by Marie Arana
She had died on the morning of Mother’s Day. Clam-Hand had slid her into his refrigerator and gone off to Laramie. Three full days crawled by before we could trudge up the steps to view his rendition of my grandmother.
The Wooten parlor was set up like a schoolroom. There were four rows of wooden chairs behind a raised platform. Twenty-four chairs in all. The room’s ceiling was low, its walls hung with blue wallpaper, fleur-de-lis against yellowy cream. The carpet was dingy, worried by prairie grit, thinned by the boots of the bereaved.
Mr. Wooten’s pocked face met us at the door. He was wringing his hands in dismay. His fingers were long, cool as fish when he slipped them around our wrists and into our palms. “On Mother’s Day, of all things,” he whispered. “Terribly sorry.” A wan smile coiled across his face and was gone.
Mother pushed past him into the parlor. There were candles set out on a table and a body behind them, under glass. The lady was dressed in flowered cotton, her hands folded neatly over her still heart. A white satin sheet covered her legs. I saw no more than that at first. A quick glimpse, and then my eyes were back on my patent-leather shoes.
We were the only ones there. Grandpa Doc was nowhere to be seen. When we hurriedly whispered to Mother, asking her where he was, she simply turned and rapped one gloved fist on her left breast, over the chambers of her heart.
As we filed into the last row of chairs, the candles flickered against the warm May breeze and Clam-Hand spun around to shut the door behind us. A fat black fly buzzed in. We lowered ourselves onto the hard-edged chairs and looked out at the table in front.
“That’s not Grandma Lo,” said Mother in a voice that seemed somebody else’s. “That’s just her body. She’s off with God now. I wanted you to see it for yourselves.”
It was clear she was right. The woman up there was pink and smiling. Her hair was in tight little curls. On her mouth was a smear of vermillion, on her cheeks powdery circles of rose. She looked more like Mrs. Birdseye than my grandmother. She was puffed out, painted, and pert. Any minute now, she was going to roll over, prop her chin on one hand, raise the glass case with the other, eye the fly, and say in Mrs. Birdseye’s earnest little voice, “Well, dear ones, everything in this world has a sound explanation. There’s nothing wrong with dying. Nothing wrong with it at all!”
Where had Grandma Lo gone?
Off. Like Grandma Clapp, clanking downstairs in the Ferguson Building, flapping out Cedar Street, chasing the ghosts of her past.
Off. Like Nub’s mother on her sprees from the loony bin, bolting through gardens into the night. Down, down, to the rum-drumdrum of the road.
Off. Like Joe Krozier’s woman. Never to be seen again. Off, down some great stretch of highway, as Americans were wont to go.
THERE WAS NO more reason to stay in Wyoming now. We packed our bags and went out to the ranch one last time. Grandpa Doc was in the new house, sitting in his chair by the fire, poking at cinders with his long iron brand. His face was ragged, hanging down from his skull like hide that’s been out in hard weather. A tumbler of scotch sat close by.
“You be sure to take good care of yourself, Daddy,” my mother said, and he nodded, but his eyes weren’t those of a man who planned to take good care of anything. They had the flat glint of lead.
That evening, I sat out on the porch with him as sunset stole over Elk Mountain. A ribbon of color slid from the clouds and spilled over the crest: shell pink, then hot methyl orange. We watched it in companionable silence. I had finally learned how. George was walking the prairie with Great-Grandma Clapp, and her skirt billowed out like the jib of some large sea creature, ready to engulf him, pull him under. In the distance someone was singing.
It was dark before someone switched on the light from inside the house and I turned and found my grandfather’s eyes. They were talking at me, in the way gringo eyes do. I eye-talked him back. Then he spoke.
“See over there?” He motioned to a place in the sky behind me. I wheeled around. Two eagles were circling the pearly night.
“Yes. I see them,” I said.
“There are two,” he said enigmatically, and then fell silent. We watched them wind lazily, then fly off toward the cliffs.
“You know about eagles, do you?” he asked. I shook my head no.
“They fly upside down when they’re courting. Go crazy, they do. Put on shows. And then when they mate, they mate for life. For life. If one dies, the other won’t last very much longer. Not without the one he loves. Not long.”
More than anything I wanted to ask him if he had been married before, like my mother. Or if he would ever marry again. He was seventy years old and, judging by Great-Grandma Clapp, was looking forward to another thirty years of life. The answer to those questions was no—he had married one woman and would die married to her only—but I never asked. I didn’t dare risk annoying him the way I had annoyed my mother. I slipped my hand into his large palm and focused on the black hulk in the distance.
“Grandpa, does Elk Mountain have an apu?”
“What’s that?”
“An apu. A spirit.”
“Well, yes. I suppose so.”
“How do you know?”
“Do you see how we all gather around it? Old Man Widener over there. Joe Krozier there. Me here. Wouldn’t sit here looking up at it if something weren’t drawing us, would we? That’s how I see it.”
“Does the apu ever get angry?”
“You mean like a volcano? No.”
“I mean if you do something to make him mad. Like if you dig in him for bones.”
“Oh, well, I reckon the Injuns think so. They tell me things like that. But I don’t know. Never seen anything like that myself. And I tend to believe in what I see.”
I must have looked at him with a puzzled face, for he continued, “Wish it were different, honey girl. Sure would like to believe in something otherworldly. Something that would make me one hundred percent sure I’ll see your Grandma Lo again. I just don’t know what to believe.” He squeezed my hand, lifted his heavy frame out of the chair, swung open the screen door, and disappeared inside.
That night I overheard my parents discuss our three months out West. The house was small, the walls were thin, and I could lie in the blanket spread out on my grandfather’s sofa and listen to every nuance of conversation. Vicki was doing fine, they said, but needed some distraction: something to get her mind off death, something to make her laugh. Maybe a museum, a quick visit to a historic site, a concert in some park. Marisi was a sport, no problem there; she seemed to have taken it all in stride. But George, it seemed, was suffering. Oh, he’s all right, my father said. No, he was not, Mother insisted. He was ill. Some shock; hadn’t he noticed? A trauma of some kind. Probably because he’d been made to look at his dead grandmother, Papi said. No, Mother said sharply, it started long before that. In Peru. Nonsense, my father said, but we’ll make a point to see a doctor while we’re here, if that will make you feel better.
The next morning, old wifeless Joe came winding up Rattlesnake Pass on his mange-bitten, swaybacked mare. As we downed the last of Grandpa Doc’s flapjacks—lighter and sweeter than any a servant had made us—Old Joe thrust his mug in the door and called out, “Goin’ta Rawlins, anyone? Got room for a big-fisted horseman with no car and a li’l ass?”
We did go to Rawlins that day. We dropped off Joe, watched him go into the bar down the street from the Ferguson Building. Then we boarded a train that took us to Boston. It was a big town, hard town, with nothing to recommend it except that my parents held hands briefly when they walked down the Fenway. But I do recall that we saw three things there we’d never dreamed we’d see: a television, a jukebox, and a psychiatrist.
The television was in a hotel lobby; there was a Cuban man in it, scolding his redheaded wife. It was just the thing to make Vicki laugh. The jukebox was in a corner soda shop; I fed a nickel into it and our waitress stood over us and bleated every word of the song. The mind god was in Children’
s Hospital; he gave George a vial of pills and made his face go slack, smooth—tranquil as the dunes of Pachamama, smiling and beckoning us home.
9
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POWER
La Conquista
PACHAMAMA WAS NOT the only one welcoming us to Lima. Tension greeted us, too. There was an arch in Abuelita’s spine.
“Y la Abuela Clapp?” Abuelita asked me, issuing the right name like the sharp report of a gun. “Did you see her before she died?”
So. She knew about the Clapps. With that volley, it was clear to me that the skirmish between her and Mother would resume. Much later, when I was grown, Papi told me that for years letters had been delivered to Abuelita’s door addressed to Mother, with Clapp printed neatly on the envelopes. When Mother’s remarks to him indicated that the letters were from her parents, he didn’t say a word, never posed a query. But then he found himself rushing to flood walls, plugging the leaks in advance.
“She changed her name to Campbell before I met her in Boston,” he told them once. “Clapp has an unfortunate medical meaning in the United States. Not nice for a woman.”
Not nice? Clapp, as in cloepian, Saxon for “name”; or clappen, Middle English for “strike.” To wit: The angel yclept Clapp clapped his wings, clapped a saddle on his horse, and clapped to the pearly gates. What’s not nice about that?
Well and good. But a French calque got in the way in America and made life miserable for Mum. Clap, c’est à dire, clapier, a brothel, or more to the point, clapoir, a venereal sore. To wit: Le diable, en visitant le clapier, a trouvé un clapoir dans une partie de son corps que je ne veux pas mentionner ici. In other words, not very nice at all.
Or, to put a sharp point on it, see the 1828 edition of Webster’s: Clapdoctor: one who is skilled in healing the clap. But if the name had been good enough for six generations of Clapps in America—a very nice oral surgeon among them—why wasn’t it right for my mother? No, no. That explanation would not do. But the issue was never addressed openly.
Other questions hung in the air like malodors the family was too polite to acknowledge. “Now that you’ll be living in Lima, Marisi,” my abuelita asked me on our first day back, as if I were a full-grown señorita, “where will you be attending church?” The sheer force of the question, when I repeated it to Mother in our pensión on Avenida Ricardo Palma, drove her into the next room. Even my soul, it seemed, would be their battlefield. I had heard Mother complain that Abuelita had had no right to baptize me a Catholic behind her back. She had tried to do it with Vicki, Mother said, and failed; the only way George had ducked it was by having the good sense to be born in Wyoming.
When, on our second day back in Lima, Abuelita announced she would pick me up at the pensión and take me to mass, Mother countered by saying she had already enrolled me in the American Union Church. No one seemed a bit concerned that I would burn in hell if I shuttled between churches. I had heard a priest say so myself. But the dispute clearly wasn’t about hell. It was about will.
“What do I do that makes your mother dislike me so much, Jorge?” Mother whispered one day. They had taken to pulling each other into the next room and speaking in ill-tempered voices.
“Nothing specific,” he replied. “But you’re a gringa, honey. Your presence offends her.”
“Somos culturas distintas,” my abuelita declaimed about the difference between Lima and Rawlins. We are two very different cultures. But I could see she meant hers was better.
Within a week, my parents found a place to live. We slipped into our new quarters on Avenida Angamos as if it were something familiar, but there was an otherness to it. A change. There was nothing grand about the house. Certainly it was not the sprawling colonial construction we were used to, with leaping arches out front and servants’ quarters in the rear. I hadn’t understood it when my parents had decided it over the kitchen table in Rawlins, but Papi was resigning from W. R. Grace to start an engineering firm in Lima. It was a dream the Arana brothers had, a bond that would honor their father. At thirty-eight, when he finally handed Grace his resignation, Papi was the oldest, most beribboned, most successful of Abuelito’s three sons. For him the launching of their new engineering company, Techo Rex, was the fulfillment of an obligation. For my uncles, Víctor and Pedro, far younger men with skyscraping ambitions, it was a leap at wealth. For us children, prosperity had long been delivered—we’d tasted the good life already—and change meant something else. In real terms, we had ceased to be wards of a rich gringo company: We had less money, less prestige, less protection against the harsh winds of Peruvian politics. Less power. We were in a small house, facing the cinch of a city life, sensing an ebb to things.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the ranks of our servants. There was one where there had been six. Nora was nineteen, a shy girl with a pretty face and a thick black ponytail. She scrubbed and swept and cooked and shopped, but she barely touched our conscious lives, bustling to and fro with all the exigencies of her day.
Our home was the first floor of a stone and stucco duplex in the residential area of Miraflores. Black iron girded its windows; nothing shielded its door. Across the avenue was an open lot with little in it save dirt and the sketch of an imagined apartment tower. Down from that, the American ambassador’s mansion: a Spanish colonial with graceful wide balconies. A riot of fuchsia spilled over its walls.
Our rooms were narrow, closed, dim on a sunny day. The vendors who came hawking bread and fruit were impatient urbanites with jingling pockets and places to go. The garden was minimal—a Potemkin illusion—with no room for children’s games. After the scale of Paramonga or Wyoming, George and I could see that we needed to rein in, straiten the radius, think small. We had, in every material measure, stepped back. Qualms were starting to show.
“The children need school uniforms, Jorge.”
“Buy them the minimum, please.”
The last luxury that was left us—our mother’s classroom, a luxury of the spirit if not of the purse—was traded in for the sepulchral halls of the Roosevelt School. “A real school! With English books and American teachers!” my mother beamed, but when we went to register, it seemed a vast building, full of arrogant gringos and a brain-numbing clangor of bells. “La escuela Americana?” my grandmother gasped when we told her. “With so many fine old Catholic schools in this city?”
We were squeezed into gray wool and starched shirts. On our first day of school, Papi motioned us to the walkway where our geraniums stood sentry, bright red and anxious.
“This is Tang,” he said, pointing to a round Buddha of a man who nodded genially from inside our yellow Studebaker. “First he takes me to work, then he drives you to school. Pay close attention. This is a big city. Bad things happen.”
Mother stood in the frame of our carved front door and waved. “You’re going to learn so much!” she called out. But she turned back into the house as if there were something she’d just mislaid.
THE PLAYGROUND OF the Roosevelt School was swarming with hundreds of children, milling about and yammering, waiting for the bell to ring. We edged through the gate and stood in awe.
A girl about my age leaned against the wall and stared at us. She was dark-skinned, frail, her eyes bulging from her face like boiled eggs, blue-white and rubbery.
“Primer día?” she asked. First day? I was gawking around me, an obvious newcomer. I nodded that it was so.
“You speak English,” she said, more of a fact than a question.
“Yes,” I answered, ready to prove it. But she continued in Spanish, and my affirmation hung in the air like a hiss.
“Then you’ll be fine,” she assured me. “Don’t look so worried. I’m Margarita Martinez. My English is not so good. They put me in Señora Arellano’s class.”
There were two streams for every grade at Roosevelt, Margarita explained. The main one was for English-speakers, a smaller one for those who spoke better Spanish. I would be tested for my abilities and streamed accord
ing to my tongue.
The man who would decide my fortune was vexed in the company of children. I could see it the moment he called out my name. He was frowning and fidgety, flicking his hair with his fingers and peering impatiently at his wrist. I followed his orange head into a room next to the headmaster’s office.
“Do you speak English or Spanish at home, señorita?” he asked me in Spanish, motioning me to a chair.
“Both,” I replied, and stared at his hair. There was something miraculous about the way it cocked up on top and slicked flat around the ears.
“Which do you read?”
“Both,” I answered again.
“No,” he said, drumming a long white hand on the tabletop. Gold fuzz sprouted on his knuckles. He was wearing a ring, ponderous as a prime minister’s. “You don’t understand me. There must be a difference in the level at which you speak and read your two languages.” Ee-dee-oh-muzz. His Spanish was broad and drawling, like my mother’s. He opened a green folder and looked through it, and then switched his questions to English. “What I’m asking you, missy, is which language are you more proficient in? There are no records or tests here.”
“I think I’m about the same in both,” I said.
“Sir,” he said.
“What?”
“I think I am the same in both, sir.”
I repeated the phrase after him. I had never heard anyone in the United States of America talk like that. I wanted to fall on the floor and squeal, his words were striking me as so idiotic. But there was nothing amusing about the man.
“Here,” he said. “Read to me from this book.” He shoved a brown volume across the table, pinched two fingers, and then plucked a white shirt cuff out of his jacket sleeve.