We had Thanksgiving at Granddad and Mamacita’s house on the other side of town. Mamacita was light-skinned and from Chicago; she used a straightening comb and pin-curled her hair like Rita Moreno’s in West Side Story. She wasn’t remotely Hispanic or Latina.
Her dressing was too wet — something like the consistency of oatmeal. She said be mindful of the china, rather than be careful with the china. She was oddly Victorian. She cut her dinner roll in quarters, never pulling it apart with her hands. Her fingers were impossibly small. She wouldn’t rest her back against the back of her chair.
I wondered what was up with all the wicker, how they kept the black baby grand with the sticky keys free of fingerprints.
Granddad said grace. Bless us, Oh Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ, Our Lord. Amen.
The other night, I dreamed I was spending Thanksgiving with them this year. It was one of those dreams where the dream is having you and laughing at you. You’re completely aware that you’re asleep. You recognize the dream is absurd — not a good one, nor a bad one. You know it’s a waste of time, but you can’t wake up.
The dream had us perfectly preserved in the ’80s. I bit my nails like they were sustenance. I was taller than my big brother. But the story on the front page of the Baltimore Sun was one I read the other day: three Virginia men arrested for plotting a race war. I looked like I did when I was 9; but, the stories I’d heard recently about swastikas painted on buildings at Bowie State and death threats at Howard had me nervous to work on a college campus.
In the dream, I was the kind of religious I was as a child, a little girl with a specific gift for memorizing the Bible. After Granddad said grace, I listed all 66 books of the Bible in order and couldn’t pronounce Zephaniah or Haggai correctly. I recited Revelation 22:20: He which testifieth these things saith, surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
Genesis 7:21-22.
If Freud’s theory of dreams as wish fulfillment is right (that our dreams are not what we wish would happen but rather what we hope will not happen), then, apparently, I hope I won’t be able to list all 66 books of the Bible in order; I hope I won’t know the stories; I hope I won’t have Thanksgiving at that house again.
I can still list the books in order. I can do it backwards, too. But I can’t spend the holiday there, on the other side of town. My grandfather divorced Mamacita a few years before he died in 2005. She moved back to Chicago. I don’t know if she’s still alive, still making people call her Mamacita, still pretending to be something she isn’t, somewhere she isn’t. Maybe that was her gift.
This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2015.