Let Their Spirits Dance

by Stella Pope Duarte

  My father was dark and stocky with rounded shoulders that had once been muscular and a limp that favored the hip the Germans shattered with an exploding grenade. The government had a surgeon stick pins into my dad’s hip, then the doctor said he was healthy enough to go to work. Under his shaggy brows, my father’s black eyes were alive, alert, penetrating every face, taking in everyone else’s eyes. My father could do that. He could absorb your eyes into his until you were only a reflection in his pupils. I guess that’s how he held on to Mom. She could only see the world through his eyes. If he couldn’t capture your eyes, he didn’t want anything to do with you. Power was a thread stretching taut and brittle between my parents, a tug-of-war that went in my dad’s favor. The struggle ended when Mom walked away shaking her head, wringing her hands.

  Mom’s skin was light with a few freckles on the soft flesh under her arms. Her hair was sandy red. After Kennedy was elected president, she dyed it dark brown and brushed it into a flip to imitate her idol, Jackie Kennedy. Her head came up to my dad’s slumping shoulder and her body smelled like Frosted Flakes. She wore different colored aprons, fringed by a collection of safety pins around the hem. Mom said you never knew when you would need a safety pin. Mom noticed everything. She saw dust bunnies under the dresser and the crooked part down the middle of my hair that looked like a road crew’s idea of a joke.

  “God is God, no matter where you go.” I heard it with my own ears. My dad said this to Mom when he gave us permission to go to the Two Doors Gospel Church with Blanche. He sat at the table with a full plate of chili con carne and beans. I could tell my mom was getting ready for World War III by the way she went from one end of the kitchen to the other doing nothing more than picking up plates putting them back down again and rearranging forks and spoons. This was the nervous energy of her migraines. My dad was sullen, quiet, his mustache drooping. His attitude was “I don’t care, leave me alone.” So careless. I looked closely at him and knew he was ready for another trip to Tío Ernie’s. I glanced out the window, but there was no rain in sight. “Construction crews don’t work in the rain,” was one of the excuses my dad used for visiting his brother. Jesse took odd jobs all over the neighborhood to help support Mom and us when my dad was over at Tío Ernie’s. We depended on Jesse for so many things, we forgot my dad was supposed to be the man of the house.

  One night, I heard Tía Katia yell at my mother “Divorce him! Leave him, the lazy good-for-nothing. Que se vaya a la chingada! Look at Bernardo, he doesn’t do that shit to me.”

  “Bernardo’s afraid of you, Katia. Besides, you know Pablo’s hip is bad, pobre. He’s got pain in his hip. He wasn’t always like this.”

  My mother’s defense of my father was solid. “We married in the Church. I’ll pray to Santa Rita, the patroness of women with evil husbands. I’ll light another candle to El Santo Niño. If all else fails, I’ll call on St. Jude for impossible cases.”

  Tía Katia said Consuelo was good at one thing, and that was opening her legs. “She’s opened them so many times, you’d think she was riding a horse.” When I thought of Consuelo’s six kids, I knew there was truth to what Tía Katia said. The last two kids looked like us, except their voices didn’t match ours. They spoke like they had just blown their noses and didn’t get all the snot out. The girl’s name was April, because she was born in April. April looked a whole lot like me except her hair was dark like Consuelo’s and mine was light like my mom’s. I don’t know why they didn’t name her brother January, because he was born in January. Instead, they named him Federico, but everybody called him Fufu.

  April sometimes pushed her doll carriage down the dirt sidewalk in front of their house. The brat sometimes waved to me and wanted me to play dolls with her. I imagined one day turning into Tarzan and whipping from one telephone pole to another, snatching her doll carriage and stomping it to bits. I’d gouge out her stupid dolls’ eyes, too.

  Every time I saw April and Fufu, I wanted to do crazy things like set fire to my father’s tool shed or grab his electric saw and cut off the posts holding up the roof of the garage so the whole thing would fall on his car and crush it. All I really did was walk backwards in the yard sometimes and make myself fall in holes in the yard so my mother would worry and show my dad all my bruises. I wanted her to say, “See what you’re doing to mijita, she doesn’t care if she lives or dies!” Then I’d say, “Kick his ass out, Ma! Let him go live with Consuelo and her stupid kids. You don’t need him! Why don’t you stand up for yourself!”

  After I said all that, he’d look at me and maybe slap me across the face, then my mom would have to stick up for me. Then he’d leave Consuelo for good and stop humiliating my mom, and she’d stop roaming all over the house, cleaning and re-cleaning things that were already clean. But I couldn’t stand up to him either, and there were times I didn’t want to, times when he hugged me and told me I was his one and only. His neck smelled like sweat mixed with sawdust from the wood he hauled around at the construction sites. I wanted to set the table for him and rub his shoulders and make him feel good so he’d never go back to Consuelo.

  The night we went to Brother Jakes’s revival, I washed up and got into my oxfords, white blouse, and dark skirt and let my mom brush my hair and make a clean part down the middle that nobody would laugh at with two smooth-as-silk ponytails hanging on either side. Jesse had to wear his clean Levi’s and tennis shoes and the checkered shirt my mom liked but he hated. He was on a baseball team and wanted to wear his cap. Blanche said that was disrespect to the Lord’s house.

  Jesse was agile, lean, his muscles taut. Energy in his body surged to the surface, surprising everyone around him. I saw him release it, like a bottle cap popping when he hit a home run that nobody expected from the “poor little guy.” He defied the odds against him, winning at King of the Hill when everybody thought he’d never make it halfway up. He’d smile when he was at the top, showing two rows of perfectly formed teeth that I envied because I had a crooked one toward the top back, but it didn’t show much unless I wanted someone to see it. People underestimated Jesse’s skinny body and didn’t suspect that behind the shy smile there was an intense power that could bring down the most formidable opponent.

  “Hope nobody mistakes him for one of los negritos at Two Doors,” my dad said. Jesse looked right through my dad like he hadn’t said anything at all. It was no use fighting with him. Nobody ever won a battle with my dad. When he told me I was gonna quit school and marry the first man who told me he loved me, I said “Yep, you’re right, dad,” then he shut up. All he wanted to know was that he was right.

  “Don’t be sceered of them ol’ holy rollers,” Blanche told my mother. “They all be’s in the Lord and are harmless as flies.” She assured mom that the “ol’ Devil of headaches is gonna meet his match tonight!” All this happened before Paul was born so he doesn’t even remember. Priscilla was only four years old, and we left her with Tía Katia.

  Blanche came by for us that evening with her four kids. They were all spruced up and shined up. Jesse didn’t feel so bad when he saw that his friend Gus, Blanche’s son, was going too, along with his two older sisters and brother, Cindy, Betty, and Franklin. They all stood on our front porch, and it was all I could do not to laugh, because they all smelled like hair grease. Gus and Franklin had on ties that made them look like miniature preachers. Gus was called Gates because people said he was as big as a gate and twice as strong. He was almost as tall as Franklin, even though Franklin was five years older. I asked Mom if Gates looked like his father, but she said Blanche’s husband was a skinny negrito who had arthritis all over his body and showed every rib through his shirts. Gates was big and had a light complexion. Blanche said it was nobody’s business who his father was, because she had turned her life over to Jesus Christ and repented after she kicked her husband out and got rid of all his heating pads and pills. Gates wasn’t afraid of anybody or anything. When Jesse took off for the Army, Gates had already done training in Special For
ces and got as close to wearing a green beret as he could, except he kept getting into trouble and bringing his rank down.

  We walked three blocks to the church, and all the while I kept comparing Mom to Blanche, watching their flowered dresses sway around their hips one step ahead of us. They dug their white high-heeled shoes into the soft dirt and balanced their walk with purses they dangled on their left arms. Blanche was tall and slim and dark, but not exactly black. She wore a small hat with a shiny red pin stuck in the middle. On days Blanche wasn’t wearing her Sunday best, she wore an apron over her dress tied around her waist. Blanche always smelled like clean clothes hanging in the sun even when she was out back feeding the chickens and her proud rooster, Fireball.

  Mom was shorter than Blanche, and her creamy skin gleamed smooth and silky in the darkening shadows. Every now and then, I saw the soft, red tone of rouge on her cheekbone as she turned to look at Blanche. She had left her lace veil at home. I couldn’t imagine what a Catholic priest would have done if he had seen us walking to the Two Doors Gospel Church. Maybe he would have sprinkled holy water on us to bring us to our senses.

  Everyone in the neighborhood watched us as we walked by, but nobody came out from anywhere, because they didn’t know what to say to us. “Hello” wouldn’t have been enough. They would have had to go into details, and nobody wanted to do that. The Ruizes’ old dog stood out on the front yard and barked at us. He was the same dog who chased cars and was later killed by one of them.

  I noticed gallons of ice cream out on tables as we walked up to the big tent and wondered how they would hold up in the warm night. The sisters of Two Doors were making Kool-Aid in huge plastic containers. They cut up lemons and threw them in. The lemon slices collided with ladles that bopped up and down on the surface of the water. All through the service, I worried about the ice cream and wondered if the Kool-Aid would be cold. The tent was different from the church. Fold-up chairs were set up on bare dirt and Brother Jakes stood on a wooden platform with other members of the church sitting in a row behind him. The three front rows of chairs were taken up by the choir, who burst into song every now and then, whether it was time for them to sing or not. The choir sounded so good you’d think you were listening to a long-playing record set at full volume. Hanny was a member of the choir. She came by and gave us a hug and the ostrich feathers on her hat tickled my face. “’Bout time yo’ all came by!”

  Brother Jakes spoke into a microphone, but I didn’t think he needed one. His voice carried all the way down to the end of the block. There were rough-looking people there that night, people Jesse and I didn’t see at the Sunday services. I later found out that the brothers had gone down to skid row and visited places under the bridges looking for lost souls in need of conversion. These were brought in and made welcome. I think most of them were waiting for the ice cream and Kool-Aid.

  After two hours of singing, preaching, and touching each other’s chairs for electricity, we were told that everyone who was sick should go up to the front for prayer. By this time, Blanche was in tears, and her hat was on backwards with the shiny pin on the back instead of the front. Lots of other people were crying, and I thought maybe they were sorry for all their sins and wanted to go in through the right door. I spotted the ostrich feathers on Hanny’s hat as we shuffled up to the front. By this time, Mom was crying too, and I was holding on to her purse trying not to lose her in the rush to get prayed over by Brother Jakes. I glanced at Jesse next to me looking serious like he was gonna get Mom’s headaches settled once and for all. We were probably the only people in the whole place who weren’t Black and that caught Brother Jakes’s attention. He put the microphone down and started mopping his forehead with a big white handkerchief. Every time he wiped his sweat away, new drops showed up, and he had to do it all over again. I was hoping he’d roll up his sleeves so he would cool off. He put his handkerchief in his shirt pocket and walked right up to Mom.

  “Speak, sister! What do you ask of the Lord?” My mom answered, “My head hurts, I have migraine headaches.”

  “Not anymore!” he shouted. “In the name of Jesus Christ, sister, I deliver you from migraine headaches!” Voices from the congregation answered “Amen!” “Jesus is the Healer! Turn your faith loose, sister!”

  Brother Jakes barely touched Mom’s head with one of his huge, shaky hands, and Mom fell back like she had been hit by a bolt of lightning. She landed in the arms of Blanche, who was standing behind her. My heart jumped to my throat. Jesse and I were over Mom in a flash. “She be all right,” Blanche said. “It’s the power of the Lord what knocked her down.” All around us people were getting knocked down by the same power. I grabbed Jesse’s hand tight. I figured if I went down I’d bring him with me.

  Mom got up and was still crying, holding on to Jesse as she made her way out. I became a believer of the Two Doors Gospel Church that night, because Mom never had another migraine in all her life, except after Jesse’s funeral. Then I think it was more than that. It was all her heartache bursting inside that made her hurt so bad she stayed in bed for two weeks.

  When guys in El Cielito were being drafted to Vietnam, Brother Mel Jakes took a position as a conscientious objector and refused to allow his son Rufus to go to war. Rufus eventually went into the ministry and was just as successful as his father in rounding up souls for the congregation. Besides his skills at convincing people to choose the right door, Rufus played guitar like Jimi Hendrix and that made it easy to attract a crowd.

  The Two Doors Gospel people had the right idea about the ice cream. By the time the service ended, it had melted down and was ready to spread over peach cobbler that the sisters had baked in huge pans. It was the sweetest dessert Jesse and I ever had. We were so happy, kicking up loose dirt in front of the revival tent with Cindy, Gates, Franklin, and Betty and watching Mom standing out in the warm summer evening with her headache gone, eating a dish of peach cobbler with the Black sisters of Two Doors Gospel.

  • THE BALLERINA LEFT BEHIND by the descendant of Carlos Peña Arminderez hasn’t slept a wink in thirty years. Her beady eyes are locked into the distance. She doesn’t know anything about medals or war. She is the lithe figure on the top shelf of the cabinet with the little glass doors that my mother bought at the secondhand store. One of the doors has a missing knob. You have to put your hand in through the door above it, then push out from the inside to get it to open. There aren’t any more medals to put in the cabinet, so life there is very quiet.

  If the medals talked to the ballerina, they would frighten her away. She doesn’t understand that for them to be there, somebody had to bleed or die. If it weren’t for them she wouldn’t be there either, because the cabinet was bought to display them many years after my mother decided she was the mother of a veteran like all the other American Legion Gold Star Mothers. For years, my mother wouldn’t even look at the medals. The medals have names too, Silver Star, Bronze Medal, Purple Heart, Good Conduct Medal, Air Medal, and two from the South Vietnamese government that have no names. The ballerina also has no name. We didn’t care enough about her to give her one.

  The medals don’t tell the story of why my brother had to die. They are the evidence, the passion flower opening, its stamen sticking out from the center and the white-lobed petals blurry through my tears. It surprises me that the medals and the ballerina are dusty. Crevices, I suppose, between the little doors. Everywhere there are crevices, life is like that.

  Yoloxochitl ·

  Last night I dreamed the roof was leaking, leaking right through the vent over the stove. First it was slow, then fast, faster, until it was a shower. There were other people in the room. I asked someone, “Is the Río Salado flooding?” and the person answered, “No, we don’t know where this water’s coming from.” A man came in who was going to repair the leak, but he said he couldn’t because he had to go make love in a hurry, then he’d go up and do it. I watched the leak go from a drip to a small shower and I kept thinking, isn’t that dangerous, wit
h the electricity from the stove and all. Maybe the man was more dangerous, his need to make love was urgent. He was more dangerous than electricity, than fire, explosions, and death.

  • “IS IT OK IF I take Jesse’s medals to my classroom, Mom?”

  Mom’s leaning on her cane in the doorway of the living room. She’s looking at the glass cabinet fitted stiffly in its corner of the living room.

  “Now?”

  “No, tomorrow. We’re learning about the country of Vietnam. I have Li Ann in class, una chinita. She’s from Vietnam.” I think of Li Ann’s face, a small valentine someone forgot to color red. Her face is the color of ivory. Beads of sweat on Li Ann’s forehead appear clear, colorless. When she smiles her lips loop over her small chin, making its triangle tip go flat. When Li Ann smiles she is like any other second-grader. When she is solemn, she is not like any of them. A serious look from her starts a chain reaction in her body that ends in quiet, fluid movements. You might expect her to float up over the heads of the other children and land on your lap. They’re like that, the women of Vietnam, phantomlike. I’ve seen them in pictures wearing graceful ao yais, delicate silk clothes that free up their midriffs, hang loose around their legs and tight around their tiny breasts. Jesse mentioned how they dressed in one of his letters and told me about a village girl who was teaching him Vietnamese. In pictures I’ve seen of Vietnamese women, their hair always seems to match the sheen of the silky clothes they wear, long or short it’s kept neat, never wild.

  Did Jesse fall in love with one of them? So different from our warm, round bodies. Their faces tell you nothing, our faces tell you everything. Some of them became whores. War always plays havoc in women’s lives. Hard to imagine the delicate bodies raped and bruised. I know Jesse saw whores. They’re the product of war, man’s violence erupting from his sex splitting a woman in two, any woman, anywhere in the world. He gets even with the enemy by pinning his woman under him. He enters her, tempting fate with the hard rod of his body thrust between her legs. He is coming to the end of himself in her and doesn’t even know it. The white flag of surrender is his. Jesse’s too? I’ve never thought about it.