Umami

by Laia Jufresa

  ‘And what about facial hair, then?’

  She might have a point. As soon as she forgives me for what happened the other day I’ll tell her as much. This happens sometimes with us: we stop talking for an afternoon, or even a couple of days. One time we didn’t talk for almost an hour in the same room because she made fun of me for using the word ‘bygone’. She doesn’t get it. ‘Bygone’ is an awesome bygone word.

  The letter doesn’t say anything they haven’t already told us by email, but it makes me happy anyway; happy not to be there with them. And because in it they repeat the one really important thing: that they got my seeds. I’ve done my research, you see. It seems knobby tomatoes don’t just grow from a single plant that you can plant. So now I’ve got myself an ‘heirloom tomato-seed kit’ which I bought online. I paid with Mom’s credit card and my brothers are going to smuggle it back in their suitcase. I have no idea how to say ‘heirloom tomato’ in Spanish. To me it sounds like a shady character: the Heir of the Looming Tomatoes. Or like some kind of macho saying: ‘You must stay home and weave, chosen heir of the loom.’ But when I told Pina this she just said, ‘Get over yourself, Elizabeth.’

  Every three months, since I was about eight, Emma sends me a box of books. She buys them by the kilo whenever someone in her county dies, and then sends them on to me. For two whole years I got nothing but Agatha Christie novels. Whoever Emma’s neighbor was (RIP) he was a major fan. During those two years everything around me was a clue, and Pina would respond to anything I said with a ‘Cool it, Christie.’ Alf never stopped calling me that, but he also never tells me to calm down or get over myself.

  I thought that Emma wouldn’t send me any books this year seeing as I boycotted camp, but a couple of weeks ago a box arrived full of Elizabethan classics written in an elegant and long-winded English. That’s where Pina got Elizabeth from. What’s in a name? My nicknames are determined by the reading preferences of dead folk from Michigan. Maybe now – because of all the Elizabethan and because I skipped the US trip this summer – my spoken English will disappear altogether. If they ask me my name, I’ll answer, ‘Taa tin tete tu,’ and I’ll have to communicate with Emma solely in writing. I only ever practiced speaking English at summer camp. Emma would say to me, ‘You’re so pretty, kiddo.’ And I’d answer in my best Miss Marple accent, ‘Why, thank you, my dear!’ Which doesn’t mean I believed her.

  ‘You’re so pretty,’ I say to my yard.

  *

  I take Pina a few cherry tomatoes from my plant and she forgives me for calling her stupid for no reason the other day. She comes over with her new hula-hoop and is gobsmacked by how it all looks now it’s planted. Mom made lemonade and I take sips from my glass while Pina tries to make the hoop hula around her waist.

  ‘I think Daniel has a lover,’ I tell her out of nowhere.

  ‘The neighbor?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Yes way.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The other day I went and knocked and he was there but he didn’t open the door.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I peeked a look under the door and saw some shoes.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘There was a pair with high heels too, just sort of lying there. And Daniela doesn’t wear heels.’

  ‘Men are scum.’

  ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘It’s what Chela says.’

  ‘Shall I tell you something else? When Emma went to the University of Michigan in the seventies, the women weren’t allowed to go in through the main door.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Uh-huh. There was a little door to the side with “Ladies’ Entrance” written on it.’

  ‘That’s awful! And it wasn’t even that long ago. But, shall I tell you something? If Theo isn’t careful, he’s gonna turn into a macho.’

  ‘Theo? But he plays the piano!’

  ‘Uh-huh, but he never takes that T-shirt off. The one with the naked girl on it.’

  ‘She’s a pin-up girl.’

  ‘It’s deprading.’

  ‘Degrading?’

  ‘Whatever! It’s wrong.’

  Pi lets the hoop fall to the ground and she sits down at the table. I pour her some lemonade. I feel strong and tan. I pass her the glass and illuminate her, Marina-style, ‘It isn’t wrong, darling: it’s vintage.’

  ‘What really is wrong is Chela giving me a hula-hoop.’

  ‘Wrong how?’

  ‘Like she thinks I’m still nine.’

  Mom opens the sliding door and says, ‘Look who came over!’

  Marina emerges from the kitchen, as if summoned by my impression of her. The second she sees Pina, though, her eyes drop to the floor. Marina always avoids Pi. It’s one of those things that goes on in the mews and which we all know about but nobody understands. The same with Alf, who every evening takes The Girls around the block in their stroller. Pina doesn’t care. I think she might even like it: it amuses her. She says hey to Marina and offers her a go on her hula-hoop. Marina tries it while I tell them all about the Iroquois, a tribe of American Indians who had their own constitution and shared out all the powers equally: only the women could be chiefs of the clan, and only the men could be chiefs of the military, but the chief of the clan was the one who chose the chief of the military.

  ‘And were there less wars?’ Marina asks.

  ‘No idea. What I do know is that they planted a kind of milpa. I’m using their technique actually, it’s called the Three Sisters. The three sisters are corn, bean, and squash.’

  Marina and Pina look over at the plants in the planters.

  ‘No,’ I tell them, and point to the part where it looks like there’s nothing but soil.

  They nod, unconvinced.

  ‘It’ll take a few months to get going,’ I say.

  The window opens and Mom whistles for me to go over. I’m convinced she’s going to tell me to get rid of Marina, and that by some secret Protestant mafia law she’s not welcome in this house. But instead she passes me a clean glass. It has movie characters on it and a straw built into the side. Theo got it in a fast-food promotion. Mom says, ‘It’s the only plastic one we have.’

  Marina blows her a kiss, but Mom doesn’t react: she’s staring at something else. I think she’s about to notice that I planted the corn. She might be able to tell from the notches I made in the planters where I’m going to tie thread to mark out the plot (I don’t want anyone stepping on my three sisters thinking there’s only soil there). But her eyes are on something else.

  ‘Pina, where did you get that?’ she barks, all weird and aggressive. My mom never calls her Pina.

  I look at my friend. She’s holding the cuddly dog I found the other day. Marina looks at it too and shouts, ‘Patricio!’

  ‘Did your mom have it?’ my mom asks.

  ‘What?’ Pina asks.

  ‘That was Luz’s dog!’ she says.

  ‘It was mine!’ I tell her.

  ‘I remember that, Ana. When I first met you, you wouldn’t let it out of your sight,’ Marina adds.

  Pina is still looking at my mom, clearly feeling hard done by. Mom studies my face carefully and then raises her arms.

  ‘You might be right,’ she says, before disappearing from the window. For a minute we think she might reappear at the screen door, but we can only see our reflection, which shimmers on the glass in the sun. When you look at all of us three together in the glass, we don’t look that different. No more than corn does to bean, or bean to squash.

  Marina lights a cigarette and every now and again, without saying anything, passes it to Pina, who takes strategic drags facing away from my house. Smoking is a dumbass thing to do. But a dumbass thing that right now makes me feel pretty jealous. I don’t want those two to be friends. I can’t believe they’re sharing the cigarette and the hula-hoop and they haven’t even insisted that I try, all because I said it was a dumbass thing to do.
Although it also bugs me the way Marina is so awkward every time she sees Pina. Something went on there that no one will tell me. One day everything was fine, then Marina did something and my mom ran her out the house, and suddenly there were no more English classes, and no more babysitting. Every time Pina and I ask my mom what happened she just raises her eyes and starts singing, which is her way of summoning her powers of discretion.

  Before leaving, Marina says to me, ‘I made you a color.’ Then she whispers in my ear, ‘Gleenery.’

  ‘Shall we go grab an horchata?’ Pi asks.

  ‘I’m on a diet.’

  ‘Quit it, will you? You’re not fat.’

  ‘OK, but you’re buying.’

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘I’ll see you at the bell in an hour.’

  God knows what she’s going to do all that time. Probably her hair. Since she came back, Pina spends her life grooming herself. She walks off and I stay outside reading Euphues and His Anatomie of Wit. But ‘reading’ is a manner of speaking really: it’s more like deciphering a code. But thou Euphues, doft rather refemble the Swallow which in the Summer creepeth vnder the eues of euery houfe, and in the Winter leaueth nothing but durt behinde hir: or the humble Bee, which hauing fucked hunny out of the fayre flower, doth leaue it and loath it: or the Spider which in the fineft web doth hang the fayreft Fly. For a millisecond, I wish my brothers were here. If I were reading out loud to them with a British accent, Olmo would be chuckling and Theo would be composing a song for our non-existent band, The Honey-Fucking Bees.

  When the sun gets too much for me, I go in. It feels cool, almost cold, and unlike outside, it’s dark. I can’t see two centimeters in front of me when I go through the door, and I trip over something. It’s Mom. She’s on the floor. I yelp. She laughs.

  ‘What are you doing there?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, just my jujitsu,’ she says.

  ‘Doesn’t jujitsu involve some movement?’

  ‘Not this kind, no.’

  *

  We’re all eating dinner when Pina brings up the launch party.

  ‘It’ll be open to the public and pay-on-the-door,’ she adds.

  ‘Are you kidding me, Pi?’ Mom says.

  Dad pours Beto some wine, then some for Mom, and he says to her, ‘You used to sell lemonade.’

  ‘Different times,’ Mom says. ‘Different country.’

  ‘You and I sold crickets, do you remember?’ Pi asks me. ‘You’d trap them and I made little holes in the containers so they could breathe.’

  I stare at Mom and, without knowing what exactly I’m referring to, say to her, ‘I’ve earned it.’

  ‘Totally,’ adds Pina. ‘The girl’s been slogging away. Look at her arms, she’s bionic!’

  I flex my right bicep. Dad feels it and pretends to be impressed.

  ‘Beto and I bought your crickets off you then let them go in Alf’s milpa once you were asleep.’

  Beto whistles and says, ‘I’d forgotten all about that.’

  ‘Can we have an inauguration?’ I ask.

  Mom is wearing a blue rag. She smiles at me, does Protestant hand, but in the end says, ‘Fine.’

  ‘But only once your brothers are back,’ Dad adds.

  ‘Duh,’ Pina says, almost offended, as if we’d already taken that into consideration.

  ‘And by invitation only,’ Mom says. ‘And free entry.’

  ‘Voluntary donation?’ Dad pitches in. ‘Hey, if people want to help, why stop them?’

  Mom takes one slow, deep breath, which I know means ‘OK’. Dad holds out his hand to me, then to Pina.

  ‘Deal,’ we say, and shake on it. But on the inside, I say something else. On the inside I say, ‘Squeeze!’

  *

  Pina and I go over to hers. The adults stay in my living room. Dad said we had to celebrate Pina and Chela’s reconciliation, hence tonight’s dinner, but only Pi, my parents and I know that. We told Beto it was in honor of us starting high school next week.

  Pina passes me an envelope with some photos she developed. It’s pretty weird seeing her mom again. Was she always so good-looking? I tell Pina that the beach looks great and how jealous I am that she got to see hatching turtles. Then I let her braid my hair because she swears on her life she knows how. She doesn’t of course, but this is a necessary experiment. Daniela gave us elastic bands from her brackets. (She looks terrible, pregnant with brackets.) She told us that if we sleep with our hair in braids then take them out in the morning we’ll have ‘created volume’. We need volume for the yard inauguration. Pina braids and braids and tells me all about the beach at Mazunte and the people there and the turtles. Eventually she tells me that the weirdest thing is that the same thing happens as when she was little: when she’s with Chela, she doesn’t dare speak. Like she wants to say the right thing, but she thinks about it so much that in the end she doesn’t say anything. She says that this doesn’t happen with anyone else; apart from boys she likes. She says she bucked up the courage to ask her mom what the notorious letter said, and Chela told her that she didn’t remember.

  ‘Did she say sorry for leaving?’ I ask her.

  Pi shakes her head, looking at me in her dressing-table mirror.

  ‘Did you get a boyfriend?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Men our age are all useless, Elizabeth, Liz, Lizzie; from now on I’m going to call you Lizzie.’

  ‘Men our age aren’t men yet, Pizzie.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘They’re youths.’

  ‘They’re what?’

  ‘They’re fayre flies with fucketh for brains.’

  *

  Pi has been asleep for hours. I can’t sleep because my braids are itchy and because the things she told me are crushing down on my chest. I don’t know if I could see Chela again; if I could manage not to hate her till the end of time. Or maybe I can hate her so my friend doesn’t have to. I could be a hate surrogate and Pina could let it all go and just forgive her. Maybe she has already. Not only for leaving, but also for what Chela confessed to Pina and Pina just told me now, before falling asleep: that last year, for her birthday, Chela came all the way here but didn’t get farther than the doorway. She was here and just left without a word. That makes me angrier than anything. That, and what the letter said.

  It’s easy to hate Chela, but I can’t sleep at the same time as I do that; I keep waking up and it’s all still there, all jumbled up inside me and it’s like when Luz died: like I want to go back in time, open the door to the mews and catch Chela hesitating in front of the entry buzzer and make her ring the damn thing. At some point I notice the window is no longer black. I get up to look at the stereo: it’s five thirty in the morning. I get dressed, go downstairs and cross the larynx barefoot, stopping to touch the bell with my toes. It’s much colder than the floor. I stay like that for a while, like a charactress from a movie: standing alone, the dawn sky spelling sadness over me.

  The other thing Pina told me was this: when she came back from her mom’s beach, Beto finally agreed to show her the letter. It’s just one sentence; one that none of us could have ever imagined. I think that’s actually what’s brought on the insomnia, because how many years have we spent wondering if it was a suicide note, or if Chela was really a spy and had been forced to leave on a mission? Basically, wondering if she wrote something that shed the light on her disappearance. But what’s breaking my heart is that the letter doesn’t say anything. The letter says: Pina, I only ask that you finish high school.

  *

  At home, the screen door to the yard is open. At first I’m worried, but then I walk closer and see my mom out in the middle of the lawn with a cup of coffee in her hands. She looks lost there, still in her white nightgown and with a woolen shawl wrapped around her half-heartedly, staring at it all as if she were deciding whether my plants are fact or fiction.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask gently, taking her hand.

  She’s barefoot too, and her wheat-colored h
air is loose. Her wedding ring hangs between her collarbones. She never liked wearing it on her finger. Dad says she put it on a chain three weeks after their wedding. I realize then that it’s been ages since I saw this part of her body: it moves when she breathes, up and down, and the ring catches in the light of a streetlamp. Her shoulders look like two tennis balls implanted under her skin, the same as my brothers’: I didn’t remember that. Has Mom been hiding her body, too? I run a finger along the furrows between my braids and the itching starts up again. We look down at our feet. Mom holds on to my arm and shows me how, if you go in to touch the grass from the side, the droplets land on your toes. We have the same feet, too wide for pretty shoes. And now we have this too: dew, silence, green things.

  Mom clenches her toes and pulls out a few blades of grass. She regrets it immediately and looks at me like a little girl who’s just done something naughty. I shrug my shoulders.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ve got more. More of all of this.’

  Then Mom blinks at me slowly, which I know means ‘thank you’.

  ‌

  ‌2003

  They’ve only just sat down when Chela says, ‘Now we’re going to talk about happy things.’

  The crepes, the cutlery, two plates and a selection from Chihuahua’s jelly collection are laid out on the table. They’ve also decanted some water from the twenty-liter bottle in the kitchen into a pitcher. Marina, who never sits at the table, feels like she’s taking part in a simulacrum.

  ‘You start,’ Chela says.

  ‘I invent colors,’ is the only happy thing Marina can think of.

  ‘With paint?’

  ‘With words.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Like… this one I thought of earlier. I’m still not sure if it works: “blacktric”.’

  ‘An electric black?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Nice. You got anymore?’

  ‘Scink is the pale pink you find after you pull off a scab. You know the one?’