CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I gave birth to Angelica on February 24th . For the next four years, my life was consumed with baby and I never left the house. After Angelica was born, Cecil and I decided to use birth control. He said he didn’t want to overwhelm me with dozens of babies. That was fine with me. Angelica was a hand-full.
I remember those first two years, not much to talk about really. I loved her and nursed her, despite how some people felt about nursing at the time. It felt right to me. I lost a lot of weight in those days.
She was a beautiful child. She had dark brown hair at birth, but over the first two years of her life, it lightened to a honey-brown. It curled and refused to grow past her shoulders. She was a quiet baby. Never complained much. Cecil called her an old soul. The first thing he would do when he came home from a long day was kiss her little cheek and then pet my hair. I believe he was a happy man then.
I had decided I wanted no contact with Barbie and Aunt Savannah. They made no efforts to contact me either. Nobody in our families came to see Angelica when she was born. My grandmother sent a wide array of baby supplies, and my mother wrote a short note of congratulations and asked for a picture.
The first word my Angelica said was “Play-doh.” She loved play-doh. Her voice was always gravely, like she was really an old soul with an old voice, like Cecil believed.
In 1981 the Republicans were coming into power. Cecil had moved up in the political world of Philadelphia despite. He often talked about the state of things. I listened, and sometimes played Devil’s Advocate. Although I was quite pleased to be with Angelica while he was gone, and to absorb myself in literature when my baby slept, I was becoming bored. Sometimes when Angelica was sleeping I would take Cecil’s brandy glass and fill it with nice liquors Cecil brought home for us and sip slowly as I read. I have to admit, it made life seem a little less dull that way. Then when he came home we would often sit at our kitchen table and sip more liquor and I listened to him chat about what he had seen and heard that day. Angelica would sit on the floor and quietly watch, occasionally spitting out some words, repeating the ones we said and smiling wisely.
In 1982, Angelica was ready to go to school. Cecil asked for the millionth time if I wanted to move out of Powelton Village. We had money for a nice place in northeast Philly, but I was very comfortable in Powelton Village then. I didn’t want to move. He suggested we get another home, a bigger, nicer place, in the Village.
We did, and moved a few blocks away to a nice, yellow-painted Victorian home that had been renovated by a well-known architect. Cecil went with me the first day I took Angelica to school. We sent her to a private school in the city that was close to where Cecil worked full-time. He was to be the one to take her every day, so I suppose I should say, I went with him the first day of school for our daughter.
I got very lonely those days when she was at school. Cecil cut his hours just to bring her home and spend time with us, but money was a-plenty. He was becoming admired by the political community and had several sponsors. Hernandez had long since been bankrupt and left the country, but at that time Cecil had wealthier backers, mainly from what people might call “new money.” He was working as a researcher and speech writer, often telling me how he was glad not to be in a spotlight position, but rather a behind-the-scenes man.
But those mornings and days alone, I read even more books and started reading magazines about music, art, societies around the world. I read in a magazine about Bast. It made me wonder about Fidore, but I never asked Cecil what happened to my mother’s favorite cat.
Maybe another cup of coffee, with another nip of whiskey. It tastes awfully nice right now. Thank you.
You ask, what did I do? To relieve my boredom? I started writing my mother when Angelica was about two and a half. I told her about my life and all about my daughter. She wrote back as soon as she got my letters. For a year and a half, we kept in contact through letters.
Around the time when Angelica was ready for school, my mother started writing things that seemed odd to me. In one letter in particular, a year later, she wrote that she was locked in her room because she was a threat to society, and I never got another letter afterward. It was then that I decided to try to find Barbie again. In mother’s letters, she always mentioned that Barbie wrote her, too, and that we should be together, that we were family, that we should remember the life we had in Nebraska. I didn’t want my mother to know what had, in my mind, become of Barbie. I thought even four years after I had last seen her that she was bad news. How? I don’t know, I just knew that I didn’t like that little apartment she shared with my Aunt, or the way her hair looked, or the small glass pipe, or anything about the situation. But I knew in ’83 that there was something wrong with my mother, and that I had to find my sister and talk to her, to find out what she knew.
I went to their apartment early one morning after Cecil and Angelica left for the day. A woman answered the door. I asked if she knew anything about where my sister and aunt might be. She said she had been living there for two years, and didn’t know anything about the people who had lived there before. I sought out the apartment manager, and he gave me a forwarding address in another part of the Village. I went there, knocked on the door, but nobody answered. I had brought a pen and paper, anticipating having to write a new address down. I ripped the paper that I had written down the new address on in half, and wrote, “Barbie, I think we need to get together and talk about Mother. Come see me if you get this note.” I wrote my address down. I slipped in under the door, which had a wide crack between it and the hardwood floor of the apartment building’s hallway.
I also requested as a P.S. that she come before one. I did not want my daughter exposed to whatever lifestyle my sister had decided to live after I saw the place of her new address. It was smaller, dirtier, and smellier than the last place I had seen her at. I could smell drugs on the second floor.
The next day at 11:30 A.M. my sister knocked on my door.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN