Millie's Girl: On the complexity of writing about flawed people

Her name was Maria Milagros Rodriguez aka my Millie. She was the butch who raised me alongside my mother. They met in April of 1974 whenI was just three years old.

March 15th made twenty years of her being gone, taken by that mothafucka of a disease that many of us know but wish we didn’t—cancer.

She had her right breast removed and repeated stints of chemotherapy. But the mastectomy and chemo were not meant to save her life. The cancer had already spread to her lymph nodes by the time she felt the lump in the shower, so Millie knew eventually she’d die from the disease. She carried her mortality like a heavy load that shrank her will and faith. And even her pride.

She said the breast that remained looked like a deflated whoopee cushion. She slapped it so it bounced and her double rolled belly jiggled. “Si yo fuera una mujer femenina, estó me molestaría,” she said about the keloid gash, bubbled and sagging to one side.

I could tell that she was lying. She was covering up her sadness with jokes. I once caught her staring at her nude reflection in the mirror. She traced the wound with her finger and bit her lip. When she saw me watching, she laughed. “Yo si estoy gorda, negra.”

When I cleaned the gash, she searched my face, looking for a reaction. Disgust, I think. I never showed it. This was the woman who cleaned me when I shat my pants that time I had a bad case of the runs when I was eight. This was the woman who carried me on her shoulders when I was just three and mom made us walk the two miles to Knickerbocker Park. This was the woman who taught me how to fight when I was being bullied. “Te tienes que aprender a defender. ¡Con puños Vanessa, con puños!” I was only doing for her what she’d done for me since I was two. I was loving her. (Excerpt from my essay “Millie’s Girl”)

20 something year old me and Millie, after her mastectomy

I’ve written about Millie at length. Who she was to me. What having in my life has meant. When I imagined the kind of love I wanted, it was Millie’s and my brother’s love for me that I looked to as models.

My mother once told me, “tu pones a Millie en un trono.” I scoffed. I swore I’d done the work of making her into a real person on the page, with all her flaws and beauties. I didn’t believe I’d idealized her. Now, after reading ma’s stories, I wonder….

There’s so much I didn’t know when I wrote the version of Millie’s Girl that I excerpted above and later in this piece.

It’s still true that Millie loved me, that she helped me survive my childhood while also being a part of the trauma.

Was ma right? Did I put Millie on a throne?

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When my brother spoke about Millie, he always prefaced what he was about to say with the same line: “I know you had a different relationship with Millie than I did.”

Ma told me many times: “Millie loved one of my children: you.” She’d always look right at me before she said you.

I’ve known that my mother and Millie had a complicated, often abusive relationship. They could be so cruel to one another.

My mother resented what I wrote about Millie, saying I wasn’t fair or honest in my representation of her. I didn’t know that she’d leave me her story of meeting Millie and being partnered with her for thirty plus years.

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When I think of Millie, I am filled with a warm nostalgia that makes me smile, and a slideshow of memories run through my mind.

I remember the way she’d grab the brim of her kangol hat and say “yo soy butch,” but the way she said it, it was like she was dancing salsa but just with her shoulders.

I remember how much she loved her island. How her chest would swell and she’d raise her chin proudly when she said: Yo soy Boricua. Yo soy del campo.

Millie in Puerto Rico

I remember how her jeans were so worn that there was a white rectangle where she kept her wallet in her back right pocket, like it’d been traced with chalk. The other impression on her front right pocket was where she carried a knife. I once saw her brandish it to a man that was talking shit to her. She held the knife out in front of her and dared him to come closer: “Ven, que te doy una puñalá’!” Millie came out as a masculine presenting lesbian in the mountains of Lares, PR, where the Pentecostal religion is as deeply ingrained as the wild mango trees. I imagine this was where she learned she had to defend herself by any means necessary.

She loved the color orange in all its shades and hues—bright orange, peach, coral. I still have a few of her old t-shirts. My daughter wore one as a nightgown when she was seven, eight, nine years old. She’s wearing it in this pic of the first time she made me breakfast.

Once, when ma put me in Jehovah’s Witness bible classes when I was ten, Millie walked into the hallway of our building to find my frenemy from the block, Caroline, yanking my hair. I was not defending myself or doing anything to stop her other than whimpering “let me go” over and over. Caroline released her clutch when she saw Millie. Millie walked up to us and glared, “Hit her back.” I shook my head, “I can’t. I’m Jehovah’s Witness.” I hung my head. I was already a peleona by then by I was trying so hard to be different, less violent. Millie sneered at me and said, “Tú lo que eres es una pendeja.” It was the worst thing she could have called me. Pendeja.

When I came home from first grade crying because I was being bullied, she took me out to the backyard and taught me how to throw punches, what now know are straight rights, jabs and upper cuts. She said, “No te puedes dejar cojer de pendeja.” She wasn’t raising no punks. I had to learn how to defend myself. She put her hands out in front of her and had me practice those punches as she directed me: Hold your hand like this, so your knuckles are facing the sky. Keep your thumb outside of your fist. Use your legs. Your strength comes from your legs. At one point, I hit her so hard, her hand snapped back. She howled “¡Puñeta!” as she shook her hand vigorously, as if trying to shake off the pain. Then she grabbed my hands, turned them over as if marveling at them, and smiled a small, satisfied smile. “Ten cuida’o con esas manos de madera.” That’s how I learned about the power I had in hands. (It was a long time before I unclenched that fist to grab a pen.)

It took me years to regain Millie’s respect after the Caroline incident. I was already out the house in boarding school, 15 or 16 years old, home for a vacation when a girl from a nearby school came to my block looking for me. I’d heard she wanted to fight me but paid it no mind (perro que ladra, no muerde) until she came to my block with a crowd of people behind her. I was across the street from our building when I saw her. Millie was sitting on our stoop. I looked at her then down the block. Millie followed my eyes so by the time I looked back at her, she was already standing. I didn’t have say anything. We had an unspoken language, Millie and I. We headed down the block in unison. I didn’t talk, as Millie had taught me and hood rules dictate: there are no conversations to be had when someone comes to your block. I ran up and swung and the fight was on. I could hear Millie yelling: “con puños, Vanessa, con puños.”

Millie would talk about this fight for years, bragging about how I dragged that poor girl. She never called me a pendeja again.

When I was obsessed with basketball, she fashioned a hoop out of a rusty tire rim, nailed it to a splintered piece of plywood and put it up in the backyard. Then she went out and bought me an official Spalding basketball.

When I wanted a bike, she went around and collected parts from her friends and neighborhood junkyards and built me my rainbow bike. One wheel yellow, the other blue, a white seat, peeling aqua grips on the handlebars. I rode that bike like it was a king’s chariot.

And when I told her, excitedly, as she lay withering away from that mothafuckin disease, cancer, “I think I wanna write a book, Millie,” she propped herself up on one arm, her breath raspy, and said, “Pero negra, you’ve always been a writer.” (Excerpt from my essay “Millie’s Girl”)

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As I read ma’s story about Millie, when I translated it and brought it into my body the way only story can do, as I work on this book, I’ve been struck by the similarities between ma’s story and my story of a relationship I had with the reptile, how I refer to that trash ass man in my writing.

I met him when I was 12. He was 20, one of the guys that hung out on the corner of the block where my grandmother lived. I passed by that corner every chance I got. I made sure when I did, my long hair was neat, half up, half down; shirt fitted against my budding breasts, pants hugging my ass. I batted my lashes. Pursed my lips. I was so hungry for attention, and those guys were more than willing to quench that hunger. They commented on how beautiful I was, what a nice body I had. “Que nena tan linda.”

I was also rageful in that adolescent angst way that happens as a result of trauma. I didn’t hesitate to sneer, “Get the fuck away from me” if they got too close. One grabbed my hand and I shoved him away, “Don’t fuckin touch me.” They said I had that Brooklyn stank attitude. I didn’t care. But I still wanted them to want me.

Then there was him. Bottle bottom glasses, missing front tooth, deep, scratchy voice. He didn’t get too close. Knew he’d get a hard glare and a “véteme de allí.” He’d always smile and say, “Hi, Vanessa.” I’d roll my eyes and keep on walking, but I couldn’t hide the pull at the corners of my lips. I was pleased by his worship of me.

I was walking by their huddle one day, the summer after my freshman year in boarding school. Being away on my own made me even more ravenous for attention, but I played it off better, or so I thought. I didn’t see him coming.

He put his lips close to my ear. Whispered: “You’re gonna be mine one day.” I pushed him away. Said: “You wish.” He laughed and watched me saunter away.

I was 14. He was 22.

When I was 16, he got me like he said he would. He was 24.

He came to visit me the following March in Boston. I was a senior, awaiting college notifications. I took him around the city, though all he wanted was to hole up in the hotel room I’d reserved for him on Boylston Street. That’s where he showed me what he could do to my body. I learned a pleasure I didn’t yet know.

That was also where he shat out the pellets of marijuana he’d swallowed on the trip to Jamaica that he’d just returned from. I watched as he unwrapped them from the latex and plastic wrap. I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. I thought I was old enough and had seen enough. After all, I’d already been on my own for four years. I thought I was worldly and wise. I claimed myself a woman.

I didn’t know shit, and would spend the next five years learning just how much. (Excerpt from my essay “1994”, published in So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion and Birth, edited by Aracelis Girmay)

Millie was for ma who the reptile was to me…except my fucked up relationship lasted five years. Ma stayed for decades longer than I did.

This is what I’ve learned: Millie would never have survived the Me Too movement. Her actions when meeting my mom were stalkerish. She didn’t take no for an answer. She pursued my mother relentlessly until Ma gave in, which Ma says was an act of rebelliousness against her mother. She finally found a way of getting back at her mother. That rebellious act lasted decades.

I’m not here to defend or explain my mother’s queerness or her rejection of it. My mother carried a lot of shame for being with a woman. She told me many times that she wasn’t a lesbian. I didn’t buy it but that’s neither here nor there.

Religion and people’s notions of god have fucked up so many queer people and what they know about themselves, their attractions, who they love. Millie was one of them…

One day when I walked into the hospice, she was whimpering into her pillow. I ran to her. “What’s wrong? Te duele algo?” I reached for the nurse button but she grabbed my arm with the hand that was forever swollen after the mastectomy so it looked like a blown up latex glove.

“No, I’m okay.” She wiped the tear that clung to the tip of her nose. “Hi negra.” She kissed and hugged me. She was trembling. “Pasame la nena.” I put Vasia in her arms, sat on the chair next to the bed and watched.

I knew better than to ask any questions. Millie didn’t talk much when she was emotional. She did so in her time. I get my “I need to process this” tendencies from her.

After she drank the coffee (con leche y dos azucar) and ate the old fashioned donut I brought her every morning. After holding my daughter and cooing at her. After explaining to Vasia what was going on in whatever show she was watching, in between her stories about life and love and how blessed Vasia was to be my daughter “porque yo la crié,” she looked at me. “Tengo miedo, negra.”

“Why? What are you afraid of?”

“¿Te sacastes mas leche o le vas a tener que dar seno?” Millie preferred that I pump my breastmilk so she could feed Vasialys until mom came in the early evening and sent me packing, telling me I needed to go home to my marido, though by then my daughter’s father was more roommate than partner. But the hospice was no place to reveal that I had failed at yet another relationship.

“No, Millie. There are two bottles in the bag. Don’t change the subject.”

“Que subject, ni subject. Eh!” She shrugged. “Dos botellas no es suficiente.”

“Millie, there’s plenty of milk in these tetas.” We laughed, staring at my swollen breasts that popped out of every top I owned. “And I brought the pump just in case.” I pointed at the bag hanging from the carriage.“So, ¿que fue lo que tu diji’te?”

“Ay na’. It’s nothing.”

I grabbed the remote and turned off the T.V. Only I could do that. Anybody else would have gotten an ice stare and something thrown at them. Usually the closest thing to her. I raised my eyebrow and waited. She looked down at Vasia who was sleeping on the bed next to her. She adjusted her onesie and rubbed her back. Her hand was trembling. “What if it’s true? That I’m going to hell.”

“What do you mean?”

“Vanessa, la biblia dice…”

I cut her off like I always did when she brought up the bible. These kinds of conversations never ended well between us. I’d listen for a while, rolling my eyes. Then I’d get frustrated and go on a rant about how the bible didn’t come to earth via fax, that it was biased, machista, and contradicted itself. She’d call me atheist and we’d stop talking about it. But this conversation felt different so I held my tongue, or at least I tried to. “Millie, you’re not going to hell.”

“¿Y tú que sabes?” She stared out the window, one hand still stroking Vasia’s head.

I leaned in and ran my fingers through Millie’s hair. It had re-grown after her last chemo session, but now it was gray and wiry, not thick and jet black like it used to be. She started to cry softly. I held her head on my chest until she calmed down. “Tu huele a leche,” she giggled. Comedy was how she kept her sanity.

“How can God send you to hell? You loved me, Millie.”

She brushed the hair out of my face. “Tu eres mi negra, you know that?” I bit back the tears. She needed me to be strong. This was no time to get lost in my grief.

“You’re really scared, aren’t you?”

“Si negra. Yo viví en pecado. ”

“¿Quien dice? Who is this God you’re talking about? The God I know loves you.”

“Si, pero la Biblia dice que yo viví en pecado, Vanessa, y Papa Dio no perdona esa cosa.”

“¿Que pecado ni pecado?” I was getting mad. I felt helpless. I knew that I couldn’t do anything to save Millie from what she learned as a kid en Lares. From her three brothers who were all pastors, especially the one who was extra self-righteous because he found God after being an alcoholic for twenty years. If he could give himself to God, anyone could. And then there was Millie’s mother, who died begging her, “Deja esa vida, hija. Te quiero ver en el cielo un día.”

My helplessness got the best of me. We didn’t talk about it again. I found her a few times whimpering in the bathroom and sobbing into her pillow. She sometimes confessed to being scared, before an exam or after a really bad night. I held her until the shaking passed. It was all I could do.

I’ve been trying to reconcile who Millie was to me & who she was to my mother. I know people can be different things to different people, or at least I know this in theory. Real life is so much more complicated… (to be continued)

My ma & my Millie, early 2000s