In
rags She filled herself up
with air then let it all out like she was a fire-spitting dragon trying
to
scorch a medieval hamlet. The quartz pendant that rested on her linen
tunic
followed the movement of her chest. Nothing has the power
to piss me off more than my sister’s deep breaths. Whenever she tells
me to
take a deep breath, I want to stop breathing altogether. Sometimes I
picture
poisonous gas travelling in through her nostrils and all the way up to
her
lungs. Which only confirms: it’s way past time I find somewhere else to
live. Don’t get me wrong, I
couldn’t wait to get away from the mandalas, the dream catchers and the
eye-tearing incense. The problem was that I had nowhere to go. I was a
broke
artist that had to work odd jobs to make ends meet. To think I’d tried
so hard
to avoid clichés in my work just to become one myself. My sister had been
dropping hints here and there, making it clear I was overstaying my
welcome. “I bought paint for
the kitchen but I’ll wait until you’re gone to work
on it.” “After you leave I
might turn the spare bedroom into a home massage space.” Things were about to
change, though. I had rushed home that evening before I’d finished my
shift at
the café. An idea had come to me, the million-dollar idea. I had it
laid out in
my head and I had the materials I needed for it. Or at least I thought
I did. *** My fabric scrap collecting
had started when I was 4. I would spend my spare time sitting by my
seamstress
mother, a chaotic rainbow of crayons and paper sprawled on the linoleum
floor
in front of me, while she conducted her sewing machine. Our afternoons
smelled
of fresh fabric and paraffin wax. Sometimes talk radio was on, but most
days
there was only the murmur of the machine. The bow window in her sewing
room
allowed every lumen of sunlight to come in and made it look like we
lived in a
palace. The rest of the house gloomed in comparison. “How about this for
the scales?” my mom would ask as she watched me draw, handing me a
scrap with a
greenish-reddish pattern to add to my crocodile-ladybird hybrid. She
had the
perfect touch-up for each one of my creations, be it a mutant
apple-watermelon
orchard, a winged snail with a castle on its back, or a three-headed
underwater
queen. Whatever scraps didn’t get used went into a sandwich bag. Over
time the
sandwich bag grew into a gallon bag, then a grocery bag. By the time I
left for
college I had a 13-gallon bag worth of fabric rags that my mom had
given me. She was not surprised
when I told her I had decided to apply for art school. All those years,
as I
summoned my imaginary worlds on the floor, she had always made a point
to look
down from her seamstress throne and reassure me of what a great artist
I was. I
believed her. Even years later, when I realized the rest of the world
would never
be as enthusiastic about my imaginary worlds as my mother was, I never
doubted
I was an artist. My mother had told me so. ***
A harsh truth I’d
learned in art school was that artists had to spend as much time
looking for
submission opportunities as they did making art. Good chances were few
and far
between. I had become a master in sniffing them out, but winning a
prize or
landing a grant was a whole different story. Competition was fierce.
One of my bitter
professors had once compared art students to contestants in the Wacky
Races. We
were all Dick Dastardlys trying to maintain a Penelope Pitstop facade.
We
craved the money, we yearned for the fame, and we would cheat to get
them if
necessary, some with more remorse than others. On the outside, though,
we still
wanted to be seen as charming and sensitive souls. We wanted to be
perceived as
cooperative people that didn’t care about being rich and famous and
that considered
their fellow artists’ achievements victories of their own. At the time
I
shunned his vitriol. I wasn’t ready yet to let a jaded egomaniac
destroy my
romantic notions about the art world. *** I knew that The Most
Important Art Museum in the Country was about to open their annual
visual arts
contest again. This one paid a fat sum and gave winners the red-carpet
treatment.
Once again I was spinning the gears in my brain trying to come up with
a project
to submit. That evening at the
café, after I was done scrubbing red lipstick marks off of coffee mugs,
I was
assigned the task of gorilla-gluing the broken wings of a few espresso
cups.
“You’re good at this, you have artist hands,” my boss told me, wiggling
his
fingers in the air. That’s what he said to me every time he wanted me
to do
some odd chore like fixing a wobbly table or disguising a crack in a
water
glass. I had made my sister laugh once when I impersonated his
gesticulation to
her. “He should toss the broken stuff anyway,” she’d said. “Keeping it
around
is bad feng shui.” I had just finished
reuniting the broken cup pieces when the spark came to me. A project
that would
have a chance. More than that: a winning project. The perfect project.
A quilt.
I was going to sew a quilt using the fabric scraps I had been gathering
since
my childhood. Not the neat and symmetric kinds of quilts you see in
heritage
museums. It was going to be a crooked one, one that meandered like a
snake, one
whose seams twisted and turned like a river, one that reflected my
uneven
trajectory both in life and in art. My attempts, my failures, my mild
successes. “So deeply personal, yet so organically relatable.” I jotted
down
those words on a paper napkin. They might come in handy once I started
filling
out the Justification field of the submission form. Before I started
working on the project, though, I had a more pressing question to
answer: where
the hell was my bag of scraps? *** “Here,
grab the quartz,” my sister offered me
her pendant. “Hold it in your hands and visualize the bag in your
mind’s eye.” “My mind doesn’t have
an eye,” I replied as I kneeled to look under the living room couch for
the
zillionth time. I was breathing like
I had just finished running a marathon, cheeks hot and oily, sweat
sprouting
out of every pore. I had turned that apartment upside down but my bag
was
nowhere to be found. “Are
you sure you brought it with you?” my
sister asked, clutching the quartz herself. I didn’t dignify that
with an answer. If I were moving to Nepal or the Moon or Atlantis I
would take
my bag of scraps with me. If my house was on fire and I still had a
cat, given
the chance to only salvage one thing, well, there were always plenty of
kittens
waiting for a home. “Maybe it’s the
Universe telling you to let go of material possessions,” my sister
said. That was a funny
thing coming from someone whose apartment had more Buddha statues by
square
inch than a temple in Thailand. She was the one with a regular income
and three
credit cards, not me. I had moved to my
sister’s apartment about a year earlier because she lived closer to my
mother.
Our mother. Our mother had been diagnosed with cancer. The kind that
makes time
shrink. The doctors gave her six months to live. She didn’t last more
than
three. As the evil cells
drained the life out of her, I did my best not to let the sadness kill
me too.
She insisted on spending nights on her own. “To maintain some sense of
normalcy,” she said, as if that was possible. Every night by her
bedside I
promised to sneak out through the front door as soon as she fell
asleep. It
wouldn’t be long until I could no longer hold that promise. I did
chores and
ran errands for her. I drove her to the few appointments that still
made sense
to hold. I went from eating with her to force-feeding her. I tried to
convince
her to donate her body to science. She took a hard pass. Our days now smelled
of medicine and a body that was failing. Moaning had taken the place of
murmur.
The studio apartment she had been living in had slits for windows, and
the
curtains were always drawn because the brightness hurt her eyes. My sister came by a couple of times
bringing scented candles. Her visits
were shorter than what a hospital ICU would have allowed. The same
person that
would kneel in the middle of the sidewalk and do reiki on a pigeon’s
broken
wing wanted nothing to do with her own dying mother. There was always
an excuse
not to be there. Bad vibrations. Inauspicious planetary conjunction.
Chakra
pollution. Her default excuse was work, though. Ganesh forbid she had
to call
one of her clients and cancel a massage session or astrological map
reading.
Entitled white middle-aged ladies were a ruthless clan when it came to
giving
liberal professionals bad reviews, no matter how spiritually elevated
they
were. “Don’t
you think it’s bad karma,
not caring that you’re mother is dying?” I’d asked my sister one day,
trying to
beat her in her own game. “Don’t try to tell me what I care
and don’t care about,” she replied. “I
gave you the keys to my apartment,
you
can come and go as you please. What else do you want from me?” She raked the sand in her miniature
Zen garden with so much roughness
that some of it spilled out onto the glass surface of her coffee table. “I’m doing long-distance hand
imposition on mom,” she went on, “and a
15-minute morning meditation focused on her healing.” “You know that crap doesn’t work,”
I said. “And you know that if anyone should
be concerned about karma, it’s not
me,” she replied, nervously gathering the white sand and placing it
back into
the wooden square. “You could at least go do that shit
in person then,” I said. “Be with
her.” “She doesn’t want me there!” my
sister yelled. “And you know it, so stop
it already!” “It’s different now,” I insisted.
“She’s dying.” “Death doesn’t change the past.” *** I was 6 when my sister was born and
we became a family of four. Not long
after that we were three again when my father, our father, ran away
with a
Dolly Parton boob-alike. My mother spiraled down, and for a while I
feared she
would never bounce back. That baby had been her last attempt to rope my
father
in. Even though I knew jack about relationships, I could tell my
parents’
marriage hadn’t been a happy one. Still, my mother was addicted to my
father,
and the withdrawal made her suffer as much as the drug itself had. She got some sympathy from friends
and neighbors, the same people that
pitied her and offered a bunch of judgment disguised as advice. She was
a fool
for wetting her pillow after someone who would do something like that
to her,
they said. My mom would nod in agreement, but it wasn’t until she
started
repeating those words herself that I knew she had reached the other end
of the
abstinence crisis. “I have a daughter to take care of
after all,” she told my grandma. “Two daughters, Selma,” my grandma
had replied in bewilderment. “Good
Lord, you have two daughters now.” That idea never stuck with my mom.
She managed to keep the baby alive,
but I’d seen her dispense more affection to our neighbor’s puppy and
the fern
she kept in the bathroom than she did to her second daughter. She fed
the baby,
bathed it, put it in the crib to sleep. It was more like maintaining an
appliance than raising a child. My grandma stuck around. She didn’t
want to
risk seeing her only daughter go to jail for child neglect. As my sister grew from baby into
toddler, my mom seemed more and more
disturbed by her presence. “Good Lord, Selma, you can’t treat
the poor child like this,” I
overheard my grandma scold her once. “It’s not the girl’s fault if she
looks so
much like her father.” They did have the same droopy eyes,
the same underbite and pointy chin.
This could make them look either sleepy and sorry or mean and feisty,
depending
on which part of the face you focused on. Was it true, though? Were my
mom’s
wounds that deep? I never had the courage to ask anyone other than
myself. Caught in the middle of that silent
feud, I started to think I could be
the mend. I was the in-between one. It was my job to fix things. If
only I
could act as heavy-duty thread, I would sew the two of them together,
tie them
in a double seam that would never break apart again. But my mom would
not allow
my sister in the sewing room despite my insistence. My sister cringed
at my
mere suggestion that maybe our mother could help her with her homework
every now
and then. Meals were affairs where I ended up being the chatterbox,
trying to
get the two of them to talk to each other and only getting
monosyllables in
response. Birthday parties for my sister had to be planned by my
grandmother,
or else they wouldn’t happen. Whenever my sister showed interest in
visiting
the zoo or the library, she demanded that my mom did not come along. I
never
managed to bring the two of them together but I did a great job of
ripping
myself up. Things didn’t get any better when my sister entered her
teens and, a
few years later, my grandma passed. Because it was the fastest way out
of the house, my sister got married
at 18 to the dinosaur-looking owner of a dry-cleaners chain who had
been making
moves on her. He was thirty years her senior and was looking for a way
out of
his own frayed marriage. Four years later she turned from wife to
widow. By
then she had solidified her independence and turned into the most
annoying
wellness/good-vibes/Namaste person I had ever met. But she never let
anyone
snatch her autonomy away from her. When the news of my mother’s
illness came, I fantasized about a
Hollywood happy ending of sorts. Maybe the closeness I had tried so
hard to
achieve was on the verge of happening. There would be tears and
forgiveness and
“I love yous” galore. My mom would admit to her faults and
shortcomings, while
my sister would say she regretted not having tried harder. Who knows,
maybe
they would even say things like, “I wish I could turn back time and do
things
differently!” It would be excruciatingly uncomfortable in the
beginning, but
eventually the dam of awkwardness would break and love would flow
freely. The
three of us would then chat nonstop, pouring our hearts out. Maybe my
sister
and I would move into my mom’s studio just so we could make the most
out of the
time we still had together. My mom would tell us family stories,
gossips, maybe
even a dirty secret or two? We would stay up late watching bad movies,
although
skipping the junk food part. My mom’s farewell would be a fun slumber
party.
“I’ve never felt more alive!” my mom would say. Maybe the cancer would
see all
that happiness and take off in disgust to go find someone else to kill. Cheesy movie endings don’t sound so
bad when you start wishing they
would happen to you. *** I slumped on my sister’s couch and
dumped my head into my hands. “The only thing I haven’t tried yet
is to hammer down the walls,” I
said. “I’ve never been happier to say I
don’t keep tools in the house,” my
sister replied. While I scavenged every inch of the
apartment, she had followed me
around. Every time I moved one of her succulents or books on aura
reading out
of place, she’d immediately put them back where they belonged. The
apartment
was looking as pristine as it did before I had started my search, and
my sister
seemed suspiciously calm. “Did you throw my bag away?” I
asked her. “What? No!” she replied offended. “Because it seems like something
you would do.” “You’re out of your mind. Why would
I do that?” “Because you’re jealous!” She let out the most amused
laughter, while I gave in to tears. “Hey, hey, it’s okay,” my sister
shushed me, cutting her laughter short.
She sat by my side and placed a hand on my back. “I’m telling you, you
need to
breathe.” She went over to the kitchen and
returned with some steaming water and a
box of teabags. “Free Your Lungs,” commanded the box. “Here, drink this,” she said,
dipping a teabag into a cup of hot water. “No,” I said without a hint of
politeness. I grabbed the tag of the teabag and
looked at the message on it. “Be so happy that when
others look at you they become happy too,”
I read in a mocking relaxing voice. “That’s stupid.” “Easier said than done,” my sister
sort of agreed. “Why are you so
desperate to find those scraps now?” she asked. I told her about my quilt idea. My
eloquence was comparable to the one a
little kid might display when sobbing to a teacher about how some other
kid had
stolen their favorite toy and broken it in half, then refused to even
apologize. “A quilt?” my sister asked. “You
think you would land a 25-grand prize
with a quilt?” “I was going to use maybe a couple
of mom’s shirts, maybe even some of
your clothes too,” I explained while blowing my nose. “Sounds like Goodwill art if you
ask me,” she said. “It wasn’t going to be like that,”
I replied annoyed. “It was going to
be beautiful.” “I’m sure it was. Your art is
beautiful,” she said. “Mom was right about
that. But you can do better than a quilt.” “I can’t think of anything else,” I
said. “You still have time,” she replied.
“And I don’t think you’re even
allowed to call something uneven like that a quilt.” My tongue begged for something
liquid other than tears. “For hydration,” I made a point to
clarify as I sipped on the tea. “Ooh,
I can feel my lungs getting free already.” “Are there any other places where
your bag could be?” my sister asked,
ignoring my mockery. “I must have mixed it with the
donation bags,” I admitted. That was the only explanation that
made any sense. I had just come
around to dropping off the last batch of my mom’s stuff at this place
that took
donations to assist refugees. “I should have paid more
attention,” I scolded myself. “It just hurts so
bad, you know,” I felt more tears on the way. “To think that it’s gone.” “You kept a bunch of other
mementos,” my sister said. “It wasn’t the
best of times anyway.” “Not for you, that’s for sure,” I
replied. “That bag was charged with tons of
negativity. It doesn’t do good to
keep that kind of stale energy around.” “You know I don’t believe that,” I
had to repeat. “Regardless, you should think about
the future now. Enough living in the
past. Here, turn around.” She made me turn my back to her and
started massaging my shoulders. As
she kneaded my battered muscles, I released another storm of tears. “None of what happened to us was
your fault, you know?” She was talking
to me like I was indeed a little kid. “You don’t have to carry this
guilt.” I had always thought of myself as
the one that would tell her that kind
of stuff. I turned to face my sister and
stretched my arms around her. We were
both surprised at how long we stayed embraced. I kept waiting for her
to start
crying, but she never did. “Maybe you don’t have to go yet,”
she said. “You can stay and help me
paint the kitchen. You’re good at this, you have artist hands,” she
said, and
we both giggled when she wiggled her fingers. “I’ll think about it,” I said.
“Thanks, sis.” Maybe it was her words, or the
massage, or maybe it was the tea, but
there was more room in my chest now. I took in some air and let out a
long
breath. A baby dragon breath. Fabiola Werlang is a Brazilian writer and translator living in the United States. She is the coauthor of two picture books in Portuguese: Moscas e Outras Memórias and A Menina que Organizava, both published in Brazil. In the US, her work has appeared in 3Elements Literary Review. In 2021, she was featured in the Transnational Voices series promoted by the Guild Literary Complex of Chicago.
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