave until I’d written my name on a date on the hardware store calendar he kept tacked to the kitchen cupboard, letting him know I’d be back.

I knew she--my mother--wrote him every once in a while when I was growing up, but he laughed off the letters, protecting me. “You wanna read it?” he’d ask me, waving it in the air like a dirty rag, knowing I’d say no, that I wanted nothing to do with her.

“Why do you bother? Why don’t you just throw it out?”

“Ah,” he’d wipe his hand across his forehead as if to clear it.

“Your mother, she’s got problems,” and he’d wiggle his eyebrows and make it seem like her letters gave him something to joke about with his poker buddies.

“Her problems got nothing to do with us,” I’d say.

Sometimes, he’d tell me something she said. “She’s got a guru, la-di-da,” he said, and we smirked and shook our heads, both secretly glad that she never seemed to find what she was looking for. The last he’d heard from her was right before Christmas; he mentioned it in passing when I came to pick him up to take him out to the house. He was quiet about it this time, and didn’t make his jokes. He seemed more tired than usual, and I fussed over him, cutting up his ham and making sure he had all the biscuits he wanted. He was more cheerful on the ride home, but it always wrenched my heart to drop him off, to see his bent figure waving from the stoop, a little smile on his face, nodding his head, reassuringly.

In late March, when crocus were just starting to push up through scruffy snow in the new park down the block, I came to the apartment with the kids for our usual visit. He didn’t answer the buzzer. Uneasy, I made the kids wait by the door and used my old key. He was in his ratty Barcalounger, head back, the Daily News spread on his lap, his eyes open like he was inspecting the ceiling for cracks.

It was his heart that killed him, the doctor said. And for all his attitude, his pride, I was sure that was right. The whole time I was growing up, he never even mentioned a woman other than my mother. I don’t think he ever stopped loving her, God knows why. He had his friends, he said. He had me.

“We got each other,” I’d say.

“I’m happy with that.” He’d always smile and give me a big hug.

My husband and I gave him a nice going away. It was idiotic, but I felt like an overgrown orphan, especially when we had to clean out the apartment in a hurry because the landlord had another tenant ready to move in. No respect. Pop kept an old military chest locked up in the closet. When I was little, I pestered him until he opened it and showed me the uniform, the handguns. “I keep it locked ’cause I don’t want nobody to get hold of these,” he said. I used Pop’s keys to unlock the chest. The military stuff was still laid out on the top. Underneath an old towel were hundreds of letters, postmarked all over the world--my mother’s letters. I felt the old anger bloom again; she tortured him, kept him hanging on with those letters. I couldn’t look at them. We locked the chest up, took it home, and left it in the garage behind the lawn mower.

A month after the funeral, another letter came, sent from Los Angeles, addressed to Pop, forwarded to me. I almost tossed it in the garbage that night, but I looked at my daughter’s face, shiny pink from the bath, and the letter stuck to my fingers. I kept it, unopened, in a pile of bills I meant to pay the last week of the month. It stayed there for two months, a sharp pain in the heart every time I picked it up. Finally I opened it one night when my husband and kids had gone out for pizza. As the thin paper tore under my fingers, I knew I wanted her to be sick, pitiful--begging for help, so I could refuse. And she was sick. “The cancer came back,” she wrote “they’re sure about it now,” and she asked Pop to come see her, maybe for the last time. I guess he had written to her over the years, because in her letter she asked about me and the kids. She knew their names, and how old they were. She said, “I know Marcy doesn’t want to see me, but she’s always in my prayers.” Oh sure. I hated her for her hypocrisy, for the easy way she used my name, dirtied up my kid’s names with her casual use of them. I made up my mind to see her, to tell her off once and for all. I wanted her to pay for what she had done, or at the very least, tell me she was sorry, beg my forgiveness. I guess that’s what I really wanted.

My husband wanted to come, and I thought about it and knew I had to go alone. I was half-afraid I was going to show a side of myself that I didn’t want him--or anyone else--to see: the broken, angry little girl. Better he stay home with the kids; I would get it out of my system once and for all, and then it would be over.

I flew to the L.A. airport and rented a car. My impression of Los Angeles was that it was New York, squashed flat: people and freeways and heat. You could look right at the sun there without blinking because of the yellow haze that hung over everything. I drove up and down the freeways, past the Miracle Taco Shop, Hollywood Auto Parts, Big Star Photo, on two-lane streets past what seemed like hundreds of identical fast-food places and car lots to a faded Spanish-style building twenty miles east of town. Dust was thick on the windows, and what once might have been landscaping was now a mess of weeds and cracked earth. I was shown to a room by woman the same color as the dust outside who looked to be about my age--though it was hard to tell since her exhaustion aged everything about her, even her walk. She wore a green name tag with a little white cross pinned to her baggy blouse. We passed through the nearly deserted courtyard. A few silent, stringy haired women in dresses stained with age and food stared at us. One of them yelled, “Room needs cleanin’”, and the young woman said, “I’ll be over in a minute, Gracie; just a minute.” The room was dark after coming in from the bright sun and smelled of pee and rubbing alcohol. There were four beds in the room, and if the woman hadn’t smiled a quick little smile and said, “Here’s that visitor you’ve been waiting for Mrs. Delgato,” I wouldn’t have known which one was my mother. The woman I stood in front of was a stranger: tiny, with curly gray hair fluffed out on either side of her face. When she saw me, her eyes filled with tears, little flashes of light in the dark room. Good, I thought, good. I sat down on the bed and she grasped my hand tight by the wrist as if it were a rope thrown over the rail to save her from drowning.

“Marcy, honey, I knew it was you, the minute I saw you,” she said. “You look just like your pictures.” She reached up to touch my hair. I leaned away. She composed her face as she dropped her hand and said, “I don’t suppose your father wanted to come.” She looked away and pressed her lips tightly together. I could have done it right then. I could have said, “He’s dead, you killed him.” I could have said, “You killed both of us.” But I didn’t. I was choking on my own rage. What I said was, “It was easier to come by myself.”

“Yes.” She stared at my face, her eyes darting all around it, hungry, like she was eating me up. I couldn’t meet her eyes. “You’re so far away.”

“It was you who was far away,” I said. I could see the tiny shift of her body, the ragged intake of breath. She blinked several times.

“But I always wrote to you. I know it wasn’t much, but it was all I had. I understood how it was. He didn’t want me back. I begged him, I pleaded. But it was too late. When he said he’d found someone who loved him much more than I ever could, that he was happy, and you were happy...” We sat in silence; dust filtered the light in the small room, making the rickety chair in the corner seem to glow. “I’m glad he found someone. At least you were cared for. He said you were.”

All the blood rushed out of my head. I heard what she said, all right, and I saw the look on her face, that hopeful, yearning look. It was hard to grab breath to speak, but I had to say something, and I had to say it quick. “It was all right,” I said. “It turned out all right. Mama.” I called her mama.

She brightened suddenly. “Remember, in New York, that awful woman and her dog. The way she yelled at you. I could have killed her! Even though I.... I could have killed her!” she said. “It wasn’t right to treat a little kid like that. It just wasn’t right.”