Making Callaloo in Detroit

Ole Year’s Night

109  Adios, Detroit Dear Mama: What I want most is a plate full of red beans and rice and a good Bogey movie. Maybe Clark Gable. Maybe a movie with Bogey and Clarky. Wasn’t there one like that? How about a movie with Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy and Lauren Bacall? We could look at Bogey through sultry eyes the way Lauren did. Or get red in the face when Gable stared out at us with that bad-boy look of his. Did you get hot when you watched those movies? I did a little in my young girl way. I don’t know if I would now or not. True, I know what a woman could feel if she could feel, I just don’t know if I can feel anything anymore. Not today. Okay, if Valentino were to walk in here this minute, I might feel a quiver. I wonder what you must have felt then in front of the television on the edge of your seat. Were you panting inside, Mama? I think that I am beyond that now, but you must have had that much in you then, 110  Lolita Hernandez didn’t you? A pant or two for handsome Hollywood men? I never saw you breathe heavily, but something must have been happening. Why else would you hurry and cook rice and beans on Sunday afternoons in time to catch Bill Kennedy. You ate your rice with grace as you would say, mixing bits of stew beef in with each mouthful, dropping rice grains on the carpet. There were the two of us in the living room in front of the television with heaping plates of food, my father and Cyrilla in the kitchen to eat by themselves. That’s one thing the both of them had in common, a dislike for television. I’m not too particular myself for television in general, but on Sundays when it’s cold and the snow blows, I feel as if I could eat a good set of red beans and rice, stew beef, and watch one of those old-time Hollywood boys ooze sexiness on the screen. To Cyrilla: This is what memory is for me: fantasy and time. Me locked in closets of dream for as long as I dare, and when I awake, I am saying to myself: oh this is real—the closet, the dream. The cold air nipping at my nose is not for real. The sun and the birds flying high in its heat are not for real. Their wings will melt in the sun like Icarus, then they will land on the sidewalk, flat and lifeless. Even then they are not real unless I can close my eyes and see them, reconstruct them, blow air into them, hang them in the sky like a mobile. Do you realize that in the Catholic Church my birth is on the feast of the Ascension? In history it is the date the first atom bomb was 111  Adios, Detroit dropped? I think about these things and wonder if anything I try to do in life matters. I would like to soar but someone or something drops bombs on my head. I am like a bird with melted wings. I wish you could understand. Who else should or could? Why tell anyone you ask? Because I am tired of feeling so tight, C. As if cold, rough iron lodges in my bowels. I can’t bend over; I can’t lean back. If I want to twist this way, I groan in pain. If I want to twist that way, same thing. Christ, Cyrilla, my life so far has been one long search for a good purge. Do you understand what I mean? Remember when we used to have to take castor oil and then senna the week before Easter and the week before Christmas? Remember how nasty they tasted, but how clean we felt after, especially when Mama pronounced us fit enough to eat a good set of Easter and Christmas sweets? Cyrilla, I long for a good cleansing. What do you think I should do? Really? Should I holler on the street corner? Should I drop my drawers and swing my bam bam over the new dumpster Coleman Young installed in the alley behind my house? Should I drop my own atom bomb out there behind the...