Save the Bathwater by Marina Carreira A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-Newark Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Rutgers University – Newark MFA Program Written under the direction of Cynthia Cruz And approved by Jayne Anne Phillips ________________________________ _________________________________ Newark, New Jersey May 2014 Acknowledgements To family, friends, and MFA folks: for their constant support and kindness. To Rigoberto González: this work would not exist without his careful eye and candid wisdom. To Cynthia Cruz: for her remarkable advice and insight. For Avó, my muse. ii 2014 Marina Carreira ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii Contents: In the Cemetery Where My Grandparents are Buried 1 I. After Emigration 3 Bloodlines 4 A Grand-Love 5 The Old Yellow House 6 Save the Bathwater 7 Luso-American Ephemera in Avó’s Old Armoire 8 Poem for Avô's Hands 9 Mercurochrome 10 Day of the Dead 11 Madrugada 12 An Ugly Thing 13 A Bird Watches My Grandfather Age 14 Shrinking Violet 15 Portuguese Olive Oil 16 Thread 17 These Days 18 Eucalyptus 19 The Morning After Your Death 20 Os Velhinhos 21 II. Saudade 23 First Generation 24 A Girl's Fado 25 Letter to My Stillborn Brother 26 The First Real Memory I Have of My Father 27 Bedtime Story, or Monsters 28 The “My Guardian Angel” Painting on Avó’s Living Room Wall 29 Ironbound 30 Bodega Blues 31 These Walls 33 Poem for Suzy 34 Papi 35 Parque da Market Street 36 iv Tomatoes and Onions 37 Parque dos Mosquitos 38 Crushing Snails 39 Dying Twice 40 Our Lady of Something 41 Summers in Fanhais 42 Across from the Village Church 43 In the Shadows of an Orange Grove 44 v 1 In the Cemetery Where My Grandparents are Buried cats glide between graves looking for the perfect place to curl up and glare at the caretakers crushing colored glass for the plots of the villagers who died impoverished. Dried-up bouquets petalling the in-betweens of the burials remind me of trails my sister and I made behind Avó’s house. Blissful, we’d leave chickenfeed and newspaper scraps and venture out, our basket packed with lemon soda and cheese sandwiches. The skeleton pines welcomed us with their stiff, bony arms. August made the ground sandy, and the neighbor’s doves rolled over us in little waves. The wind would blow away parts of our path. Back then, losing the way home never scared us; today, never feeling so alive again does. 2 I 3 After Emigration In the distance, a train kills a lost dog. It happens all the time in my grandmother’s village: small things crushed. But who is ever there to witness it, to tell the story? 4 Bloodlines I. Even in the dark, I’m ashamed of my lemon breasts, my peach-fuzzed midsection. I want to go back home to my father. To my bed with the threadbare blanket, the hand-carved cross over the headboard. I want a God-fearing man, hands roughed by fields. Augusto is a pretty boy with a new blue bicycle. He rides into the next town, buys all the things my mother assures me will make for a good life. But the patch of blood on the bed sheets promises different, promises thorns no bread or gold can dull. II. In America, I’m a maid at the Ramada , I rent an apartment on Market. Broken English and bad fruit. Pigeons as pets. My two children in a one-bedroom. A Technicolor TV with antennas sky-high. Double-locked doors. Barred windows. An ironbound city, the unfamiliar cacophony: honks of trailer horns, the bloody spur of factory smoke, the brandied laughter of construction workers. I try to sing the lullaby I’d hum to my brothers in the dark over the news anchor’s Más lluvia para mánana! III. Tonight, my granddaughter sits in my kitchen and considers the importance of bloodlines, waits for the words to pop like champagne grapes. My blood from my veins into her veins until we are both blue with life. Outside, the song gulls sing as they look for food separates the wind from the hymn of pine needles. She writes a poem to remember me, to remember it all-- sweat and tears, ancestry, and of course blood to run roots through my future great-granddaughter’s bones. 5 A Grand-Love When the snake bit my hand, sunk its teeth deep into the blue bed of my fist, dropped its venom into my slippery vein, you grabbed it by the mouth, squeezed its jaw open, sliced its head off in one fiery sweep. You would do it, too, outside of dreams. Save me from snakes, men with the allure of nineteenth-century vampires. You would behead the devil himself, offer me his horned skull on a silver platter. Be Judith on Holofernes’ lap, blade behind back. You’d hold no pity for Antoinette or John the Baptist. Thick like mud, your love. Bloody. Every head rolls towards my feet, a token, of how deep. 6 The Old Yellow House The old yellow house, now coral with brown trim. Unrecognizable, except for the onion-domed roof, the careful fog surrounding it. I still remember the gray walls, spider-veined. The burning bush television with crooked antennas. Avó’s shady bedroom, the huge hand-carved rosary, the billowing blue curtains between it, shading away the grit and grime of Market and East Ferry. The scuffed, stuffed armoire with its loose, mothball teeth. An empty pigeon cage in the kitchen, the chouriças hanging upside down from the oven hood. My milk bottle half-full underneath the plastic couch. A different house now, since you moved back home to Portugal, since they tore down the Dairy Queen to put up a bank, more condos. This house is now home to azaleas and rubber trees, Mexican children, tamales, cumbia, and menthol cigarette smoke. Our Lady of Fatima now Guadalupe. Our old stuff in boxes, in city dumps, in memory, in ashes. Only the shell remains constant: its hallway, a bottom-black well, its windows, golden fish gills out of water. At night, I imagine it sighs but never says a word. 7 Save the Bathwater Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container. –Wallace Stevens In America, people don’t bathe in each other’s leftover water, but when he was a boy the trough was emptied after the last pig feeding, after his younger brothers had their turn; his naked body would shiver something awful standing in it. Three buckets of used water heated by after-dinner fire— the rinse. Avô’s wasted no water ever since. My skin cells, hair, and navel lint floating around him didn’t matter. This residue was a reminder that I always woke up to bread, that he sweat in the face of a steam presser. With the same certainty he knew birds flew further south, trains arrived through Penn Station with their usual hoot. A little money was saved. He sets a cup of water on the night stand, considers his shoddy leg, his wife’s cough: the things water won’t wash off. 8 Luso-American Ephemera in Avó’s Old Armoire Page from a Portuguese passport stamped one-way: 1973, USA. Old coins the color of a lizard’s tongue. Tassle from the lip of my grandfather’s Sunday loafer. Ace of spades curled at the corners, reeking of Winston cigarettes. Polaroid: my father’s youth league soccer team. My baby tooth charm, dangling off a broken bracelet. Christmas card: the blue of “Boas Festas” fading. NJ Transit ticket stub: BROAD STREET stop. Funeral prayer card for Alberto Silva, village baker. Flyer: Amália at Carnegie Hall. Penny candy wrappers, crinkled, smelling of coat pocket. Postcard of Nazaré: a fisherman’s wife in seven skirts, with love, Tia. Gold medal of St. Antonio: restorer of lost objects, but never brought back anything worth saving. 9 Poem for Avô’s Hands You look at them carefully, wonder how they got from that little boy’s arms to yours. Little raven-haired, bird-like boy who’d run from his house every morning after stuffing corn bread in his mouth, wiping away chalky crumbs with a flannelled sleeve. Run past the olive fields to join the others in stick-and-stone play until his father came to pull him away by the ear. With the years, your hands out-grew the village, dreamt of gold rings and savings bonds, made their way overseas, employing needle and thimble and thread. The midnight shifts making A-line skirts and black-tie suits by the open window, the Passaic aglow with headlights and neon. So much a dollar could get you in end-of-century America; so far your son could go if he really tried. This afternoon, an apple, exceptionally red for a cold spring, is an elephant in your palm. You sit on an upside-down crate, look at your hands and wonder, Where did the time… 10 Mercurochrome First the unmerciful burn and then the balm cool of blown air. Finally, Avó lets the liquid spill over and stain the scrapes and bruises until my elbow or knee or palm streams with alligator tears. I would be red for days, the scarlet-tinted spots of skin like ribbons on kite tails. Nowadays, when hurts crow-feet and frown-line, I search for her breath, for the cure-all tincture in her apron pocket.