MOON STORY
BY ROSHINI SK
In the first quarter of my new moon existence, my dreams of my mother are hazy. She was unfazed by the surreptitious glow of the sky when she cut herself open with an x-acto, my umbilical cord hanging out like sausage links. My mother used to tell me she was in labour for 18 hours, strapped onto the bed from the mid-afternoon till the ascend of the moon. Said that at one point, my heartbeat curtailed to a distant throb, lost amidst the whirr of monitors before the doctor buckled down for an emergency C-section.
In some distant void, my memories and dreams intersperse. My memories of my mother are foggy. Obscured by the present and thinly-veiled grudge, held closely in my heart like a heirloom. I hardly remember the earnest tenderness a first-time mother has in her touch when my mother held me in the crook of her elbow. Neither do I remember the times she was shackled home, cleaning my diapers, rubbing baby powder on my bottom. Tying a bib around my pudgy neck and coaxing the mush into my mouth. Roused by the incessant wailing of a new-born, how it cuts through midnight’s throat. Once, during the apotheosis of a spat, in response to the ever-relatable ‘Don’t you remember what I’ve done for you,’ you hear every so often from the mouth of a birthgiver, I confided how I do not remember a single thing.
Science and the general masses claim these memory lapses to be normal. From birth till the ripe ages of middle-school, the mind forgets as quickly as it is forgiven. A mother’s touch is as fleeting as childhood. But the photographs littered across the TV console do not let me forget. There’s one where I’m fully clean-shaven to the root - one of my father’s many sacramental absolutions - baby-fat pulled back by a striped romper as my mother ventriloquises me on the coffee table. She’s decked in a velvety blue number and she’s luminous.
My mother has the profile of a beauty pageant. Alabaster skin and an angular profile framed by frizzy liquorice locks, she was a stunner. A broad of the Manilla streets - she lit up the Jollibee joints and the dance floor alike, sipping Pepsi with the unmistakable scorpio glint in her eyes. Women birthed from loam and on the riverbanks of Roxas move this way - the daughter of pesos pittance, desk-bound from the dinted local school to the only department store within a 5-mile radius. Mud-slicked wrestling with her seven sisters in the hen pen for the day’s bread. She’s the ingress of summer solstices, chugging balut and value-store beer. She’s the harbinger of harvest, of tip-toeing through the rice fields, of frilly rainwater-stained hand-me-downs on her way to church. She was bronzed by the tropical heat before she was flushed across the transatlantic, schlepped into the unforgiving hands of the lion city.
*
In the days of yore, very little is known about her. Once during recess, my friends exchanged stories on how their parents met - from as banal as meeting while in university to a valiant tale of falling in love at a drug-bust - and when it came to my turn, all I could render was a blank-faced, ‘I don’t know’.
The next day before school, I glanced at the mirror as she worked wordlessly on my hair. Before dropping me off to be chauffeured by a disgruntled 40 year old bus driver, she’d rise before the morning sun and braid my frizz-stricken tresses. Palms oil-slicked with the remnants of sleep in her eyes, I timed my question to the sound of her chafing her hands with Mama-store-bought olive oil. I asked, ‘how did you meet Daddy?’
She stalled for a second, hands suspended in the air with strands of raven swathed across finger-webs. She met my eyes in the mirror before she answered, ‘at work’ and went back to braiding. The second time I asked her the same question was 2 new moons later. She told me she met him while in college. I never got the truth until I turned 21.
For the most part, I chalked up my mother’s seclusiveness to being born under the Scorpion sun. Rudimentary astrology depicted us in the following alliteration: secretive, sly, and salacious. But then again, grandmother’s memories were as nebulous as the full-moons depicted in werewolf films. Grandmother mentioned that her third daughter was actually born a day before what we all came to know and consequently celebrated as her birthday. This revelation lived on uncontested for her birth certificate was juddered loose with the thatches of their house and jettisoned into the whorls of yet another seasonal typhoon that cohabited with native Filipinos.
Besides that one-off chance where my mother divulged a fossil-fissure deep secret out of what I assumed was reverence for my 21st solar return, much less is known about her marriage to my father.
*
The attic that stored the family’s paraphernalia—a Michael Kor’s knockoff handbag, battered boxes of prehistoric cooking apparatus and patti’s punjabis—was home to my father’s photo albums. Yellow-edged pages of my father’s lived-in experiences all documented by an outmoded Nikon camera. Deco-tacked to the fleur-de-lis decorative pages were all photos of my father with cameos of my relatives scattered throughout. From his graduation from kindergarten to his army days they were all showcased arbitrarily - starting off with a blurry picture of him building a sandcastle in all of his kiddie glory and in the next page, he had his lanky arm draped across an unidentified Chinese woman (mother upturned her nose at this when I asked her about this) - and they all featured the characteristic bulbous-nosed and hooded-eyed man that I grew to hate.
I scoured the entire box only to find a singular album with a cushiony cover that featured my mother in melange. My fingers came away sticky and sickly-sweet, redolent of myrrh and jasmine joss sticks when I thumbed through it. A thanksgiving dinner with my aunt and her bloated Texan husband. Backlight and blurred out blobs of people, my father boogieing beside my mother. My mother in another party this time sans my father, smeared red lipstick and a paper cup dangling from her obsidian nails as a random man leans into her. Heads bent, it almost looks like a heart but my mother is staring straight at the camera. Needless to say, she dodged the question when I brought it up.
But even in exosomatic memory, nostalgia mediums and liminal spaces alike she is blue-moon evasive. Very little can be known about a woman who is virtually a spectre; her presence barely bolstered by her physical entity. And even then it’s muted. I never knew male violence could do that.
For all the recollections that have slipped past my mottled brain, the only one that strikes out is watching her relegated to the kitchen. She was alway cleaving and de-gutting something in the kitchen. My nose would sting every time I walked past her for a quick water break, the noxious scent of oyster sauce and stir-fry. Sometimes when I dreamt about her the backdrop would always be of the terracotta dinner table. Sometimes, I watched as dream-her julienned a carrot. Sometimes, dream-me would tug at her apron, the categoric plea of a child waiting to be fed. Sometimes, dream-dad would shake her loose, the hank of her ponytail galvanised into a frenzy. Sometimes, I’d cower behind the sofa and peer, my mother’s silhouette eclipsed by father’s fist. Sometimes, dream-dad would be shaking me loose in lieu. In one dream-memory, I’m writhing on the floor as he stands over me like a pyrrhic victor. Between his legs, I watch as mother walks away without so much a glance. In another, white-hot anger takes over and he’s slumped next to a bag of basmati rice as mother stares, mouth agape like a cartoon caricature.
*
They met at a college party. It was the chase that got to her head. Libra women were always romantics; even the self-proclaimed ‘astrologers’ can tell you this. What they don’t tell you though, is that a man has no business afflicting a woman with a fiery moon, especially one that seeps out like ambrosia.
Now though, she’s clearer than day. It must be the vernal freshness of a woman’s deliverance. Evergreen, she leaves the house often for a shift at the mall’s only 24/7 diner or to grab a cuppa with the women in our new apartment complex. The saltish scent of sautéed sauce doesn’t hit my nose when she walks past my room anymore.
No longer do I see her hunched in the apertures of the kitchenette, neither does she bite her tongue. Her voice rings out especially when she’s nagging. Only on certain occasions do I see her spaced out, when she’s scooping white rice into the cooker.
As much as I am raptured by the vivacity of a woman with a renewed spirit, I still remember.
I still remember when she cantered off, the fear gathering in her irises as she watched on, pummelled like a rotting peach. It almost feels like a movie - like I’m clawed into the maw of a great white, floundering and watching her figure recede. Will she turn around, chop through the waves and save me? Will she come back with a life buoy?
In archetypical Scorpio fashion, I could let it stew and take this grudge to the grave. However, how much of a mother’s negligence can be accounted for if both child and immigrant mother were disenfranchised of their own bodily desires?
For all the downsides of a memory ravaged beyond redemption, it has its own beauty, like a nacre twice-shucked. Reinvention has allayed what’s left of the mothballs and morass of my mind. For better or for worse, the generational trauma only lingers if you let it. That’s another thing about Libra women - they love to delude themselves. My plutonian self knows better.