Spring 2021

Two weeks into my confinement, I noticed more raptors cruising the big blue. The spectacle had become a welcome respite from the awful daily death tolls and case numbers given by Governors Cuomo and Murphy on the television.

Did seeing more birds have anything to do with the lack of jet planes landing at our area’s three major airports? Or that most people took the stay-at-home order to heart, leaving their cars idle, or that buses were fewer and businesses were closed? A TV reporter commented that during COVID-19, birds, not overwhelmed by constant noise interference, communicated more with each other. She had footage to prove it.

I analyzed my growing obsession as a calling. A born-again birder christened within the walls of her eight-hundred-square-foot sanctuary.

By the third week, I spent breaks from work Googling information, typing in hawks, New Jersey, lifestyle, and coming up with sites like Audubon, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and my favorite blog, Birdchick. Homeschooled without the pressure.

Their mating season begins in March. Right around the time my friend came visiting to cruise potential partners from my window’s ledge. Broad-tailed hawks practice courtship feeding by delivering food to each other before they commit. A mouse here, a chipmunk there. Gourmet flirting. Watching pairs sky dance day after day was pure rom-com material. I no longer needed Netflix. I had them.

My name is a distortion, a misspelling botched in Sharpie, bleeding on a birth certificate issued minutes after I tumbled into a life christened with pandemonium. If spelled correctly, Serrina would be Spanish for “serenity,” soft to the touch and synonymous with peace.

Perhaps the Sharpie merely slipped and unconsciously voiced the fear my mother could not bring herself to confess: that she would lose her only child to a country whose earliest visions had no place for our ancestors, whose manifest destiny our yellow ancestors cultivated brick by brick only to have their bodies carted across the sea once again, unwelcome and unwanted. Perhaps misspelled, it meant that the native Mandarin she grew as a second skin would eventually drive a great wall between her and me, that her child would eventually fall in love with the perverse beauty of an English she stumbled to tame under her tongue, its pronunciations and grammar sticky and viscous, trapped. On the news: “Spit On, Yelled At, Attacked: Chinese-Americans Fear for Their Safety,” and “Couple names newborn twins Covid and Corona” are trending from halfway across the world; the greatest fear, confirmed.

If I had a child, I would name them Cielo, after the sky and heaven I have always feared most of all. Someday I will tell them stories about la pandemia, about how I wished this life to be a lie. Someday, I will tell them that in naming them after my greatest fear, I gave them the chance to forge their greatest strength.

“I cannot watch you die.”

This melodramatic cowardice, this catastrophizing, has permeated my outer edges and floated along the periphery of every decision I’ve ever made:

Don’t tell your mother how much it hurts when she leaves so she will come back; attend the same university as your brother so you don’t have to be alone; don’t move away from the Midwest because you’re a terrible writer and you won’t make it; marry your second husband almost immediately after divorcing the first; beg both to stay even though they’d both been unfaithful; don’t tell anyone so they don’t remind you how stupid you are for staying, for following, for worrying, for being needy.
My confession is the only time I remember not blaming my mother for who I am.

Many people I know have said that they didn’t regret dropping everything to be with their loved one as they died. I’m not one of those people. I dropped everything to get away.

Memory is like fishing.

Out of the murk it swims; we pull it up, keeping even what’s too small to sustain us. In May the new motor fell into the Pacific and we floated, you and I, waiting to be towed. I carry an image of our catch hooked to the links of the heavy silver stringers until they made strange necklaces, the bass like charms, following our boat back to land. You said you’d never seen anything like it, the way the mullet jumped out of the ocean all around us that afternoon. I recall little of that day. The rest you told me. All I know for sure is that I had a bucket hat with a real starfish sewn onto it. That when I was a kid you sometimes fried up fish for breakfast.

The many varieties—bowling ball-sized Tommy Atkins, green Kents that blush red just on top as they ripen, skinny Ataulfos with their sweet, mellow flavor—beckon like tropical sirens.

But this year we are in lockdown, my mother in Florida and me up north. Enjoying fresh mangoes with her is just a shimmer of a memory. There’s no possibility of me visiting. There’s no discussion of us going to Cuba to see our family whose trees are dripping with the fruit. The pandemic has rendered me too fearful even to wander over to my grocery store for an imported one.

Instead, our mango adventures take place by phone. One day my mother tells me she’s cooking marmalade, and I envision the thick orange bubbles popping in the pot. On another call, she says she’s freezing slices of mango for my next visit. My next visit, when will that be? My heart surges— then sinks when I realize it may not be until the new year. She tells me she’s sending me chupa chupas—our nickname for a type of mango so stringy they can’t be eaten, only sucked dry.

Nobody says Baby in song quite like Tom: Oh, Baby, don’t it feel like heaven right now? What? Don’t it feel like something from a dream?

Insert your dream. Insert might feel like. Fuck. I was a naïve, chaste, very innocent freshman girl with naïve, chaste, very innocent friends. Yet we had secured Tom Petty tickets and delivered our sweet and beautiful selves to him. I know he saw us, five pretties up front dancing and singing and flirting. I never thought then how close in age we were, fourteen to twenty-nine. He was a rock star; we were new teens, still just girls, the brevity of youth a bloated thing surrounding our angsty, arrogant bodies and haughty alluring faces and we had no idea that life unmoors us from this attractive flash of perfection and moves us along. We sang and swayed, arms linked, hair flowing and soft in the light from the stage.

As the years passed, it seemed to me that Tom was always surprised by his own success or good fortune or luck. Tom, his courage, his willingness to sing our hearts, babied his way through all of our lives. Oh, Baby, don’t it feel . . .” I would turn the knob on my mom’s Jeep all the way to the right when Tom came through the speakers.

This has always been the conflict of my addled mind and my more convoluted trickle-down heart: how? How can I inhabit the music? The music, sexy and full, nonjudgmental, nonthreatening, a haze of narrative webbed together with guitar and keyboard and drums and delicious vocals sat on some front porch, waiting, waiting for me.