I could always smell food even before it
was on Mama, my paternal grandmother’s green Formica
dinette in her Harlem apartment as a
child. I’d lie awake on a Saturday morning having spent
the night on the foldout bed in the livingroom.
Before I heard her slippered feet shuffling on
the worn spots of her brown linoleum, I could smell the crisp apple wood bacon,
the griddle cakes,
and the scrambled eggs. Mama said it was because I was born with a third eye just
like her.
She said she knew from the day I was born I had inherited the gift of being
able to evoke images,
see and smell things before they were palpable because at only a few hours old
I was trying
to raise my head to see what was around me.
My father had died when I was seven in a
car accident a year after he and my mother got divorced.
I’d go to Mama’s after school and on
weekends because my mother was always working.
She was a teacher at the School of Performing Arts on West 46th Street. I
didn’t mind going
to Mama’s. I loved her and I loved her food.
At home I never smelled anything except
the smell of a can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli burning in
the pot my mother forgot about. I lived on Fruit loops and milk in our Brooklyn
apartment but at
Mama’s I had my fill and then some.
Mama always played music when she cooked. I’d
brush my teeth and make my way to her Formica
dinette and get baptized in her rendition of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come. It was
my father’s favorite song and after hearing it so much it became mine. “I was born by the river in a
little tent, Oh and just like the river I've been running ever since, It's been
a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will…”
Afterwards we’d clean off the dinette and
Mama would spread out her photo albums on it.
She’d
show me my father’s baby and school pictures and pictures of the two of us
together. I always
took them out of their plastic sleeve to get a better look at him, spreading
them on the table
like a set of oversized dominoes. Mama shared the good parts about him that my
mother forgot
about after their marriage failed.
Though I wished my mother had a different
opinion of my father; that in death he had redeemed
himself to her; I was at least grateful that she never stopped me from spending
time with
Mama. So I never told her when we went to Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn to talk
to him and
put flowers on his grave because that might have ended my visits. But at times
I felt that she should
know but to avoid telling her I’d stay in my room and immerse myself in words;
books, magazines,
newspapers. I devoured them all.
Twenty years later, no longer worried
about spilling secrets to my mother; I am thankful for my
reading habit. If I hadn’t been an avid
reader I would never have come across the article in the
New York Magazine called, “Secrets of The Deep,” by Christopher Bonanos. It was about the
things that lie beneath the New York Harbor. Under number eleven was a Formica
Dinette found
in the East River on 16th Street.”
Some things you don’t need proof of when
you feel it in your gut. I knew that was Mama’s Formica
dinette. I closed my eyes and could envision it with the metal band around its
edge and the
tubular chairs I sat in awaiting my breakfast on Saturday mornings. I could hear
her singing.
I
could see the framed picture of Jesus overhead and a bowl of plastic fruit in
the middle of the table
and a portable radio on the far end. Mama’s dinette was seasoned with a heap of
memories just
like her heavy black skillet. Each year that passed even as she grew old she
created memories
for me even when I grew old enough to stay home on my own and only came every other
weekend.
“How’s school Jacqueline?”, “Now help me
snap this pound of string beans.”
“Hope you’re not thinking about a
boyfriend yet,” she said when I turned fourteen. “You got time
for that now get the jelly jar top to help me cut out these biscuits.”
I could see Mama just as clear as the day sitting
there quiet at her end days tired and still mourning
my father. I had thought Mama’s Formica table would be in her house until I
knocked on
her door one day and she didn’t answer and I found out she had gone to Heaven.
But one summer
day she decided it was time to get a new dinette set. She wanted something
bigger for Thanksgiving
dinners when her family came over. I went with her to pick it out.
“Not that one,” I said when she pointed to
one she liked.
“Not that one,” I said when she pointed to
another one.
Finally after an hour of browsing and me
saying no to all of her choices she sat down on a sofa
and told me what I needed to hear. “I’m getting a new table but I’m going to
save my old table
for you for when you get your first apartment.”
When the new dinette came, Mr. Earl,
Mama’s landlord, having learned she wanted to keep the
old one for me, said he would store it in the basement for twenty-five dollars
a month. When he
and his son came to move it I let my fingers graze the top of the Formica and
didn’t want to let
it go. Once I even attempted to sneak down to his basement and see it but the
door was locked.
After I graduated from college Mama died
quietly in her sleep. Mama’s brothers and sisters cleaned
out her apartment and I figured Mr. Earl gave them her Formica dinette along
with her other
belongings. I was glad that when she died I had a boyfriend who loved me as
completely as she
did. My mother didn’t like him. Mama would and she’d tell me all about his good
parts if she had
been alive.
I’m ninety-nine percent sure that Mr. Earl
pocketed Mama’s money for all the years she trusted
him to watch over her Formica table. I am sure along with his son in the
covering of the night
he loaded it in his old pickup truck and threw it in the East River. As greedy
as he was he probably
doled out the same fate to countless other tenants in his Harlem building. Miss
Leslie in Apartment
309 right above Mama, her oak dresser that she told Mama was in the basement.
Mr. Brown
in Apartment 211, the golf set he was saving for his grandson. Mrs. Harris in
Apartment 413;
her Singer sewing machine. Mama’s Formica dinette, and in all probability her neighbor’s cherished
belongings, was in the East River.
I had always thought of the river as being
agitated and raging but now I thought of it as being calm.
Calm because a piece of Mama, labeled number eleven was down there and every
now and then
she visited it with my father and told him daughter stories, and serenaded him
with their favorite
Sam Cooke song and all other existence beneath the sea became motionless.
