She joined the National Maritime Union, which represented cargo-ship workers. Then on a lark, she decided to go to sea. She had been married for a couple of years - “the only thing I kept from that marriage was my last name,” she said - worked on an assembly line, sold oil paintings, spent time as an accountant and tended bar in places including Puerto Rico, where she lived for a while in the 1970s. “The place where we made you.”īy 1983, when my mom reached Diego Garcia, she had lived many lives already. My mom told me this was called an atoll, a kind of island made of coral. There were wisps of clouds and long trails of ships heading toward something large at the center. The book began with a postcard of a satellite image taken from miles above an inky sea. She would step on my mattress and reach onto a shelf to pull down a yellow spiral photo album that had pictures of when she worked on ships, too. To her, he represented an entire life she had given up to raise me. Before long, I would start to miss him, and it seemed to me that my mother did, too. My father never stayed for more than a few days. “Don’t listen to him, Nico,” my mother said. He was rummaging through his bag, pulling something out - a tiny glass bottle. He got into our old Volkswagen Bug, and soon we were heading back down the highway to our home. I remember one day when we met him at the dockyard in Oakland. There was the smell of sweat and cologne on his dark skin. He had the beard that I would grow one day. From that height, I could work my fingers through his hair, black and curly like mine. But I just wanted to see him, wanted him to pick me up with his big, thickset hands that were callused from all the years in the engine room and put me on his shoulders where I could look out over the water with him. His stories were endless, his voice booming. It might have been Alaska sometimes it was Seoul or Manila. He would be visiting again from some faraway place where the ships on which he worked had taken him. There would be a meeting point somewhere outside a dockyard or in a parking lot near a pier. I remember the salty air coming across San Francisco Bay, the endless cables of the suspension bridges in the heat. Moments later, we would be racing down the highway with the windows rolled down. My mother would put on some makeup and fish out a pair of earrings from a tangle in the basket next to the bathroom sink. I slept in a twin bed in the living room, and I would start jumping on it, seeing if I could reach the ceiling of our mobile home with my tiny fingers. She would put down the receiver and look up at me. She would put out her cigarette, grab a sheet of paper and scribble down the address. Her eyes, just starting to show their wrinkles in those days, would fill with the memories that she shared with this man. I remember his voice on the other end of the line, muffled in the receiver against her ear. Somehow it was always my mother who answered the phone when he called. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |