The Tequila Worm

by Viola Canales

  “That’s for my quinceañera. And don’t forget, Sofia, you’re still my maid of honor.”

  “Anything you say, Lucy. So, Berta, when are you and Jamie getting married? I’ll be happy to be your maid of honor for that, too.”

  “After graduation.”

  “I was kidding! Are you serious?”

  “Yes, I’m serious.”

  “But what about college?”

  “Maybe. But right now, I’m thinking of getting married, settling down.”

  “Settling down? Like having children?”

  “Perhaps. Listen, Sofia, you’re the one breaking the mold. Almost all the women in our family got married and settled down before finishing high school.”

  Silence.

  “So, Sofia, are you still intent on going to college?”

  “Yes.”

  “University of Texas in Austin?”

  “Maybe I’ll apply to Harvard.”

  “But that’s many, many, many states away. You’re too far already.”

  “So you both miss me?”

  “Of course we do,” said Berta.

  “So you’ve been homesick for me, like I’ve been homesick for you. . . .”

  “Well, surprise! I have the perfect cure!” said Berta.

  She popped the glove compartment open— “Ta-dah!”—and pulled out a tiny bottle of mescal with a tequila worm inside.

  “Wow!” I said. “Where did you get it?”

  “That’s a secret!”

  We drove back to the house. “Hey, Berta, are there any glasses in your car cantina too?”

  “Of course!” Berta popped the glove compartment and took out two shot glasses. We got out and sat on the porch.

  I opened the bottle and poured. “Here, Lucy, you watch the tequila worm while your two comadres drink.”

  I sniffed the mescal. Wow! Strong! Berta was looking at me. “Well . . .”

  “You first, Sofia. Show me how it’s done.”

  I took a deep breath, then kicked it down. Oh my God! Wicked! It burns! How can people drink this stuff! And why!

  “Piece of cake, Berta! Now you!” I felt mescal fumes smoking my stomach. Lucy’s eyes were as big as conchas. Berta bit her lip. Sniffed the mescal. Squinted. Then threw it down.

  “Yuck! I’m burning all the way down! Sofia, the things you make me do!”

  “Berta, it was your idea. Remember? But now the best part. There’s a tasty bite for Lucy, too.” I popped the tequila worm out of the bottle. “It’s only a question of who gets the head, tail, and middle. Yummy! Lucy, you have first pick since you didn’t get to drink.”

  Silence.

  “Lucy?”

  “Sofia, don’t be mean,” Berta said. “You go first. Eat the butt! And make sure to chew it—slowly!”

  I bit the tail off and started to chew. Squishy. I swallowed. “Delicious!” Lucy and Berta looked a bit green.

  “Now, Berta, don’t be mean, either. You go next. And bite off the head, ears, and snout.”

  “It’s a worm, Sofia, not a pig,” said Berta. She closed her eyes, bit, and swallowed. “Gross!”

  “Berta, no fair! You didn’t chew! It only works if you chew it!”

  “Shut up! I can’t believe I just ate—Yuck!” I started laughing.

  “And, Lucy,” said Berta, “you don’t have to eat the rest. Forget what Sofia says. She’s still making us do crazy things!”

  “Lucy, that’s right. You don’t have to.”

  “But can I still be a comadre?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll . . . do it too. But I won’t chew. Okay?”

  “We’ll do it when you’re older.”

  “I want to do it now.” Lucy took the rest of the tequila worm, shut her eyes tight, and . . . swallowed. “Yuck! Yuck! Yuck!” We all laughed.

  Berta reached into her purse and pulled out a Hershey’s chocolate bar. “Always prepared!”

  Lucy took the first bite.

  As I walked through the living room, I noticed a skull with my name on it on the home altar, next to the pictures of dead relatives.

  Berta stayed for dinner. Mama’s cheese enchiladas were as mouthwatering as I’d remembered. Way better than the tequila worm!

  During sobremesa, Mama mentioned that she had made pan de muerto for the Day of the Dead. I looked around and counted—one, two, three, four, five, six crucifixes on the walls.

  I wanted to get Terry’s voice out of my head—“Don’t you think Mexicans are obsessed with death?”

  “Sofia,” Mama said, “did you hear me?”

  I blinked and nodded.

  “We all have to be up bright and early tomorrow. Tía Petra has a special surprise for us,” she added.

  The next morning we were at Tía Petra’s by eight. Papa wheeled her into the sala on a plastic-covered wheelchair. I gave her a big kiss. Poor Tía Petra had suffered a slight stroke since I’d last seen her. We all sat down and pasted ourselves to her furniture.

  “It’s time,” Tía Petra said. “Before it’s too late, I want to give each of you one of my prized possessions. Sofia, I want you to have the armchair. Berta, the sofa . . . See how I’ve kept it for you!”

  She took a pair of scissors and started removing the plastic from the red velvet armchair. As she cut, we saw something start moving on the chair. . . .

  Thousands of termites! Swarming everywhere!

  Tía Petra shrieked and then started to cry. “I’ve been a pendeja! Call the funeral home! I don’t want plastic on my coffin! Just throw me in a hole! Throw the dirt on my face! Let the termites eat me, too!”

  We all rushed to hug her.

  That evening, Lucy was in the kitchen helping Mama with the turkey mole while I visited with the abuelitos in the living room. Then the front door opened and Papa wheeled Tía Petra in, her wheelchair no longer in plastic. I kissed her. The front door flew open again. It was Berta. “We’re all done with dinner at my house.”

  “Ay, I’m so embarrassed about this morning,” said Tía Petra. “And here I was supposed to be tutoring you and Berta, teaching you the mysterious secrets of life. But . . . well, there is a lesson in what you saw today too. More for me than for you, I’m afraid. Yes, not even plastic can prevent . . .

  “I should’ve enjoyed my furniture. I should’ve let Sofia put buñuelo crumbs all over my bare sofa. Let her spill her red hibiscus water all over my table and floor . . .” Boy, I hope this lesson isn’t that I’m a messy mule too! I thought.

  She continued. “Yes, by death, we know life. And so it’s best to embrace it. How’s that for Martian talk?” Berta and I kissed her. “Now—we eat!”

  Our Thanksgiving dinner of turkey mole, rice, beans, hot corn tortillas, and tres leches cake was to die for.

  At sobremesa, we were drinking café de olla, Papa’s sweet spiced coffee treat. Abuelita went first. “Sofia, as the comadre in charge of the family’s Christmas nacimiento, I have the honor of appointing you the Christmas madrina this year.” Everyone started clapping.

  “Eh . . . thank you, Abuelita, but what do I have to do?”

  “You’ll put baby Jesus in the manger on Christmas and then make him a new dress to wear on the sixth of January.”

  I looked over at Berta and Lucy.

  “Thank you, Abuelita. But can Berta and Lucy help me make the dress?”

  “Yes, yes, of course, for this is good training for comadres .”

  I went next at sobremesa. “Tía Petra, as I wrote in my letters, Berta and I are getting good at connecting from far away. When are you going to teach us how to connect with the dead?” Berta’s eyes widened.

  “Ay,” Tía Petra said, “just wait until you experience being the Christmas madrina. This is about learning to kick with your soul, mi’ja. Something that the mind—however educated—and even the heart can’t do or even begin to understand.”

  The ChRisTMaS. NaCiMienTO

  Winter term classes began the day after Thanksgiving break, and fiel
d hockey ended. At last I was playing soccer on those emerald fields.

  The days before Christmas break rushed by. It was a magical time too, for one morning as I headed up the hill to clean room twenty-four, I found the entire campus, trees, grass, and all, encased in ice, sparkling with the first rays of sun. It was like being inside a glass dome full of snow.

  The last day before Christmas break the chapel was aglow with flickering luminarios and the altar was surrounded by rows and rows of red poinsettias. It was just like the picture I’d seen in the school brochure. We all sat down to a formal Christmas dinner with china, silver, and crystal, where we ate roast meats and mashed potatoes and ginger cake and were entertained by the school’s madrigal group. Then the headmaster stomped in dressed as Santa Claus, saying “Ho! Ho! Ho! ”and wishing everyone a merry Christmas and giving out bags of cookies and chocolates.

  The next morning Brooke and I exchanged presents: I gave her the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, saying it would give her a taste of the magical; she gave me a book of poems by Emily Dickinson, saying it would give me a taste of the Northeast, home of the Big Three.

  Her family dropped me off at the bus station. Marcos and the other valley students were flying home.

  I sat in the first row again. How wonderful to be going home, and for Christmas, the most magical time of the year. Then I remembered that I had to be the Christmas madrina. Would this teach me to connect with the dead, as Tía Petra had said?

  Before dozing off, I smiled, so happy that I’d received honors in all my fall term classes, and that we were now playing soccer. Brooke was hogging the soccer ball; even so, she was nice and fun. I’d been over to her house a couple of times, and her family was warm and friendly.

  Marcos and I were good friends now, kicking the soccer ball almost every Saturday while practicing our Spanish. Sometimes Brooke played too. She laughed when we told her about Johnson’s Ropa Usada and about my “gorgeous green dress” that she kept borrowing.

  I slept most of the trip. Papa, Mama, Lucy, Berta, and Noe were waiting at the station. After we kissed, Mama said, “We have to hurry over to the abuelitos to help with the nacimiento.”

  Abuelita was wearing yellow rubber boots and gloves, and standing beside an enormous pile of mud right in the middle of her living room. Her face, glasses, and braided hair were splattered with mud, and the floor was littered with twigs and leaves.

  “Ay, the Christmas madrina has finally arrived!” Abuelita took her gloves off, stomped her boots on the tarp, and gave me a big hug. She started wiping off the mud. “I’m making a Mexican town, mi’ja, with a big plaza. It’s a replica of the town where my grandmother, who gave you the gift for mule-kicking, met and fell in love with your great-great-grandfather, who gave Berta the gift of those big choppers of hers. First, we will make a four-foot mountain with sprouting tiny trees.”

  We put pots of cacti, rosemary, and red poinsettias on a plank-and-cinder-block structure, and then filled the spaces with buckets of mud. As we worked, Abuelita told the story of how our great-great-grandparents met:

  “My grandfather lived in a tiny town in Mexico, up on a hill, in a two-room house. When I first visited, I was stunned at how small the house was and couldn’t believe that six people lived there.

  “But what struck me most was how everyone was always so calm and got along. It was because of the town plaza.”

  Once we finished the mountain, we helped Abuelita create the town, using blocks of Styrofoam and wood painted to look like adobe homes, a church, shops, even a cantina. There were miniature benches, a fountain, and a pink gazebo for the plaza.

  Abuelita continued, “The townspeople gathered at the plaza every evening. They sat on the wooden benches, strolled, gossiped, told stories.” I remembered Clara, explaining how tales were first told in plazas. “Some sold flowers or fruits from their gardens, or small toys they’d carved, or squares of flan they’d made fresh that day. Others came with guitars and sang songs about love and broken hearts. And this was where recipes and remedies were exchanged, where pictures of babies, quinceañeras, and brides, as well as the dead, were passed around.

  “And that’s where you—Sofia, Berta, Lucy, and Noe—were conjured up too, for that’s where my grandfather and grandmother first met and fell in love.

  “She was fifteen and had gone to visit her Tía Paula. As was the custom, all the girls in town started walking around the plaza in one direction, while all the boys walked in the opposite direction. He was eighteen, quite handsome, and was carrying a big blue balloon attached to a long stick.

  “On the first turn around the plaza, she came face to face with him and his balloon. They smiled at each other. On the next turn, there he was again, now holding only the long stick because his balloon had popped. And on the third turn, he bowed to her and handed her the long stick with a piece of balloon still attached to it.”

  Once the town was finished, Abuelita reached into her pocket and pulled out a blue balloon. “Here, Lucy, please blow this up, mi’ja. It’s to honor the love of your great-great-grandparents.” Abuelita tied the balloon to a long stick and stuck it inside the plaza.

  “Now it’s time for a merienda of coffee and churros.” As we sat at the kitchen table, Mama said, “What this barrio needs is not another fancy TV channel or a new 7-Eleven or even Wal-Mart. No! What it needs is a plaza. Just an open space where the comadres can gather in the evenings to talk, look, gossip. And where the young people can meet, just like in Abuelita’s story.

  “I once heard that if you put too many cats in a house big enough for only one or two cats, the cats eventually go crazy and turn violent. That’s exactly what’s happening to our barrio.

  “Before there was no plaza, but it was nice then, with just our one-family houses all around. The kids played games in each other’s yards, kickball in the alley, soccer in the street.”

  Abuelita said, “It was one big family, with everyone knowing each other and everyone pitching in and looking after each other’s kids. The old ones were always telling tales and stories. And when they died, the family would lay them out on a table in the sala and retell their tales, until it was finally time to plant them in the ground. Now apartments are taking over.”

  I said, “Oh, but it still feels so good to be home.”

  On December 21, we all gathered at the abuelitos’ house. Abuelita had added a wooden jacal to the plaza. It was made from pieces of mesquite and had a ceramic Mary and Joseph—each about a foot high and badly chipped and faded—kneeling before an empty cradle.

  Ten cardboard boxes marked EL NACIMIENTO stood where the tarp and mound of mud had been.

  After a cup of frothy Mexican chocolate and a handful of pan de polvo cookies—each star, bell, and angel sprinkled with crystals of sugar and freshly ground cinnamon— Abuelita carefully opened the first box. It was filled with balls of old newspaper.

  I wondered what pieces I would find. Year after year, each of us selected a ball, unwrapped it to discover the piece inside, and went to Abuelita, who stood in front of the nacimiento like a conductor before a symphony. She would take the piece, examine it through her thick eyeglasses, and then tell us where to put it.

  Each piece had its own story about who had given it to her and when. A piece might make the nacimiento one year but not the next. It depended on how Abuelita was inspired to decorate the nacimiento that year.

  The only pieces she put out herself were those of Mary and Joseph. They were the oldest.

  Abuelita took Mary in her hands. She traced her face, her veil, her entire outline with her long fingers. “This piece makes me feel as if my mother and grandmother are right in the room with me. It makes me feel like a little girl again, when I was helping them create the Christmas nacimiento. I’ve since discovered that creating the nacimiento isn’t work, really, even when it takes weeks, for it’s a gift of sacredness— to the baby, to the whole family.”

  I unwrapped one ball and laughed. The gray ceram
ic elephant with the pink saddle! I’d chosen it in other years. “Now, that,” Abuelita said, “belongs to one of the three magi. Put it at the very bottom of the hill, for the three magi aren’t coming for a while.”

  The next piece I unwrapped was a lime green plastic dinosaur with a long goofy neck. This used to be my favorite, but now it seemed only gaudy and silly: did it really belong in the nacimiento? But it was also one of Abuelita’s favorites, a gift from Mama when she was a little girl. Abuelita said, “Put it right next to Mary, just outside the jacal, with its long neck peeking in.”

  And that’s how it went for hours, box after box. There must have been more than seventy angels—some flying, others kneeling or sleeping; and many with chipped wings and cracked faces; and three with no heads at all. There were hundreds of animals: pigs and ponies, storks and camels, even a pink flamingo and a big ceramic whale that went in a pool of wadded-up blue plastic.

  There were the usual shepherds, about thirty of them, and the three magi—one a foot high; the second, five inches; and the third, only the size of a thimble. There were twelve plastic mariachis, each equipped with a tiny violin, horn, or guitar; a huge ceramic Cantinflas, with his pants falling down, chomping on an onion, as well as a bobbing head of JFK and a hula-dancing Hawaiian girl in a bright grass skirt. There were cut-out pictures of Maria Felix, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  And then there were the inexplicable: two big stuffed green frogs, one playing an accordion, the other, a trumpet; as well as bottle caps, glass marbles, maracas, Mexican jumping beans, tiny piñatas, plastic whistles, cardboard dolls in acrobat outfits, a dried-up pomegranate, an enormous lollipop with a tequila worm inside, and another tequila worm in a tiny bottle of mescal. There were rocks and shells and paper flowers and bows and all kinds of Mama’s wacky handmade things too.

  Abuelita added a big yellow pineapple, five red apples, three oranges, half a dozen green chilies, and a handful of cinnamon sticks and walnuts.

  Then we put wisps of angel hair here, there, and everywhere.