Marriage and Inheritance #4

The question, I thought, was about dimension

so half-drowsy, I snuggled up to my seven-year-old

and tried to explain in cartoon-friendly manner

the immigrant's journey across an ocean

through decades of cities

and how we two came to occupy space

in the bed

in the room

in the house

on this street in Paterson.

But along the ramble of my explanation,

he stirred me awake

to let me know he meant the mansion:

Why don't we live in the mansion, mom?

The one Nici lives in two houses away.

And I am stirred out of sleep

to stumble over bewilderment and ire

at a seven-year-old girl's princess fantasy

on streets where dreams of suburbia

stand overgrown by wild grass,

boarded up and marked with broad black strokes.

I stumble while my son waits

with remarkable patience

for me to draw him a mansion of his own.

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Charmaine Valere is a Guyanese-American writer whose non-fiction writing has been published in The Caribbean Review of Books, Caribbean Beat Magazine, and Sx Salon Journal. She has taught writing and literature courses at several colleges in New Jersey, and she maintains a blog, Signifyinguyana, where she writes on Caribbean literature, with a special focus on the works of Caribbean women writers.