I was going to get up and tell the lady myself to leave, but just then Magda turned to me, and said my name, “Manny,” real low and weak.
Finally, we got her into the wheelchair. The receptionist held the hydraulic door and watched, her eyes a mushy boredom. She wasn’t preaching anymore. She didn’t even look embarrassed about her slobbery speech. If anything, it was my mom who looked embarrassed. She was rattled, too, by what the lady had said. She wasn’t surprised, though. Nothing surprised my mom. She expected people to treat her mean. Then a little anger sparked inside her. When she turned the chair to wheel Magda out, she said in a gruff voice for me, not the lady, to hold open the door.
In the waiting room we sat down near the guy clenching his bloody diapers. I couldn’t see much under the compress, but he was a bald guy with bulby, alcoholic ears and a sunburned neck. His wife had come over when she heard the commotion. Her fat rolled in different directions when she walked with us down the hallway.
The lady stopped at the coffee machine and plopped in some coins. The spout squirted out a dark, rusty water. She planned to give it to her husband, but from under his mountain of diapers, he peered at her like she was an idiot for even thinking he could drink from a cup.
She asked Mom if she wanted the coffee. Mom took the coffee, gulped a mouthful, and braced it on her lap.
“These people,” the lady said, sitting down beside my mom. “I can’t stand them, either. It’s like they care more about the gavachos than they do about us.” She shook her head and stared at the floor.
I was sitting behind my mom and the lady. I saw Mom’s shoulders begin to jiggle. She was crying. The lady reached out and put her hand on Mom’s lap. As she did, a tear from Mom’s eye dropped on her arm, and quickly, the lady rubbed it off, as if it burned. Then she looked up at her husband peeking at her from behind his barricade of diapers. He flinched his head, signaling with gritted teeth. He wanted her to keep to her own business and get back to taking care of him.
When we got back from the hospital it was early, but already dark. Dad was asleep and Nardo nowhere to be found. Pedi was at Sophie’s. I went to my room and nestled under the covers, feeling wound-up and anxious, cringing down in bed. I must have fallen asleep, because when I heard moaning, I sat up in an eyeblink, and there was a gray shaft of morning light under the door, and Nardo was beside me, asleep.
I heard Mom through the walls, talking to herself. I wasn’t sure if she was saying something about Magda or reminding herself of the chores needing to be done. Flopping off my side of the blankets, I called to her, then knocked lightly on the wall to see if I could get her attention. Dad heard me, and began mumbling curses about the pesty annoyance of kids, but he didn’t get up.
Beside me, Nardo was a dark clump on the bed. I whispered to him, but there was no answer. His face could barely be seen in the murky darkness. I wondered whether I should wake him, but just as I was about to touch his shoulder, he snatched at the blanket and tucked himself into a cocoon. I saw a shadow flicker under the door and slipped out of bed.
Magda had been tumbling in fever, strangling phlegm in her throat and making gruff, coughy barks. When I got to her room, the bedsheet was moist and the blanket mussed from all her twisting. Sweat had glued her eyelids shut, and spit leaked out of her mouth and pushed a wet dent on the pillow. Mom, her eyes worried to slits, was sitting on the bed beside her, wondering aloud whether to take her back to the hospital. Her fever was worse than the doctor had said it’d get.
When she heard me, she ordered me to stay by the door. She didn’t want me tugging her brain with questions. So I stayed where I was, staring over Mom’s back as she loaded up a towel from a bowl of water, squeezed it, and washed away a smear of milky wetness from Magda’s nose.
“Are we going to take her to the hospital?” I asked, worrying my finger on my T-shirt.
Mom turned, and after settling her eyes on me for about a second she looked above my shoulder. I followed her eyes and there, through a slit in the hallway, I could see my dad lying, the blankets kicked to his feet and his arm dangling over the side of the bed. He’d fallen back asleep as soon as he shouted for Mom to shut up the noise. He looked like a huge baby, but with a mustache and graying hair.
“Go back to sleep,” Mom said, her face soft, “quit worrying about your sister.” She went back to dampening her with a towel.
I stayed where I was, my eyes locked on the ruffles of her blue nightgown. “Mom, I think you better get Dad’s keys so we can take her to the hospital again,” I said, twisting my finger more on my shirt.
Mom shrunk her eyes narrow. “You listen to me, Manuel,” she said, “if you don’t get back to bed…” She stopped there. This was the voice she often used on me, but I was getting too big now to bow to her threats. If I remained stubborn, she’d usually call on Dad to come threaten me. But Dad didn’t know what had happened, and she didn’t want him finding out.
“I think we ought to take her to the hospital,” I said as a low whine flowed from Magda.
Mom laid Magda’s head gently back on the pillow. When she turned to me, a wildness showed in her eyes, and her right cheek fluttered like a nerve had blown out on that side of her face. She took the moistened rag and threw it with a splat near my feet. “I told you to go back to sleep,” she said icily.
Then, suddenly, before I could say anything, or even lift my eyes from the wet rag, she rose, and with her hand cupped like a spoon, smacked me hard on the ear. I just stood there, bracing, but the blow was like a spike inside my ear, and I stumbled, my head butting against the side of the door. I collapsed on one knee and stayed there, gazing at the floor. When Mom spoke again, I lifted my face. I wasn’t angry or afraid but could only plead at her with my eyes.
“Now, go back to sleep!” she said, her voice breaking.
I refused to budge. I kept holding my ear like it was an abscessed tooth. “You just don’t want him to be mad at you,” I said, with crevices in my voice.
Looking around like there was no place for her to hide her eyes, Mom shrieked, “We don’t have any money!” Then, her face reddening with panic, she covered her mouth, afraid that any more yelling might wake up Dad.
Then, maybe to keep me from saying anything more, she struck me again, this time with mean, chopping strokes. Zigzags of lightning connected the seconds as she cut down smack after smack on my neck and on my shoulder. The air had a sharp, splintery edge. I arched my back, cowering, but I didn’t want to raise my arm to cover myself, thinking she’d stop hitting me sooner if I didn’t do anything.
When I finally looked up, Mom backed away, her eyes circles of panic and her long liquid hair drooping across her face. She pushed back some strands of hair and stood there, her nose flaring and her cheeks watery with tears. “Mijo, please, do what I say,” she pleaded, sucking back a ribbon of saliva. Then her voice became tender, and she began to cajole me, saying, “Please, I can’t wake him. He’ll blame it on you for not watching over her. He’ll say it’s your fault. Come on, honey, go back to bed, I’ll fix Magda up. Don’t worry.” Her last words wound to a slur, and a glassy trickle weeped over her chin.
I leaned against the wall, my arm dead to the coldness. “How’s he gonna blame me?” I asked, in a voice that sounded like a girl’s. “Who’s he got to blame other than hisself?”
An aching, heavy gravity pulled down on my stomach when Mom looked at me, her face twisted with hurt over what I’d said. She hurt, I knew, because she didn’t want to admit it to herself, afraid that she too was to blame. But just then, Dad sat up in bed with a jerking snort, his body creaking the bed springs. He was moaning from pain. From years of cranking tools and lifting sacks, the heels of his palms were anvils of yellow callus, and his back had slipped a disc. He couldn’t move in the easy way he once did. Every time he rose from a couch or bed, he’d groan.
Mom turned to me with a stiff stare. I thought she’d stay frozen that way forever, when suddenly her eyes lifted over my shoulde
r. There, suddenly, in the doorway, was Dad. He put his hand on my shoulder, peering into the room. Even with his half-painful, half-sleepy eyes he figured out everything in a flash.
“Put her in water,” he said to my mom in Spanish.
“But…”
“Put her in water,” he said again, brusquely this time, then walked away wobbly and absentminded.
I thought he was going back to bed, but then I saw a light blink on at the end of the hallway and heard water drumming into the bathtub. He came back pushing his way past me, and without a word grabbed Magda from the bed and with a mighty groan lifted her up.
Like an ant carrying a giant statue of bread, Dad carried Magda out of the room. I slid up beside him, bracing his arms. I knew his back was hurting. In the bathroom, Dad put Magda, nightgown and all, inside the tub and bobbed her steady. She floated a little, her gown blossoming in the water like a boat sail, and after a long while her eyes blinked open. She looked up at us staring down at her, and then, with a surprise that showed the fever had died, she looked at Dad, amazed. I don’t know if it was because of the pain in his back, or the pain of seeing Magda sick, or both, but his face was trembling and red, as if blown by a hot, blurry wind.
9
Dying of Love
To Mom’s surprise, Dad actually found a job doing office work for the Awoni Building Company. To everyone’s surprise, Nardo got a job delivering medicine for Giddens’s Pharmacy. I helped him with his route on Saturdays, when the weather was either snips of cold snagging fishhooks through your clothes, or just plain icy, with steam flowing from every breath. Nardo would keep the engine running while I bolted for the cash, or Medi-Cal card, whichever arrangement those old retired geezers had with the pharmacy. Afterward, we’d go to lunch in Chinatown and order hot plates of chow mein noodles and sweet-and-sour pork.
That Saturday I roused myself from bed, put on my red hunter’s jacket and right away walked out into the thin ghosts of fog. I heard the kitchen faucet hissing, and saw Mom through the kitchen window squeezing a mop in the sink, humming as she shook out dirt from the strands. She was wearing her flower print dress, the one with the flowers faded, and rumpled like she’d crushed it in her hands before putting it on.
She always did chores before the sun blinked on the horizon, when she could think clear without a lot of kids yelling, or Sanchez, our neighbor with the blue Virgin tattooed across his back, gunning his car engine.
She began slapping the mop wildly on the floor, shuffling around in my dad’s old hightop boots, the ones with the buckles torn out and tongues wagging. Most of the time she mopped the floor barefoot, since her feet had enough calluses to step on my dad’s cigarette butts without making her wince, but that day it was too cold.
I heard more water moaning through the pipes, then a drumming in the bathtub. Dad was taking a bath and singing. For as long as I remember, especially when in a good mood, he sang this Mexican ballad that I never could figure out the words to. He’d repeat this one line over and over, “Quiero morir de amor,” or “Quiero vivir con amor.” I want to die of love; or, I want to live with love. One or the other, I wasn’t sure. Both phrases in Spanish sounded so alike.
When I neared the pharmacy, the sun was knifing a big blue hand through the ghosts of fog, sweeping them away like cobwebs. The maple trees on that street were dreary and weeping moisture, their stripped bark dusted with a glassy talcum of mist. But that, too, was melting. And when the wind came, little sneezes of drizzle sprayed on my face.
Nardo, who’d taken off earlier, should have been waiting outside, since he didn’t want Mr. Giddens to find out I was working with him. I doubted if he’d get fired, though, since Nardo with my help was the fastest deliverer that old boss man had.
I waited outside, trying to keep my teeth from chattering. Finally, against the nagging in my head, I stepped inside.
Mr. Giddens was behind the counter, pouring pills with a plastic shovel into a jar. He had parched hands and a face hacked as if by baseball cleats. I acted casual over by the Get Well cards, pretending to read them and then jamming them back into the slots.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Giddens sizing me up. He put down what he was doing and came over. He had a mustache of sweat and tiny diamond necklaces under his eyes. Figuring he’d lose more money from thievery than gas bills, he kept the store steaming hot, so that everybody who came in would have to take off their coats and hang them on a tree rack by the door. I didn’t take off my coat, and that’s why Mr. Giddens noticed me.
Steering his finger toward the storage room in the back, he said, “You and Bernard better get your butts cracking, all the other boys are gone.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Giddens,” I said, hurrying down the aisle. “We’ll get going right away…. I mean, I’ll tell my brother to get going.”
“Don’t think I don’t know about you two working together,” he shouted after me, wiping his face with a handkerchief. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”
Nardo was busy sorting out prescriptions in a cardboard box. Other guys hoarded routes that gave tips, or had addresses near their homes, so they could knock off for lunch. Nardo didn’t need to, since most of the guys lived across town, and our side of town didn’t give any tips.
Acting annoyed when I came in, Nardo nodded and kept counting the bags of prescriptions. In the storage room there were packing crates full of empty soda bottles. I put my finger into the hole of a Dr Pepper. “You ready?”
“Yeah, let’s get going.”
“We still going to Chinatown?”
“Yeah, we’re still going to Chinatown!” he said, still annoyed. “I think we should finish all the deliveries before we eat, though, don’t you?”
“If you say so.”
“Yeah, I say so,” he said. “Hey, and what’s the deal coming in through the store?” He put the box down on a chair and shook his coat before putting it on. “What did the old fart say, anyway?”
“I think he knows we’re working together.”
“For crying out loud—I knew he’d find out,” he said, pushing his fingers through his hair. “Well, if we don’t admit it, I think it’ll be all right.”
To keep up the pretending, I went back in through the store with the idea of going around to the alley, where Nardo would pick me up.
That’s when I saw Dorothy, Mr. Giddens’s daughter, although I didn’t know her name or who she was at the time. She was standing over by the Get Well cards where I’d stood, raising her arms in the air and talking excitedly to Mr. Giddens. She kept turning heatedly away from him, as if to puzzle over some hot question, then she’d whirl around and say stuff like, “You’re kidding!” or “That’s hard to believe!”
When she saw me, she smiled, like she recognized me, then turned back around to Mr. Giddens who looked at me like suddenly an idea had popped into his head.
“Oh, Manuel! Could you come over here a minute,” he said, bending his arm around in a little corral. “I want to introduce you to my daughter.”
He kept circling his hand for me to come over, but I couldn’t get my shoes to budge. Something was screwed on wrong. Mr. Giddens inviting me over to introduce me to his daughter wasn’t natural. He hardly ever talked to Nardo, and the only time he’d ever even talked to me was on that day, and then only to yell at me.
“Dorothy, this is one of my delivery boys, Manuel, uh, Hernandez—or is it Herrera?”
“Hernandez.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, tossing his hand flightily in the air. “I get Bernard confused as well.” He smiled and looped his arm around me.
Dorothy wore a beige skirt and a thinly woven sweater with cord designs. Her hair was clipped in high bangs on her forehead. Close up, her shoulders and hair smelled like a peach orchard with the wind coming through it, and there was a sort of mushy softness to her face, like she’d carefully massaged oils and special creams into it. Her nose was small, with the most delicious angles, and she had a moony way of looking at me
that got me all buttery inside.
“Hi, Dorothy!” I said, anxious to meet her, yet stiffening a little against Mr. Giddens’s push.
“Hi,” she said, smiling.
She wanted to talk more with her father, but he didn’t want to. He clamped both his hands on my shoulders.
“You know, Dorothy,” he said, “one day Manuel is going to be my best deliverer. Right now I have him training with his brother Bernard. He’s too young to have a license, but as soon as he gets one, he’s going to have a job right here.”
“But Dad! What about the cards?” she said, taking a big step forward.
“Oh, the cards! Is that all you want? Well, go ahead, take as many as you like.” He waved his hand carelessly along the aisle. “If you want more, there’s boxes of them in the back. Here, I’ll get Manuel to help you.”
“I already have the ones I want,” Dorothy said, tapping the stack of cards she had in her hand against her other wrist.
“Oh, well, I’ll tell you what. How many do you have there?”
Dorothy tilted her head slightly, and one of her eyes shrunk with suspicion. “Fifteen?” she said.
“Fifteen, huh. I’ll tell you what. Get one more. Make it an even sixteen. I’m sure Manuel here would like to go. What do you say? Would you like to come to Dorothy’s party? Lots of food and punch?”
He said this enthusiastically, wiping his face with a handkerchief, but while he did, Dorothy was tightening her shoulders and her smile collapsed a little. “Dad!!” she said, stressing her voice.
“No—no—I’m serious about this, now. I think Manuel would like to come. Wouldn’t you, Manuel? Sure—sure, you’d like to come.”
“Daad!!!” Dorothy said again, and this time her smile vanished. She struggled to hold her hands to her sides. I could see the bones on her chest stretching from the muscle, like little wing-blades about to take flight.
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