B0061QB04W EBOK

by Reyna Grande

  Mami hailed a cab, and the three of us sat in the back. Mami and her little girl took the front. We had so many questions to ask her but didn’t because the taxi driver started a conversation with Mami.

  “You’re coming from El Otro Lado, aren’t you?” he asked.

  To this day I still don’t know how it is that people always seem to know when someone has just gotten back from the United States. Do they smell differently? Speak differently? Or is it their clothes?

  Mami laughed and told him yes. “I just got back last night,” she said.

  “Did you like it? Is it as nice as people say?” the taxi driver asked.

  “Oh, yes. It is beautiful,” Mami said. “A truly beautiful place.”

  “So why did you come back? I mean, with our economy in the toilet, everyone is leaving for El Otro Lado, not the other way around.”

  Her little girl started to cry, and Mami didn’t answer.

  Despite our sadness at leaving Tía Emperatriz and missing out on the movie, we were thrilled that our mother had returned. We kept waiting for her to say that she had missed us, but she’d hardly said a word to us. We got off at the main road and walked the rest of the way to Abuelita Chinta’s house in single file behind Mami. The air smelled of smoke as trash piles burned on either side of the train tracks. Abuelita Chinta’s house was the only one on the block made of bamboo sticks. It was covered with cardboard soaked in tar on the outside, and the roof was made of corrugated metal. The neighbors’ houses were made of brick and cement. The prettiest house belonged to Doña Caro. Her husband, Don Lino, was a welder. He made good money and his family had a refrigerator and running water. Abuelita Chinta didn’t have those things, but she had a stove and electricity. She bought water from the next-door neighbor and carried it home in a bucket.

  Sixty feet from Abuelita Chinta’s shack, to the west, was a canal that sometimes overflowed during the rainy season. Perpendicular to the canal were the train tracks which served the El Río Balsas Railway up until the 1990s, when the government privatized the railroads and the train from Iguala was suspended. But back then, the trains would come by carrying iron ore, grain, sugar, salt, fuel, cement, fertilizers, and passengers. The bamboo sticks of my grandmother’s shack rattled like maracas when the train passed by. It was especially scary at night because everything was quiet, except for the barking of the neighborhood dogs, when all of a sudden the train would come rushing by with its whistles and roaring engines.

  Doña Caro was sitting outside her house combing her long, gray hair. When she saw my mother, she said, “Juana, you’re back.” I wanted to scream that yes, Mami was back, and we would no longer be the little orphans!

  How is Papi?

  Tell us about the U.S.

  What did you do while you were there? Is it true what people say?

  Did you miss us?

  Does Papi miss us?

  Why didn’t he come back with you?

  “Why don’t you kids go outside to play with the new neighbors?” Mami said without answering our questions. She said she had something to tell us, but that now was not the time. Only Carlos listened to her and went in search of kids to play with. Mami handed Mago her little girl and told her to take care of her while she and Abuelita Chinta prepared dinner.

  Mago refused to take the baby.

  “She’s your sister,” Mami said.

  “She’s your daughter,” Mago said, and ran out of the house.

  “Reyna, you take care of her.”

  “But—”

  She put her little girl on my lap, and I did as I was told. I didn’t want to watch this little girl. But Mami was back, just as I had hoped for, and it was better if I behaved or she might decide to leave again.

  My grandmother’s shack was just one big room. (Unlike Abuela Evila’s, this house had no interior walls, so privacy was hard to come by.) A curtain separated the front from the back part of the house, and that is where my grandmother had stored our belongings from our old house, like my parents’ bed, the broken refrigerator, the dresser. In the middle of the shack was the dining table. To the right hung a hammock from the rafters where my uncle, Tío Crece, slept. Abuelita’s bed was on the left side of the dining table. The kitchen area was in the front part of the house. Next to the stove was a small table full of saints, candles, and flowers. In the center was a portrait of my dead grandfather.

  I sat on Abuelita Chinta’s bed and watched her and Mami make dinner. Finally we would start having real meals. Meals that were more than just beans and tortillas. I was so happy about the food that for a moment, I forgot I was supposed to be mad about watching Elizabeth, or Betty, as Mami said we should call her youngest daughter. My little sister. A complete stranger. She was a year and three months old. She looked at me and smiled. Part of me wanted to smile at her. Part of me wanted to hold her in my arms and smell her scent of baby powder and milk, but I didn’t do it. Instead, I studied her face, and I was jealous that she was prettier than me, even at her age. I was jealous that her hair was curlier than mine, and her eyelashes were thicker and longer than mine, and her eyes were not slanted like mine, but instead were round and framed by those thick, dark lashes that made it seem as if she were wearing eye makeup.

  But then I looked at her skin. She was very dark, this little girl. And it made me feel glad that she was so dark. I had heard people say that in El Otro Lado there were a lot of golden-haired people, with eyes as blue as a summer sky and skin as white as a pig’s belly. But this little girl, who was born in that special, beautiful place, was almost as dark as the Nahuas, the indigenous people who came down from the hills to sell clay pots at the train station.

  Mami had forgotten I was there and didn’t whisper as much as before. Now I could hear a little of what she was saying to Abuelita Chinta. Something about another woman. A fight she had with Papi. She was making green salsa, and as she talked she smashed the roasted green tomatoes with the pestle so hard the juice splattered on her dress. But she didn’t care. She said she hated Papi and never wanted to see him again.

  “I’m going to get back at him, Amá. I swear.”

  “Hush, Juana. Don’t say such things. He’s still the father of your children,” Abuelita Chinta said.

  “But it can’t be true,” I stammered. “Papi can’t love another woman.”

  Mami looked up, startled, and when she realized that I was in the house with them—and that I’d been there all along—she got furious.

  “What are you doing standing there? Go outside and don’t come back until I call you, you hear!”

  Betty started to cry. Tears stung my eyes, but Mami didn’t care about our tears. “Get out!” she yelled again, and I ran out.

  Abuelita Chinta’s shack

  Carlos was playing marbles with the boys, but Mago wasn’t playing jump rope with the girls. Instead, she was all alone, perched up on the metal thing used to change the direction of the train tracks. I carried Betty in my arms and struggled to hold her up. Her cheeks might have looked as if they were stuffed with cotton candy, but she weighed more than a sack of corn.

  Mago was staring into the distance, past the huizache trees, and when I looked in her direction, I saw the towers of La Guadalupe Church near Abuela Evila’s house sticking up like two fingers. Behind the towers, the Mountain That Has a Headache touched the sky.

  “Do you miss her?” I asked.

  Mago glanced at the mountain one more time and then jumped off the track-changer. “Who, Mami? But she’s back,” she said. “And why were you crying?”

  I started crying again. I didn’t know why I still felt that familiar emptiness inside when I looked at the Mountain That Has a Headache even though my mother was back.

  Carlos came over to us, smiling and pointing toward the house. “Can you believe she’s here?” He took a deep breath and said, “Finally, everything is going to go back to how it was before she left.”

  Mami stood at the door and told us to come inside. As I looked at h
er in the doorway, beckoning us to come in, I knew why the emptiness and the yearning were still there. Carlos was wrong.

  The woman standing there wasn’t the same woman who had left.

  11

  Papi and Mami as a young married

  couple, with Mago and Carlos

  IN AUGUST 1982, two months after my mother had returned from El Otro Lado, the peso was devalued for the second time that year due to the national debt crisis. What little money my mother had brought with her was quickly spent. She found herself the head of the household and with very few options of how to make a living. After two years of earning dollars, it was difficult for her to readjust to the hardships brought on by Mexico’s unstable economy. But what was harder for her was to have to explain to everyone who knew her why she had come back. As the taxi driver had said, everyone was leaving, not returning. I didn’t realize back then how difficult it must have been for my mother to look at her friends and admit that her husband had indeed left her for another woman, just as they had once teased her that he would.

  I often found her talking with my grandmother in whispers. But when Mago, Carlos, and I asked her for details of those two and a half years that she was gone, she would say little. So all we knew at that point was that my father had left her for another woman, but back then we still didn’t know how he’d gone about it. We wanted to know what it meant that he was now with someone else? Did it mean he would not be coming back? Did it mean he had given up on the dream house? Did it mean that he would start a family of his own with that other woman and forget about us? Did it mean we would never see him again?

  “It means he’s washing his hands of us,” my mother said. “It means we will starve here in this miserable place, and he will be too busy tending to his new woman to give a damn!”

  “Papi wouldn’t do that,” Mago said. “He’ll come back.”

  Out of all of us, Mago was the only one who harbored any hope that Papi would not forsake us. My mother’s broken promise—that she’d be gone only a year—had caused a rift between them, so Mago’s loyalty to my father remained strong. He had been gone for so long that in his absence he had become bigger than life in Mago’s eyes. But regardless of how much she had changed, I was too happy to have my mother back to cling to the hope of seeing my father again. And I was angry at him. I didn’t have a single memory of him and Mami together—of all of us together—and I felt cheated out of the family I yearned to have. Why did he have to go and fall in love with someone else? I wanted to know. Hadn’t Mami always done what he had asked of her? Hadn’t it been enough that she had followed him to El Otro Lado and left us behind?

  And now he had returned to us a different version of my mother, one who was bitter, heartbroken, and weighed down by the knowledge that she had four children to support and was on her own.

  Not too far from the train station is La Quinta Castrejón. Although it has now deteriorated and is no longer the fancy place it once was, back in its day it was frequented by wealthy people. It was on the outskirts of my grandmother’s colonia, La Ejidal, which was as poor as could be. But La Quinta Castrejón sat there amidst the poverty, teasing us, reminding us of what we couldn’t have. It was surrounded by a block wall lined with broken pieces of soda bottles that glinted in the sunlight like the jagged teeth of a beautiful but deadly beast. There was a long driveway that led to the reception hall and pools. The driveway was lined with palm trees, the only palm trees in the neighborhood, like soldiers standing guard. Inside there was a large swimming pool with a high diving board and smaller pools for little kids. There was a playground with swings and slides and a seesaw. Weddings and quinceañeras were held in the reception hall every weekend. Later, when the middle class was almost entirely wiped out as a result of the debt crisis, those parties became less frequent, causing La Quinta Castrejón to lose its glamour and be mostly forgotten.

  But at the time, that hadn’t happened yet, and Mami decided to try her luck there.

  “That place is immune to the recession,” Mami had said. “People still have to get married. And inflation can’t stop young girls from turning fifteen.”

  Mami had been unable to find a job, and she did not want to sell Avon anymore because she wanted to avoid her old clients and their mocking glances as much as possible. So we started to sell things at La Quinta Castrejón on the weekends.

  On Saturday, after a lunch of alphabet soup and tortillas, Mami prepared the merchandise to be sold that night. I wondered what kind of party would be taking place. Mago said it would be a wedding. I thought it would be a quinceañera. We placed a bet and the loser had to clean the outhouse the next day.

  Around five o’clock Mago, Carlos, and I left the house with Mami. Betty stayed home and cried. She wasn’t allowed to come. Mami wanted her to come along. She wanted all of us to come so the guests at La Quinta Castrejón could see she had four mouths to feed and take pity on her and buy from her. But the first night we came to sell, Betty cried and cried because the loud music and the laughter and chatter of the people inside kept her from falling asleep. The night was cold and we were shivering because our sweaters were too thin to keep out the chill. But Mami refused to leave even though everyone was inside the hall dancing and having a good time. She said that soon the party would be over and they would come back out and buy more cigarettes or gum, maybe even a bag of potato chips if they felt like a midnight snack.

  Then the next day Betty had a fever and a cough. Abuelita Chinta scolded Mami as if she were a little girl, saying that it was the night’s dampness that had made Betty sick, and what would we do if she came down with pneumonia?

  Mami said, “She’s an American, that’s why she’s so fragile.” Because Mago, Carlos, and I have thick Mexican blood running through our veins and neither the dampness nor the chill of the night would make us ill, we had to come along. I didn’t mind it so much. It meant we would get to spend time with Mami and see the beautiful dresses the quinceañeras and brides would be wearing.

  We got to La Quinta Castrejón and were disappointed to see there were already other mothers setting up their stands. They had all their kids with them, too. The winner was the mother who brought along five kids, the youngest tied to her back with a rebozo. Mami cursed under her breath and began to set up her stand. She put out the mint and caramel candy, little bags of peanuts and roasted pumpkin seeds, cigarettes and matches. Mago and I helped her with the stand while Carlos walked around the parking lot offering to watch people’s cars in exchange for tips.

  Mago and I watched a limousine approach. I held my breath and prayed that it was a quinceañera, first because I loved quinceañeras and second because I didn’t want to clean the outhouse the next day if I lost the bet I’d made with Mago. I prayed to the saints and held my breath until the driver opened the door of the limo, then I saw the young girl in her puffy pink dress and glittery tiara emerge, her escorts at her side. Mago was too mesmerized by the girl who seemed to be floating in a pink cloud to get mad that she lost the bet. We watched this young girl and her escorts walk into the reception hall while everyone clapped for her and congratulated her for becoming a mujercita, a little woman.

  Soon all the guests were inside, and we were out in the cold night shivering and blowing puffs of warm air into our hands. It was the middle of the rainy season, and the sky was thick with rain clouds. Once in a while we would see lightning flashing over the Mountain That Has a Headache. Mami paid no heed to the weather. She kept glancing at the other vendors. She rearranged her goodies as if trying to find just the right way to display them. A man came outside to buy a pack of cigarettes, and he looked at Mami and at Mago and me. I put on my sad face, just like Mami had told me to do. But I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I was almost seven years old, too old to compete with the baby nursing at his mother’s pitiful small breast. The man looked like a prince with his suit and tie. He bought his cigarettes from the woman and even gave her an extra tip, for her children, he said, and then we
nt back to the party.

  I didn’t look at Mami because I knew she was angry, at me, at the man, at the mother with her five children, at Papi for putting her in that situation, at herself for leaving El Otro Lado in a moment of desperation. “I should have stayed,” she would say to Abuelita Chinta sometimes. “He left me there on my own, and I knew no one, but I should have stayed. There were jobs. Maybe not great jobs, but at least we weren’t starving. And here in Mexico, with the cost of everything going higher and higher, how are we to survive?”

  I leaned against the wall and tried not to think about that beautiful place she yearned for. Mami picked up her tray of cigarettes and gum and decided to go inside the reception hall to offer them to the guests. Sometimes she got kicked out; sometimes, if the hosts were kind, they would let her stay for a bit.

  Mago and I got up and walked over to look at the pool. There was a chain-link fence from the reception hall to the ticket office to keep people out, but we didn’t need to go inside. From out there, we could see the pool clearly, shining like a blue jewel. By the ticket office was a white poster listing the admission prices. Mago helped me add up the numbers because I hadn’t yet learned to add big numbers in my second-grade class. The cost of swimming here, for my siblings and me, plus Mami, was two days’ worth of meals.

  “Your father worked on that pool,” Mami said from behind us, startling me. I turned to look at her, expecting her to be angry at Mago and me for leaving the stand unattended. I was waiting for her to yell at us, but instead, she said, “Your father tiled that pool.”

  We turned back to the pool and admired the navy blue tiles going all around the edge and covering the inside. “Papi did that?” I asked with awe. I had known Papi worked in construction, but I’d never really known, until that moment, which projects he had worked on around the city.

  “I remember that he came home after work and told me that as soon as the pool opened, he would bring me here to swim.” Mami put her hand up on the chain-link fence and curled her fingers around the metal wire. She put her forehead right up against the fence and looked at the pool. “Your father said that as a thank-you gift, the owner had allowed the workers to come for a day to enjoy the pool, free of charge. So he brought me here. Imagine that? I don’t know how to swim, but your father does. He held on to me the whole time. I was so afraid, but not once did he let me go …”