Crumbs
By Amy Marques
Nine
My aunt, Tia Lilia, didn’t hover. She was too dignified for that. Even as a child, I understood she had a je ne sais quoi of gentility, the kind I loved reading about, but rarely encountered outside of books.
Every time I glanced up, Tia was watching me write. I used a four-color pen, switching between black and blue and green and red, glorying in the heady power of ink. At school we used pencils. How else would we erase mistakes? Only sixth graders were allowed pens. I couldn’t wait.
“School work on a Sunday, child?”
“It’s not homework, Tia. It’s my journal.”
“What are you writing?” Tia moved closer to the page covered in a colorful array of sentimental quotes and earnest ramblings.
“I wanted one of those once,” Tia said, her voice slow, with the precise enunciation of the scholar she never became.
“You didn’t have notebooks?” At nine, I was just the right age to ask. I was her eldest niece, the one who traveled far and lived away, the one who knew little about Tia’s long-ago days and little enough about anything else.
“I wrote song lyrics in a notebook once,” Tia said. “My mother saw it.”
Tia didn’t say she’d been punished. She never said things like that. One doesn’t complain. It’s not seemly.
“What happened?” I was too spoiled to guess.
“Mother said notebooks were not to be wasted on scribbled daydreams.” Tia looked longingly at the journal with the ribbon bookmark, pages full of the fat, bouncy handwriting of a schoolgirl only beginning to realize the reach of her ideas.
“Did you buy one for yourself when you grew up?” I had not yet learned hopelessness.
“No.”
***
Ten
When Lilia was ten, a military coup overthrew the Brazilian democratic government. Adults huddled around the radio in the large farmhouse kitchen. They argued over city happenings. To hear them tell it, a military government would change everything.
But, in Lilia’s life, nothing changed at all. Soldiers were little more than gatekeepers of old orders, conventions, and status quo.
And life in her mother’s house was little more than status quo.
Lilia’s mother, Honora, was a master of convention. Dressed in cotton skirts that hit a finger or two below the knee and modest tops with soft cardigans, in her small, unassuming way, Honora was bigger than life. Although her voice was rarely raised, and every statement was framed as a request, everyone understood they were, in fact, soft-spoken orders. She embodied noblesse oblige, asking only on behalf of others while subtly hinting at imbalances in privilege. Thus, she mobilized everyone around her to help everyone else.
Held hostage by duty and piety, Lilia paid little heed to the unrest stirring among her generation. In college campuses and music festivals, youth buzzed like hornets whose nest shook in the winds of brewing storms, but Lilia had a life where each day ushered in diapers to change, children to bathe, meals to serve, and, despite the ubiquitous ajudantes, she was expected to do her fair share of chores. Or at least supervise. Or at least not act lazy and frivolous. Her mother eschewed frivolity with almost religious vehemence.
***
Eleven
Honora’s mothering career was prematurely thrust on her at eleven when her mother fell ill. The doctor was a family friend unable to muster any diagnosis beyond melancholy or “she needs rest… you’re a big girl, you can help with the little ones.” He didn’t say mother was crazy. But Honora knew what people said when they thought she couldn’t hear.
She quit school. There was only the one classroom anyway, and she spent more time helping than learning. Besides, she was a good homemaker.
She stayed until the baby went to boarding school and Honora could marry a nice boy and have children of her own. Her beau didn’t talk much, but he was a hard worker and expected no miracles. A relief. Honora didn’t believe in miracles.
She birthed 17 children. Although she allowed herself tears on the birthdays of the three she buried, she told herself to be grateful the others were healthy and mostly good. Lilia was her fourth. The first daughter. Honora birthed her, cut the cord, expelled the placenta, and had Lilia at her breast before her husband arrived with the midwife. From birth Lilia was the easiest child.
***
Twelve
I loved visiting Vovó Honora’s house. Tia Lilia told of a more frugal time when milk sweets were laid out in nice porcelain for guests only. But by the time I came along, Vovó no longer guarded pantry doors.
The place was always full. Vovó Honora was pregnant with her last child when her first grandchild arrived. Sharecroppers and relatives came to help and brought offspring. I don’t think Vovó could fathom the kind of quiet we had in our home where I had my own room and spent hours talking to no one.
Adult children wove in and out of her house, some moved back in, brought wives, then children, lost wives, left children, some of whom repeated the pattern. Tia Lilia stayed. A fixture in her mother’s shadow.
***
Dozens
The last time I saw her, Tia’s gray eyes were as blurred as morning fogs on a coast she’d never visited. Her tiny frame barely made a dent in the narrow hospital cot placed in a room filled with altars to saints and pictures of a family that was the closest thing to a prize she’d ever won.
When she saw me, her skin stretched and folded itself into joyful lines that seemed misplaced in a face that had most frequently rested in a frown. She glanced towards the precisely stacked pile of pristine composition notebooks.
I opened the top one and read words I’d written on the first page of each before mailing them to her: Tia, write your dreams and stories and memories. I’d love to read!
Every page in the notebooks was blank.
THE END
Author Bio: Amy Marques grew up between languages and places and learned, from an early age, the multiplicity of narratives. She is a Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net nominee and has work published most recently in Streetcake Magazine, MoonPark Review, Bending Genres, Gone Lawn, and Chicago Quarterly Review. You can read more at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.