Caramelo

by Sandra Cisneros

  I meet Viva at our after-school job, straightening up the rows of desks in the study hall. This is the job I land after the housekeeper’s gig doesn’t work out. A bunch of girls work at our school, some in the cafeteria, some after school like me. Thank God nobody sees me skulking in here after class. No one knows I’m one of the poor girls except for the other poor girls, like Viva.

  The first time I see her, Viva Ozuna is holding court seated halfway out the study hall window, smoking a cherry-flavored cigar, blowing the smoke outside, all the while chatting up a storm about her favorite subject. Sex.

  —He’s this wide, Viva says making a fist. —Mexi-size, and he ain’t even Mexican.

  —But I thought it was length that was important, I say.

  —You stupid virgin! Somebody just made that up so as not to hurt her boyfriend’s feelings. Listen, you can’t feel nothing unless a man’s thing is as wide as a baby’s head. Push or pull, it’s the width that’s gonna make you howl. Width, honey, remember.

  I wonder about her name, and one day when I get to know her better, ask her.

  —How come your parents named you Viva? Did they want you to live long, or because of a paper towel, or what?

  —Stupid! My name is Viviana. And they named that friggin’ paper towel after me! Honest to God, you don’t know shit.

  It’s true. I don’t know a thing. I mean, compared to Viva. At least until we talk about Mexico.

  —I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been there, Viva says.

  —No way! You’ve never been to Mexico?

  —Only to Nuevo Laredo. My family’s from here. Since before.

  —Since before what?

  —Since before this was Texas. We’re been here seven generations.

  I can’t even imagine staying in one place for seven years.

  I like Viva. She spits cuss words out like they’re watermelon seeds and knows where the best thrift stores are. We buy old painted Mexican skirts. The cotton ones and the velvet sequin ones with scenes of Taxco or Aztec gods. The longer ones are mine, because my legs are too thick. The little girl skirts Viva claims, the shorter the better she says. If we’re lucky we hit Thrift Town on the south side and hunt around for vintage cowboy boots. I found a pair of black Noconas, the pointy ones with the slant heels, for only six dollars! And Viva has a pair of Acmes and a real cute shorty Dale Evans pair. We make Father sew us halter tops out of bandanas and vintage tablecloths—sexy! At least we think so. Father complains we look like ranch people, but what does he know about fashion?

  To pay me back for helping her pass the last algebra exam, Viva invites me to her house for dinner. Everything in her house looks like it’s been around forever, including her parents. The smell of things soft and worn and faded. Every chipped bowl, nicked tabletop, bent fork, scuffed rug, nubby bedspread, saggy couch, dusty window fan, polka-dotted kitchen curtain remembers, and in remembering has a place here, in this house, home. The smell is everywhere, hallway, closets, towels, doilies, even Viva. Like the smell of boiled hot dogs.

  At first I find myself breathing out of my mouth when I’m there, but now I’m so used to it I don’t even smell it anymore unless I’ve been away for a while. People’s houses are like that. Nobody who’s a member of the family can smell it, name it, or recognize it, unless they’ve been gone a long, long time. Then when they come back, a whiff of it just about makes them cry.

  After all the apartments and kitchens we’ve inherited, I’ve become an expert at detecting the smell of previous tenants. Usually I associate a family with a single food item they left behind. A gallon of apple vinegar. A bottle of mouthwash-green ice cream topping. A giant restaurant-size can of sauerkraut. Because we don’t know what to do with these things, they stay in our pantry for years until somebody’s brave enough to toss them out.

  Viva’s mom had a stroke a few years ago. She’s all there, she just can’t walk around real good. Sometimes she gets stuck on one thought, like a record with a scratch in it, and says the same thing over and over. That’s why her dad cooks and everything. The mother just sits on the same kitchen chair and touches things with the one arm that still works. And she talks funny, like if her tongue is too fat for her mouth. But she’s real nice to me. Says hi and tries to get up and looks at me kindly with those sad, watery eyes of hers.

  Viva’s got a grouchy older brother who was married once and maybe still is. He left his wife and came back home, and nobody knows when he’s leaving, except they wish he’d do it soon. He makes life hell for everyone, yelling and screaming. That’s why no one complains when he’s out. Where? Who cares.

  How they talk to each other in Viva’s house is like this.

  Viva’s mom reaches for an apple on the kitchen table. —Ha! How is it a tree can hold such heavy fruit?

  —Viviana, you want me to heat the tortillas for lunch?

  —It’s okay, Daddy. I’ll do it.

  —How’s about the tortillas, mija. Want me to heat them now?

  —No, Daddy, it’s okay, let me.

  —Ha! How is it a tree can hold such heavy fruit?

  —How’s about I heat them now, Viviana?

  —Don’t bother yourself, I’m going to get to it in a little bit.

  —Ha! How is it a tree can hold …

  —Want me to get you another kitchen towel? How’s about this towel?

  —No, thanks, Daddy, this one is fine. It’s clean.

  —Ha! How is it a tree can …

  —But that towel’s got holes. How’s about I get you another one? Want this one, Viviana, or that one?

  —Don’t worry, Dad. This one’s fine.

  —Ha! How is it a tree can hold …

  —You want me to do that for you, Viviana?

  By about this time, I just want to yell, —Gimme that! I’ll do it!

  They make me so dizzy, I just have to hold on to the walls. In our house Mother ends every sentence with “quick.” —Pass me that knife, quick!

  Viva says we can move to San Francisco together and be roommates. How do you like that? And we can both write songs together and become famous and everything. It makes me laugh to think about us writing songs together like Lennon-McCartney. Ozuna-Reyes, I say to myself, and it sounds cool. Except all the songs Viva writes are full of cuss words, and all the ones I write are full of sad shit. Who’d want to buy that?

  One day when we’re walking home from school, a red Corvette convertible starts following us. It scares me, but Viva acts like this happens to her all the time, and it probably does.

  —You girls need a lift?

  It’s Darko. Viva hangs on the door and talks for the longest time, and finally makes it understood, no, not this time.

  They have a strange way of talking to each other, those two. A bunch of put-downs, and how it ends is with Darko saying something, I don’t even remember what, before he drives away. Something stupid really, like, —You’ll be sorry, you’re losing quite an opportunity.

  Instead of just laughing, Viva shouts, —Fuck you, Zorro, as he roars away. Then she adds for good measure, —Your mother’s a man!

  66.

  Nobody but Us Chickens

  —El cuarenta-y-uno, Father shouts from his bedroom at one end of the house.

  —No, el ocho, the Grandmother counters from her room off the kitchen.

  —Forty-one, Father keeps insisting.

  Mother spent the day covering her rosebushes with plastic garbage bags and quilted moving blankets because of the freeze, and now that it’s nighttime, we have to leave every faucet in the house dripping so the pipes won’t burst. The kitchen sink, the bathroom sinks and tubs and showers, the ones in the little apartment in back, even the spigots outside. All that trickling and gurgling and drip-drip-dripping just makes me want to pee.

  A norther has blown in. Un norte, which just makes me think of a tall Mexican in pointy boots and a cowboy hat, people like Mother’s family. But a norther here in Texas is a mean wind from up north. From Chicago. And
in Chicago it means a wind from across Canada. And up in Canada it’s the North Pole wind, and who knows what people up in the North Pole call this. Probably summer.

  Ito called from Chicago and said that except for the below-zero temperature, they were all fine and managing without us, and that we should count our blessings to be living in Texas right now. True, but we didn’t expect temperatures in the twenties to feel so cold inside the house.

  —Shouldn’t be freezing in San Antonio in winter, Mother says, bringing in her potted aloes and plonking them on the kitchen counter. She has to climb over Wilson, who is curled up in front of the stove. —¡Quítate, animal bruto! Like all people from the country, the Reynas believe animals belong outside. But because of the drop in temperature tonight, Wilson has visitor’s privileges. When we negotiated for Wilson to come to Texas, I’d promised Mother he’d be no trouble. Now there’s newspapers and Pine-Sol all over the kitchen floor because of Wilson and his no trouble.

  —It’s not normal for it to freeze in Texas, Mother goes on. —If you ask me, must be more of that nuclear monkey business. That’s what causes the planet to act weird. It’s those secret underground tests the FBI are doing in West Texas and New Mexico and Arizona. I heard about it on public TV. Why the hell did we pick up and leave Chicago if it was going to be just as cold here? Yuck, it feels colder. At least up north the houses are insulated. I knew moving to Texas was a bad idea. You hear me, Ino? I’m talking to you.

  She hollers this toward the front of the house where Father is lying in bed watching TV.

  —El cuarenta-y-uno, Father shouts to his mother, to our mother, to anyone who will listen. This means the Grandmother should punch the remote on her bedroom portable to channel 41, and Mother should turn the dial to 41 on her kitchen TV. —Hurry, Father adds urgently. —María Victoria* is about to appear.

  —I don’t care about that crap, Mother growls, but only loud enough for me to hear. —No intelligent life around here except my plants.

  I’ve pushed two chairs next to the space heater in the dining room, and this is where I’m trying to read a book on Cleopatra. I’ve got no privacy to hear my own thoughts in this stupid house, but I can hear everyone else’s. Voices echo because the house is still only half furnished, even though Father promised to make us all new furniture as soon as we got here, but that was back in August.

  My Cleopatra book is a fat one, which is all I ask from a book these days. A cheap ticket out of here. Biographies are best, the thicker the better. Joan of Arc. Jean Harlow. Marie Antoinette. Their lives like the white crosses on the side of the road. Watch out! Don’t go there! You’ll be sorry!

  Mother marches through on her way to her bedroom, but she doesn’t yell, —You’re going to go blind, or, —Get away from that heater, you’ll get an early arthritis. She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at me and shakes her head. She’s still mad about the tampons.

  —Don’t you know tampons are for floozies? Mother had said when she found them in the bathroom, and then she got even angrier because I didn’t hide them well enough, but left them in the cupboard under the sink “advertising for all the world” instead of stuffing them in the bathroom closet behind the towels where she’d taught me to bury the purple box of Kotex. —Don’t you know nice girls don’t wear tampons till they’re married? And maybe not even then. Look at me, I wear Kotex.

  —Ma, I told you and I told you. I’m sick of wearing those thick tamales. And anyway I’m in high school now. Lots of the girls wear tampons.

  —I don’t care what other girls do, I’m talking about you! We don’t send you to private school so you can learn those “filthy ways.”

  Only she uses the Spanish word, which is more like “pig ways,” and worse.

  —El cuarenta-y-uno, the Grandmother shrieks from her room. —There’s a black-and-white Libertad Lamarque† film. Se ve que está buena.

  —That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Father shouts from the other end of the house.

  Every night it’s like this. The TV’s always hot, the radio with its aluminum-foil, coat-hanger antenna jabbering on top of the refrigerator next to the slouched plastic bag of sliced bread, my brothers stomping up and down the stairs that had a carpet when we moved in, till Mother got the bright idea to toss it because—It smells like a wet dog. Father shouting to his mother to watch what he’s watching on TV. They never think of getting up and watching TV together. Maybe because the boys always hog up the big TV in the living room, or maybe because they just like to watch TV in bed. There isn’t any room for Father to watch TV in the Grandmother’s little bed, and Father would never dare to ask her to his room without Mother starting up.

  Father promised me the Grandmother’s apartment would be ready soon, and I’d have my own room finally. In the meantime I’m stuck next to the stairs where my brothers thump up and down like a football team in training. And they never talk in a normal voice, they’re always yelling.

  —We’re not yelling, this is how we talk, Lolo says, yelling.

  The boys thunder up the stairs to their room, making sure their footfalls are even louder.

  —Yeah, and this isn’t a library, Memo booms. —If you don’t like it, move.

  —I wish I could … so I could get away from you. But by the time I think to add the second part, he’s already galloped upstairs, two steps at a time, and doesn’t hear me.

  I have to wait till everyone is in bed to get any privacy around here. I can hear Father’s snoring, Mother’s whistled breathing, the sighing and gulping and wheezing coming from the boys upstairs. The Grandmother sleeping with her mouth open, hogging the air like a drain swallowing water, then waking herself up and rolling over with a groan. The house with all its faucets gargling.

  I pull down my blankets and sheets from the closet and make my bed on the living room couch. Bury myself under three blankets tonight because of the freeze—a fake-fur leopard blanket Father’s seamstresses gave him as a good-bye present, an itchy Mexican wool blanket that weighs a ton and smells like mothballs, and a nubby blue blanket with satin trim that we’ve had since we were babies. Then I turn off the light.

  Somewhere in the middle of all the bubbling and gurgling water, in the middle of the coldest night of the San Antonio winter, the Grandmother gets sick. I mean really. When she doesn’t wake up the next morning, Father says she’s probably tired, pobrecita, and we have to tiptoe around the kitchen till noon. After the breakfast dishes have been washed, Father starts to worry, and finally, he thinks to knock.

  —¿Mamá?

  We wait, but there’s no answer.

  Father rattles the doorknob, but the door’s locked. It’s not one of those hollow doors, but a real door, an old one with four panels, solid, part of the original house, or from some other old house. Father sends Toto around the house to look in the window, and he reports the Grandmother is slumped in her bed. There’s some argument about knocking out the window as opposed to knocking down the door, but by then somebody has had the good sense to call the fire department.

  They’re big guys, these firemen. They come into our house and the house becomes small, their tallness grazing the ceiling, their elbows poking out from windows. They come in with their big voices as if no one is sick and this is just another fire drill, as if it’s any other winter morning. The tree by the curb with its tiny golden leaves like melon seeds. This they bring in with them, because firemen never wipe their shoes.

  I look around ashamed. The sheets on the couch still warm, my bedding a crumpled mess because I didn’t have time to clear it. The bathroom door open, a towel draped sloppily over the shower rod, a T-shirt bunched on the floor.

  Crack! The door opens with a crowbar and a good hard shove, and then it’s just bodies hovering over her.

  Did she take her pills for her high blood pressure? Did she remember to order her medicine? Was anyone watching her?

  But as the Mexicans would say, sólo Dios sabe. They wheel the Grandmother out on a
gurney, but the Grandmother can’t answer. She can’t say a word, except to stick the tip of her tongue out between her thin yellow beak and give a weak sputter.

  * María Victoria, a Mexican entertainer, was famous in the fifties and sixties for draping herself on a piano and wearing skintight dresses that gathered at the knees and flowed out into a fishtail skirt, which made her look like a magnificent mermaid. Her voice was soft and sexy and not especially strong, but her outfits and her body were unforgettably campy. In a time of blondes, she was dark; black-black hair and the voluptuous body of a Mexican goddess, and this to me makes her wonderful.

  † Libertad Lamarque was an Argentine singer and film star with a voice like a silver knife with a mother-of-pearl handle. Supposedly she was Perón’s lover, and for this they say Eva had her ousted from the country. Libertad settled in Mexico, where she had a long and flourishing career. She died in 2001, working till the last on a Mexican telenovela, una señora grande y una gran señora, as beautiful and elegant in her old age as ever, perhaps more beautiful.

  67.

  The Vogue

  Not class like Frost Brothers, but definitely not cheese like the Kress. —Verrry rrritzy, verrry fancy, verrry Vogue, Viva says in a snooty fake accent she makes up from I don’t know where. —Formals, shoes, gloves, hats, hose. Whenever you shop for a special occasion, head over to the Vogue, corner of Houston and Navarro Streets, downtown San Antonio, Viva says breathlessly as she swirls through the doors like a TV commercial.

  —We’re shopping for the prom, Viva says to the saleswomen trailing us. Not true, but that’s how we get to play dress-up for an hour, trying on beaded gowns we can’t afford. Viva pulls a purple crocheted number over her head and shimmies until it falls into place, the pearl spangles sparkling when she moves, the neckline plunging like an Acapulco cliff diver.