Mam is wedged in between two rather fat women. Her blouse is white and opened down to the fourth button so that a man in a flat hat above her is leaning over, trying to peep down into the cleavage. It might be a bit bony for his taste. She has lost a lot of weight in the Bronx. She has a tendency to sit at the dinner table and push the food around on her plate, the fork clanging tinnily. Her arms are cartilaginous. A hip-bone juts from the dress. Her neck is a brown stalk of rhubarb with its long striations. The dark hair is pulled back, ribboned in red. She is on the bottom stoop with her hands placed carefully in her lap, one over the other. They are hands that have been doing laundry all day. She works with a family from Tipperary who still keep the letters ‘CHINESE LAUNDRY’ over the door, inspiring jokes about the slanty eyes and yellow skin of the Irish rednecks. Mam’s eyes are drawn down to her hands. Long and water-wrinkled, they have been scrubbing for many hours. Remnants of white washing powder under the nails. The tops of the fingers are puffy and the skin is loose from so much water. It is strange the patterns that are made in her hands. The fingerprint lines seem to become much more prominent, so that the rings at the top of each finger are bigger to the eye. Maps on her fingers. Far away, a boy named Miguel could lodge dirt in the fingernails and make a work of art from it. Mexican earth, the good earth.
A salesman has called earlier that evening, selling hand cream. She has bought a bottle of it. Salesmen are always calling at their door, at night. They have very short hair and perfect trouser creases and fabulous pitches in their voices — selling vacuum cleaners, knife sharpeners, wireless radios, kitchen tiles, kettles, ironing boards — and a lot of notes change fists. A great street for salesmen. People here talk a lot about new kitchen machinery. The lemon scent on her hands rises up to her nostrils, and she is glad that she bought it, although money is fairly tight these days. Money is like that flock of birds that arrived last night just as an old Hoagy Carmichael song jumped out of the radio. The birds arrived on the very first strain of ‘Ol’ Buttermilk Sky,’ flittered through it, left when the song ended. When they took off there were a lot of bird droppings on the ground outside the door. Money is like that flock of birds, Mam might think. You notice it when it’s not around. But if you have enough money you can get away, fly off, as many do.
Removal trucks sometimes arrive, and many jealous stares follow the lifting of the furniture, off to a street in a wealthy part of Brooklyn, or Queens, or Long Island, a road lined with trees and motor cars, where there might be a few Italians or Jews as well. Or even some of her own.
Mam is just about smiling as she looks down at her hands. It is not an unhappy smile, just a little lost on her face. Maybe she’s wondering what she’s doing here. Wondering what has led her to this. Wondering if life is manufactured by a sense of place, if happiness is dependent on soil, if it is an accident of circumstance that a woman is born in a certain country, and that the weather that gives birth to the soil also gives birth to the unfathomable intricacies of the heart. Wondering if there is a contagion to sadness. Or an entropy to love. Or maybe Mam isn’t thinking this way at all. Maybe she is wondering about the sheer banalities of her day, what she will cook for dinner, what end of the kitchen table she will do her ironing on, when she will get time to wash the white tablecloth, if she should put some aloe on her husband’s hands, hands that are now out of the photograph, pressing down on a button that will open a shutter.
The old man is hot-roofing these days because he cannot make enough money from his photographs for them to live on. He hates the job, but it’s all he can find. The Wyoming photographs come back from publishers with courteous notes, not even signed. Mam doesn’t like the idea of him being on a roof. Brutal work, carrying buckets of hot tar. She doesn’t like the man who runs the company either, Mangan, a sly-eyed man who drives around in an old Ford truck, ladders jutting from it. The company is called Koala-T Roofing Company, with a picture painted on the side, an impish koala holding a bucket. Mangan doesn’t pay very well and when my father comes home she has to scrape the globs of dried tar from his forearms. ‘Koala-T, me arse!’ he shouts. Sometimes he curses and slams his fists down on the table — ‘I want to take photos! Not do this shit! Do you understand me!’ and she must soothe him and sometimes get in front of his camera. She is wondering if perhaps he will take more photographs tonight and be happy for that. I stand in front of her and ask: Are ya happy, Mam? She doesn’t reply. But there is something in her that says: Well, yes, I am happy here, I suppose I’m happy, but I’d be happier elsewhere.
I drift off from the group again and hear the leaping boy still screaming in delight by the fire hydrant.
Not a lot is going on in Mam’s life. Sometimes, on a day off from the laundry, she goes into New York City on the subway and tries on red hats in the Fifth Avenue department stores, wanders around through acres of perfume and cosmetics and fineries. The ladies behind the counter soon realise she isn’t buying and leave her alone. She moves gracefully through the stores, fingering things, acquiring them for the briefest of moments, lays them down again, moves out into the street, where she walks through the traffic to sit in the rear of St Patrick’s Cathedral. In the silence she reincarnates herself — nothing too romantic, a grackle maybe. She settles down on a telegraph pole in her hometown, looks around. Swoops down and takes the host from the mestizo priest’s fingers. Takes off again into coloured winds. Revisits a house. Darts along dry streets. Strange to be a bird. Strange how hollow your bones become.
And how curious it is that she hasn’t heard from Cici in so long. The last time Cici wrote, she was on a train heading west, slamming through flatlands. She scribbled from a boxcar, where light filtered through in slants, and a mad red-faced hobo shared Spam sandwiches with her. It was a short letter and Mam read it so often that she began to incant parts of it in her mind like a church prayer: I miss you very much, Juanita, keep smiling, it paints the world well, I will see you very soon. There is something about Cici that makes the world worth living. Mam thinks about her often — it’s not so much that she wants to kiss her again as just simply see her, reassure herself that Cici really existed, that there was a time of such splendid happiness, that there might be one again.
Most of Mam’s other times are spent in quiet exactitude in her apartment, cleaning, arranging, putting things back in their proper places, meticulous, proud. When she talks she has the strangest lilt of half-Irish, half-Mexican accent. People seem to enjoy her company. She has stories to tell about chickens and a far-off country. And another world of fires and a tower. Yet the secret part of her — the photos in their bedroom — is well hidden from view, behind lace curtains on the third floor, where pigeons sometimes nestle at the windowsill. The only time that her husband seems to be truly at peace is when he’s taking those photos. They’re not obscene, not in any way. They make him content. It’s a small enough price for Mam to pay, and it’s an attention of sorts. He is still in love with her. He still makes a temple from her body — even though it’s much like a minaret now.