Post 3: DCMJ: Chapter 1
The House on South Seventh Street
When Mom moved into Tata’s three-room shack at the end of South Seventh Street, it had already begun to crumble. Every year it deteriorated further so that by my family’s last year there, it bordered on hazardous. A perfect metaphor, it turns out, for my parents seventeen-year marriage.
Mom was a naive seventeen-year-old, she said, when, in 1956, she met my dad, Zacarias Olivas—a handsome, very masculine twenty-seven-year-old with dark, indigenous features. Separately, the two had been asked to serve as godparents for the newborn of a mutual friend. Despite the age difference, they quickly began dating. “Well, we didn’t really date,” Mom said. “We didn’t go anywhere. I would go to church to the rosary every day, and your tata would come see me there after.”
Only a couple of months into their relationship, Tata brought Mom to his house on South Seventh Street for a supposed visit with his two younger sisters, Rosa and Ventura. Although the siblings, all in their twenties now, still shared the home they had grown up in, he owned it, having inherited it from their deceased parents several years earlier. As Tata already knew, the women were still at work when he and Mom arrived, which confused her until Tata began to kiss and fondle her. When he slipped his hand under her skirt, Mom froze up and told him to stop. She asked him to take her home, but he refused. He proceeded until he had taken her virginity and sealed her fate.
Mom knew she couldn’t go back home after that, she said. Her parents wouldn’t want her after what she had done. “That’s what we were taught. If you had sex with a man, you had to marry him.”
For a few months, Tata resisted making it official but expected Mom to live with him from then on and follow his orders. Her first week in his home, he made her quit her job at Hunter’s Photography Studio downtown, despite her boss’ plans to retire and leave her to manage the business. “Your tata was very jealous,” she said. “He didn’t want me to work because he didn’t want any men to see me.”
Men did notice her. With her fair skin, green eyes, radiant smile, and petite figure, she was stunning in her youth. But for almost two decades, she remained unwaveringly loyal to her husband, Latino Catholic mores and a fierce sense of personal responsibility driving her, binding her to marriage and motherhood in a decaying shanty.
By the time I came along in August of 1968, Mom was raising seven other children in the house, from my brother, Joe, age ten, to my sister María Rosa (aka Princess), age three. In the next two years, my brothers Tino and Jesse joined the family. My earliest memories date back to when I was four and our twelve-member household navigated a living room, one bedroom, and a kitchen.
Our most basic needs determined the furniture that occupied the two main living spaces. Our rectangular living room served as a second bedroom, with two big beds monopolizing most of it. That was where my four older brothers slept, two in each bed, with my younger brother Tino curled up in between Ricky and Jr. in one of them. The only older brother not in either of the beds was Louie, who enjoyed having all to himself the military-green mattress he rolled out onto the living room floor at night. Three additional pieces of small furniture fit in the room: a dresser in the corner, on top of which sat a black-and-white TV, a rickety armchair with ripped upholstery, only inches away from the dresser, and on the other side of the door an antique one-piece desk.
We had two beds in the official bedroom of the house as well. My sisters slept in the one right under the window looking out onto the front yard, with Jesse snuggled in between them. In front of the window hung a pink blanket, in place of curtains we couldn’t afford for every room. I loved watching it at sunrise from the second bed a couple of feet away. Although drowsy, I’d force my eyes open long enough to see it absorb the light.
Sharing that bed with Mom and Tata, I slept at their feet, to give them privacy, I assume. Although for Tata it wasn’t enough. A few times, I woke up to his carrying me to Louie’s mattress in the living room. The first time, after he set down my body, I sprung back up and started heading back toward the bed, only to run into his towering, shirtless body. “You stay there!” he yelled. I lay back down bawling, hating him for hogging my mother. When he didn’t physically carry me out of bed, stopped from doing so by Mom, his heavy feet all over me in the middle of the night drove me out. One night I woke up to a swift, painful kick on the side of my hip. Tata grunted, hitting me a second time, with enough force to flip me onto my side. The blow scared me so much that I scrambled to get out of there. I dragged my body toward the edge of the mattress, my heart beating quickly, and, grabbing onto the fitted sheet, lowered myself feet-first onto the floor. Tata’s feet slid closer to Mom now, then rested on their side. A barricade that kept me out.
I wandered alone for the next several minutes in the darkness. I couldn’t figure out where to sleep. Bodies lay everywhere, with everyone in their own spot. I especially envied Jesse. He looked so warm and safe with his thumb in his mouth, his arms around his teddy bear, and his head resting against Reyna’s chest.
I lumbered up to our toy box in the darkest corner of the room and sat down. I wanted to stretch out on the pile of toys to sleep, but wooden blocks and plastic trucks jabbed at my butt and the back of my thighs. I looked back at Mom and Tata’s bed. Mom lay on her side with her back to me, the sheets up to her neck. Facing Tata. Choosing him over me. Agreeing with him that I was unlovable.
Exasperated, I wriggled my butt trying to get comfortable, driving over the edge of the box a toy that crashed onto the floor. Bodies shifted in their beds. Mom rolled over and sprung up to a seated position. “Who’s there?”
A lamp clicked on in the living room. Tata lifted his shirtless torso, propping himself up on his elbow. He squinted, adjusting to the light, then glared at me.
“Abel,” Mom said. “What are you doing there?”
I didn’t answer. I sat there shivering in the partially lit corner with no words yet to explain.
By morning, Tata always seemed to loosen his grip on Mom, eager to leave the house. Mom would fry his eggs and brew his coffee and, and then he’d take off—in search of a job, he’d claim. Yet he often ended up lounging at his sisters, Rosa and Ventura’s, house and then spent the afternoon at his favorite bar, the Toltec. Or before heading to the bar, he’d stand in front of the train depot, facing Holland Street. He’d stand there for a couple of hours watching the cars travel down one of the town’s main thoroughfares. I can only guess at what he might have been thinking.
Although Tata got to roam about daily, he forbade Mom any social visits, except for limited ones to her mother’s, where she reconnected with Amá and her younger sisters. Other than that, she only left the house for her trips to the grocery store or to Sunday morning Mass at Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church a couple of blocks up the street, often with some of us in tow.
Mom’s days in the house on South Seventh Street consisted of chores, laundry, and endless hours of taking care of her children. Before I was school age, her only breaks occurred right after lunch, during nap time for Tino, Jesse, and me. She’d lie down, too, in the bed nearest the TV, where she watched her favorite soap, All My Children, until she grew drowsy. I often had the privilege of joining her in that bed. Before she drifted off to sleep, I played with her soft, short curly hair, a sensation she loved. She’d lure me into it by claiming to have lice and asking me to hunt for them. “Is this a piojo, Mom?” I’d ask her, picking out pieces of dandruff instead. “Mmhm,” she’d say, barely opening her eyes to look at the white spec at the tip of my little finger. “Kill it.”
In the middle of the afternoon, my brothers and sisters tramped back into the house, the school bus having shuttled them back from the elementary, junior, and high schools on the north side of the tracks.
My siblings’ return gave Mom a chance to finish up her chores, often involving her daughters. The older kids watched us little ones. Sometimes the older boys got permission to play football in the street with their friends. Eventually, Mom called everyone back in to do their homework on beds or on the floor. Then we’d watch TV and have dinner. Tino, Jesse, and I ate with Mom at the table while the others plopped themselves throughout the rest of the house.
Since we had no indoor plumbing, Mom would holler at the boys to help her retrieve water from the spigot in the front yard. “Chicos, fill the buckets!” she shouted. All the pots on the stove boiled the water, to pour into the tin tubs for baths. I had the shift with Tino and Jesse.
Mom scrubbed my skin harshly as if I hadn’t bathed in weeks. I always wondered if she was angry at me for something, not at all aware yet about the deeper causes of her misery: our poverty, her marriage to an alcoholic, the stresses of having to care for ten kids by herself, and her conflicted feelings as she plotted to leave Tata for good.
Large tin cans that once contained shortening for Mom’s cooking were where we crapped. The older kids used the outhouse in the backyard throughout the day, but after dinner, our kitchen doubled as an indoor bathroom, with everyone using the tin cans. The older boys and Tata made use of two, one in front of the other, since they couldn’t fit all of their private parts into one. Mom would pin a pink blanket in the doorway to give herself, Tata, and her adolescent kids privacy. On nights when it was too cold to open windows, the house stank. Until recently, dreams of living there have come to me with intense smells of gas and feces.
Even in our working-class neighborhood, we were the poorest family on the block. Our house was the only oddly constructed one, with an oversized cement slab at its entrance, an improvised solution on our paternal grandfather’s part, maybe, to not having the funds for an actual elevated porch. He didn’t have the funds for quality building material either, apparently, or to hire skilled contractors. He and Tata built the house themselves, and by the time I came along, the structure’s façade was riddled with holes from the years of exterior plaster breaking off, and the kitchen ceiling dropped chunks of dry wall on occasion. During the winter, the cold penetrated through the poorly insulated walls of every room in the house.
I was too young to notice our poverty. Far from feeling self-conscious about the holes in our front exterior wall, I broke off bits of plaster myself to reach in and hide things more easily. I wasn’t ashamed of the small, course bumps covering the interior walls. I took advantage of them to scratch my back when I had an itch, moaning as I pressed against them swaying back and forth. I never agonized about our nighttime bathroom arrangements in the way my older siblings likely did. I found it fun to crap in a tin can because of the ring it left on my bottom, one I loved tracing with my finger. Sometimes it was easier to wipe my butt with newspaper, which we did when money was especially tight and we couldn’t afford toilet paper. Although it hurt, it didn’t stick to my butt the way the soft white stuff could. When we moved to the projects, I even missed some of the features of our previous house, such as the scratched-up hardwood floors, their smell and warmth.
What I didn’t miss was the way dusk triggered dread, reminding me that soon Tata would be stumbling through the door, eager to pick a fight with Mom. One of those nights remains etched in my memory. Tata arrived after I had fallen asleep, but the guttural grumbling woke me. From my spot at the end of the bed, I peeked out at what was happening.
“This is my house,” he said in Spanish. His dark silhouette turned and pointed toward the living room behind him. He wobbled into the kitchen, where he opened the refrigerator door and, to goad Mom, threw the plastic bowls of leftovers covered in foil wrap onto the floor.
Mom rushed into the kitchen and screamed, “¡Estás loco! We barely have any food!”
He yelled back something drunkenly indecipherable. The fights almost always got physical, although I don’t recall seeing them hit each other, not while we lived on South Seventh Street. Maybe I blocked it out. A few of my siblings have clear memories of the violence: Tata shoving Mom so hard against the window that it broke the glass. Tata grabbing a knife and cutting her on the nose. Mom shattering a glass baby bottle over Tata’s head. All I recall is agonizing in bed in the dark when the fighting started, before anyone got up. My head throbbed as if it were the brunt of Tata’s punches. Convinced that he was going to kill Mom one day, I was certain I would lose her forever.
If he didn’t kill her, he’d find other ways to deprive me of her. On more than one afternoon, Tata came home sober, having slept off the alcohol in a jail cell the night before. He nuzzled up to Mom as she lay in bed next to me at nap time, as if I weren’t in bed with them, as if he couldn’t even see me. My heart hammered because I knew what could happen next. When Mom allowed him, Tata lifted her out of bed and carried her off into the other room. Then the pink blanket went up at the doorway, while I remained shut out in the living room. Unfazed by it, Tino and Jesse jumped up and down on the beds, adding to the noise coming from the afternoon TV soap. I sat quietly, sure I heard moans coming from the bedroom. His and sometimes hers. Moans telling me Mom had stopped thinking about me. That Tata had made her forget me, leaving me completely alone.
A month after I turned four, Mom sent me to preschool, at the community center a mile up the road, a couple of blocks east of our church. I don’t recall crying when Mom dropped me off the first day, perhaps because the community center was an older building with wooden floors and my teachers were Mexican-American women who spoke English with a hint of an accent, the environment not drastically different from the world I was from. I had the complete opposite experience the next year on my first day of kindergarten. Mom and I entered the red, brick building and took the long hallways with the white, hard linoleum floors into a classroom filled with children my age, many of them white. A tall and skinny white lady greeted us. My English very limited before I started kindergarten, I caught only half of what she said to me but followed her pointing finger to a coloring book on the floor. Mom nodded at me to sit down and color, which I did, with the sounds of sniffling children in the background. For a second, I wondered if they were crying, but the opportunity to color distracted me.
I had barely begun to shade the images on the page when I looked up to see Mom leaving the room. I shot up to follow her, but as soon I reached the door, the teacher shut it and planted herself in front of it. She pointed at the coloring book again. I couldn’t figure out what had just happened, why Mom had left me here. Tears rolled down my face. I cried louder, which seemed to trigger other children’s wailing as well. Suddenly, the whole room had joined in. We had all been abandoned, I realized.
The teacher scanned the room, the stress on her face intensifying. A second woman’s voice called her name, and she stepped away from the door, bringing the silver shiny round doorknob fully into view. I dashed forward, turned the knob, and sprinted down the hallway. When I spotted Mom near the building’s exit, I screamed, “¡Mami!”
She turned and waited until I reached her. She chuckled, “No, you have to stay here.” She must have added, “I’ll be back later to pick you up.” But it didn’t register. Or maybe she didn’t say it all. Maybe she figured it went without saying since we had followed this very routine countless times the previous year while I was in preschool. The teacher reached me and snatched my arm. She must have flashed Mom another distressed smile as she pulled me away. Back in the classroom, I sat on the carpet in a corner and buried my face in my hands. I was sure I would be stuck in this trap forever with other unwanted children, all of them parentless like me.
I’ve always wondered why the beginning of kindergarten was so traumatic for me, that first day and the weeks that followed. Maybe the stark contrast between the new school environment and home. Such foreign sights and sounds. For a period, I could barely understand what the teachers were saying, their words so unrecognizable I recall them as muffled utterances. I’d come to distinguish those sounds, even to associate them with warmth and kindness at times. And yet, my new environment and that abrupt separation from Mom would plant the seed for a somber, perhaps distorted, view of education. A deepening sense of isolation throughout my years as a student would cement that view: The main purpose of school was to rip me away from the people I loved and wall me inside unfamiliar territory. It even constructed walls inside my very self, such that no family member or aspect of my home life could fully bring me comfort again.