Boston Year

My first week in Cambridge a car full of white boys tried to run me off the road, and spit through the window, open to ask directions. I was always asking directions and always driving: to an Armenian market in Watertown to buy figs and string cheese, apricots, dark spices and olives from barrels, tubes of paste with unreadable Arabic labels. I ate stuffed grape leaves and watched my lips swell in the mirror. The floors of my apartment would never come clean. Whenever I saw other colored people in bookshops, or museums, or cafeterias, I’d gasp, smile shyly, but they’d disappear before I spoke. What would I have said to them? Come with me? Take me home? Are you my mother? No. I sat alone in countless Chinese restaurants eating almond cookies, sipping tea with spoons and spoons of sugar. Popcorn and coffee was dinner. When I fainted from migraine in the grocery store, a Portuguese man above me mouthed: “No breakfast.” He gave me orange juice and chocolate bars. The color red sprang into relief singing Wagner’s Walküre. Entire tribes gyrated and drummed in my head. I learned the samba from a Brazilian man so tiny, so festooned with glitter I was certain that he slept inside a filigreed, Fabergé egg. No one at the door: no salesmen, Mormons, meter readers, exterminators, no Harriet Tubman, no one. Red notes sounding in a grey trolley town.