“No te dejes” didn’t keep me from “experimenting,” as my generation imagined itself doing during the liberation movements of the 1970s, but it did tell me when to leave the bar or the bed of a batterer. It reminded me to step away from the cruelty of gossip and to learn when to hold my own cruel tongue. It developed in me a fierce judge of character, one as tough on myself as on others. And finally, it made it very difficult to lie. It was not a “happy” childhood, but a true one, if for no other reason than I somehow believed myself loved, not only by my mother, but also by my entire familia mexicana.
* * *
My tía Tencha and Elvira are nursing an hour’s worth of Friday-night-paycheck beers at the nearby Skip Inn. Our heads stacked pyramid style at the back-alley screen door, JoAnn, cousin Cindy, and I peer into the smoky dusk of the late-afternoon bar, trying to distinguish the silhouettes of our mothers. I check for the feet first. As our eyes adjust to the dark, my auntie’s iridescent feet, covered in her coveted aqua-colored pantuflas, gradually come into view, propped up on the leg of a barstool. She suffers from merciless bunions and, after eight hours of assembly-line work, the fluffy pastel slippers become their own kind of podiatric sanctuary.
The two are hardworking women who wave us off with “We’re just gonna finish this one last beer, mi’jitas.” And true to their word, even when the beer extends itself into another, they finally emerge in good humor, smelling of hops and Salem cigarettes and electronic copper wire. We make our way home to my auntie’s house, stopping off at Nino’s to order a small-size pizza for a buck fifty and a few RC Colas to split. Friday nights were the best of times, for they were off-the-clock times.
On most other days, JoAnn and I walk the two blocks home from Mission Grammar School, drop our books onto the Formica fake-wood dining room table, have a snack of maybe a buttered tortilla and a glass of frozen orange juice, and get to work.
First, we make everyone’s bed, pick up the soiled clothes off the floor and stuff them into the hamper: men’s and boys’ pajama bottoms, boxer shorts, T-shirts. Then we wash and dry the breakfast dishes, wipe down the countertops, and sweep the kitchen floor. Then we collect and empty the trash around the house and shake out the throw rugs. We clean up the bathroom, hang up the towels, and put the cap on the toothpaste and the lid on the Listerine. We toss cleanser into the bowl of the sink. We scrub. Then we start our homework.
An hour or so later, our mom comes home tired and irritated from the electronics plant. The work quotas keep getting higher; the arthritic pain in her knuckles is killing her; they got a new forelady that is jealous that my mom is so well liked by the other workers. My mom brings them tortas, burritos de carne y cebolla, little special things she makes the night before.
Coming down the driveway, she had heard Grama cussing up a storm next door when one of the aunties starts some kind of pedo. The pleito always ends with my mom to blame somehow because she’s the one who doesn’t fight back. She just swallows it, my tías Vicky and Josie always stirring up trouble. “That’s why she can never keep a husband,” says my mom about Josie, the biggest troublemaker of them all. “She doesn’t know how to keep her damn mouth shut.”
My mom knows she should probably go over to Grama’s apartment to settle the problem, but she’s so sick ’n’ tired of it all. She never gets a moment’s rest, and does anybody give a damn? By Saturday, one or both of the two tías (if they are talking to each other) will turn up in our driveway with a six-pack of beer for an afternoon visit. We’ll hear a voice calling from outside, “Elvira,” all pleasant, like nothing has happened. That’s when my mom will mutter to me something about how your mind just can’t sweep away memories cuz it’s the heart that remembers. I figure she’s talking about the bad stuff. And I finish sweeping the last of the breakfast crumbs from the kitchen floor and head out the door for the toolbox. I am forever cleaning up and clearing out, hammering and fixing, raking and sweeping; my sister and I taping moldy tiles back up onto the crumbling bathtub wall and kitchen sink, covering up the broken spots.
After the tías have gone, my mom will make a perfect dinner. Tonight, it will be curry chicken Mexican-style, mashed potatoes, canned peas. The canned peas are not perfect, but my sister likes them. I just roll them around my plate to look like they’ve been eaten. Mr. Perry, the old man boarder who lives in the room behind the garage, sits at the chopping board that comes out like a drawer from the kitchen counter. It is covered by an embroidered flour sack to make a small tablecloth and I have folded the paper napkin into a triangle and put it on the right side of his plate with the knife and spoon on top. The fork will go on the other side. My mom taught us this from her Tijuana days. There Mr. Perry will eat his meal and drink his nightly buttermilk in silence. The buttermilk looks thick and delicious in its clear glass, but it’s not. I think you only drink buttermilk if you grow up on a farm in Kansas like Mr. Perry. Mr. Perry’s skin is paper-thin white and spotted purple and pink. His old man hands tremble when he brings the buttermilk to his lips and he has only one eye. He lost the other eye from skin cancer and from waiting too long to go to the doctors because Christian Scientists don’t believe in them. But eventually he gave in and the missing eye is now just a hole in his head. Sometimes the patch covering the hole opens, which of course he can’t see. But we can see it, a huge empty bowl carved out from the gray bone in the side of his face. We don’t say anything, just eat our chicken.
My sister talks and talks while my brother and I eat fast. That’s why JoAnn’s so skinny, because she’d rather talk than eat, which gets my mom mad because she has to worry about her, giving her special tonics like cod liver oil so she’ll fatten up. Our father doesn’t eat with us because he always works overtime at the Hobart Railyard, usually the graveyard shift. That’s the best pay for the hours.
After dinner, my sister and I will fight about whose turn it is to wash or dry the dishes, but we won’t hold it against each other later. I think my brother does his homework while we fight. Or maybe he watches TV or goes out to play some ball. But he doesn’t have to worry about school too much cuz he can do everything pretty much hands down, no sweat.
Later that night, my mom will be ironing in front of the TV. She unrolls the burritos of wet starched cotton and sprinkles them from a green-tinted Coke bottle with holes in the metal cap. JoAnn and I will be finishing our homework. Then we’ll get to watch TV, too, like Million Dollar Movie or The Loretta Young Show, and maybe my brother will join us and my mom will ask me to adjust the clothes-hanger antenna cuz I got just the right touch to make the snow almost completely disappear from the screen. And all three of them will cheer me on: “That’s it, you got it. Hold it just like that!” And then I have to figure out how to let go without moving the hanger not even a fraction of an inch. Sometimes I just watch the TV from that spot, holding the antenna with my fingertips and twisting my head sideways around the TV to see the screen.
We go to bed, maybe 10 p.m. or so, and we will say our prayers on our knees, sometimes with my mom, and then my sister will read and my brother will sleep (I guess that’s what he does behind the vinyl-and-plastic accordion doors that separate his small twin bedroom from ours) and I will eventually fall out, too, to the sound of my sister reading aloud with true expression even when she whispers. I always promise I won’t fall asleep, but her voice comes into my ear like a lullaby and it just drifts right into my dreams.
Maybe a half hour later or so, the whole house is asleep in the dark and I wake up, afraid that I have forgotten my prayers (although I haven’t), and I will start my Our Fathers and Hail Marys all over again, just in case. And then I will nod off to sleep again and then I will wake up again, maybe an hour or so later, worrying that I forgot to check that all the windows and doors are locked. And I will get up oh so quietly so no one wakes up and tells me, “You’re just crazy!” and “You’re gonna make yourself sick!” Cuz they know and I know that I already checked everything too many times to be normal.
L
ike how it’s not normal when my mom catches me at the kitchen table, waving my hand down below my right knee like I’m shooing a fly. At least that’s what I tell her when she asks me, “What the hell are you doing?” So I gotta tell a lie cuz I can’t admit that I might’ve just kissed the devil by accident. You know how when you’re talking and you pause or something, how you naturally press your lips together and then they open again kinda like in a soft kiss. Well, I worry that God might think I want to kiss the devil, so I wave the air of that fall line to hell, where my kiss could’ve gone by mistake.
These are the things that keep me up at night. Until, finally, I fall asleep and dream the pictures I have been dreading all along—stupid “impure thoughts,” like penises spraying menstrual blood and women’s breasts all swollen like in those dirty magazine pictures. If the dreams wake me, and they always do, I’ll sit up to pray some more and then get outta bed and check the doors again.
* * *
There were other nights I awoke to my father coming home after the bars had closed; nights I awoke to the sight of him crawling on all fours down the hallway, whining like a sick cat I once saw who had a fever that arched its back and weakened its limbs and caused a great animal cry to spill out from it. My father, too, looked fevered, and red-faced from so much alcohol, as he’d make a path down the hallway on his hands and knees to my bed. He’d try to kiss my cheek, but he smelled so bad and his nighttime beard was so scratchy, I’d pull away. So he’d just drop his heavy drunken head onto my blanketed belly, crying and begging for my pity because my mother was going to throw him out.
“I’m soooo sorry,” he’d whine.
“Leave the girls alone,” I’d hear my mother snap from her bedroom. And eventually he would. He never laid a hand on me. Just that head, that heavy head.
BODY MEMORY
MADRE: Have you met my son, God?
HIJA: Yes, I had a brother by the same name.
MADRE: Tell me.
HIJA:… What?
MADRE: Tell me about him.
HIJA: He’s … I worshipped him.
MADRE: Yes?
HIJA: When we were young he’d play a game with me.
MADRE: ¿Cómo?
HIJA: He’d twist my arm behind my back and press it to the point of breaking.
MADRE: Oh.
HIJA: “Kneel down and call me God,” he’d say. And so I’d whisper, “God.” And he’d keep pressing until I’d say it louder and louder. And then—
MADRE: Dígame.
HIJA: He’d have me down to my knees, before I’d submit.
MADRE: You gave in.
HIJA: I had to … And then he’d let me go.
MADRE: I don’t remember that.
HIJA: I know.
From The Mathematics of Love
* * *
There was the photo. It is a candid shot.
I am probably about four years old and I am sitting on my brother’s lap. We are watching TV, my sister at one end of the couch; James and I are coupled at the other. The length of each of my bare legs straddles his bathrobe-clad thighs. The indoor shadowy quality of the black-and-white mid-fifties photo gives the impression of nighttime, just before bed. The photographer has caught us off guard, and this, no doubt, is what attracted his eye: the image of three children, immersed openmouthed in the ever-wonder of television circa 1956. Maybe it was an episode of Lassie or Gunsmoke or Spin and Marty; the moonlight of our faces reflects back the glow of the screen.
I had uncovered the picture, rummaging through an old box of long-abandoned family photos that my mother had kept on the bottom shelf of a kitchen cupboard. At first I see it as any adult might, as the original photographer had, as an image of childhood unselfconscious contentment. But upon closer observation, what draws my eye is the space of sofa between my sister at one end and the double-decker figure of my brother and me on the other.
The space told a story, which I had long ago suppressed, of a big brother’s love and a little sister’s reciprocity. Sitting down to watch TV, I had probably taken the middle spot between JoAnn and James; but, in the course of the evening, I had found my way onto my brother’s lap. There was no objection on his part; he may even have drawn me to him. His head leans around mine for a clear view of the TV show. We are so close we adapt seamlessly to the other’s body.
* * *
I remember feeling myself the body of my brother as I tucked the football under my left arm and against my barely budding chest. I had his moves. He had trained me how to weave effortlessly to escape the tackler’s grasp as my hips shifted from side to side and out of reach.
I remember feeling myself the body of my brother as I followed through with the basketball, wrist slapping down in the last flick of the shot, the ball swooshing through the hoop … again, effortlessly.
I remember the boxing gloves bound tight around my wrists, my brother’s palms rubbing the backs of my shoulders—“You can do it, champ!”—as he pushes me into the ring for the fight.
I remember feeling myself the body of my brother the first time I grabbed a woman by the waist and escorted her out to the dance floor.
MARTIN
It is the day before my Confirmation, the Holy Sacrament through which I am to become a “Soldier of Christ” in a ceremony where the bishop will slap my face as a lesson in turning the other cheek. Sister Genevieve has just stepped out from our seventh-grade classroom and has disappeared down the hall. Our class of sixty-one hormonal females immediately falls into full and predictable chaos. Ten minutes later, seventy-year-old Genevieve will return, the crumbs of a morning pastry on her scapular, and will ask who had talked in her absence.
“Confess,” she says. And, in order not to add the sin of lying by omission to the transgression of talking in class, I will stand up. Alone. And Sister Genevieve will make an example of me. I remain standing at my desk as she crosses to the blackboard to review the class Communion chart. She is aghast to discover the utter absence of silver stars next to my name: daily masses, yes, but not a single Communion. “What kind of sinner must you be?” she asks aloud.
* * *
When I enter, the midafternoon New Mission Church is mostly empty. A middle-aged man in grease-stained work clothes kneels in back, his face buried into brown swollen hands. A few devoted viejitas are praying; the thinning treads of their fingertips skim their rosaries like worry beads. I tip along the scuffed linoleum floor as the old women look up, scanning me with suspicion—or is it concern? Their lips murmur marías.
I cross to another aisle, genuflect, and scoot into the pew. I start to kneel, then stop. I sit back, my hands on the thighs of my blue-and-gray-checkered uniform skirt. I hesitate. It is my final face-to-face conversation with God.
I do not pray. Praying has not helped. I wait a long time to find the right words until all I can think to say is … “I give up.”
* * *
This is the catch-22 game of Roman Catholicism. In order to receive the sacraments, you must be in the “state of grace.” But you cannot be in the state of grace because, from minute to minute, second to second, you fall from grace. By thinking. By doubting. By having a body with too much boy in it—too much hair on your upper lip, your toes, your thighs, your belly, which you shave & pluck & bleach & wax away behind locked bathroom doors. Sinfully, you stuff the depilatory paraphernalia (hardened lumps of wax stuck against the walls of a bent metal saucepan) beneath towels in the far corner of a closet drawer. And your mind … your mind wanting females like a bandit.
You are not brave like Frank, the boy-girl in seventh grade strutting around open-legged in her uniform jumper (the sackcloth of a bitterly imposed penance). No, you are too smart, too sorta cute, too well raised to be a Frank. Frank, who is not Mexican, would not be loved, her rebellion told you. While you, the impostor, feign the good daughter, la niña obediente. But you can’t fake it to God, and God made the Church’s rules. And the Church will banish you, decree you outside the Mystical Body of Chris
t. So you will have to come clean with the impure thoughts that rack your sleep at night. But not to the priests, for the priests have already forsaken you.
In the dark shame of the confessional booth, the devil sits gluttonously pleased behind your left shoulder, where once your guardian angel stood. “Don’t come back here,” the priest says. (It is your fourth confession that week.) “You’re crazy. You need to get some help.” The confessional grille slams shut before your latticed shadowed face. You rise, push your weight against the huge oak doors, and step back out into your masquerade life.
By tomorrow you will have to say to everyone in the world that matters, “For two years now. It’s been going on for more than two whole years.” But you know you will never find the courage for such a public suicide. Instead you barter for the privacy of the communal church, where you beg God’s counsel, a directive, or even an ordinary unannounced miracle to relieve you of your suffering—its desperate weariness, its aloneness. You sit in your Catholic school uniform. Your eyes lift up to the blond Christ hanging heavy-headed and impassive over the altar steps. And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And then … nothing.
Just …
nothing.
* * *
There is no god out there.
* * *
And in the silence of that extended moment, the sensation of a profound emptiness begins to move from the bottom of your belly. You feel it rising gradually—a wave of something stirring, a fluttering just beneath your rib cage, climbing until it spills open-winged and light as breath into your chest. It is a presence, an almost-you, but not quite, something grander and oh so ordinary at once. You, in the company of the praying viejitas and the obrero in his grease-covered pants; you, in the familial ecosystem of Elvira punching the time clock at the Electrocube a few blocks away, of Tío Bobby picking up starched shirts for his evening bartender shift, of Abuelita hanging sun-bleached manteles out on the clothesline to dry. All of you warmed by the afternoon sunlight spilling in through the stained glass just above your head. So ordinary. Just heat and light and a kaleidoscope of color from the window; and a vast and holding endlessness in your heart.
Native Country of the Heart Page 5