“Carmelina,” I say out loud, liking how full it feels inside my mouth.
When I think of my grandmother, I think of her rubbing gin on my gums to numb the teething pain, or frying dough in a skillet to serve with powdered sugar and a baked apple for breakfast. I think of her cursing in Italian at the nasty ducks in the creek behind her sorbet pink Florida condo, or breaking leaves off the aloe plant in her front yard, slicing them open and aggressively rubbing the jelly all over my sunburned body. I think of her chasing me around the house with a spatula, or telling my grandfather to go to hell before kissing him goodnight.
But that all was before everyone started dying; I try to forget what came after, like when she began incessantly asking me, in Italian, if I was afraid of being alone: Hai paura di stare da solo? Hai paura? she’d ask. Are you afraid? But when my mother died on a Tuesday in spring, just as the forsythia’s began to bloom, Carmelina stopped asking questions. She stopped talking entirely. The last words I remember her saying were at my mother’s funeral, when she asked me what I was going to do now without my mother. Five years after my mother’s death from lung cancer, and a year and half after my grandmother’s from breast cancer, I still have no answers.
But I wasn’t named after my grandmother. I was instead named after my great-grandmother, Carmelina’s mother, Cynthia, who was born in Naples. I’ve only seen her in photographs, specifically a sepia one of her and her family – a husband and seven daughters – in Italy; not one of them is smiling. Cynthia is sitting next to her husband, both in separate arm chairs, while their daughters stand around them. She is large, in all black, and looks unsatisfied; she, too, died of cancer. The name Cynthia, I’ve learned, is the epithet of Diana, goddess of the moon, who is also known as the goddess of young, wild things, hunting, and bringing and relieving disease in women. None of these things about my name have ever surprised me.
*
“Your mother and I were born at 525 Wythe Avenue between South 11th Street and Division Avenue in South Williamsburg,” Uncle Joe begins when I start asking him about the early days in Brooklyn. He and my mother were born, in the 1940s, twenty blocks from where I currently live. In a small way, it makes me feel close even though I feel so far. “The area at that time was trolleys, the Schaefer Brewery, the East River and the Williamsburg Bridge within blocks,” he reminisced. “Running through fire hydrants in the summer on the cobblestone streets. Not many cars riding around the streets at that time. That’s what the area looked like. You’d get all the smells from the brewery, the hops, and the river. We lived in an apartment, a cold-water flat, which meant no heat other than kerosene stoves that we cooked on. I think we had hot water, but I’m not too certain where that came from. Our apartment was heated by a cast-iron stove, and we would get the kerosene from a fifty gallon drum in the basement. Grandpa would siphon out the fuel by sucking on a half inch hose and let gravity fill up our gallon can. I thought that was so cool, it was my first lesson in physics…and how to steal gas from cars.
“The apartment was a railroad flat. The bathroom was in the kitchen, you know, off the kitchen. It was a private little commode with a door. The kitchen had a large double sink and a bathtub. We took our baths in the kitchen! The tub had a porcelain top so it could be used to chop vegetables when someone wasn’t bathing. My mother made this little curtain to put around it, to disguise it. Everyone hung out in the kitchen. We would sit at the table and listen to the radio most nights. There was also a window out to the fire escape and I remember being able to smell the fig tree in the landlord’s backyard through it. I was a big sleepwalker when I was young, and one night your mother woke to find me out there on the fire escape, just chatting with myself. “There was a storefront on the ground floor of our building that gypsies would rent. I don’t know whether they were Spanish or Romanian, but they were really cool. I don’t remember any men, but I remember the women and the way they looked at me, like they could see right inside me. The looks weren’t harsh, but rather very sensual. It was a very magical world to me, but my mother didn’t want me going down there. There were tapestries and fabric all around; it was like being in a tent. The women would dress with a lot of jewelry and bangles, you know, and silk fabrics. It was just a very different and unknown world to me, so it was very magical and I enjoyed that. There was a gypsy boy down there that your mother and I liked to play with, he was around my age, and he got run over by a trolley at some point and died. It was really gruesome. I really think that’s when that family moved.
“As kids we played on the docks because the river was very close by. I remember almost stepping on a water rat one time. Another time I tried to climb the fence, it was probably a six-foot cyclone fence, to get underneath the Williamsburg Bridge. They had it all fenced off. I think I was climbing to get to the outside of that fenced off area and I got hung up right on my wrist, and there I was, hanging on the fence where the metal came together at the top. I had to pull myself off of that. I think that was my only injury. Oh, and falling on an old broken bottle in one of the old houses. We often played in vacant homes that were not boarded up, ones that were ready to be torn down…”
My uncle continues, but my mind wanders. I realize those same streets, those same buildings and waterfronts he is reminiscing over, were explored by both me and my mother in Brooklyn, only fifty years apart. I first moved to Brooklyn in the summer of 2006, not far from the old Domino Sugar Refinery, on South 3rd Street. The old brown brick buildings were closed two years earlier, but for 150 years they produced, refined, shipped and received sugar on five blocks along the East River. My friends and I would often ride our bikes there, late at night after we got bored with drinking cheap beer in dark bars, slicked with sweat and hoping the waterfront would cool us. The streets smelled rancid with steaming garbage and the sweet decay of whatever bloated matter made its way to shore. We’d lock our bikes and drunkenly shimmy along the barge on the side of the shipping and receiving building, our arms spread like wings along the red bricks, until we found ourselves at the back of the factory and standing on a narrow ledge of concrete above the water. We’d sit on the ledge, kicking our legs over the river that sloshed between the beams below. The Williamsburg Bridge came in and out of focus to our left and the city gashed the river with wounds of yellow light. Above it all was a pathetic marquee of sparse stars. “I hate it here,” we’d all say at some point, never sure if we would make next month’s rent, or how much longer all this idling would last. We never meant it; we choose to be unhappy. Someone usually brought a flask of shitty whiskey to pass around. It burned our throats and we would cringe, we but we knew it would soon glow warmly in our chests. That much has stayed the same; we no longer have to choose.
*
Together Uncle Joe and I go through the family photographs I’ve brought along with me. I show him one of my mother and me lying in a linen hammock in our backyard. It was August and my mother’s legs were bared in white cutoff shorts, and those legs are now mine. She held up my year-old body, all baby fat and curls, kissing me on the lips. The summer was lush; honeysuckle and forsythia bushes reached toward the sun in the background, growing taller each year, ever-upwards. The photograph it is a non-memory; I don’t remember it. I look at it and think, This is not my life, this is not us. And then I look back on the memories I do have, and I think the same thing. Sometimes I find myself walking through the streets and I’ll see a certain eye or the profile of a nose, or hear a voice or laugh of a stranger and feel a burning in my throat. There’s something there, a glimmer in an inflection or a look. But they are not us.
What I do remember is this: Some years after the photograph of my mother and I in the hammock was taken I would pluck the honeysuckle flowers and suck out the sweet nectar while gathering stalks of forsythias for my mother. “They grow for you,” she would say when snipping the ends on an angle and placing them in glass vases around the house. “For Cynthia.”
*
When I returned to Brooklyn, I rode my bike toward 525 Wythe Avenue. I went south on Kent Avenue, along the East River, making sure I passed the Domino Sugar Refinery. Over the past couple of years a small waterfront park has been built next to the shipping and receiving building. Grand Ferry Park is small, unassuming, with nothing more than a few benches, some fenced off grass areas and a bed of rocks covered in graffiti on the shore. The wooden barge that we once drunkenly balanced on is still there but no longer accessible, not even illegally. The wakes of boats ripple toward the shore and slosh between the beams of the barge; this much has stayed the same. A sparrow chirps. Trucks beep as they move backwards. An old yellow raincoat hangs out of one of the blackened, broken windows of the building. A shredded life vest is crumpled between the shore rocks, its foamy insides exposed. Beyond this building is another, the main sugar factory, which is actually made up of three connected buildings. This was once the Pan, Filter and Finishing House, the most notable of all the buildings. A sign outside the House on Kent Avenue reads, “Domino Sugar/Welcome to the American Sugar Refinery Company/Brooklyn Refinery.” The buildings are made of dark brown brick, arch top windows with peeling green sills, and two smoke stacks are pointed toward the sky like a rifle. Its entranceways were once painted blue and yellow, Dominos trademark colors; I think of photosynthesis, of sunlight turning thin air into saccharine.
When the factory closed in 2004, there was talk of the buildings being torn down and replaced with condos. In 2007, the Landmark Preservation Union designated the Pan, Filter and Finishing House as landmark status, but not the syrup station, the building with the iconic neon “Domino Sugar” sign that can be seen from Manhattan. Some years ago, someone from the neighborhood hung a red neon sign on the side of the House that faces Manhattan; it still burns red and at one time fully read “Save Domino.” As if all it takes is a sign to keep anything standing.
I continued riding for several more blocks, my legs continuously peddling, and stopped on the corner of Wythe and Division. I walked my bike along the odd-numbered side of the street, where they skipped from 481 to 531, and stood for a long time in front of a three story yellow brick apartment building, numberless, that seemed to have been turned into offices. A sticker read “Do Not Fall in Love” on the gray metal door; it swings open. A woman around my age exits.
“Hey!” I called after her. “Excuse me!”
She turned around, unexpectedly smiling.
“Do you know what number that building is that you just came out of? Is it 525?”
“That building?’ She pointed to the one. “No, my office is 52 but I don’t know the building number.” She flipped her long black hair to one shoulder and cocked her head toward the same side. “Why?”
“My mother,” I said, nervously, suddenly feeling like a fool for thinking this building would still exist. “She grew up in 525 and I’m trying to see if I can find it.”
“Oh, that’s so cool,” she sighed, “but I don’t think it’s this one.”
*
When I rode home, I stared at the sun. When I closed my eyes, the sun was still there; a glowing red in complete darkness. When I opened my eyes, I hit a grate and found myself on the ground, and then I found the floater in my left eye bobbing along, like a flea moving across the backdrop of a cloudless sky. I’ve come to learn that floaters, the small black dots that float across your vision, are dead cells that you are seeing microscopically, and are caused by staring at the sun, always drifting in the periphery. One day I woke up and the cell was just… gone. I can’t help but wonder to where.
I got off the ground and rode home. I unlocked the door to my building, walked up three flights of stairs, and unlocked apartment number three. Inside I saw what I recently always see: plastic forsythia’s. Uncle Joe hid the fake flowers in my luggage when I left Alabama, so that when I opened my backpack on the plane they expanded and reached out in every direction. One of the branches poked the woman sitting next to me in her gut. She rolled her eyes; welcome to New York.
On Google Maps, I looked up 525 Wythe Avenue. I clicked on “street view,” which would show me the exact building. Everything looked the same as it did an hour ago, except the little pink bubble that pointed toward the approximate location was pointing at the middle of the street. I looked closer and saw that it pointed to a manhole cover. A. Man. Hole. Everything is shit, I thought, if all that’s left of my mother’s life in Brooklyn is a manhole.
But then I thought this: how strange.
How strangely things have changed over time. How strange that Uncle Joe has forgotten all the memories I want him to remember, the one’s that I make up in my mind of how I imagine my mother’s childhood was, the non-memories. How strange that my mother’s birthplace is gone, a hole in the middle of the road. I’ve always viewed manholes as the only visible reminders that there are things beneath these streets, things underneath this city that we will never get our hands on. Because maybe we don’t need to. The remains we seek aren’t always physical, evident things; the more pertinent remains are the ones we can’t touch, because they will always exist. The memories. The smells. The ghostly reminders. Maybe what we need has always been here, hidden under the surface, someplace untouchable, miles below a Brooklyn manhole. And maybe it runs even deeper than that.
