Walnut (Chapter Six)
Lafayette, here we come!
My grandmother Amelia was in and out of the hospital in the fall of 1972 when I was 12. I was old enough now to go to the hospital to visit her, unlike when my father was hospitalized. But be careful what you wish for because visiting someone who is sick is not a good time. On one such visit, I was waiting in the hall next to her room with my brother and doctors were with my grandmother and I could hear her scream in pain. A piercing wailing sound that I can never stop hearing. My brother, always aware and keenly sensitive to my age and innocence took me away from there and held me until the wailing stopped. He let me react. What a gift to let my feelings out and to be held and comforted.
Maybe I was crying for her and maybe I was finally crying for my father or maybe I was crying for myself or all of the above. But I was feeling her pain and finally letting mine out. At some point, she went into a coma but I was allowed to see her. Who was this tiny woman looking so weak teetering between life and death? Where was the powerhouse woman I had come to know? The woman who tackled a man to save her own life and would in my mind tackle ten more in a row if she had to. But here was a delicate frail-looking woman fighting for her life or maybe ready to let it all go. She had had a full rich life with so many twists and turns and like a cat always landed on her feet always defying the odds. But the odds were not in her favor and she passed on a few days later. This time I was a part of it, I saw her with my own eyes, I knew what the possibilities were and I was prepared for the worst if it were to come, unlike my father’s death. Amelia Pestana at the age of seventy-two died in the hospital on October 22, 1972. The exact same date as my father five years earlier. The truth is always stranger than fiction.
Just as my father had left me a gift by enrolling me in private school before he passed away, my grandmother left my mother a gift, her magnificent house, on Lafayette Street! Her own house! Even though I didn’t like change, this was a change I was looking forward to. I could leave the unspeakable happenings of Walnut Street behind me and start anew. On the cusp of becoming a teenager, was Lafayette Street’s magnificence going to sprinkle some magic onto this confused girl? Could I rebrand myself and shed the awkward skin I had been in for so long? This was a lot to ask of a house that was literally only two blocks away and parallel exactly to Walnut Street. Only time will tell.
Leaving Walnut Street was a relief for me and I think, for my mother. She had lost her husband there and I had lost my father and been betrayed and abused there. There was no love lost between that Bedrock-looking house on Walnut Street and me. Maybe now I could introduce myself as Laura of Lafayette! In my mind, Newark’s version of Anne of Green Gables with new adventures yet to come and the pain of the past washed away. And just maybe, if I don’t speak of it, it wasn’t real.
Right?
