Memo and Lolo start singing “Mi mamá me mima …” to tease Toto, who is mother’s favorite.
—Quit it, morons! Toto says. —I said shut up already!
—What are you going to do? Memo asks. —Demote us to donkey-privates?
—Wait till you guys get shipped to Vietnam, then we’ll see who’s laughing!
—Fat-Face is to blame for everything, the Grandmother says, not having understood a word of Mother’s rantings because Mother said it all in English. —I don’t know how he does it, but Fat-Face has always convinced your father to do horrible things!
—What kind of horrible things, Grandmother?
—Yeah, what kind of horrible things?
—Like running away from home, and then sending for Baby to go north too. That’s how they all wound up so far from me, getting involved in business that was none of their business in my opinion.
Mother just snorts, but the Grandmother doesn’t notice, or pretends not to.
—I was working here and there, Father explains. —Philadelphia, Little Rock, Memphis, New York City. Shelling oysters, wiping tables, washing dishes …
—Why he’s never even washed a dish in his own house! the Grandmother adds as if boasting.
—You can say that again, Mother says in English.
Father just laughs his letter “k” laugh.
—But why didn’t you stay in Philadelphia, or Little Rock, or Memphis, or New York, Father?
—Because it wasn’t my destino.
And I wonder if he means “destiny” or “destination.” Or maybe both.
—And then what? Tell more cuentos of your life, Father, go on.
—But I keep telling you, they’re not cuentos, Lala, they’re true. They’re historias.
—What’s the difference between “un cuento” and “una historia”?
—Ah! … now that’s a different kind of lie.
* During the Vietnam War, a draft lottery based on birthdates was instituted beginning in 1969. It aired on national TV. Whole families watched this lottery of death in terror, as 365 Ping-Pong balls came down the chute and announced if you were a “winner.” The birthdates of men between eighteen and twenty-six were drawn and posted in order of sequence. If you were one of the first 200, it was almost certain Uncle Sam would call on you.
† Burrola and Don Regino Burrón are characters from the excellent Mexican comic book La familia Burrón, a chronicle of Mexico City life created by Gabriel Vargas. In a country where books are expensive and often out of reach for the masses, Mexico’s comic books and fotonovelas are aimed primarily at an adult audience, among them Mexican Mexicans and American Mexicans, as well as Mexican Americans and some ’Mericans trying to learn Mexican Spanish. La familia Burrón is remarkable because of its longevity. It began in 1940 and is still sold today in kiosks across Mexico. Every Tuesday—or is it Thursday?—a new issue appears on the newstands, but if you don’t get there early, you’re out of luck. Copies of La familia Burrón are sold in Mexican grocery stores throughout the U.S., though the issues are not as current. Thus, a popular request to someone venturing south is to bring back the latest issues of La familia Burrón!
‡ —Lies! All lies, Mother says. —Nothing but a bunch of lies. He doesn’t exist.
—Who doesn’t exist?
—God, Mother says.
She’s staring at stacks of her precious magazines she’s piled in a plastic laundry basket.
—I can’t believe I saved this shit, she says.
There are volumes of Reader’s Digest, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and a year’s worth of National Geographic, a gift subscription from her sister Aurelia. “Apollo 15 Explores the Mountains of the Moon.” “Those Popular Pandas.” “Lady Bird Johnson’s White House Diary.” “Julia Child/28 Great New Vegetable Dishes.” “The Skirt-Length Problem/Ten Ways to Solve It!” “Do-It-Ahead Holiday Ideas/Food, Fashion, Beauty, Gifts, Needlework.” “Ralph Nader/Are Baby Foods Safe?” “A Guide to Christmas Gifts under Twenty Dollars.” “The Kahlil Gibran Diary.” “Adorable Animals to Crochet and Decorate.” “Fifteen Ways to Trim That Tummy.” “Twenty Scrumptious Dessert Recipes.”
—You, Mother says to me in her that’s-an-order voice, —help me get this junk outside.
The laundry basket is filled to the top and bulging, too heavy to pick up. We have to slide it to the back door, then thump it down two flights of porch steps to the backyard. I thought Mother meant to haul everything to the alley, but she heads for the garage, unlocks the padlock, and wheels out the Weber kettle she bought at the Wieboldt’s with her S&H green stamps. Mother feeds the Weber the first batch, douses it all with lighter fluid, and, with a little sigh, lights a match.
It takes a while before the fire catches. The magazines are thick and let loose a pale, ashy smoke that makes you cough. Satisfied, Mother puts the lid on and then goes back inside. She makes her bed, washes the breakfast dishes, starts several loads of laundry, before we sit down to egg and hotdog tacos. Every once in a while she plucks the kitchen curtains aside and makes me go outside to feed the kettle more magazines. Mother isn’t satisfied till she can see the smoke unspooling steadily from the lid, a thin gray string.
—Cripes, she mutters while peeling potatoes.
When the boys come home later that evening they ask, —What’s burning?
—My life, Mother says. Every time she talks like that, kind of crazy, we know to leave her alone.
Memo wants to go out and take a look, but our mama grabs him by the hood of his sweatshirt. —Oh, no, you don’t. You eat your dinner, boy, and finish cleaning up your room, she says. And by the time he’s finished, he’s forgotten about the Weber kettle.
There are unfinished embroidery projects she’s abandoned. There are paint-by-number sets. There are plants to repot and television shows to watch. But Mother doesn’t feel like anything. Nothing. Not even lying on her back and staring at the ceiling.
It all started when December 20th popped up on a Ping-Pong ball, number 137 in the draft lottery, Toto’s birthday. Mother stops putting on her makeup, gives up setting her hair and plucking her eyebrows. She lets the Burpee seed catalogs pile up with the Chicago Sun-Times, and then throws them all out. She gains weight once she stops doing her daily exercises. Nothing interests her.
Until the older boys bring home their college textbooks. She reads Freire, Fromm, Paz, Neruda, and later Sor Juana, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, and Chief Joseph. She begins a subscription to Mother Jones and The Nation. She tears out pages of political poetry and tapes them to our refrigerator. She listens faithfully to Studs Terkel on WFMT and pastes Spiro Agnew’s face on our dartboard. Mother clips the slogan of a national ad campaign and tapes it on the bathroom mirror: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
53.
El Otro Lado
The Little Grandfather died on a Tuesday in the time of rain. He had an attack of the heart while driving on the periférico and crashed into a truck filled with brooms. The Grandfather’s face looked startled. This was not the death he had imagined for himself. An avalanche of plastic brooms of all colors spilling onto the windshield like crayons. The thwack of brooms under car wheels. The thunk-thunk of their tumbling on metal. Brooms twirling in the air and bouncing. The Grandfather, who never lifted a broom in his life, buried under a mountain of plastic brooms, the ones Mexican housekeepers use with a bucket of sudsy water to scrub the patio, to scrub the street and curb. As if Death came with her apron and broom and swept him away.
At first the family thinks they can outrun Death and arrive in time to say their good-byes. But the Little Grandfather dies in his automobile and not in a hospital room. The Grandfather, who paid so much attention to being feo, fuerte, y formal in his life, backed up traffic for kilometers; a feo diversion, a fuerte nuisance for the passing motorists, a sight as common as any yawning Guanajuato mummy, as formal as any portrait of Death on the frank covers of the ¡Alarma! scandal magazine.
When they
dug him out from under the brooms, they say he mumbled a woman’s name before dying, but it was not the name “Soledad.” A garbled swamp of syllables bubbled up from that hole in his chest from the war. That’s what the periférico witnesses said. But who can say whether it was true or simply a story to weave themselves into that day’s drama.
He had a bad heart, it will be explained when explanations can be given. —It’s that we have a history, we Reyes, of bad hearts, Father says. Bad hearts. And I wonder if it means we love too much. Or too little.
The brothers Reyes hurry to make their reservations south. In our family it’s Father and me who fly down for the funeral. Father insists I go with him even though it’s almost the end of the school year and the week of my finals. Father talks to the school principal and arranges for me to make up my exams later, so I can be promoted to the eighth grade. I’ll miss the end-of-the-year assembly where my class is to sing “Up, Up, and Away.” —I can’t go without Lala, Father keeps saying. Father and me on an airplane again, just like in the stories he likes to tell me about when I was a baby.
The Grandmother is already beyond grief by the time we get there. She busies herself making great pots of food nobody can eat and talking nonstop like a parrot that has bit into a chile. When she’s exhausted her stories with us, she talks on the telephone to strangers and friends, explaining again and again the details of her husband’s death, as if it was just a story that happened to someone else’s husband and not hers.
It only gets worse at the burial. When the time comes to pour dirt on top of the coffin, the Grandmother shrieks as if they’d put a pin through her heart. Then she does what is expected of every good Mexican widow since the time of the Olmecs. She tries to throw herself into the open grave.
—Narcisooooooo!!!
All three of her sons and several husky neighbors have to hold her back. How did the Grandmother become so strong? There’s a commotion of huddled bodies, shouts, yelps, screeches, and muffled sobs, and then I can’t see.
—Narcisooooooo!!!
Please. Too terrible. The Grandmother collapses into a trembling heap of black garments, and this bundle is tenderly lifted and loaded into a car.
—Narcisooooooo!!! the Grandmother hiccups as she is led away. The last syllable stretched out long and painful. Narcisooooooo, Narcisooooooo!!! The “o” of a train whistle. The longing in a coyote’s howl.
Maybe she’s seeing into the future. Maybe she can foresee selling the house on Destiny Street, packing up her life, and starting a new life up north en el otro lado, the other side.
To tell the truth, the Grandmother didn’t realize how much she loved her husband until there was no husband left to love. The smell of Narciso haunts her, his strange tang of sweet tobacco and iodine. She opens all the windows, but can’t get the smell out of the house. —Don’t you smell it? You don’t? A smell that makes you sad, like the ocean.
Days later, when everyone who has tried to help has gotten out of the way and events have settled to a startling solitude, the Grandmother decides.
—The house on Destiny Street must be sold, she says, surprising everyone, especially herself. —There is no changing my mind.
The Grandmother decides everything, same as always.
—And why do I need such a big house in the center of such a noisy neighborhood? It was different when my children were children. But you have no idea how Mexico City has changed. Why, our old neighborhood La Villa is no longer La Villa anymore! It’s flooded with a different category of people these days. I’m not lying. It’s not safe for a woman alone, and with my only daughter abandoning me to be a burden on her daughter, do you think she’d invite me? Of course, I wouldn’t think of imposing on her even if she did, I’m not that kind of woman. I’ve always been independent. Always, always, always. Till the day I die my children will know I never imposed on any of them. But my sons, after all, are sons. And with the three of them up in the United States, what else can I do but suffer one more calamity and move myself up there to be near my grandchildren. It’s a sacrifice, but what’s life if not sacrifices for our children’s sake?
And so that’s how it is that Aunty Light-Skin is summoned back to Mexico City to help the Grandmother say good-bye to the past. And that’s how it is we go back, after the Grandfather’s burial, recruited as involuntary volunteers to help move the Grandmother up north. At least the half of the family still young enough to have to obey Father. The older ones have perfect excuses; summer jobs, graduate school, summer classes. Father, Mother, Toto, Lolo, Memo, and me are stuck with her. That’s how it is we lose another summer vacation and head one last time to the house on Destiny Street.
By the time we arrive, the house has already been sold to the family who rents the downstairs portion, the apartments where Aunty and Antonieta Araceli once lived. The rooms closest to the street, where we always stayed, will be rented to strangers. All that’s left is for the Grandmother to pack up her things and come up north with us to Chicago. She plans to buy a house in the States with the money from the Destiny Street house and its furnishings.
The Grandmother insists on overseeing every little thing, and that’s why everything takes twice as long. Father has to make sure she is given something to keep her busy, and now she is sorting through the walnut-wood armoire, the doors standing open exhaling a stale breath of soft apples. She pauses at her husband’s favorite flannel robe, holds it up to her face, and inhales. The smell of Narciso, of tobacco and iodine, still in the cloth. She had avoided sorting through his clothes. And now here she is, holding her husband’s ratty old robe to her nose and relishing the smell of Narciso. A pain squeezes her heart.
What does she miss most? She is ashamed to say—laundry. She misses his socks swirling in the wash, his darks mixed with her florals, his clean undershirts plucked stiff from the clothesline, folding his trousers, steam-ironing a shirt, the arrow of the iron moving across a seam, a dart, the firm pressure along the collar, and the tricky shoulder. Here, this is how. That silly girl! Leave my husband’s things. Those I’ll iron myself. Cursing all the while about how much work it was to iron undershirts and underpants, men’s shirts with their troublesome darts and buttons and stitching, but she did them all the same. The complaining that was a kind of bragging. Scrub out the sweat stains—by hand!—with a bar of brown soap and the knuckles stropped raw, scrub with lots of suds, like this. Put the shirts to the nose before soaking them in the outdoor sink with the ridged bottom, the smell of you like no one else. The smell of you, your heat I roll toward in my sleep, your wide back, your downy bottom, the curled legs, the soft, fat feet I embrace with my feet. Your man shirts puffed with air, your trousers hooked on the doorknob, your balled socks shaken out of the sheets, a tie lying on the floor, a robe draped behind a door, a pajama top slouched on a chair. I’ll be right back, they said. I’ll be right back. I’ll be … right … back.
And she misses sleeping with somebody. The falling asleep with and waking up next to a warm someone.
—Abrázame, he’d demand when she came to bed. Hug me. When she did wrap her arms around her husband, his fleshy back, his tidy hipbones, the furry buttocks tucked against her belly, the bandaged chest, his wound with its smell of iodine and stale cookies, this is when he would sandwich her plump feet with his plump feet, warm and soft as tamales.
The talk in the night, that luxurious little talk about nothing, about everything before falling asleep: —And then what happened?
—And then I said to the butcher, this doesn’t look like beef, this looks like dog cutlets if you ask me …
—You’re kidding!
—No, that’s what I said …
How sometimes he fell asleep with her talking. The heat of his body, furious little furnace. The softness of his belly, soft swirl of hair that began in the belly button and ended below in that vortex of his sex. All this was hard to put into language. It took a while for the mind to catch up with the body, which already and always remembered.
Everyone complains about marriage, but no one remembers to praise its wonderful extravagances, like sleeping next to a warm body, like sandwiching one’s feet with somebody else’s feet. To talk at night and share what has happened in a day. To put some order to one’s thoughts. How could she not help but think—happiness.
—Father says I’m to come and help you, I say, entering the room and startling the Grandmother from her thinking.
—What? No, I’ll do it myself. You’ll only make more work for me. Run along, I don’t need you.
All over the floor and spilling out of the walnut-wood armoire is a tangled mess of junk impossible not to want to touch. The open doors let out the same smell I remember from when I was little. Old, sweet, and rotten, like things you buy at Maxwell Street.
In a shoe box full of the Grandfather’s things, a photograph of a young man. A brown sepia-colored photo pasted on thick cardboard. I recognize the dark eyes. It’s the Grandfather when he was young! Grandfather handsome in a fancy striped suit, Grandfather sitting on a caned bentwood settee, his body leaning to the side like a clock at ten to six. Somebody’s cut around him so that only the Little Grandfather exists. The person whose shoulder he’s leaning on is gone.
—Grandmother, who was cut out of this picture?
The Grandmother snatches the photo from my hand. —Shut the door when you leave, Celaya. I won’t be needing your help anymore today.
The key double-clicks behind me, and the springs from the bed let out a loud complaint.
Behind a drawer of stockings, rolled in a broomstick handle, wrapped in an old pillowcase with holes, the caramelo rebozo, the white no longer white but ivory from age, the unfinished rapacejo tangled and broken. The Grandmother snaps open the caramelo rebozo. It gives a soft flap like wings as it falls open. The candy-colored cloth unfurling like a flag—no, like a hypnotist’s spiral. And if this were an old movie, it would be right to insert in this scene just such a hypnotist’s spiral circling and circling to get across the idea of going into the past. The past, el pasado. El porvenir, the days to come. All swirling together like the stripes of a chuchuluco …
Caramelo Page 26