by Laia Jufresa
‘Alright,’ says the boy. ‘Who’s first?’
The girls let out nervous laughs and one of them points to the other. The pointed-at girl shakes her head and sits down next to Pina.
‘You first,’ she says to the other girl. ‘It was your idea.’
The girl on her feet says, ‘All right,’ and gives her right hand to the boy. Pina is waiting for something gross, like him kissing it.
‘Girls’ names first, boys’ after,’ says the boy.
‘No,’ the girl says, ‘the other way.’
‘It’s easier the other way.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Fine, whatever.’
‘OK, OK, fine, girls’ names first. Will it hurt?’
‘Girls first?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Get on with it already!’ says the girl next to Pina. She pulls her feet up onto the bench and hugs her knees to protect her legs from the heat. She’s wearing sparkly plastic sandals. Pina’s mom would never buy her anything like that. Her mom likes leather shoes; she likes Pina to go barefoot: she says it’s natural. Without letting go of the girl, the boy lifts his right index finger so that everyone can see the nail, which is longer than the others. Víctor and Pina’s dad also have one nail longer than the rest, on their thumbs; they use them to play the guitar. But it seems this boy uses his nail for other things, because after showing it off he places it on the back of the other girl’s hand and starts to move his finger: he’s scratching her.
‘A,’ he says, still scratching.
‘Almond,’ says the girl.
The boy stops scratching.
‘Almond isn’t a name,’ he says.
‘Uh-huh, I know, sorry. I just got nervous.’
‘Only names, got it? That’s the last time I stop before the second z, OK?
‘OK,’ the girls say together.
Pina says it too, with a nod, but luckily no one notices. The boy starts to scratch again.
‘A,’ he says.
‘Alma,’ she says.
‘B,’ he says.
‘Berta,’ she says.
‘C,’ he says.
‘Claudia,’ she says.
The boy goes into a trance, scratching the same spot, at the same speed, and reciting the letters of the alphabet. The girl, by contrast, becomes more and more fidgety. She squirms, but without moving her hand, which the boy is holding onto. She reminds Pina of those butterflies fixed to the bottom of frames with a single pin. When they get to m, the girl raises her voice (‘Monica!’), but doesn’t take her hand away. She hesitates at p and Pina wants to whisper her own name to her but she doesn’t dare. Whenever she tells people her name they look at her funny.
‘Paula!’ the girl says, and the game goes on.
‘Q.’
‘Queta!’
‘R.’
‘Rocío.’
‘S.’
‘Savior’
The girl’s friend wrinkles her nose and asks Pina under her breath, ‘Savior?’
Pina shrugs. The boy goes on reciting the alphabet and scratching, doing his best to hold the girl’s hand still. She’s started to do little jumps. Pina and the friend get up and move in closer to see how the hand is doing: it looks pretty red under the boys nail. Not blood red, but definitely hives red.
They move on to boys’ names. Armando, Bernando, Claudio, Damián, Efraín, Fernando. The girl starts to cry. Her friend puts her hand on her shoulder.
‘Get out of here!’ the girl says to Pina.
Pina goes back to the bench. Of all the words the girl has said, ‘Get out of here’ are the only ones that aren’t a name, and the fact that they were directed at Pina makes her feel important. She realizes she still has the banana in her hand, all sticky between her fingers. She flings it into the bushes. Nobody notices.
By the time they reach Humberto, the girl has her neck cocked to one side with her eyes closed. Then the boy says i and her head pops up.
‘Idiot!’ and she pulls her hand from the boy’s clasp.
The friend sniggers but immediately shuts up again. The girl holds her right hand with her left and looks at it as if it doesn’t belong to her, as if she can’t understand where it came from. The boy still has his finger out, in position, but there’s nothing to scratch anymore.
‘Are you OK?’ asks the friend.
The girl wipes away some snot with her forearm.
‘You were almost there!’ says the boy, picking the blood out of his nail with the corner of his swimming shorts.
*
The swallows gather in the afternoons. Pina sits down on a lounger to watch them. At this time of day it smells less of chlorine and more of the flowers that hang from the trees like little open hands: purple and yellow. Pina imagines herself all grown up with flowers like that in her hair. She imagines admirers hot on her heels: the boys, now men, fighting over her. Fighting over who would get to take her flowers. It’s Sunday, and there’s hardly anyone left in the pool. Her dad is in the bungalow and her mom went out for a walk. Flights of swallows swoop down into the old chimneys on the main building’s domed roof. Pina is counting them, and if she gets to more than a hundred her parents will stay together; if she counts less than a hundred, they’ll split up.
A boy gets out of the water and walks toward her. Pina thinks he might start calling her names like the braid girl. She looks up at the sky, but even then she can tell the boy is approaching.
‘Hey,’ he says, and Pina immediately recognizes his voice.
He’s making her lose count and she doesn’t want to.
‘Wait,’ she tells him, and starts counting aloud so he gets it.
‘Eighty-four, eighty-five…’
The boy turns around so he’s facing the swallows too. His swimming trunks drip onto the flagstones, and in the pool’s reflection the birds multiply.
*
‘Ana, Berta, Carmen, Diana, Esther, Fernanda, Gema, H…, H…, Helena, Irma, Julieta, Karla, Luz, María, Natalia, Omara, Pina, Quintana… yes it is a name!, Raquel, Sonia, Tania, Úrsula, Vicky, Wanda, Ximena, Yolanda, Zamuela… I don’t care, Armando, Bernardo, Carlos, Domingo, Eduardo, Félix, Gerardo, Horacio, Ilario, Jacobo, Kiko, Luis, Mariano, N…, N…, N…, Núñez, ouch! Nothing, Nobody, Nepal. Norberto? I give up! Octavio, Pedro, Quetzalcóatl, Raúl, Saúl, Tito, Uva… Uber… Under, I give up!’
The boy cleans his nail and Pina thanks him. They sit on the bench. He grabs her other hand and she immediately snatches it away. She doesn’t want to play again. The boy says he only wanted to take her hand, that’s all. But she knows you can’t trust anyone around here.
‘Do you know how babies are made?’ she asks him.
The boy gets up, disappears into the bushes and never comes back.
Pina hasn’t told a single lie all day, so why does she feel like a liar?
III
2004
Luz turns three years dead today. Mom fixes herself up a bit (she lets her hair down) but is in a terrible mood. She burns the toast. I spill juice on the floor and she says, ‘Perfecto.’
When she goes to brush her teeth she complains that dad, who’s just shaved, has left hairs in the sink. Dad and I mutter to each other, ‘Patience,’ and when Mom finally announces, furious, that she’s not coming with us, I think we’re both relieved. Dad tries to convince her anyway, but she’s unswayable.
‘This year I have a stand-in,’ she says to him. And to me: ‘Pull up any weeds you spot, will you?’
Then she hugs me way too tight, as if she could pass on whatever it is I need to be her surrogate by osmosis.
‘Come on,’ I say from inside my headlock. ‘Let’s go say hi to Luz.’
But the name has an electric effect on her. In a flash, Mom lets go of me and walks off to her room, wrapping her hair back up in her rag. Today it’s the black silk one. It’s embroidered with silver flowers and in another lifetime it was her very special concert shawl. But
tragedies take the shine out of objects. Ever since Luz died no one around here seems to care about clothes or furniture anymore. Not even the instruments seem to matter much. Utilitarian things: the cello, the piano, the timpani. Nothing but buoys.
*
I never knew my parents did this while we were away at camp.
‘Every year?’ I ask.
‘Every year,’ says Dad. ‘And we always stop by that flower stall there.’
He parks, gives me some money and I go by myself. In fact they’ve only come twice, which isn’t all that much. But the new life already feels old. We have new customs. The first time we went home without Luz I thought I’d never be able to walk into our room without expecting to find her there, playing with Bedtime Bear.
But now her bed is my chaise longue and Bedtime Bear is in a box someplace and I don’t ever expect to see her when I come home. If I think about her it’s to imagine what she’d be like now: she’d be eight. Pretty soon she’d be wearing a training bra and I’d have to explain to her what to do if she gets her first period in school. I’d show her how to tie her sweater around her waist just in case, and tell her not to panic if she spots a dark stain in her knickers, to keep cool and to come looking for me in my classroom. We would be in the same school by now.
‘And Luz,’ I would say to her, ‘don’t you listen to those girls who say using tampons is like having sex, because they’re eleven and they’re liars.’
I swear some girls in my class talk about having learned to use a tampon like it was sailing across the Atlantic. All that’s missing is the slideshow, like the one Emma gave us when she came back from Niagara Falls.
The flower arrangements at the stall are for old ladies. For dead old ladies or for old ladies who think their dead were really cheesy. I take three sunflowers, pay for them and, getting back into the car, remember something basic: Luz isn’t buried where we’re going.
‘Next year,’ I say to Dad, putting on my safety belt, ‘we’ll bring flowers from our yard.’
Dad starts the car and corrects me:
‘Our milpa.’
Then, smiling, he uses the name, maybe to make up for Mom’s reaction earlier:
‘Luz would have loved your milpa.’
*
The grave is small and made of cement, not too different from my planters, only with a lid. The lid says: Luz Pérez-Walker, 1995–2001. And underneath: Beloved daughter and sister. Be-loved. Like an order. I’d fantasized about this moment, about what I’d say to Luz. But in my fantasies it was raining and Luz was somehow able to listen to me. Now the sun is beating down and there’s not a patch of shade in the whole cemetery. She’s dead, and I have nothing to say to her. Was she beloved? She was my sister. ‘Bina’, she used to call Pina. ‘Sana’, she used to called me (a mix between sister and Ana, although she didn’t come up with it: Olmo and Theo used it before her). One time, Bina and I changed her outfit twenty times and put makeup on her: she’d let us do anything. Yes, I guess she was beloved. Her death certificate was made in Michigan. DECEASED, it says in capital letters. I hate this word. It sounds like diseased. But you can be cured from a disease. And, anyway, Luz wasn’t sick. She even knew how to swim. She must have got caught up in something, that’s what we think. Luz’s body is in ashes in the lake. At the time it seemed logical, to cremate her and put her to rest with Granddad. But now I can’t understand it: why would we leave her there? I wonder if my brothers think about her while they’re out fishing. I wonder if they have anything to say to her.
I brought Alf’s big shears with me, but I don’t spot a single weed. I use them to cut the stems of the three sunflowers then I arrange them on the grave until Dad and I agree on a nice composition. But almost straight away I mess them up again. If there was one thing Luz wasn’t, it was tidy. Dad agrees.
‘When she was really little,’ I remind him, ‘she used to get baby food everywhere.’
He laughs.
‘One day,’ he adds, ‘I had to clean mush from the ceiling. The first time that ever happened out of all four of you kids. That girl had arms like a baseball player.’
A blow to the chest, there, a few tears that come to my eyes but don’t fall. ‘That girl.’ That’s exactly what we no longer have for Luz. What is it? Irreverence? Nerve.
‘You little shits,’ Dad calls my brothers sometimes.
‘Scaredy-cat!’ he says to me when I refuse to eat chili.
Being dead means this, too: nobody dares insult you anymore, not even out of love.
I feel good when we leave. Sad but interesting. And clean. The only thing missing is the soundtrack. I ask Dad to sing something and who knows why but he breaks into ‘La donna è mobile qual piuma al vento, muta d’accento e di pensiero’, a family classic. Mom used to sing it in the mornings.
‘Now I feel like a pizza,’ I tell him, and he passes me his phone.
I call Mom and she asks for a bacon-and-onion pizza, even though normally she refuses to eat anything from a box. Dad cries at the wheel on the way to the pizzeria. Discreetly. No heaving chest, no little sobs, just tears running down his cheeks, like in the pictures the guy in the park near our house used to make: he would kneel down on the floor, and with a spray can and a spatula paint the same scenes over and over, in a matter of seconds. His favorite subject was a clown with a single tear rolling down his cheek. Now I realize I should’ve given him some credit: it turns out that there are actually people out there who cry like that, in my own home even. Isn’t this called a revelation? Some people might call it that.
When we get home, Mom’s not angry anymore. She’s sad and gentle: she eats some pizza and says it’s good. Afterward, we flop on the sofa together and she strokes my head.
‘It shouldn’t be called an anniversary,’ I say.
‘That’s what your dad always says,’ she replies.
‘I invented a word.’
‘What is it?’
‘Graycholy.’
‘One of Marina’s.’
‘Yeah, I borrowed it. By the way, are you going to make it up with her?’
‘If Chela and Pina made it up, why not, eh?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Did you pull up the weeds?’
‘There weren’t any.’
‘Hm. It must be because there’s no body there.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Could you bring me a blanket?’
*
Dad comes with us on our second trip to the garden center, to oversee his investment. But he’s his own budget’s worst enemy. Pina and I watch as he falls prey, over and again, to the shop assistant, but we don’t say anything. I’m glad Pina’s back and that she seems as psyched about the plants as I am. It’s another assistant today: not the pervert, but a young guy with dreadlocks. He makes me feel awkward. I chew the inside of my cheek, then force myself to talk to him.
‘I’m regenerating the oxygen in my mews,’ I tell him.
‘Nice,’ he says, his eyes on Pina.
We leave the garden center so overloaded with goodies that Dad decides to go get the car. While we wait for him at the entrance, a lady comes up to us.
‘How much for this?’ she asks, pointing to our newly acquired cherry-tomato plant.
Pina butts in before I have time to answer.
‘Two hundred pesos, señora. Go ahead, try one.’
The lady tries a tomato and buys the plant off us. I’m so impressed I’m lost for words. By the time Dad parks up and opens the trunk, Pina is already back, a replacement cherry tomato plant and eighty pesos change safely tucked away in her pocket. She got back yesterday, but she still hasn’t told me anything about her mom. She says to wait till she develops the photos. She took her old film camera, but now ‘Chela has a digital one.’ It makes me sad that she calls her mom by the same nickname we all use for her. I must have pulled a face because next thing she says, ‘She asked me to call her that and I like it.’
‘OK,’ I say, ‘OK, sorry.’
In total we have: two aloes, a lemon tree, a lavender plant, and various unidentified succulents. After today’s trip we can add the cherry tomatoes and two specimens of a tall plant called Monstera deliciosa, but which for some reason has the nickname ‘skeleton’. It has huge, dark green leaves with roundish holes in them. I guess that’s where the name comes from: the holes being the eye sockets in a skull. Or maybe it’s subtler than that: the holes the dead leave behind, something you can’t say. We also got a few other pretty plants: one of them looks like a red cabbage; the others are all green. I’m going to put those ones together in the planter nearest the house, because according to the dreads guy they like the shade. I already have the soil for the milpa corner (the milpa has been ‘downsized’ and now occupies just one corner), and next week we’ll go buy the turf. I’m pretty excited about that as well. As I understand it, you just lay it out like a rug.
As soon as Dad leaves us alone in the yard, Pina lies face down on the picnic table. She’s wearing a pair of hot pants so short you can see the smile of her butt cheek poking out on one side. It reminds me of last summer: we were sitting on a bench outside a shopping mall when a girl walked by and Emma said, ‘She’ll kill herself if she falls off that skirt.’
‘Look!’ shouts Pina, pointing to the basil I planted two weeks ago.
Some little flowers have blossomed on it. I call Mom and she opens the sliding door. She’d been practicing in the living room and has red eyes and a vague smile, like she does when she tells us she’s sorry.
‘You need to pull them off,’ she says, pointing to the basil with her cello bow.
‘Why?’
‘If you leave them on the leaves fall off, and the leaves are the bit you eat.’
‘Why?’
‘Just listen to me, will you?’ she says, and slides the door shut. One by one, Pina and I pull off the little flowers. It occurs to me that if I’d known, I could have taken them to the cemetery. It’s a silly idea: they’re tiny. But Luz was too. Tiny, I mean. She used to sit on my lap, hug her legs, then curl into a little ball so that I’d hold her.