When I was six months old, my mother dropped me off at grandmother’s apartment and left. But grandmother didn’t have a crib for me. She found an abandoned refrigerator shelf in the basement and placed it over the drawer of the oak dresser to keep me from rolling out. The shelf had bits of dried goop crusted over with ancient droppings. Back then, I didn’t have words for these things—they were sensations and feelings, yet there was something I couldn’t identify, a sound, a constant murmur, a something.
I tried to assemble my own picture—a dress hanging from the closet door was like a piece of sky, blue and white. I turned off a lamp in the shape of an ostrich by moving my head. One day I found myself able to lift the shelf with my feet, and held it in the air until my knees bent and I dropped the shelf back down. I kept practicing until I got stronger. My feet propelled themselves up from my hip sockets, my toes were wild bandits that pressed against the cold metal, pushing up and up and stretching my toes to their very tips. I balanced the refrigerator shelf on my soles for a moment, but couldn’t keep it there and it fell to the linoleum. I heard a terrible bang and crash and began to cry, expected the plaster ceiling with its jagged mouth to shriek and punish me.
My grandmother rushed to her bedroom. “What happened?” She saw the shelf, laughed and carried me to the living room where she held me to her bosom, and spun me around the room. The sounds I’d heard during those weeks was music from her record-player, and when it stopped playing, so did we.
She put me on the floor, picked up the phone to call Star who lived on the ground floor. “Lula’s kicked the shelf from her drawer.”
In a short while, I heard the doorbell, an insistent buzzing. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. “Where is she?” Star scooped me up. She was our building’s superintendent, and smelled of cleaning solvents and perfume. Her real name was Estrella.
Star had danced at the Baile Club in Havana, Cuba. Now she was studying herbs with Joey the Witch from Manhattan.
“Lulu loves music.”
“You should know,” grandmother said. “You’re a professional, a real dancer.”
“You’re right,” Star said, and then asked softly, “Have you heard from Hilda? How’s she doing?”
“Acch! Don’t mention that name. My own child dancing in some strip club, when she should be on stage with Balenchine. And what do you think? Lulu’s going to start crawling. I can’t chase her around the floor; I’m an old woman. Hilda should be taking care of her daughter.”
“I’ll find something to help. No worries.”
The storage room in the basement was filled with an assortment stuff former tenants had discarded before moving on: a mattress, a mirror, a box of detergent, all knick-knacks. Star passed on such items to her favorite tenants, but only if they paid their rent. She said that the building should be hers and not the landlord’s. “Mister doesn’t even live in our city.” Each month, she collected the rent and deposited the checks to his account. Grandmother always paid on time, was one of Star’s favorites.
“It’s like a little wooden fence. My cousin has one. You put it around a baby.”