Brasalina

For years we lived in San Diego among the blue gum trees above Missile Boulevard in the sprawling Castle Apartments, which were packed with crazed and troubled tenants, most of whom were this way, my mother insisted, because they were poor. They lit their curtains on fire, tossed wine bottles into the oleander bushes, and died from rheumatic fever or Asiatic flu. About once a month someone from the Castle Apartments would appear on the news: a crosseyed kid would fall off a balcony, or a bearded man in a dirty T-shirt would get arrested because he was wanted in Utah. Once, Bernard Chiles, the boy downstairs, climbed on top of a five-gallon Sparkletts water bottle to steal cookies out of the cupboard, and he slipped and fell, and the bottle broke and cut him open waist to throat like a fish. His older sister Dixie would make him pull up his shirt and show me his scars.

I have only faint recollections of my father from this period, the late 1950s. He was always at work or school or bowling. My memories of my mother, however, are abundant: Look how young and pretty she is, with her bobbed brown hair, her glasses with ruby glints on the rims, and her smell, like a freshly opened box of Wheaties. Here is a picture of her setting aside the raw onions from my hamburger to spell “coo-coo” on my napkin. Here she is bringing a banana into my room after I have smarted off to her and she has sent me to bed without any supper. I fancy I can smell the ocean as we stand together out on the terrace and she tells me how my father is going to night school to earn his chemistry degree so he can get us out of these crazy apartments.

My parents bowled on Sundays at the Bowl-O-Rama across the street. They belonged to a league and were usually gone for what seemed like four or five hours. Bernard’s sister Dixie often came to watch me while my parents were away. A dumpy, green-eyed high-school dropout, Dixie kept the TV on and pressed herself against the underside of the kitchen table until her eyes rolled back in her head and she gave out a shiver and a moan. My mother spoke mistrustfully of Dixie, and more than once I heard her say something about “that girl getting her plumbing fixed by the maintenance man.” But Dixie was fun because she was restless and had no fear of sugary treats.

I was seven years old and had just started summer vacation when I learned that my brand-new grandmother from New York City was coming to stay with us for a week or two, “to meet her new family.” Brasalina, a half-black, half-Indian Brazilian woman of twenty-one, had just married my grandfather, my father’s father, who was eighty-three and too ill to come with her on this visit. Her impending stay, even if it meant free baby-sitting for a while, was the subject of grave late-night discussions at the kitchen table. My mother, only a few years older than her new mother-in-law, seemed to take Brasalina’s visit as some kind of insult, and the conversations, to which I was privy on those warm summer nights when all the doors and windows stayed open, would go something like this:

“She’s so young,” my mother would say, her voice heavy with misgiving. “Can we trust her to baby-sit?”

“Dixie’s sixteen and headed for a home for unwed mothers.”

“Yes, but this woman’s from another country. She doesn’t even speak English.”

“She speaks English, dear. Remember, the Old Rascal married her. Give him some credit.”

“Where does he find them all?”

“More power to the Old Devil, I say” was my father’s reply. He had many other names for my grandfather, all preceded by “the Old” and spoken with restrained but unmistakable pride.

“The Old Scoundrel doesn’t have that much longer,” he would say, as if to comfort my mother. “He’s not well.”

“You’ve been saying that for three wives now.”

At last Brasalina arrived from New York City. I was eager to meet this controversial new grandmother. She was “quite a looker,” my father had confided to me; a dancer, he’d added, and a great cook, too. But nothing he’d said prepared me for seeing my grandmother descend from the plane and walk across the tarmac. Her hips writhed as if she were sustaining the orbit of an invisible hula hoop. Her breasts rose and fell in an amazing tide. She wore a yellow sun hat with a crocheted pineapple on the side, and each way she turned she melted everything in sight with her smile. She looked like a woman out of a Harry Belafonte song. I glanced at my father, whose jaw hung slack. My mother drove an elbow into his ribs. “Hello, Brasalina,” she said with a vinegary smile. “It’s so wonderful to meet you at last.”

On the trip home from the airport, Brasalina sat in the back seat with me and replied to every question with a drawnout, singsong “woood.”

“How are you, Brasalina?”

“I’m woood.”

My gramps was woood, and New York City was woood. I had never been to the East Coast before and imagined a singing Pinocchio forest. Asked how she liked America, she declared that it was woood, and she “like much,” but it was “too fass, like crazy chicken people.” She seemed unflappable, with that brassy smile and the constant clashing of her lashes. Whenever my parents weren’t looking, she would caress the top of my head and give me a wink and a real smile that made me feel as if I were floating on a magical island.

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