It Chooses You - Миранда Джулай

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She passed away on December 24. We buried her on December 31 at Forest Lawn. Then I kept her children and raised them. So whatever happens, I always try to share things that we can learn from what happens in our lives, how we can help others.
Miranda: And what do you do for a living?
Primila: I’m director of rehabilitation at a hospital. I’ve worked there twenty-three years. I’m so passionate about my work that in twenty-three years I’ve never had an unscheduled absence. I never picked up and said, “I’m not coming in today.” But today I locked my door – I always lock my bedroom door when my husband’s in India – and I realized my purse was still inside with the car key. I didn’t know what to do. I went up and I shook the door. It wouldn’t open. So I thought, What do I do? Let me call my son. My son tells me, “Mom, you’ve never called in sick. I’m busy. Maybe today’s the first time in your life – you have a reason: you don’t have a car.” I said, “Are you kidding? I would never do that.” The day I drop dead I won’t show up at work. So I went up again and I just shook the door and I managed to budge it.
Miranda: You broke down the door?
Primila: Yes.

      Primila took us upstairs and showed us the door, hanging off its hinges, and then she pointed out two places in the house where a tiny square of wall had been removed. She asked me to guess what these holes were for, but I said I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Primila: Okay, I’ll tell you because it’s a funny story. One day I was at work and my nephew Benny calls me and he says, “Auntie, I’m hearing voices from the wall. Not from the roof, but from the actual wall.” I said, “What nonsense.” But when I came home I listened, and sure enough, in the closet, behind the wall – in the wall – there was a little meow meow. So my son-in-law cut a hole in the closet wall and he put a little food there. Then in the morning there was the cutest little black and white kitten, just two weeks old.
And then a week or two later, just behind the water heater, he calls me up and says, “Auntie, there’s another meow going on there.” And sure enough, we cut a hole there and another kitten came out. And then it happened again! There was a tree that had grown over our wall, so the cat from there had climbed up, made a hole in our roof, and got into our attic to have her kittens. And then they were falling through the insulation. My daughters are married and I’m waiting for grandchildren, but the joke is that the stork brings only four-legged babies to my house.

      Before we left, she showed me how to wear a sari properly. As she wound the fabric around my hips I realized I would join the Latina actress when Primila told her story about people who had answered the ad. I had thought of myself as outrageously forward, but PennySaver sellers weren’t hung up about inviting strangers into their homes. So I didn’t have to be so nervous — I could drop the Leave It to Beaver voice and focus on the secret clues each person was trying to convey to me.

      That night I wrote down: (1) Each day is a gift, and, (2) Look for the rainbow. Gift. Rainbow. Primila was a hellcat, breaking down doors and threatening officials with eternal damnation. She had adopted four kids and had three four-legged grandchildren. I crossed out clues one and two. These were obviously decoy messages. Of course the truth wouldn’t be sweetly concealed in a motto, because I wasn’t Hansel or Gretel. My inquiry was open-ended, but it wasn’t pretend, I wasn’t in a fairytale or a fable. I shut my eyes and absorbed the silent whoomp that always accompanies this revelation. It’s the sound of the real world, gigantic and impossible, replacing the smaller version of reality that I wear like a bonnet, clutched tightly under my chin. It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.

      PAULINE & RAYMOND

       –

      LARGE SUITCASE

      $20

       –

      GLENDALE

       –

      Pauline had been eager on the phone; she’d begun telling me about her life even before I asked the question or offered the fifty dollars. She lived in a pretty part of Glendale, my ex-boyfriend’s neighborhood. As I exited at the familiar exit, I thought what if it was the same street, the same house, what if it was him selling the suitcase, what if the suitcase was mine, something I’d forgotten, and what if I bought it and inside there was myself as a child or my dad as a child, or my child as a child, the one I hadn’t found time to have yet? But my ex-boyfriend’s name wasn’t Pauline, so we drove right past his street and parked on one a few blocks away. The house was big and grand, again. Pauline was in her seventies, and she immediately began showing me pictures and telling me stories about her amateur singing group, the Mellow Tones.

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