Learning to Be Brown

My first memory of being in a grocery store: I’m with Lala, we’re loading the sliding black belt with our food, and a little blond behind me, about my size, asks her mother loudly, “Mom, what is she?”

The little girl is pointing at me.

“Don’t point,” says the mother, lacking conviction. The girl asks it again, and neither her mother nor I know what the girl is talking about.

“She’s black,” the girl says, now pointing to the cashier ringing up our groceries. “And we’re white. So what is she?” Again, pointing to me.

Answering that question has been a big part of my life. At that moment, as a five-year-old child, I wanted to say, “I’m white too, you idiot,” as a means of feeling safe, feeling one of the rest of them, and also because it wasn’t totally a lie. Though my mother had arrived here from Ecuador without American language or mentality, my father was half-Sicilian, half-French, and that was good enough for me to feel acceptable.

Only it wasn’t enough for lots of people. My mother dated a string of white men in the early 80s, and the one she married (and whom fathered my two sisters) had a penchant for calling us dirty Spics when he was at his drunkest. (Incidentally, he also liked to call me a prima donna, and for many years I interpreted that as my being a forerunner of the Madonna, and could not for the life of me figure out how that was an insult.) Girls in school, too, were vaguely hostile, as if I might start doing a Mexican hat dance at any moment. I was brown, I was bookish, I was weird.

I don’t mean to overemphasize my struggle. Lots of friends look at me now and say, “I didn’t know you were Hispanic! It just looks like you have a tan!” And in late high school, early college, during the meteoric rises of J-Lo and Ricky Martin, brownness suddenly became hip. At one point I might have offered translation services I was so proud of my darker heritage.

But other moments I’ve been accused of being too white, not owning my roots enough. In graduate school, a blue-eyed blonde I later became friends with but, during the incident I’m about to recount, I was deathly frightened of, told me she was more Hispanic than I was. She’d grown up in a heavily Puerto Rican populated neighborhood. She knew more rituals, had more Hispanic friends, felt love from more Hispanic people than I ever had. We were both drunk at an English department party when she said this and I hoped she didn’t mean it, but still I was livid and hurt and I felt she was right.

(Side note: not that I’d have the balls to compare myself with the leader of the free world or anything, but I get truly pissed at people of all stripes and races and creeds who’ve decried Obama for not being black enough. And obversely, for not being white enough. Or more disturbingly, I’ve heard, “If he were a white man, he would never have (fill in this blank).” As if the man could have ever chosen who he is. Learning to navigate two worlds is difficult enough—to hear black and whites both say, “Hey, stay in my world!” must be as maddening for him as it is for me.)

I, unlike my blond Hispanic-esque friend, had grown up in a New Orleans neighborhood that didn’t exist to me. In Gentilly Woods it was me and Lala (inside, ironically, the only unbarred house on the street), and the outside world was filled with white people who were out to get us. When I started going to school with whites and longed to be confident and loud as they were, Lala balked. The gringo language was hideous, she’d say, with the exception of words like motherfucker, and she didn’t want it spoken in her house. When Americans spoke, they didn’t know what they were saying, she said. (I didn’t argue that just because she didn’t understand them, it didn’t mean they didn’t understand one another.) Her ban of English didn’t bother me. But when she would pick me up from school some days, she’d bring her brownness into the white world and embarrass me. Rather than going to the principal’s office to check me out, as per the rules, she’d march directly to my classroom and address the teacher, Mrs. White (no shit—her actual name), in Spanish. When someone doesn’t speak your language, it’s hard to argue with them. I was always let go immediately when Lala showed up, and my classmates thought she had some special power. We understood words they didn’t, and that made us doubly weird.

When my mother would come home from work, I was in the white world again. It wasn’t as if she loathed her first language or her heritage, but I sensed it was sort of uncool for her. She had gone to an elite Catholic all-girls school, had zero Hispanic friends, wore the frosted hair and pink lips of the 80s. Rosita was doing her utmost to be a material girl in a material world, and I wasn’t sure whether to follow her lead or Lala’s. Both of their lives seduced me, both were beautiful. But while I was a part of them, deep down I felt detached from each. Many years I spent avoiding making a decision about who I’d be. Which side was I on?

Here’s the real reason I’m writing this, and it’s a shift from the personal to the political: for me, learning to be brown is also a simultaneously struggle with learning to be white. Learning to be myself. And lately I’ve been dismayed at the passionately intense hatred I’ve felt toward white conservatives in recent months, and I’m looking for ways to cure myself of it, for what it is inside of me that boils these political waters.

Many people, including my very liberal husband, want to know why I’ve lately got a near zero-tolerance policy for conservatives. Here’s the simplest definition I can give: 1963. 1968. Jim Crow. The Voting Right’s Act. Lilly Ledbetter. Jack Johnson. Brown vs. Board. Social equality. Civil Right’s Act. David Duke. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Selma, Alabama. Birmingham, Alabama. The 19th Amendment. Water hoses. George Wallace.

I feel that if one is not working for social equality and justice, then one is working against it. As a teacher of rhetoric, I usually abhor the either-or fallacy, but I think it applies here. For the most part, conservative Americans (obviously, especially those in power) are historically on the forefront of denying all people their rights rather than bestowing them freely as our Constitution promises it shall do. I’ve got staunchly libertarian friends who make everything an economic issue, and if you know me at all, you know I’ve got no claims to understanding our vast economy and want can be done to heal it. I see issues such as health care reform, civil rights reform, equal opportunities, in strictly humanitarian terms. Balancing the budget doesn’t interest me (though I’ll concede it must be done), but healing people and old hard wounds does. The work in healing our nation’s ills isn’t finished, and if you think it is, then…I won’t be cynical and say what I truly think, but I will pray for you. I know conservatives don’t speak my language, and I don’t speak theirs. I am working on it: speaking more softly than I once spoke, listening more closely. I’ll try to whisper the last lines of this blog.

I won’t make this into a political party thing, as I know that southern Democrats of the past and present have been particularly repugnant, but I do believe it is about a liberal versus conservative thing. I will agree with what Patrick Kennedy said as he was eulogizing his father: we must agree that Americans from both sides of the political spectrum love their country equally.

But I have a question to ask: when people at tea parties and town hall debates hold up signs glorifying our country’s past, saying they want America to be the same America they grew up in, with what perspective are they viewing the world? Through what lens do they see themselves? How did that America seem to other folks?

I grew up in this country and wanted to be nothing more than a real, proud, white American. Now I want to hug that little brown girl, hug the little white girl who didn’t know what to call her. I want them to love each other before they don’t know how anymore. Before it’s too late.

Prose poem...sort of

On his left eyelid Brock has 143 eyelashes. I’m thinking this is a whole lot and they’re long ones too, considering I pull out about ten of mine per day, while he’s telling me this is the last time he will ever drink this way. I pull the blanket to his chin and he’s close to shivers. One of 143 eyelashes is white— anomaly, or prescience? His beard is lovely red and I count those hairs too, but in the three-hundreds descending the valley of the chin I give up and guess, You’ve got 1,846 facial hairs. This really is the last time, he says. Give everyone love, tell them I meant no harm. Now, am I listening, I tell myself. And I see, on the blackboard of my mind: cirrhosis and psoriasis—both hard to spell and say. Now, I am scratching thin white patches from his head. He can’t hear his thoughts when I scratch his head, he says, but can he feel them. So I wonder: while I’m scratching his head, am I creating new Brock-thoughts? Brooke-fingernail, meet Brock-thought. Say everything is gonna be alright. Sing the three little birds song. Right now nothing will be buggy again. I try anyway: Is this the 143rd convalescence? Is this my 143th time scratching and counting and not listening with my concerned listening face? Are there 143 ways for me to love him? I’m still counting.

The Trouble with Being Buggy

I’ve had a heck of a time working on my “On Bugginess” essay lately and have finally decided the only way to figure it out is to take a step back and write about it while not writing about it, with none of the pressures of creating an all caps ESSAY, with Montaigne pointing a finger through the annals of history and, most likely, hell. In other words, I’ll blog to see why this is so hard for me to encapsulate.

Several years ago, months into our nascent relationship, Brock came up with the term “buggy” to describe how King would behave every time I visited their place. He would become ecstatic, nervous, he’d pace the room—he seemed to be on the verge of either vomiting or enveloping me in a two-pawed bear hug. Often he did both. This term, it has to be said, also converges with the new vocabulary I’d introduced to Brock’s life. I would bring him anywhere he wanted to go rather than take him. When I beckoned him to show him something super neat and needed him close by to inspect it, I’d say Come see. And when we went grocery shopping together, we’d use a buggy, not a daft old cart. These expressions were so endearing to him he could hardly take it (really—I was almost dumped for being too adorable), and this became part of our creation of each other.

Buggy eventually became what we’d call each other at our most loving moments, which then became our permanent reciprocal pet names. Couples do this, and it’s continually fascinating to me that it spans our genders and ethnicities and cultures—everyone who owns a language finds something unique and loving to call his lover. My former boyfriend called me Bay—the same name he called his ailing cat, and I called him Babe, which seemed to me alliterative and orthodox enough to be an acceptable counterpart. (People use all kinds of pet names, and I won’t even try to come up with more examples since they are infinite. If you are interested, though, check out Alain de Botton’s great book In Love which depicts the rise and fall of the protagonist’s first real relationship. The couple experiments with about two dozen pet names before finding the perfect one.) The Buggy between me and my husband certainly was not planned, but in dissecting the essence of the word, I must say I love the two syllables, the sing-songy quality of that. And also how it takes a traditionally negative vowel sound, the “uh” of the first syllable, and flips it on its ass in the second with the oh-so-positive “ee” sound. Though I didn’t pick buggy I couldn’t think of a better word.

(An incidental sidebar: my sister-in-law Jennifer is in love with a man who shares her brother’s name but not its spelling—he’s Broc. When the four of us are fortunate enough to spend time together, the bugginess inherent in each of us rubs off on the other, and the two of them become the rare couple who does not get on our nerves after forty-eight hours. Usually after a few hours together Jen will call her Broc “Buggy”, and while he’ll love it he’ll say, “No, that is theirs.” Then he’ll become her Babe again and the world will be as it should be.)

What I’m still not sure about is whether or not Brock created the bugginess in me or just enhanced it. Before meeting him I was generally a happy person, regardless of whether or not I was in a fruitless relationship (and more times than not, I was). But happiness, serenity is not bugginess. I like to think of bugginess as a fusion between optimism and elan. It’s an optimism that isn’t blind, but frenetic. It’s the realization that most things are fucked but you love unapologetically and remain positive anyway. Positive in a way you realize may piss some people off because, hey, that’s annoying, or hey, it’s so comfortable to be complacent. In a weird way, bugginess gets shit done, makes others love you or loathe you, without really doing anything tangible at all.

I’m positive, for instance, that bugginess has gotten me every job and every promotion I’ve sought. The cynic would say, No, it was your pretty face, dummy. But I reject that. Having known tons of pretty faces at two of the prettiest campuses in the SEC, I can guarantee that looks go sour after about a minute of sourpuss-dom. Or attitude. When I applied to be a waitress at T.J. Ribs in Baton Rouge, after years of being a professional teacher/writer and never having worked a service industry job ever, I had the manager perplexed at my existence in the seat across from him. You’re a teacher, he said. You’ve got a Master’s degree. Why are you here? I told him, “I want to be here—I want to be good at something new, I want to learn, I want to work as hard as possible and see an immediate reward!” The candor and exuberance won him over. Usually they only hired experienced servers at this restaurant—a minimum of two years—but I had bugginess on my side.

The main trouble with being buggy, with the exception of trying to articulate it, is that it creates in one the insistence on being eternally enchanting. Yes, this wears after a while. Let me show you an example from two jokes I made on our recent trip to Baltimore to visit Brock’s family, two jokes, by the way, I didn’t allow anyone to forget that I told:

Joke 1: Brock’s aunt, Kris, was describing her daughter Abigail’s pursuit of equanimity in every part of her life: that all family members get fed in equal portions at dinnertime, that all children share at school, that no one is ever left out of any endeavor. (It’s important here to know an important piece of context for this joke—Abigail’s last names is Marks.) My response to this was, “She’s a perfect Marxist!”

Joke 2: While drunk, most fittingly, a group of us began pontificating on the rise of alcoholism and prescription drug addiction in our generation. Diana, Brock’s mom, said the word “alcoholic” was literally not in the lexicon of her parents’ generation. “There were simply no alcoholics,” she said, “except for my parents and every single person they knew.” My response to this was, “Sure, there was absolutely zero alcoholism in the 1950s. Back then they just called it ‘nighttime.’”

One must realize that I know, I’m perfectly aware, that neither of these jokes are the epitome of wit or intellect. But, shit man—people laughed. Heartily. That’s the Achilles’ heel of any Buggy. I want more of it, all the time. I feel that in laughter everyone is achieving their best selves while simultaneously there is something highly egotistical and wrong about me trying to lay claim on their laughter. Bugginess cannot be spread at the barrel of the laughter-gun. Love me, please. Laugh at me, please. This is not the way bugginess works. But who said zen or bugginess was easy.

But of course there is no real trouble with being buggy, other than it’s a high standard to set for oneself in the day-to-day of captive tourists in Iran, and worldwide starvation and poverty, and partisan politics and racism and all the rest. And other than the need to articulate its importance has become another of my day-to-day obsessions. I’m just a person. I’ve got emails and phone calls and family. The spread of bugginess has to sometimes play second fiddle in an orchestra of pinging triangles.

Don’t Need No Short Men

Again last night I had trouble sleeping. Over the past ten hours I’ve been able to deduce accurately why that is. Had two shots of whiskey about eight-ish—the first drink I’ve had in a week—so by ten that warm feeling in my toes was gone, by eleven I was in bed, and by two my body awakened to ask, where are those third and fourth shots? Since that hour I’ve done a lot of bing.com sort of thinking, my mind pinball-wizarding around every potential topic on which I might have something to say. The course of American presidential history, boiing, guessing the length of my hair and its rate of growth (is it abnormally slow?), guessing my weight, boiing, wondering how many movies in my Netflix queue of 500 (the limit) I won’t get the chance to see before I die, my assessment of the grand movie My Dinner With Andre, which I must write about soon, boiing, my upcoming birthday wishes: a vacuum cleaner and a new journal.

Interspersed in these boiings came flashes of how I might update my Facebook status tomorrow. Which of course got me ruminating on the truth of my life: I obsess about my potential status a lot, think of clever things I might say, and in some of the greater moments of my day-to-day am making copious notes on the blackboard of my mind rather than, oh I don’t know, listening to what Brock is telling me, or reading my book, or working on my writing. C’est moi. I’ve learned that when awakened in the middle of the night and can’t return to sleep, since I’m not technically living my life, I don’t feel guilty about trying to come up with witty Facebook statuses. In this dark I work hard at coming up with some good ones. Problem is, since I’m not truly living at this hour, still the immobile un-dead, the lump next to the lump that will be Brock in a few hours, I can’t write any of it down so I end up losing most of what I internally create. Here some of the nearly-lost ones from the middle of last night:

Brooke Champagne…recently discovered eight laps around my driveway equal a mile, and my hair is 35 inches long. Holy shit, I love summers off.

Brooke Champagne…gave myself one of those $500 Hollywood haircuts last week. It was easy. Just examined every single hair on the head and cut off only the split ends. It only took a week.

Brooke Champagne...has—no lie—split ends on my arm hairs.

Brooke Champagne…, when I compare my end-of-May summer reading list to the amount of books I actually have read, want to give it all up and become a pro sofa-sitter.

Brooke Champagne…can’t wait until certain insecure men’s penises start falling off so I will no longer have to hear that creepy Extenze commercial about how ‘growing’ can be so much ‘fun.’

Around seven this morning I stopped on the Extenze: who uses it and why. Assuming the latter is obvious, I’d venture to say the men buying this product are rich white Republican men. My supremely untested but fun as hell theory about rich white Republican men (heretofore known as RWRMs, an acronym which appropriately makes them sound like a disease) is their biggest problem is their small penises. This is why: their craving of power. This is why: fear of black men, and that these big-penised black men will rape (read: take) their women. This is why: their requisite affairs during mid-life. This is why: their fancy cars. This is why: the world is never enough for any of them. And while it must be said I’ve never in my life sought the measurement of any man, I’ve been told by the wives of certain RWRMs in my family that their penises are indeed tiny. Direct anonymous quote: “I didn’t know God made them so small.” And incidentally, my father, who is the only liberal white male in my family, I’ve been told, is hung. I’ve spent a lot of years trying to block that out as evinced by my hedging in the preceding sentence, but as it supports my still-supremely-untested theory, I need all the pseudo-evidence I can get.

This theory is both frivolous and important to me because of the sudden refrain in my mind at about 7:03—a sentence which frequently appears—and obsessed me until I finally gave up on sleep and spilt my head onto this page: “I fucking hate RWRMs!” It’s the Facebook status I could never write, but wouldn’t go away. And I mean it: for many, many reasons I hate them. Sure, it would make more sense to hate poor Republicans of any gender or ethnicity as they’re voting against their economic interests, but I pity them instead; they cannot possibly understand the hegemonic forces enslaving them. And yes, rich Republican women I loathe good and plenty, but I attribute their ideology and voting record to Stockholm Syndrome, consider them masochists in love with their oppressors. It’s the RWRMs—they get me every time.

Perhaps I’m feeling this rage now because I’ve had several RWRMs—acquaintances from a lifetime ago—condescendingly argued with me over my recent postings regarding Sotomayor and politics in general. RWRMs who didn’t know thing one about this woman’s judicial record, or even that the famous “wise Latina” comment was taken totally out of context (definition of irony, guys: she was actually saying she’s not that wise), but still, they needed to be proven she wasn’t a racist. The same RWRMs who failed to read the articles I posted, but made assertions about them anyway. To me—a teacher, a reader, a writer, a thinker—nothing is more insulting than to opine about something one hasn’t read. In most of these recent cases, I replied patiently, consulted the text directly to support my contentions, or took the even higher road by not responding at all. But the whole time, blinking on the neon sign in my mind: “I fucking hate RWRMs!” All of this reached its apex this sleepless morning. Thus my blogging, thus me and you right now. (How are you, by the way? I don’t ask you enough.)

So amongst my many other dead of night thoughts I came up with a cheeky manual for RWRMs. Originally I thought I’d post it as my latest Facebook status, but it got a bit too unwieldy and I considered I might have unwittingly befriended a RWRM who is actually a good guy, doesn’t use Extenze, isn’t racist or sexist, but just doesn’t know any better yet and could easily be swayed by my more patient rhetoric—though certainly not by this scathing manual. So leaving it off Facebook, I’m including my would-be status here for you to hopefully enjoy:

Brooke Champagne...has created a much-needed manual for RWRMs, because God knows how much they’ve suffered of late, and what small voice they have in modern-day America, and how they have no platform from which to speak, so I will do the courtesy of providing some tips to be heard and be heard well.
1) Don’t let go of the refrain that “they” (and be sure to put them in quotes—makes them more evil)—the blacks, the Hispanics, the women, the liberals, the gays—are taking over the damn country. I mean, hell, it’s written somewhere WE (the RWRMs) officially own this place and for “them” to take power is morally wrong. “They” are stealing from us.
2) Rather than read or learn about the history of this great country of ours, let’s stick to the basic: bumper stickers and boisterousness. People must know, unequivocally, how much we love America, and if you question it, then you don’t, and are pretty much French Canadian and should be excommunicated.
3) Don’t forget God knows we are the superior race (didn’t He write that down somewhere too?). As long as He’s on our side, there really isn’t a need for much arguing, is there?

Is there anybody in there?

Two o’clock in the morning—my very own witching hour—is the only time I’m compelled to write anything. At this time what vexes me seems more incomprehensible and permanent, and I start to think that each of my eyelashes represent some each question I cannot answer. One by one I pull out my lashes, eventually accumulating enough to build a tiny hair-house, or on less vexing nights, the shape of a heart, or a star. Tonight I stopped after just five lashes because this can’t go on forever, so I lined them across my wrist to look like some long forgotten scar, and I climbed the stairs to my office to write about it.

Here are just a few of the terrible eyelash questions: Why haven’t I talked to Lala in over six months, and why does this pattern recur so often throughout our lifelong relationship? Does this make me a terrible granddaughter, and why am I even asking this compulsory question when of all questions, I know the answer to this one? Why have I convinced myself, over the past few years, that I hold exactly zero skills and do not really know how to do anything meaningful?

Why have I been in a super semi-funk since the election, and does this correlate to my recent addiction to the card game Free Cell? Why am I so worried about God lately, or god, as I write him, and why does any form of church feel like it could never, ever be the answer? Why does my house seem to be out to get me, and by that I mean why did the water heater pipe burst so suddenly and when I was in a perfect state of drunken serenity, and why did—just a few days later—I go to the gas station around the corner and return to my parking spot behind the house to see a fifty foot pine lying where I’d just minutes ago been parked?

Why do celebrities keep dying strangely and regularly, and why does it affect me so? A sub-question—did celebrities die in my youth, and if they did, as I’m sure they did, was it that I didn’t understand celebrity or that I didn’t understand death—or both? Have I gotten over my carjacking a year ago, and though I know those boys repeated ad infinitum, “Let’s pop her,” did they actually have a gun, and does that matter? Why is it that, though my mother is one of my dearest friends, I am incapable of being completely honest with her, or she with me, and why can’t I remember what type of mother she was to me twenty years ago (because I suspect it’s a lot different from the way she is now)? Why do I want to love on Brock one moment and, sometimes, in the very next moment, feel miles and miles from him, marooned somewhere not-so-nice, and lonely? Why do I zone out when I’m trying to learn a specific piece of information that I’m earnestly interested in?

Why am I not always so jazzed about nature, and why, when I am, can I not remember the names of any plants or animals I’ve tried to learn? Why didn’t my mother teach me a saleable skill? Why, lately, in conversation with good friends I feel totally comfortable with, do I lose any articulateness I thought I had, and forget simple words and have to forgo certain sentences and ideas altogether (like last weekend, with Amy, I forgot how to say, “imbedded,” or “indelible,”…I forget which). And are the answers to many of these questions so simple to answer, so clear that I’m the secret laughingstock of the thought community? Is everyone besides me in on this whole life thing?

See, I can make a brick house of my eyelashes. Any of these subjects can get me blinking and my stomach gurgling for all these blue-night hours, but I think what’s most troubling me now, at this moment, is that I graduated with my MFA over four years ago and have very little to show for it. I’m maybe 8,000 hours of pure unadulterated work away from completing my book. Since receiving my degree I’ve perhaps put in five hundred hours. Perhaps. I’ve completed two polished chapters, published one of them, and almost finished a new six-page chapter that I gave up on after two weeks because even I wasn’t buying it. Which begs the question: was the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing just the way I spent some time a few years ago? The ticket to a lifetime of a series of temporary teaching gigs scattered across these States? I know, I know: more questions. And writing is to some degree supposed to arrive at some significant answers, and judging by the vast array of questions I have, my purpose in composing this won’t likely be achieved.

But back to the MFA, or the book it inspired. Sometimes I think I can just will it to be and not put in those thousands of hours I know it needs. Funny, but I’m sure I’ve worked at willing it in my mind for as many hours as it would have taken to concentrate sincerely and worked on—and possibly finished!—the damned thing.

Here’s what my reader might not know about the memoir I’m writing about my life with my grandmother, Lala: if the book ever gets finished, it is likely to be good. It is not false modesty to say that this is not because of any genius writing skill of mine; it is just that living with Lala was that much of an adventure and her character that compelling.

For a moment, imagine the nonfiction section of the bookstore. There lie biographies of war heroes and presidents and pundits and, occasionally, a regular old person who’s written a good true story. Imagine pulling down an unfamiliar title by an unfamiliar author, and finding out some of what’s contained on the inside by reading the back flap. There it says the main character (also known as the real person, the hero, the grandmother):

· once hid in the trunk of her husband’s car because she knew he lied about where he was going, and sure enough, he was attending the wedding of very woman he cheated on her with—so she surreptitiously got out and, mid-ceremony, attacked both the bride and her husband

· taught her five-year-old granddaughter (incidentally, that’s me) that, in life it’s okay sometimes to take it in the ass—literally—because, hey, that’s how she got her first car…and it played “La Cucaracha”

· taught her young granddaughter to steal from the five and dimes because they were too capitalistic, and that was sinful, and they were all white men who didn’t give a damn about anybody anyway

· breast fed her granddaughter--the me of the story

Intrigued? This isn’t even one eyelash of the story. Each time I relate a Lala-anecdote to anyone, either verbally or written, they are fascinated. More Lala, they say, more you-and-Lala. Why are you telling this? they ask. How does it end? More questions, this time from the outside.

I’ll try to answer at least these and hope they serve as a sort of temporary conclusion to this piece of writing. I began telling the story of Lala and I because I needed a subject in a workshop and was asked to relate a unique family event or ritual. Now I can’t remember the contents of that very first piece—maybe Lala’s insistence that I potty train on the dining room table, or her sneaking me out to drink café au lait and eat beignets on Bourbon Street on so many middle of the nights. Whatever I wrote I found that for the first time in my life, I had an audience. Most members of my workshop thought Lala was a terrific character but a bit horrible, bordering on abusive. I realized that, through their white-toast lenses, much of my audience might see her this way. But they were wrong. She was and certainly still is difficult, but she is a force. She’s one of the mightiest people I’ve met. And she loves me with a power that is suffocating and almost sick. Still I get her love and she gets mine.

Why, then, the trouble with talking to her? This also converges with the question of how this story, this book, ends. These are the questions that keep me up at night, keep me here with you right now, whoever you are. I simply do not know. Possibly it’s difficult to be loved in the way that she loves. I’ve always been curious about why she ruled iron-fistedly with her own children (beat my mother bloody with iron hangers, Mommie Dearest-style, on more than one occasion), but with me she was soft as a doe. Really, she loved and hugged and kissed too much. Hugged and kissed always. Kind of like I do now. One quality I own that I’m aware of is my insatiable desire to please and to be loved. If I’m watching television with my husband and something on it makes me laugh, I defer to him with a sidelong glance—is he pleased? Does he love what I laughed at, love my laugh, love me for laughing at it? What is his reaction to me? These questions possess me at any given daily life moment and they stay enough for me to type it here right now. I cannot possibly imagine the pressure I put on him to adore me, until I think of Lala. Think of her looking at me while I’m putting food away at her apartment, going to the bathroom with the door open, or folding her clothes. Her, looking at me, and surely thinking, How much does Brooke love me? Can she possibly know how much I love her? Why can’t she see my heart beating out of my chest? Only she’s thinking all of this in Spanish. And it's up to me to translate all of it.