Adeus Portugal

Coming back to that dreary apartment and the life we were living was a bitter pill to swallow.  I know I rode on the high and exhilaration of that trip for a long time after being back home. 

Here in the states, we were not close to our other cousins, not Laurie or my Aunt Leontina’s three sons who lived close by and right across the street from my grandmother on Lafayette Street.   Leontina was the youngest living sister my mother had.  There had been a younger sister Emily but she died from Meningitis & Tuberculosis in 1949, when she was only 19. Emily was the only one who had a shot at a better life than her sisters. My mother kept Emily’s high school yearbook and I was intrigued by it. The beautiful clothes, meticulously fitted, the girls so perfectly coiffed.  Emily had been popular and outgoing from all appearances.  She had long brown wavy hair, friendly brown eyes, and a big smile. She and my mom had similar features except for their noses. Emily had a wider rounded nose to my mother’s more narrow nose. Emily seemed like she was a fun girl and probably the apple of her mother’s eye. 

My mother was a month away from giving birth to my brother when she lost her youngest sister. Emily had been sick for many months prior to passing and I can’t imagine how my mother coped with that and her subsequent death. My mother had quietly suffered the loss of her father, by divorce who I think she was close to and then a sister.  My mother never mentioned her father, my grandfather, or her sister.  The only thing I knew about Emily was that my father was buried in the plot next to hers because we went to the cemetery every Sunday since my father died. Going to Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington, New Jersey on Sundays required taking a long bus ride from Penn Station in Newark to a bus stop that was still about ten long blocks from where the cemetery was. No matter the weather, cold or sweltering sun, off we went with a small planting shovel in my mother’s purse. 

Sundays like clockwork rain or shine, this was my mother’s only outing ever other than the grocery store or a visit with her sister Leontina, at her apartment.   On these trips, I would inevitably turn green and or get sick at some point during the trek. My mother made sure we sat in the middle or front of the bus to try to ward off my motion sickness.  I was the only one at home that didn’t have other plans or who’d balk. I was promised a snack and a soda on the walk back from the cemetery and that was enough to make me endure the trip,  My mother didn’t buy soda or snacks for the house, so when those treats were dangled in front of me I leaped. I liked having my mother by myself too on these trips and to get out of the apartment.  I don’t know what we talked about but I know I liked her company and she seemed to tolerate mine.

I don’t know if my mother immediately began working the year we returned from Portugal or months or even the year after. But I know I spent afternoons alone after school in the apartment or if I was on summer break, I spent my summer days at my grandmother’s house when she did work. My grandmother would also babysit other children, not related to her for money.  The other kids would leave by three or earlier and I stayed until after six when my mother would come to get me after work.  It was once the other kids left that I got to be alone with my grandmother. Not that she was going to shower me with any attention or cater to my every whim but I felt safe with her. And safe was a good feeling. We watched the Mike Douglas Show, General Hospital, and Dark Shadows without fail.   Television was exciting, an escape.  At some point, she might have dozed off in her light brown leather recliner while resting her tired legs so tightly encased in support stockings.  If she did doze off,  I got to change the channel to some other show or cartoon. 

My mother at the age of forty-six or forty-seven started working a full-time job at a retail store, Two Guys, tending to the fitting rooms and restocking the clothes customers left carelessly strewn about. The store was a more economical Bamberger’s (which later changed to Macy’s).  She got paid minimum wage but it offered medical benefits which were vital to a mother of four. This could not have been easy for her at that age and at that time. But she never complained about it. She did what had to be done, again without fanfare or pouting. A quiet resilience guiding her. She had to take the bus to boot since she had never learned how to drive.

Nothing was glamorous in my mother’s life, before and certainly not now. However, her job offered her other women, co-workers to talk to, to commiserate with, and to feel less alone. She was popular at work and beloved by her newfound friends, most of them black women.  She would delight in these new friendships.  Her job became her social time away from grunting, ungrateful children and judgy sisters and a tough mother. She had to stand on her feet all day which was uncomfortable with her varicose veins but she never complained.  At home, she had to clean up after us too because we were all lazy slobs. At least at work, she got paid for her hard work!  Later as the years passed my mother had coined a phrase for her three daughters, “damn lazy witches”. She wasn’t wrong, even though it wasn’t fun to hear.

     My brother was back and forth at college over these last two years and when I was ten he got married to his then-girlfriend and moved to another town.  He was only a kid himself at twenty getting married, barely escaping getting drafted into the Vietnam War, and expecting his first child. He met his wife while in college. I liked it when she visited the apartment because she talked to me and with me. She had wildly curly light brown hair, big eyes and smile, porcelain skin, and a distinctive giggle. I secretly and desperately was hoping I was leaving with him when he got married but that did not happen. I was prone to fantasy and lots of them. Manny and Maggie were kids themselves and about to have a baby, that was enough for both of them to have to handle. Three years after losing my biggest cheerleader and protector, I was now losing my only other supporter.  He and my father were my safety nets and now I was flying solo.  It wasn’t death but it might as well have been, I loved my brother and I still haven’t connected with my sisters, not one or the other.  Not in the way I wanted to or the way I thought sisters should be. The kind of sisters I saw on television. Television was the basis for most of my comparisons. So, who could ever live up to that?