MOTHER, UNKNOWN

Mami with a rare smile

Ernston Road, heading towards home. Mr Dee’s was just on the left, off frame.

I worked the steel mill that summer, Raritan River Steel, on Elm Street.  I’ll have to tell you about that wild-ass gig one day — I still have nightmares about it, Elm Street nightmares. At least once a year I’m back at the job, in the rolling mill and the steel cobbles and before I can utter a sound the glowing coil shears me clean in half.

It was, in poco palabras, a tough draining job.  Sweated away five pounds of water a day, minimum, and endured more racism than you could shake a memoir at. 

And then there was the commute.  Because I didn’t have a car — I was saving to help pay for Rutgers — I had to take the bus, which meant nearly one hour on the M15 to get from Sayreville to Perth Amboy, and then another 45 minutes to walk from the bus stop to our apartment in London Terrace.  Four hours day on the bus, give or take a delay.  A part time job just to reach to my full time job.  A smarter person would have quit, but I needed the money if I was going to return to Rutgers in the fall — and no one paid like the mill. 

I couldn’t read on the bus because I always got dizzy, so I just stared out at Central Jersey, which was the place I knew best in those days, my homeland.  (Homeland — the place of defeats you can’t immigrate from.)  Sometimes I’d bring along the letters my girlfriend at the time wrote me.  She wasn’t like me at all; her Cherry Hill family had loot and she spent summers at her family house on the Shore.  In her letters she shared a lot about the boys who hit on her at the beach, especially the ones on leave from the service. 

I learned that summer that you could just as easily die from jealousy as from blazing steel. 

But that’s not why I’m writing this.  There was an interesting thing about that walk home from the bus stop.  Seems my mother, who had a bullshit-paying assembly line job in South River (opposite direction from Perth Amboy), arrived at the bus stop ten minutes before me.  Every day.  And because I was a runner (casual, four miles a day) and she was in her late 40s and not even five feet tall, I always caught up with her on the walk home up Ernston Road.

My mother — what can I tell you?  I could spend a thousand pages on her and never reach an end, but in order to keep it simple: she was the prototypical hardworking non-English-speaking immigrant who always had at least two jobs, and got nervous when she didn’t.  A tiny light skinned woman and because most people in Jersey didn’t know their chabines from their elbows, everyone confused her for Arab or South Asian.  She wore glasses and didn’t talk much either, in public or at home, except those special nights when she lost her shit and ranted to us kids about how screwed we were because there was no money for the rent or for food. 

But what matters most here: my mother and I were never close.  To put it simply: my mother had five children, one favorite, and I wasn’t it.  She took care of us as best she could, but the only person she was really warm with, the only person she treated with real affection, was the favorite.  I had spent most of my childhood wishing that wasn’t true, wishing she could be more Catholic with her love, and even at 20 I was still wishing. 

For a few weeks that steel mill summer I caught up to her and we walked home together.  1.7 miles in total, up through Sayreville and then Madison Park and then across Route 9 and then at last the covered landfill and we were home.  I guess I had this fantasy that maybe on those walks some connection would blossom between us.  Maybe she’d suddenly start talking about herself, about the life she’d led in the Dominican Republic, a life that had left her physically scarred and unwilling to return unless she had no choice.  It wasn’t a super-sized fantasy; I didn’t expect to suddenly become her favorite but it didn’t seem unreasonable that we might become closer — that she might begin to share all those stories of her past, about our lives in the Dominican Republic, and I might tell her about my own troubles at the mill and about the white girl I was dating — who I felt inferior to in every way except intellectually. 

But no dice.  My mother would turn, say my name, maybe nod, and that would be it.  No kiss, no hug, no questions about my work or about me.  I’d talk to fill the silence, but after a few days I shut up.

Maybe I should have stuck it out.  After all there were only six weeks left of that summer, of that miserable job, and then I’d be back in New Brunswick.  Six weeks of silent walking — who knew what could happen in that time?  Six weeks was nothing, I had done harder things standing on my head, was doing harder things at the mill, but maybe I was just worn out from the job or maybe I was depressed over the girl or maybe it was just the bad habit I had of quitting things that I felt were impossible.  Certainly, my mother felt impossible.  By the third week I stopped calling out, just followed her home at a distance.  That felt more comfortable. 

Of course, I never stopped watching her.  She was my mother, after all — and I was still hopeful that even at a distance something might open up.  But there weren’t any revelations.  A few times she went into the stores on Route 9 to do some shopping and once she stopped to buy a hot dog from Mr. Dee’s.  After she left I asked one of the Dee brothers what my mother had ordered and they told me: a plain dog, no mustard, no ketchup, no onions, no chili. 

Otherwise, it was just her walking.  Didn’t matter how hot it got; she never stopped to catch her breath, never slowed down.  One foot after another.  

I kept hoping that she would look back and with a glance obliterate the worlds between us, but she never did. 

And then the summer was over.  The last day of work I intended to walk with her, to acknowledge that time, to say something about how I felt, but my best friend surprised me by driving down from Ridgewood and waiting for me at the steel mill gate, and we went out that night to celebrate not being burned alive and I lost the chance. 

Truth was, I probably would have chickened out. 

Still, the failure served its purpose, was generative as failures can sometimes be.  All that junior year I couldn’t stop thinking about our non-walks together.  Couldn’t stop thinking that I knew my new girlfriend’s parents better than I knew my own mother.  Couldn’t stop thinking how, despite everything, I still longed to connect with my mother, to have even a scrap of what everyone else around me seemed to enjoy — if not love or friendship, at least some knowledge of each other. 

Never got another crack at the walk but towards the end of junior year, on one of my trips home, I started asking my mother to tell me about herself.  Sat at the kitchen table, like an adult, and looked her right in the face.  She stared back at me like I was crazy.  No one in the family had ever asked about her life — it wasn’t the kind of intimacy that my immigrant family welcomed or modeled. 

There’s nothing to say, she’d mutter — before telling me to leave her alone. 

I was clearly betraying the laws of our familial universe but who better to break these than me — the kid who was not the favorite, who didn’t have a whole lot to lose?  What’s the worst that could happen?  My mother would love me less? 

As my writing professor had said during one of our classes: Every disadvantage, in another context, could be an advantage. 

As Sergeant Chang says in The Killer (a film I had on heavy rotation that year): You can't win all the time, but you can't lose forever, either. 

Simple observations that I took to heart.  

Week in, week out, I asked my mother the same thing and she brushed me off, annoyed.  I wanted to quit, of course, but there had been a lesson in my mother’s walks.  Two, actually.  No matter the heat or the distance you have to keep going. 

And: no matter the heat or the distance — the only way to get where you need to be is one foot in front of the other. 

So, in spite of the rejection and my mother’s baffled annoyance and her claims that I was crazy, I stayed asking her until finally one winter day, while she was stirring a sancocho, she remarked, almost as an afterthought: Before I met your father, I wanted to be nurse. 

And that was how I began to know my mother.