This post is the fourth post in a four post series, if you haven’t read Day One’s entry you can do that here.
*** Note *** This post is part of a live experiment. I’m making an attempt to complete NaNoWriMo; the goal is to finish a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. Instead of just writing 1667 words a day and letting it sit on my computer I thought why not share with my readers the first few days of this process. Which leads me to this statement…
…This is unplanned & unedited writing…
…This process scares me and excites me. Let’s see where it goes…
Marina
Chapter Four
Afternoon of July 25, 2011
Several hours after passing out from exhaustion on the chaise in my studio I woke up feeling extremely refreshed. I hadn’t slept like that in months. Not one thought ran through my head as I slept. The peaceful sleep allowed me to regain the strength I had lost while I slept the night before. My batteries felt fully charged as I sat up, but it wasn’t until I looked over at the canvas I had focused on before falling asleep that I felt a full charge of electricity run through me. It had been a blank canvas when exhaustion had taken me out earlier but now, there was Marina, my grandmother, painted in all her glory on the canvas with the most lush wilderness of reds, yellows and oranges behind her. I looked down at my hands and sure enough they were stained with colors. I found myself energized by my own madness. Unafraid that I was back to my old tricks of painting during blackouts. Was I ready to see the part of myself that I had run from all these years – the “it” that I had inherited from her?
I rose from my resting spot, walked towards the window and looked out at all the beauty nature offered. The colors, the shapes, the depth, the contours, the movement, and the energy that I saw outside my window – could I give all that up? Would I give that all up? “It” was going to overtake me just like “it” had once overtaken my grandmother slowly bringing down the curtain on all the colors, the shapes, the depth, the contours, the movement, and the energy that her life had once been. Once “it” took over her life faded to black so that she could truly see. As a feeling of emptiness began to grab hold of my soul, I remembered how that one passage in The House on Mango Street would always help me cry then would set me right. I walked over to my wall of books in my studio to look for it.
There among my favorite art and photography books I found the book. I knew exactly what page I had to turn to; page ten. I began to read the chapter titled, My Name. Like always by the time that I got to the first Esperanza on page eleven I was sobbing loudly. I wanted to throw the book down like I usually did and collapse next to it so that I could let all the tears inside me out. I wanted to but instead my fear took hold of me and there I stood in the center of my studio and yelled the next line aloud. I read it again as loud as I could, “I HAVE INHERITED HER NAME, BUT I DON’T WANT TO INHERIT HER PLACE BY THE WINDOW!”
Sandra Cisneros’ Esperanza knew my pain. She had inherited a name that she thought did not fit her and she desperately did not want to inherit her great-grandmother’s place in life. For me it wasn’t fictional curse. For me it was my one true fate. Looking out the window longing for something more wasn’t a metaphor for not being able to be all the things I wanted to be. Looking out the window longing for something more wasn’t a metaphor for doing the best with what I got. For me the window represented giving up everything I had to become everything I could be. This was the fate that had once been presented to my grandmother and her grandmother before her and the line of women “it” possessed went on and on. As far as I knew this was something that couldn’t be prevented – I would soon find myself sitting my sadness on my elbow as I stared out the window; blinded by everything I was destined to be.
I walked over to the painting of Marina looking directly into her eyes. Jades. Grandmother’s eyes were so beautiful that although I spent very little time with her as a child her eyes were all I could remember. It isn’t so much the color that I’ve always remembered but how she could fully see me and through me. I was terrified of her as a child. I grew to admire her as a teenager. I desperately wanted to be like her when I became a woman until the day I found myself with child.
It wasn’t until then that I remembered about the one time when the adults had left me alone with her in the living room. She was seventy-nine rather fragile and pretty much always sedentary and quiet. I was only four but I understood enough of the adult conversations to know that grandmother had a “special” gift. I also knew she was blind. Some part of my cruel or curious primitive soul wanted to test how blind my grandmother truly was. So, when the adults left the room I circled around the recliner she was sitting in listening to the radio. I kept running up to her and then away from her. Part of me was terrified as I got close to her and when she reached for me I tried to hide from blind grandmother.
What she did next stayed with me forever. She slowly got up from her recliner, danced slowly to the music for a minute then walked around a rocking chair, a coffee table, an end table and directly towards the side of the china cabinet that I was hiding next to. She had done all this without bumping one thing or taking one misstep as she slowly swayed to the music.
She bent down to meet my eyes with hers when she finally reached me and she said, “I see you. It is within you too!”
Screaming, “Witch!” I ran towards my mom and hid behind her.
My aunt gasped then comforted my grandmother that seemed to be crying but grandmother and I both knew she was really laughing! My aunt asked my grandmother what she had said and when my grandmother kept repeating “it is with her” my aunt insisted she was mistaken and needed to take a nap. My aunt asked her daughter to come help her with Marina because it was time for her medicine and nap. After the adults all made sure that Marina was asleep they spoke very quietly in the kitchen but kept looking over to me as I played with my doll. My cousin who was fourteen whispered in my ear, “They think you are possessed like our grandmother. Better you than me.”
My young ears heard her but my child’s mind couldn’t understand what she really meant. It would be a few years before I would really begin to understand why they kept my grandmother medicated between her fights with cancer. It would be even longer before I would understand what “possessed” meant to my family. It would be a very long time before my aunts, cousins, father and mother and only after all the girls had children that they would become convinced that maybe “it” had died with my grandmother. Jokingly they brought “it” up at a family reunion a few years earlier when my youngest was almost three that “it” indeed had been laid to rest with my grandmother. I feigned a smile as they all laughed loudly about how not only were none of the granddaughters mad but they all had sons.
Nobody but Erik knew that I was truly the maddest of all the women in my family line of mad women. Nobody but my oldest son knew that I had found no humor in the subject that they all joked about that day. While they joked he read my face and frowned. While they joked medicated and all I saw glimpses of “it” in him. Now that I knew “it” wouldn’t be denied it was time for me to figure out how to bargain with it. Was there a way to keep hold of some of the things that I love most about life – the colors, the shapes, the depth, the contours, the movement, and the energy that the beauty of nature offered to the barely seeing?
I looked down at my watch. I had just a few minutes before I had to be at the school to pick up my sons. All the questions in my head would have to wait until later. I picked up my keys off the chaise, walked over to the painting of Marina finally seeing all of her – not just those jade green eyes. I saw the woman that had given birth to three daughters and two sons. I saw the woman that had gone blind so early in life yet managed to raise her family alone while providing very well for them. I saw a woman that had the vision that the truly powerful wanted and often consulted. I saw the good, the bad and the evil that she was capable of relaying. I saw her and “it” for what they were when combined. Then I saw her big green eyes, her flowing auburn hair and the beautiful reds, yellows and oranges in the wilderness behind her.
Those vibrant beautiful colors were all I saw for a good minute as I stood there thinking of nothing. Fear had been protecting me from what I was really looking at. Fear had not allowed me to see what was really staring back at me. Fear quickly escaped me as I looked at my watch one more time and noticed black specks on the face of the watch. I turned my hand over to look at my palm and fingers. It couldn’t be. There was no way. I looked at my other hand but it was. It was completely covered in black paint too. I heard it laugh inside of me as it forced my eyes up onto the canvas. The laugh got louder when I finally saw what had once been a beautiful portrait of Marina was now a canvas of blackness.
