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  Mama was a Sweeper

  Michelle Espinoza

  Copyright 2014 Michelle Espinoza

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  Table of Contents

  Mama was a sweeper

  A word to the reader

  About the author

  Connect with Michelle

  This tale is dedicated to the woman who inspired the story.

  Mama was a Sweeper

  I often think about death. If it were sudden, your heart would hammer at the realization before stopping altogether. My mother has been dying for some time. She has had hours, days, weeks and months to revisit her life. We sit for hours together, talking and sleeping. I take her hand, it’s cold. I rub the bony fingers between my warm palms and remember her doing that for me as a child. Mary watches us from the wall above the bed. I tug at the cord on the window blind and streaks of light appear and run down her body, like the bars of a cage.

  We lived deep in the suburbs of Perth in Western Australia. We weren’t near a river, a beach or a hill, but close to other Spanish migrants, which was of most importance to my parents. We celebrated Christmas together as an adoptive family and the presents always arrived before the end of the night. Our bedtime was a flexible nine o’clock during the week and on weekends, I was carried home wrapped in a blanket at two or three in the morning. Occasionally, we woke up at daylight on a sofa to the smell of fried sausages and onion. The children acclimatized from sleep to play in seconds while the adults were still awake from the night before. Little saucers of sweet café con leche were placed in rows on the bench for us to sip at before early morning cubby house meetings.

  I’ve made a tortilla in my mother’s kitchen and put a wedge on a plate for each of us. I bring it to her with lemonade. She doesn’t like water. Only Australians drink water.

  ‘Here Mama, I have lunch for you.’ I scoop her up with one arm like a puppy and pad the space behind her with pillows.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ she says as she begins to eat. The salty potato and egg breaks in my mouth without effort. We settle into a space of quiet chewing. I get up and turn on the radio. The sound is soft and classical.

  ‘Mama, do you think about the past while you’re lying here?'

  ‘I think about Ceci’s hair. It’s too short and she looks like a boy.’ We dance around in stilted conversation.

  ‘Well, it’s the fashion, you know.’ I say and she grunts in reply. ‘Well, do you ever think about the baby? Because I do,’ I say. She coughs and the Miraculous Medal jiggles between her breasts. She takes hold of it.

  ‘No.’ The lie sits between us like a transparent film and we are on either side. I want to tell her that there are no special graces.

  In school, my sister and I had pieces of crumbed chicken in our lunch boxes. There were no vegemite sandwiches. We made our confirmations in voluminous lace dresses. My mother looked so proud that day. She held her hands in a clap not a prayer and I saw myself through her.

  During the holidays, we went down to the coast. We rented a house with four or five other families. The setup was one bedroom for each family. One year, I remember a family of four sleeping on the floor in the entrance.

  The men went fishing and the women played cards. The children went exploring on their bikes. Our parents were lax in the early eighties as long as we took turns to make an appearance sometime during the day, which was necessary in order to collect food. We were often drawn to the caravan park. There was a playground and someone had set up a badminton net. It was droopy and sad looking and there weren’t shuttlecocks or racquets, but occasionally there were beach balls and little dogs.

  I met Henry at the caravan park. I was only ten at the time. One of the bushes nearby had caught fire and a fire truck arrived to put it out. They questioned our group of Spanish children who were hanging around, apparently looking suspicious. They drove us back to our holiday home and spoke to our parents. As the car left the Park with us inside, I noticed a blonde boy sitting by himself on the other side of the playground. He smirked at me and I knew then that he had lit the fire. Of course we went back the next day. We met Henry then and he joined our gang for the rest of the holiday.

  Mama is sitting quietly with her eyes closed. Her breath quietly confesses her wakefulness. I long to shake her, pour the limonada over her head and imagine the bubbles bursting over her skin, biting her like fierce little bugs until she gives me the answers I crave. The time ticks away slowly, but the air is not dull despite the smell. Instead, I feel ferocious alarm behind my calm façade as her life slips away from us. There is a cuckoo clock in the hall. The ticking reverberates and the cuckoos echo on the tiles. The clean, clean tiles. Mama was a sweeper. I’m sure that she is still worrying about her floor as she lies helpless in her bed.

  Henry was a year older than me in high school. It was the following year that we discovered that we were going to the same school and although it was very surprising to us at the time, it really wasn’t.

  ‘It’s just Perth,’ we say these days. Everyone knows everyone. In my twenties, I believed that it was fate.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ I had said.

  ‘How do you know?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘I can feel it kicking.’

  All three of my life’s defining moments involved my mother. The first was the declaration of my pregnancy. I was almost seven months gone when I went to the doctor. My stomach didn’t seem to swell at all until I told my parents in the lounge room that night with Wheel of Fortune playing low on the T.V. Mama cried. Up to that moment, I had denied it even to myself and although I knew they would be mad I also knew they loved me and would want the best for me.

  Over the next two months, my body seemed to explode. I felt alight, even after Henry took off. He got a job in Sydney and left without telling me. One day he simply stopped coming over and it was almost as though I didn’t notice. The absence of him couldn’t compete with the anticipation of what was to come. I had been taken over and I needed a new plan.

  I would lie in the bath and watch little bulges glide beneath my wet skin like a foot under a bed sheet. I would picture a little girl with Henry’s blonde hair and my brown eyes.

  I must have failed to notice that mama had stopped seeing her friends. The weekend gatherings stopped, the card nights, the afternoon teas. In fact, no one even dropped in at dinner time during those few months. At the shops one day, I ran into one of my mother’s friends from back in the time of holidays down south. She asked me if my mother was feeling better.

  ‘Yeah fine,’ I had said, but didn’t ask why. It’s only now that I realize she had been making excuses to avoid her friends. I knew that they were embarrassed. I suppose I assumed that she was excited about our baby. We spent that time together. It was the only two months that we had spent completely in each other’s company, until now.

  I wait for Mama’s breathing to deepen and begin to look through drawers. I am quite sure that I’ll never find what I am looking for, but soon, in some way, there will be something. I find an old exercise book with handwritten recipes. It is open at one of my favourites, Leche Frita. I can imagine the feel of my teeth cracking the fried shell and the taste of the sweet, cold milk pudding inside. I have found rings, charms and pendants wrapped in tissues and buried under nighties and knickers. There is a cupboard full of tinned tomatoes and an oil can filled with well used oil.

  She wakes. I hear her whispering. Her skin is pale. I b
ring her tea and sit behind her resting her frailness against my chest. I hold the tea to her lips and we sit. Sometimes she whispers to an imaginary person in Spanish, but all I can grasp are a few stray words. The language has gotten away from me. Actually, I let it go. Two words emerge and repeat.

  ‘Ella sabe, ella sabe.’ She knows.

  The second defining moment was the birth of my baby. My mother covered me as I shook and the nurses asked her to remove the extra blanket and shawl. She refused.

  ‘My daughter is shaking, I will not.’ she said. They tried to explain to her that the shaking was not caused by my being cold, but in reaction to the contractions.

  ‘It’s okay Mama, I’m okay.’ And in that moment I became the carer to my carer. She was more worried than I was and I understand now that sometimes it is harder to watch someone endure a pain than to take it yourself. When the baby was born, they took him away. I didn’t hear him or see him. My mother was the one who gave me the news.

  ‘He was born without life.’ She had said with her arm around my shoulder and tears brimming in her eyes.

  After that I lost a lot of time.

  I hear Mama’s breath, rough and crackling, like a growing fire. I lurk outside her room. I am broken and pulled in two directions. If I were her, would I want to know? I hear her breathing relax and I know she has pressed the button. Liquid relief flows into her system. I know she will be asleep in moments. I suppress my guilt at tormenting a dying woman, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I know I haven’t tormented her yet. I’m confused, feeling obliged to be the good Spanish daughter, all the while, emptiness pervading me. Requisite love exhausted.

  The third and most definitive moment came in two parts. The first was in the form of a letter sent to me by a young man by the name of Cameron. It was short and benign. He claimed to be my son. Of course, I thought it was ridiculous and not a funny kind of joke. What compelled me to meet him for coffee could not have been curiosity. It must have been empathy for child searching for a parent.

  The second part occurred at the café, watching the young man walk through the swing door, feeling myself peeled downwards from the inside by an ice-cold force. His hair was dark and short, rather than the blonde of my imaginings, but his gait was Henry’s. I stood to face him, wondering if he knew me as I knew him. We made eye contact and his eyes were grey and detached. Henry’s.

  ‘Hi.’ He said and put out his hand.

  ‘Oh, I can’t believe this.’ I replied. I felt light-headed.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ He held my arm and sat down next to me. He wore a black t-shirt and jeans with a jumper resting on his back, sleeves dangling over his shoulders. It made me think of a pet monkey. His dark hair was short, except for the front, which swept across his forehead and covered half of his right eye. He was beautiful. And British.

  ‘I have a photograph. Do you want to see him?’ I say softly in her ear. Mama’s eyes widen. Watching her suffer now is not enough for me. ‘I know that you lied to me, Mama.’ Her worried eyes fall into a motion of rolling away and pulling back into focus. She is fighting the morphine to stay awake. I think she is afraid of me. ‘I know that the Death Certificate I signed was actually an Adoption Certificate. I saw it only a few months ago. I saw him. His name is Cameron.’ She grips her Medal in one hand and the button in the other. She tries unsuccessfully to give herself another dose, even mimicking the usual reaction to an intake by letting her body slacken and her eyes close. ‘I know you didn’t get anything that time. I just want you to be honest with me.’

  Cameron is a business student at the University of West London. He is so different to me that our relationship will never be loving or attached, merely mutually beneficial, in the hope of righting a wrong.

  Mother is holding on for the longest time. She was always a stubborn old girl. I have decided not to wait any longer. I am going to hunt through the house for answers before my sister arrives. The study, the boxes in the shed and the top of her bedroom cupboard are untapped historical resources. She can’t get out of bed anymore. I let her watch me in silence.

  ###

  A word to the reader

  Hi there and thank you for reading my story. If you enjoyed it, I would be quite thrilled if you would leave me a review at your favorite retailer.

  Thanks!

  Michelle Espinoza

  About the Author

  Michelle Espinoza originally trained and worked as a hairdresser for twenty years in Western Australia. She is currently undertaking a BA in Creative Writing at Edith Cowan University while working on her first novel. She lives in Perth.

  Connect with Michelle

  Friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/michelle.espinoza.11