by Laia Jufresa
‘What is wrong with you?’ I asked when she finally threw the remote on the bed and let the song play on.
‘Did you ever play this to Luz?’ she asks me.
‘No siree, Marina just burnt it for me.’
Mom went on staring at me, I laughed, and then she got up and took the CD from the stereo.
‘I forbid you to listen to this song,’ she said, already by the door. And then, looking at the CD cover, ‘I forbid you to listen to Dave Matthews! Or his band!’
‘Yeah, right,’ I told her. Mom has never forbidden me to do anything.
‘And don’t say no siree,’ she said before disappearing down the hall.
‘You’re messing with my mental health, you are!’ I screamed, but she had gone. When I went down for breakfast, I found the CD broken into pieces in the kitchen.
*
I go out into the mews’ passageway and the salmony light hurts my eyes. Last night I stayed up reading. I got through an entire novel, but an easy one, not like the ones Emma sends me. The charactress was fifteen and had a brain tumor. Her titties, according to her, look like bananas. Now it’s my favorite book, because usually in metaphors they look like apples or melons or oranges. Or rather similes. But when I bend over, my titties hang down as if I was forty not thirteen, and that’s why I never have a bath at Pina’s anymore, even though she has a big bathtub. Pi likes to chat while I’m washing and I don’t like her seeing me naked. She’s got pointy, pert titties. If it were a simile I’d say: like Grandma’s hat. On the end of each one sits a dark nipple like a hazelnut. But me, I have flat nipples and my skin’s so pale that my sad blue veins show through like a bad omen. Anyway, I don’t want to think about this anymore. The Girls are sunbathing in a corner of the passageway. Sometimes Alf leaves them outside for hours. I go up to their double stroller.
‘Charactress isn’t a word,’ I tell them, ‘but it should be.’
I have the red trolley with me so that I can bring back whatever I manage to wangle off the neighbors. I start with the house across the street: Daniel and Daniela live just out in front with two Pugs, a baby and another on the way. They’re not so bad, but they’re not especially nice either. Their house has white tiled floors in every room that make the whole place feel like a giant bathroom or a spaceship. All the furniture is made of dark, fake leather, except for the baby’s stuff, which is yellow because they refuse to buy anything blue or pink. Some afternoons, Pi and I look after the baby and root through their half-empty bookshelves. It’s mostly manga and then this one book about how men and women come from different planets. One thing they do have going for them is their giant TV – bigger than anyone’s in the mews – and while the baby sleeps we watch the random shows Daniel downloads and warns us not to touch.
As I might’ve guessed, they’re not at home. I take out one of the pre-prepared notes I brought with me and write their names at the top (Daniel, Daniela, Baby). The baby is called Baby because they haven’t given her a name. They think you should get to know your kid before naming it, because if you do it the other way around you force it to take on the personality of that name, not its natural one. My dad says, though not to their faces, that everyone will just keep on calling her Baby forever. But D and D don’t want that, they just refuse to give her a name without taking her feelings into consideration. They’re waiting till Baby is old enough to have an opinion on the matter. Pina’s dad reminded them that what they’re doing is in fact illegal in Mexico. But Daniela won’t listen to him. The way she sees it, a name can make or break you. She says that in her high school there was a guy called Abel who was run over by his brother.
‘On purpose?’ I asked her.
‘By accident,’ she said, ‘but can’t you see? It was his fate.’
I shove the note under the door, then kneel down to see if it went through OK. There’s a pair of feet standing still in front of me. My heart starts pounding. I scramble up and sprint back to the mews, the red trolley making a racket against the cobbles. Once safely inside the mews, I pounce on the first door I come to. How creepy, those feet standing there right next to the door but not opening. It must be Daniel, I tell myself. He must have another woman.
*
Bitter happens to be the first house. Marina lives there. My brothers call her Miss Mendoza, which is what she wrote on her mailbox, but she’s told me before that ‘this whole Miss thing’ makes her feel ‘old and saggy’, and that she’s ‘only’ twenty-one, which in my eyes practically makes her the local spinster. She’s definitely the token single tenant. Pina and I are also technically single, but Pi has no intentions of staying that way beyond fourteen. She swore she’s going to find a summer fling (those were her words) in Matute, or whatever her mom’s beach is called.
Sometimes Marina lives alone and sometimes she lives with a boyfriend. There’s always some new guy hanging around, and they’re usually so good-looking that if I bump into them in the passageway I have to recite poetry in my head just to stop myself from blushing (Brown and furry caterpillar in a hurry, take your walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each). It never really works though: I always turn bright red. And maybe good-looking isn’t the right word either. Let’s say: tall. And when I say Marina is the ‘local’ spinster I mean inside Belldrop Mews, which is where everything that happens in my life takes place, apart from the way too many hours I spend at the school around the corner and in La Michoacana on the next block. What measly perimeters us city-kids are dealt.
A few months ago, the Neighborhood Association got hold of several liters of a horrible rosy red paint that the hardware store on the nearby avenue was selling off cheap. It was Marina’s fault: she’s obsessed with colors, particularly their names, so she chose it because the tins said Coral. I guess she thought coral would bring her closer to her marine-a habitat or something. We all had to take turns painting. Even my mom came out of her little bubble to paint for a while. Now, if you happen to be walking along the street when someone opens the door to the mews, it looks like you’re peering down a larynx: like the long passageway is made of a living tissue, and the dew-like sunlight dappled across the textured walls is saliva.
Marina opens the door to me in jeans and a white blouse. I reckon I’ve spent more time observing her style than any other fashion trend. I don’t really get it, but I love it. When she first came to the mews, Marina babysat us while Mom grieved for Luz. She would make us sit down with the instruments in Sweet House, where my parents have their music school, and we would spend whole afternoons drawing and painting. It was boring as hell, but from the window we could spy on the cortège of women processing through the mews to visit Mom. Slowly and deliberately, they’d file along the corridor, which was purplish back then, a shade Marina used to call ‘asylilac’. And that’s what they looked like, the women; a line of loony asylum runaways, always on edge, in a rush, fresh out of a traffic jam or just stopping by between errands. Some would spot us through the window and pop into the school to deliver death-grip hugs. Then they made their way over to our house, and if they were lucky Mom would drink wine and tea with them, in which case they’d leave all serene, my sister’s death like a pill that put their own mini-dramas into perspective. Other days, she wouldn’t even open the door to them, so the deeply distressed cortège would come back to Sweet House, and we’d have to make excuses for Mom.
‘She’s at a rehearsal,’ we’d say. And sometimes she really was.
‘What about your dad?’ the women would insist.
And I’d tell them the truth, which amounted to the same thing: ‘Rehearsal. He has a concert coming up.’
Sometimes it feels like they spent that entire first year locked away in a permanent rehearsal while we sat among the untouched instruments in their silent music school, the hallway piling up with gift baskets. Something I understood then is that the Mexican gift industry may be well and truly gringofied at Christmas, but when it comes to death, our own comfort foods trump ever
ything. I’ve never received so many bags of Mexican sweet treats – pepitorias, palanquetas, jamoncillos – as I did when my sister died. I found it dumb and pretty insulting, them bringing us candies. Not that that stopped me eating them. My mom and Marina also used to meet up for wine or tea, until last year when they stopped talking to each other. I never found out why. When I ask Mom she says Marina’s a traitor, or that she sided with the enemy or something along those lines. But the last time I tried to get her to dish the dirt she stood there thinking for a while and then said, ‘Because I’m like Corleone, you better don’t mess with my people, or…’
‘Or…?’ I asked, but she just stuck out her tongue at me.
I don’t dare ask Marina what went on, but once she let it slip that she thinks Mom is ‘rancorous’. She also said it’s ‘pathological’ that she’s still mourning, and that she lives ‘shut out from the world’. But she doesn’t, really. Mom still rehearses and she’s gone back to teaching in Sweet, and if we put on a play or show at school she always comes. She doesn’t play in concerts anymore, though.
‘So why rehearse?’ people ask her.
‘Because it keeps my head above water,’ she answers, as if the lifeline music throws her were material and evident: a big, fat buoy at the base of the cello, keeping her from slipping under. As if we weren’t all wading in the river of shit that Luz’s death left in our home. Except that it’s not even quite a river, our sadness: it’s stagnant water. Since Luz drowned, there’s always something drowning at home. Not everyday. Some days you think that we’re all alive again, the five remaining members of the family: I get a zit; some girl calls Theo; Olmo plays his first concert; Dad comes back from tour; Mom decides to bake a pie. But later you go into the kitchen, and there’s the pie, still raw on the wooden countertop, half of it pricked and the other half untouched, with Mom hovering over it, clutching the fork in midair. And then you know that we too, as a family, will always be ‘almost six’.
*
Marina greets me like she greets everyone: by grabbing you by the back of your head and planting a kiss on your cheek (and if you don’t know her, and if you’re as dumb as my brothers, you might think she’s going in for the mouth). From this angle, I can see her black bra. Maybe I need me one of those. Thirteen is definitely the age for one’s first black brassiere. It’s too embarrassing if Dad takes me, but maybe Pi will want to come along when she gets back. I go into Bitter. It’s always a surprise when you step through the door. Firstly, because it’s different every time, and then because there’s something over-the-top about it. Something bubbly. The décor consists of piles of cushions on a chicken-yellow sofa, the only constant in the whole place. Some of the cushions have tiny little mirrors that twinkle depending on where you stand. Marina donated me some cushion covers, which now take pride of place on my chaise longue. I filled them with plastic bags, just like she showed me. Luz would say Marina is the queen of recycling. She gets all those clothes I like second-hand. With her hands on her hips she says, ‘Yes, miss?’
Before they clashed, my mom used to teach Marina English. She tried to teach Dad too, back when they met, but his pronunciation still sucks. According to him, on principle you should distrust any language that uses the same word for libre and gratis. When he’s around she speaks to us kids in Spanish. He says she doesn’t want us to turn out like foreigners, which is exactly what we are. Or, at least, we have two passports. Even Luz had an American passport. She’s a baby in the photo, just a few months old. Mom is holding her in her arms and Luz looks serious, sort of startled, as if even then my sister foresaw the gravity of the trip she would come to take. Four by five centimeters of portentous ID.
*
The only thing I tell Marina is that I designed a garden. I don’t feel like explaining that my parents still feel the need to send me to the epicenter of the tragedy each year to wallow in seaweed and memories under the now obsessively watchful eye of Emma, and that to avoid going, I had to make up some form of tangible compensation. She wouldn’t appreciate the word milpa either: too native for her liking. Design, on the other hand, is one hundred percent her thing, I think.
‘And now I’m actually ready to build it, so I need tools,’ I go on.
But before I’ve even finished my sentence I realize how absurd my request is. The most useful thing I’m likely to find among all this velvet is a spoon. And if there is a spoon then it’s probably from the cutlery set my mom gave her the day she discovered Marina ate exclusively out of recycled yogurt pots.
Marina puts her hands on her hips, raises her elbows and curves her spine, her breastbone backing away from me. Her collarbones stick out. She always does this when she’s thinking. She looks like a mandolin. Then, quick as a flash, she straightens up again and leaves the room. I don’t know what this means, but I stay put. There’s a new lampshade above my head. It’s made of a series of solid, sheer droplets which hang in semicircles around the bulb, like a ghostly spider. The correct word would be ‘ethereal’. It must be made of plastic because Marina doesn’t use glass. My mom explained that this is because Marina saw her father break a glass of wine with his teeth when she was a little girl. It gives me goosebumps just imagining it. In fact, when I want goosebumps I think of exactly that: my mom calmly biting her wine glass and chewing on it.
Marina comes back, takes a little bow and hands me the prettiest, tiniest, most ridiculous hammer I’ve ever seen. It’s half the size of a normal hammer and has an elaborate, flowery, leafy pattern printed on it. Marina unscrews it and shows me how, inside the handle, it has a spade hidden on one side and a brush on the other. I laugh.
‘The land,’ she says, ‘belongs to she who decorates it.’
‘I’m going to get it dirty,’ I say, ‘maybe even get lead on it.’
I say ‘lead’ slowly and deliberately, to impress her. Marina squints.
‘Keep it,’ she finally rules.
‘You sure?’
‘It was a gift from a total waste of space. You can cover it in mercury for all I care.’
‘Lead.’
‘Whatever.’
Very gently, Marina pushes me toward the door.
‘Thanks so much,’ I tell her, ‘I like your lampshade.’
She takes me by the neck, kisses my forehead, and just before closing the door behind me points to the ceiling and clarifies, ‘It’s called a chandelier, darling.’
*
By the time I leave Bitter House, The Girls are nowhere to be seen, which means I’ll find Alf at home. His mailbox says Doctor Alfonso Semitiel. I’ve known him since I was born. His wife was the doctor really, but ever since he retired a couple of months ago he’s been supplementing his pension selling the prescriptions she left behind. He doesn’t skimp on diagnoses either. No matter what time of day you pop by, he always insists on giving you an alegría (which are kind of like cereal bars, only made of amaranth, ‘So not a cereal bar, Agatha Christie, but a seed bar!’) from the basket he keeps in the hallway. He says amaranth is the food of the future. And of the past. Above all, the past. Alf is my friend. In fact, Alf is the inspiration behind all of this: it’s thanks to him I know how to grow things. I spent my entire childhood sowing amaranth and other Mesoamerican pseudo-cereals: quinoa, chia, acacia. And real cereals, too: wheat, barley, oats, millet, corn (naturally); and corn’s two sisters: beans and pumpkin. He called it his MM or Modern Milpa. Over the last years almost everything we planted was destroyed by the toxic summer rains, but some of them did OK. The MM used to be in his yard, but he let it die when his wife died. Now, in its place, there’s a built-in jacuzzi. My dad, who is the least medically minded person in the whole mews, diagnosed Alf with depression. But when I go over, Alf’s always soaking in the jacuzzi and reading. He says he’s learning to swim or, at the very least, to take little dips. Missing the MM; wanting to bring it back to life, for Alf and for all! These were some of the arguments that helped me finally convince Mom that the whole yard-renovation thing could
really work.
Alf seems pleased to see me when he opens the door (looking like a dog fresh out of the water). He is wrapped in a pinkish robe that looks like it might have belonged to his wife, but I have the goodness of heart not to comment. I follow him to the yard, skipping over his wet footprints. I don’t need to explain my plan to him because he already knows it. In fact, it was to him and not to Pina that I took the serviette contract the day we signed it. Pina is my best friend, but for her the word agriculture might as well refer to the superstore around the corner. Or La Michoacana. Her idea of a harvest is when she buys herself two horchatas in a row.
We sit down on the rocking chairs on the terrace looking out over the jacuzzi. The Girls are sitting on a bench, one looking at us and the other out to the horizon. I explain to Alf that I need tools.
‘I’m so frickin’ proud of you, Agatha Christie.’
He’s always called me that, and coming from him I like it, because Alf is an investigator. Not a private investigator, but definitely a research investigator something or other. Alf is actually a doctor too, but in anthropology not in curing people. It could be I’m the only person who knows this because hardly anyone goes into his study where he keeps all his diplomas and books, some of which he wrote himself. His doctoral thesis is about umami, the fifth taste, which wasn’t at all known except in Japan, and it was him who helped to spread the word about it in the West. Or at least in Mexico. Mexico is in the West. I don’t dare tell him, but I’m proud of him, too. He carries his grief better than my mom. He doesn’t act like a ghost, or go totally nuts over songs. At least not in front of me he doesn’t. I guess I’d have to ask The Girls what they think about it. But The Girls don’t think.
Alf starts pulling tools out of a mini-shed, which he keeps locked, as if someone might come steal his shovel.