Charming Billy/Weddings Book

It’s a little after 2am. I’m having the dreams.

The ones that blindside me and have that weird echo --- is or isn’t this real? Sleep isn’t going to happen. What’s new. I leave my room to check out the house. Doors locked? Check. Kids asleep? Check…whoa, hold up a minute. Em is awake. She’s sitting in the living room illuminated by a booklite. She’s got about 4 blankets piled on top of her and she’s….. reading. Reading? I’m used to the insomnia, on both our parts… we knock around each other, say a few words and pretend to sleep. It’s routine by now. But, to see her reading? She looks up at me and there are tears in her eyes. Okay, now I’m really testing that reality theory.

‘Mom, have you ever read The House on Mango Street?’

Huh? I look over the book. No. Never even heard of it. ’A novel of a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago.’ Okay… assigned to a freshman English class in Northern Vermont. Where ethnicity is reserved for the Somalian refugees that pepper Burlington, but hardly touch the suburbs. I’ll bite.

I pick it up, it’s maybe an hour’s read. Tops. “We didn’t always live on Mango Street.” Then, I’m lost. This is lyrical, this is heart wrenching. Words are married, sentences consummated, images borne that my white-bread, New England-raised mind can’t comprehend except on an emotional level. I’m in love.

“She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.”

“You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky.”

“Everything is holding its breath inside of me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be new and shiny.”

“You know what you are Esperanza? You are like the Cream of Wheat cereal. You’re like the lumps.”

“But I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.”

“There were sunflowers as big as flowers on Mars and thick cockscombs bleeding the deep red fringe of theater curtains. There were dizzy bees and bow-tied fruit flies turning somersaults and humming in the air. Sweet sweet peach trees. Thorn roses and thistle and pears. Weeds like so many squinty-eyed stars and brush that made your ankles itch and itch until you washed with soap and water.”

I’m caught in this world that Cisnero’s painted for me. I’m hugging Alice who sees mice and wishing that Sire would hold my hand. I’m drinking papaya juice with Rafaela and reading Minerva’s poems. I’m hiding from Red Clowns.

I’m nostalgic for my own childhood. For that freedom that kids today cannot relate to. They have curfews, and GPS chips in cell phones, and mini LoJacks® implanted in their neck. What do they know of freedom? What do they know about riding their ten speed through dark streets guided by the screams of their friends ahead of them? Will they ever hang out in vacant lots with their friend’s older brothers who hand them warm beer and try to feel up their shirts? Hell no, not on my watch.

So, thank you, Sandra Cisnero. Thanks for giving me back all those summer nights…

“They will not know that I have gone away to come back. For the ones I’ve left behind. For the ones who cannot out.”