A Store-bought Slice of Chocolate Cake

It was Thanksgiving. I was standing at the door of my apartment with fried chicken but without keys. I sure did have priorities. I was locked out, for probably the 5th time so far. I hoped to God that Mom didn’t come home first, because she’d be so mad, talking to me about responsibility and all the things that could go wrong. She would ask things like “What if neither of us come home until late? What if someone kidnapped you?” and other unrealistic situations only a mom could think up.

I rang the bell, hoping dad was home, and the knob turned. Success! But the door opened and a strange eye met mine behind the chain. It was the son of our landlord who lived in the basement. Why was he in our house?

I called my dad, scared, and told him that I was locked out and the chain was on the door, but not that I had seen someone in our house.

“Your mom probably left the chain on the door before she left,” he said.

“That’s not possible. She can’t chain it from the outside… ”

I think he was just trying to rule out the alternative.

We got up to our living room and it looked like it had been plundered by Vikings. Someone had tried to take out our t.v., but it was too heavy. Our phones were in our toilets, our rooms had been ravaged through. Nothing was stolen. It was clear that someone was trying to send a message. The message was that we had been late with the rent one too many times. Overtaken by the mess, I started to cry.

“Who would do something like this?” I asked my dad.

I knew who would do it, but I said nothing to my parents about who had been in our house, someone who would’ve had the keys. Mom got home and we called the police, and I woke up a few hours later on the living room floor to cops swarming our house. They had just finished their investigation.

“We’re sorry you had to go through this, and on Thanksgiving too,” one of them said.

“Thank you for your help,” my parents said.

“Thank God, they didn’t touch my gold,” Mom said.

❈❈❈

My mom and I always broke in any house we were moving into, spending the first night there while my dad stayed at the old place. I still remember our first night together in the bare house, our home, that we were about to move out of. Mom and I slept on the floor of the master bedroom, and I remember the place seeming fresh with possibility. The apartment was all clean lines and space, unlike the old house which was just that -- old. I considered the pristine white walls and the huge windows letting in the pre-dawn light, then went to sleep, settling into my new home instantaneously.

My mother and I continued the tradition for our new house. It was in a different area not too far from East Tremont called Hunts Point. The first difference was that we were now going to live in an apartment, the type all my friends lived in with the doors you had to get buzzed into and graffiti. We were now residents of Apt. 3E, which was missing one of its locks. In the hole where the second lock was supposed to be you could see all the way down the hallway into the house. It was tiny. There were two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a dingy little kitchen with reddish tiling. It was a far cry from our old walkup with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a skylight, but I understood that this was all we could afford. It was a quiet night with no t.v., no music, no internet. My mom and I had spaghetti and steak for dinner, then put blankets on the floor in one of the cold bedrooms. I barely slept, the overhead subway rumbling just a block away from our house every few minutes. This was a house, and there weren’t termites or robbers, but I knew it could never be my home.

The next morning I had to shower for school. I still remember the body wash my mom gave me, some apple scented thing from the dollar store. I looked out of the frosted glass, standing under the cold water and wincing as I used the cold gel to wash up. This bathroom was tiny. You barely had room to turn around without running into something. How were the three of us supposed to share this? I walked out and dried off, feeling dirtier than when I walked in. Moving our old life into this new space was difficult. There was barely enough space for three bodies to share, let alone tables and chests and furniture. Walking down the long hallway into the house was like traveling down an esophagus, and when I got to the living room I saw all of our old stuff packed in way too tight, like a stomach about to burst. I looked at our old long table, red couches, and huge lampshade among the black trash bags containing our lives. Suddenly, I was overcome with an intense claustrophobia and no way to escape it.

Time passed, and life went on. One of the truisms of life is that it must go on. We must grow, change, and die. I never fell in love with the apartment at Simpson, but I got used to it. The upside was that there were a lot of interesting people around, and interesting places to go. There was the boy who lived next door to me, for example. Whenever I got home from school he would be leaning on a car with a group of his friends, and it gave me anxiety passing by them because they looked so cool and I was just a nerd in my schoolgirl uniform.

“How was your day?” he asked almost everyday. I never answered, opening the building doors quickly and jogging up the steps while he and his friends laughed.

There was the old guy who stopped me in the stairwell one day. He was sitting on the bottom step, beret on, walker in front of him. I tried to be polite, saying hi, but that’s where he got me.

“You’re so beautiful. You could be a model,” he told me.

“Thank you,” I smiled, trying to walk up to the third floor.

He went on for a few minutes about my beauty and possible careers in fashion. He ended with a special piece of advice:

“Whatever you do, do not get into porn.”

“Okay,” I nodded, taking the sage advice.

Our neighbors were a trip. Almost every night they would play songs in Spanish over speakers, turned up so loud that the vibrations traveled into you, matching your heartbeat to the bass. Romeo Santos, Prince Royce, and Daddy Yankee were played so often that I could hum along to the tunes.

Like my old neighborhood, there were the usual go-to spots: a Kennedy’s Fried Chicken, a Chinese restaurant, and the neighborhood cornerstone which was the deli. My mom was livid at the amount of crap that I put into my body. I was as thin as a twig, so I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t eat anything I wanted. I stopped eating what she cooked months before because of the fear of termites, and unfortunately the habit stuck. I spent money we didn’t have on food everyday until sandwiches, cakes, fried chicken, and chicken and broccoli became my diet. It really hurt my mother.

“Why don’t you wanna eat what I cook?” she asked one day. I was in the middle of a store-bought slice of chocolate cake, paused mid-chew. I was too scared to answer, so I just shrugged, and she walked away disappointed, making me feel like I wasn’t the daughter I should’ve been.