symphony in e minor

     I first saw my friend Nening when she was fourteen; she was coming down the road, straight faced and already washed away. She was carrying a small bag filled with a few pairs of pants and three t-shirts. She was going to be the Lavasores family cook, washer, and anything else a maid was supposed to be.

     Nening’s laundry tub was just big enough to hold the three piles of dirty underwear and the jeans that were handed to her everyday. With three boys and four girls, the piles kept accumulating in the corners of the house, and it was Nening smelling like soap, hands wrinkled clean but with dirt under her finger nails. I would call out to her after dinner when she was in the Lavasores kitchen window looking like a Chagall painting under a stern light bulb, reds and deep blues, hair flying up behind her. Come out, I’d tease, knowing she couldn’t. It was a joke, an unfriendly jibe to shake her from her suffering.

     Her father would come once a month and collect her wages, waiting outside on the porch away from the rich floors and white walls. I could say her father was a drunk who bought liquor instead of food, or that her mother was greedy and heartless for sending Nening away, but they were a poor family, with dirt floors, one pot of rice, and debt at the corner store. Her older brother no longer made sense. He talked crazy, with his hands waving in the air because he didn’t have enough food to eat when he was younger; his head was dizzy and his eyes were loopy.

     She didn’t tell me she was pregnant. Mama told me, whispering like the old women perched out in front of their houses on lazy afternoons with nothing to do but purse their toothless mouths. Nening with her round face and big eyes, pregnant just like that.

     It turned out it was a Lavasores boy keeping himself silent in the shadows of those midnight hours, Nening sleepy and dreary eyed, washing the laundry and pretending nothing had happened. The couple eventually told his mother who was livid, eyes sighing to the ground at the idea of telling her mother it would be the new maid for their oldest boy. She sat like that for a long time, and when she opened her eyes her face was cold, lips set hard. Mama Lavasores sent Nening away to stay at her cousin’s house in Bantigi, far away from anyone and anything that could testify to Nening’s big belly and newborn baby.

     Nening eventually came back. Her stomach was flat and the strain of birthing a baby by herself was there in the waning flesh of her face. She came back to the Lavasores family where she and her young husband would stay. They took over a small room in the left wing of the house, her laundry tub still holding the rest of the families’ dirty laundry. Their house was set up in that small room, one little window with a blue curtain hanging in the sun.

     One night I was out on the beach watching the night fishermen light the waves with their lanterns when she came and sat next to me. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t mention much; she seemed lost in her thoughts, like me. And then came an overflow of something I understood.

     "I want to go fishing like the fisherman and smell like the gas that light the lanterns. Get a net and throw it out into the water. I want to hear it sink to the bottom."

     She stopped speaking and looked to her baby. She pinched its cheek until it began to cry. The baby wailed from a deep red mark made by her fingernails.

     "I want him to die like I see the fish die in the nets," she said. "I’m tired of feeding and giving. I want to feed him to the urchins and starfish crawling on the bottom of the sea."

     She sighed, resigned to the understanding she could not really do this thing. She dreamt of a day when the young one wasn’t suckling her milk, and she could sit free like me, floating in the night without any parcels to carry.

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