Grandma Rosa died a few months later, and after the burial we gathered at her house. The sun was as bright as an egg yolk leaking an orange finger across a porcelain plate, and there was a smell of bruised plums and burning grapevines drifting through the trees.
My aunt Letty cried so loud my uncle Joe scolded her by twirling his finger. “Now, now Leticia,” he said to her, “there’s nothing you can do for her now.” With a shredded throat, Letty told him to shut up.
Although moist around the cheeks, Mom didn’t cry. She sat on the living room couch next to the shuffling cooler. She didn’t wear black because she had no black dress, and my dad could only scrounge up seven dollars and twenty-eight cents. Mom claimed this was as good as could be expected, considering the funeral costs, but not half enough for a respectable black dress. She used the money instead to buy Mexican sweet bread, and make buñuelos, fried tortillas sprinkled with cinnamon, and sweet potatoes that bled a dark syrup.
Sitting there, Nardo, my cousin Rio and I stared at Grandma’s old chair. I remembered once sleeping on the floor and a mouse scuttling across my stomach. I awoke to see Grandma under the tulip lamp, asleep, her head circled by a glowing moon of light. Then I heard scuffling, as a mouse scratched across on the wooden floor. Suddenly, there was a cushiony thud, and the mouse let out a tiny, piercing yeek, as though driven through with an icepick. It was Horacio, my grandma’s cat, who’d spotted the mouse from his perch on the mantel and pounced on it, pinning it between his claws. As my eyes brightened in the dark, I saw Horacio’s fur glowing, as he sort of smiled down at the mouse. Then he released it, and it scurried away to search for a hole; but Horacio leaped again, clasping and pawing the mouse around the floor like a ball of yarn. I watched in fascination as he let the mouse go three or four times, rolling it around with crisp, playful precision until he finally snatched it up and throddled it down his throat, the tail churning around his mouth.
Grandma’s chair had bark designs on its wooden legs and carved bear claws for handrests. Already frayed on the cushion, wobbly in the struts, its wooden legs scratched, no one except Grandma ever sat in it. I began wondering about what would happen to it now that it was empty of her.
I leaned forward on the couch and in a half whisper told Nardo that the night before I had dreamt about Grandma. She and I were walking together in the mountains, when suddenly, under our feet, a huge earthquake erupted, with fire tearing open the earth like a sharp knife through seams of old leather. I woke up shivering and soaked in cold sweat. The walls of my room were like blue ice, like the sky after a clean rain.
Dreams fascinated Nardo. He could analyze people’s sleep. Grandma claimed this was because he had a birthmark in the shape of an eagle’s wing on his shoulder. Nardo said that before leaving for heaven the dead sometimes sprinkle messages inside the ears of those they love. He didn’t know why Grandma would want to leave a message for me, but the dream sounded like a warning. I would die alone, he predicted, in a very cold place.
I leaped from the couch and hammered him on the arm. We wrestled around the living-room floor in front of Mom, too buried in her grief to pay us any mind. Dad wasn’t too buried in grief, though. Irked by our noisy tumbling, he burst in from the kitchen and with one of his shoes, crowned us both on the head. He pointed the shoe threateningly at everybody and said that we all better get the message quick about how to behave, or else.
After Dad’s scolding, we sat quietly on the couch across from Mom. She was looking down at the floor as if searching for scuff marks. We all became bored and antsy. My cousin Rio pretended to be mournful, and Nardo coolly studied the dust on the windowpane, grinning because the blow Dad had given him hadn’t even hurt.
Only Pedi was having fun. She came into the room revving her lips like an airplane and spanning her arms. She circled us at an angle, swooping past Nardo and snagging her wing on his pants pocket. She flew on a crippled half wing a little way before crashing.
When she started playing at making faces, we giggled, but stopped when Dad poked his head in from the kitchen. “I’m gonna burn somebody’s legs,” he warned.
Everybody really shut up after that and stared at the walls. I munched on a sweet potato and gazed at the ringed stains inside my coffee cup. Finally, ignoring everybody’s eyes licking after my heels, I snuck out the door.
Outside, the air was a sleek powdery ash. It dusted Dad’s car and uncle Joe’s panel truck, parked grille to grille on the gravel driveway. Steam rose from the hoods in thin ghostly clouds, and blanched by the sun, the windshields shone like morning frost. I climbed over the hood of my uncle’s truck and walked over to the cherry tree, clambering up on a branch.
Over the wood shingles of the house, I could see a blond strip of Mr. Vuksanivich’s old pasture. The grapevines had been plowed over and the house lifted on struts, then trucked away, but I could almost see old Mr. Vuksanivich standing there in a gray sweater, raking and burning leaves, a great plume of smoke rising into a cloud.
In the kitchen, I heard Dad talking loud. Everybody else’s voices made tiny booms of sound against the walls, but my dad’s voice cut through the walls. He was talking to my uncle Joe about how impossible it was going to be to keep up the place, and how he’d have to sell it. You could almost hear the strategies sizzling around inside his head, like hot sand swirling inside a tin cup.
I sat there imagining the cherry tree’s roots slithering down into the earth, and how it would have to be pulled out by a strong tractor; and also, I thought about how, in the end, Grandma couldn’t read anymore under the tulip lamp, only sit on her armchair, looking up at the ceiling, swallowing and swallowing; and once, when she put her arm on my shoulder, I felt the dead weight of her strength abandoning her.
In my family, we’re taught to touch the hand of the one who has died. So at the wake, when my mother called, I walked toward the casket, and in the full bloom of my family’s eyes, I touched Grandma’s hand. A lump of salt caught in my throat, closing like a fist, as I studied the bark skin of her face—each crack sealed with perfect makeup.
She will flake away into dirt, I thought, just as the sun does the bottom of a pond during a drought. Her shadow will be erased, and her soul will drift to heaven like the fluff of a dandelion in the wind. And then it will blossom in another garden, so bright the colors will hurt your eyes. That’s how I imagined it. For Grandma, that’s how I wanted it to be.
6
The Rifle
My sister Magda lived and breathed to caress her records. She was wild-eyed about them, and danger threatened anyone who touched even the most needle worn and milky surfaced. She had a stack as thick as an elephant’s spine in the corner of her room, and copies, sometimes three, of her most precious favorites. She’d either slip them inside the flanges of a metal rack, or save them in a wooden box with a lever switch that locked with a miniature key.
On her wall, she thumbtacked magazine photos of her two dream stars, Elvis Presley and Smokey Robinson, surrounding them with a rainbow of paper colors. Elvis had a tough-guy sneer and tossed-back flame of black hair. Smokey had slit, romantic eyes. More than once I caught her drooping her head over them, dreaming.
The money for her records came from working at the Valley Laundry, a place she hated more than anything in the world. Her friend Linda said she was moody spirited and argued too much with the supervisor. Linda worked beside her on the steam press. She was in love with Nardo, but he didn’t pay her any mind, mostly because blocks of fat sagged on her hips like a belt of thick Bibles, and she dressed in those elastic skirts, the kind with stretchy waists and no belt. Only with Linda, belts were the last worry, what with skin spilling out in all the worst places and buttons missing where you didn’t want buttons missing.
Linda always showed wrinkles of concern over Magda, but when alone she confided to me that Magda had to learn how things worked at the laundry. You had to flirt a little with the supervisor. Pay attention to his lousy conversation. Flatter him a bit abou
t his muscles. Two other flirty girls who worked there were already pushed over to Loading, and in another month they were going to push her over to Processing, but Magda’s mouth was too smart-alecky for her own good, and the supervisor vowed he’d never in a million years move her up.
“Manny,” Magda said, “that supervisor tells me I ain’t doing the sheets right, that they ain’t coming out of the machine right. Too many wrinkles. And I’m just sweating there, trying to do it right the best way I can. But you know, there ain’t no right way of doing bedsheets. He just gets a big bang out of showing how he’s got me under his thumb.”
She was talking fast in front of her dresser mirror. She pressed a blunt pencil of mascara against her eyebrow, then picked up a tool shaped like a torture rack and stretched her eyelashes. She worked hard for beauty, teasing her hair high as an ocean wave, blushing pink on her cheeks and sometimes smearing her lips dark as pomegranate syrup. To me she was pretty enough with a naked face, but she never listened to me. Instead she bribed me when she wanted something. Like that day she promised me a cherry pie and a root beer.
“Keep an eye on Baby for a while, will you, Manny?” she begged, and just as quickly, hissed, “but don’t say anything to Mom.”
“Where’re you going?”
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“Out, out. That’s all you need to know.”
Magda bit at her pink-lacquered nails that she ate sometimes down to slivers. Even painted, her fingertips were scalded red and puss-y.
She had a secret boyfriend, and since Mom was at Grandma’s putting things away, and Dad was again at Rico’s, she got me to stay home and baby sit Pedi while she smooched with him over by the maple trees. If Mom found out she’d have fainted dead away; Dad would have boiled over faster than salted water.
Adjusting the belt of her skirt, Magda straightened her collar. “I’ll be right back,” she said.
I watched her walk out the screen door and cross the yard separating our house from the grove of maple trees. Her hips had a confident swing and her shoulders were proud and sassy. When she reached the edge of the grass, a guy in a T-shirt and jeans came out from behind a tree and stood watching her. He had blond hair sleeked back with pomade, except for one wave which veered over his face like a broken hinge. It was obvious he’d spruced himself up. His chin glowed with a fresh shave, and his shoes were mirror polished. They walked into the trees.
When I turned around, Pedi was sitting on the couch, smearing chocolate from a half-eaten candy bar all over her face. I really had to keep an eye on her. Usually, she wouldn’t unglue from the hem of Magda’s skirt unless given a candy. Left alone, she’d tumble off the couch or reach for boiling water. The day before, I caught her rubbing a stick in her hands until she rasped a splinter. She also suffered from allergies, which Mom first thought were congestion and shoved steaming water under her nose to loosen her lungs. When that didn’t help, a doctor stuck tiny needle pricks along her back. Each prick swelled red, which meant practically everything alive in the wind—pollen, grass, smoke, even certain siftings of dust—could bring tears and wheezing fits.
I took a chair from the kitchen and propped it on the door of Dad’s closet, reaching far back into the shelf. I scraped my knuckle on the aimer of his rifle. He’d gotten it back from the police by spending a hundred and fifty dollars on a lawyer for a rifle that had cost fifty bucks. Mom said that was the stupidest thing she ever heard, but she didn’t say anything to him about it.
With my finger, I traced a zero around the barrel hole, feeling the cold dead steel and imagining a bullet, tiny as a sliver, racing up my arm and zinging into my brain. I searched around some more and found what I was looking for, the box of dominoes.
“Come on, Pedi,” I said, wiping chocolate from her face. “Let’s build a house.”
Most kids act like your fingers are made of hot glass when you touch them, but not Pedi. She liked people to wipe her face or squish the soft pillows of her arms. If you rubbed her head, she’d get drowsy and knock out in a minute.
I stood the dominoes up one by one. After settling Pedi’s hands on her lap, I announced a tah dah and tapped the first domino. They collapsed in a riffling click of doom, but Pedi didn’t notice the spectacle. At the last second she turned her head to the door, her eyes anxious for Magda’s return.
“Come on now, Pedi,” I pleaded, gathering the dominoes into a pile. “Look, let’s build a house.”
Pedi rose and climbed onto the couch. She stretched her neck in the direction Magda had gone, pressing her temple against the windowpane, her breath blurring a small balloon on the glass.
“Did she go to the store?”
“Yeah, she went to the store.”
“Why’d she go to the store for?”
“She went to get some root beer.” I noticed her dirt-black tennis shoes crushing smudges on the couch. “You know, Pedi, you shouldn’t be stepping on the cushions. You know how Mom gets.”
“There’s root beer in the ’figerator.”
“Not the kind that tastes like vanilla.”
“Uh huh! There’s that kind, too.”
“Did I say vanilla? No, I meant chocolate.”
“Chocolate?”
“Yeah, chocolate.”
Pedi’s eyes narrowed keen with suspicion. “You’re lying, ain’t you?” she said.
“Hey, I’m no liar.”
“Yeah, you’re a liar. A big fat gordo liar!”
“No I’m not,” I said, although I could tell by her face that she knew I was lying.
Pedi slapped a hand on her pant leg and turned back to the window. When smaller, she was always arguing jibberish. Her speech was hard to understand, but you could tell when she was mad at you. She’d scrunch her face, and her fists would open and close with fury.
Usually, though, I had fun teasing her into tantrums, but only when Mom or Magda were around to quiet down her hysterics. Besides, at that moment, seeing her face empty of any trust in me didn’t make me feel good about bothering her.
“Come on, Pedi,” I said, “look, look at the house I built.”
Actually, I was surprised myself, because without thinking, I had put together a three-story domino house. One piece remained to be put on top, and I was about to do it when Pedi climbed down off the couch.
“Hey, now, check this out,” I coaxed. “It ain’t even just any old house. It’s a regular palace.”
Avoiding my eyes, Pedi knelt on the floor, shuffling her knees closer. As she did, she placed her fist on the floor and pushed it forward. Before I could stop her, she bulldozed the domino house to rubble.
“Now, what did you do that for?!” I said, my voice lengthening into a whine.
She didn’t say anything, only inched back a little on her knees. Instead of getting up, though, she suddenly splashed all the domino ruins across the floor. “Because you’re a liar!”
There wasn’t much to do after that. Afraid she’d start screeching, I quietly collected the dominoes and slipped them back into the cardboard box.
Sulking, her eyes squeezed shut, she sat back on the couch. I thought how Magda, if she were there, would probably toss around pouty faces with her for hours. She liked to argue and backbite with her, and laugh when Pedi pressed her hands to her sides in anger.
When I noticed her sneaking glances at me, measuring my patience, which by then I had to admit was pretty much punched out of air, I didn’t even blink—blank was how I played it, blank. I just kept picking up the scattered dominoes like all I did my whole life was pick up dominoes. When I finished packing them in the box, I sat down opposite her on the couch.
After a while, she stood up, roughly tucking her T-shirt into her pants. Peering once at me with tight eyebrows, she looked down at the floppy laces of her tennis shoes and after another lightning glance at me, knelt down to tie them. Then she went into the kitchen, sliding her chin haughtily over her shoulder.
I heard the refrigerat
or swoosh open and the crack of an ice tray. After what sounded like trouble reaching the faucet, she came to the doorway, a long plastic Tupperware cup in her hand. She sipped from the rim, watching me, shaking her head in little yeses and nos.
I answered her with a sizzling stare, then turned quickly around, like the sight of her had offended my eyes.
After a while I felt a little tap on my head. When I turned around, Pedi nudged her forehead into my shoulder. She didn’t say anything at first, only looped her wrist around my neck. “You’re not a liar,” she said, finally, in a forgiving voice.
“It’s okay,” I said, wiping my shirt. A small slink of snot had dripped from her nose onto my shirt.
After a while, Pedi fell asleep with her head cradled on my lap, but I eased out from under her and went back to the closet. I was curious about Dad’s rifle. I wondered why he loved it so much, why he was willing to argue with the police over keeping it, and why he’d spend every cent we had in the bank plus what he could borrow to get it back. Then it was in my hands, and I began working the bolt arm as if inside were all the secrets.
Even then, it remained jammed. I began to work it, and suddenly it slid smooth and easy and I saw the round heel of a bullet rise and flutter a moment in the air, as if to pop out and fall on the floor, but instead it sank back into the chamber. Startled, I lifted my head, my eyes falling straight along the barrel, then on the aimer, and above it, Pedi, walking through the door, her tiny fists unscrewing sleep from her eyes.
The sound of the gun going off was like a huge mouth swallowing a noise, and Pedi was eaten by that mouth. Thoughts ran together inside my head and blurred, like currents of fast water flowing together. Loud shrieks inside my lungs were bursting to get out, but couldn’t. Pedi was dead, I knew it. The way she fell back on the floor, she could only be dead. I was afraid to go up to her, thinking I’d see a gory gash where the bullet entered her head and I’d lose my mind.
Parrot in the Oven Page 6