The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters

by Lorraine López

  3

  CURSED AND CAST OUT —RITA: 1967

  Rita sits cross-legged on the floor of her neighbor’s bedroom as Cathy opens a plastic case and shakes her dolls out: five Barbies and two Kens, with felt hair that rubs off like moss. Though Rita is a year older than her five-year-old neighbor, the two girls usually play whatever Cathy chooses, since she owns the toys, a roomful of them, in fact. Rita had hoped they would roll Cathy’s Radio Flyer outside to give each other wagon rides, but when she entered Cathy’s room, she found the girl lying on her side on her canopied bed, stroking her round stomach. “It hurts,” Cathy said, and she lifted her paisley-print blouse with floppy sleeves, the “butterfly” blouse, as Rita called it, wanting one of her own. Cathy’s flesh underneath was mottled, blue-veined, hard as a volleyball. Rita reached to touch. “Don’t,” Cathy said. “I can’t make.”

  “Make what?” Rita had asked.

  “I’ll be okay in a minute. It hurts hard and then it stops.”

  “Tell your mama.”

  “No, then she won’t let me play. Get my doll case, will you?” After a moment, Cathy had lowered herself, with a groan, to sit beside Rita.

  Now Cathy peels a shiny black gown off her champagne-blond Barbie, and Rita thinks of the indigo snake she’s seen shedding skin at the zoo. Cathy lays the nude Barbie on the floor and tugs the psychedelic-print bell-bottoms off a patch-headed Ken. Then she settles the Ken doll on top of Barbie.

  “Now, if he touches her with his pipi,” Cathy says, breathing through her mouth, “they’ll get a baby.”

  Rita lunges to her feet, her face hot. “Nah-uh, that never happens.”

  “It’s true, ask anyone,” Cathy says.

  Rita flashes on her uncle José unbuckling his belt (Want to see the birdie?) and wonders about Cathy’s hard blue stomach. Does her uncle take her for ice cream? Does she have a baby there? She shakes her head. “Know what, Calfie? You’re full of shit.”

  The younger girl’s brown eyes fill. “Maw-ma-aw!” She bawls like a cattle-labeled novelty can when upended.

  “Calfie’s full of shi-it!” Rita sings in a low voice. “Calfie’s full of shi-it!”

  Cathy scrambles to her feet and bursts from the bedroom. She pounds the bathroom door. Her mother opens it and takes the girl in her arms. Something catches in Rita’s throat as she looks on at the two —Shirley cradling Cathy, stroking her back —just before Bette hauls her out, trailing apologies in their wake. After Nilda punishes her for cursing again, Rita has to play alone the rest of that long day, blaming Cathy —the damn crybaby, the liar —for her boredom.

  By morning, though, Rita’s ready to forgive Cathy. She heads next door, after breakfast, and knocks. The door cracks open, and the old woman, Señora Trejo, appears, her silvery hair uncombed, straggling over her shoulders in a witchy way. Rita steps back, but says, “Can Cathy play?”

  “She no here.”

  “Who am I suppose to play with then?”

  “Berry sick. Cathy no here.” The old woman shuts the door.

  Rita rounds the bungalow, tiptoes to peek in Cathy’s bedroom window, but the shade is drawn. She returns home to find Bette and Loretta whispering together on the porch.

  “Uh-oh,” Bette says when she sees Rita. “Now you’ve done it.”

  “Done what?”

  “You put a curse on Cathy and made her sick.”

  “Get out of here.” Rita looks to Loretta.

  “You should watch what you say,” she tells her.

  Bette says, “You told Cathy she was full of shit. Now she really is.”

  “Is what?”

  “Full of shit,” Bette says. “That’s what! You made her sick.”

  “You lie.” Rita shoots another look at Loretta, who nods.

  “It’s true,” Bette says. “Cathy’s in the hospital now. She can’t make number two. Something’s stuck in the pipes, and she’s all blocked up.”

  “She has a bowel obstruction,” Loretta tells her.

  But Rita hears “vowel obstruction” and thinks of the workbooks Nilda provides to keep her busy during the day. She wonders if Cathy’s consonants are okay.

  “She can die from it,” Bette says.

  Rita flashes on the younger girl’s swollen stomach. “Nah-uh, her panza already hurt before I said anything bad.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Bette says. “She could have just had a stomachache, but you made it worse. If Cathy dies, you’ll be a murderer.”

  Loretta’s eyes are serious. “That’s right.”

  “You shut up! I didn’t do that.” Rita’s sure Cathy lifted her butterfly blouse before the angry words, but the fixed accusation on her sisters’ faces and their insistent voices plant a tiny seed of doubt. Maybe curses can fly back and forth, like the swing at the park when Rita pumps her legs to make it go faster and higher.

  “It’s what you got from Fermina. It’s your gift,” Loretta explains. “You cursed her. They can put you in the electric chair for what you did. Strap you down —your legs, your arms —so you can’t even wiggle a toe, and then zzzzzzt!”

  “I said shut up!” Rita cries in confusion. Why would Fermina want her to hurt people? “Or I’ll make both of you full of shit!”

  Bette and Loretta charge into the house, slamming the screen door behind them. They barrel through the hall, Rita on their heels. Before she catches up, they slam into their bedroom, the bigger room they share now that she and Sophie moved into Fermina’s room. The bolt scrapes into the lock. Rita studies the closed door —its chalky whiteness, grimy knob, the scuff marks at the base. She puts her ear to the keyhole. Rita can’t make out the words, but she knows they are saying bad things about her.

  She wanders outside again, settles on the front steps, and plays with the ballerina flowers that grow nearby. She twirls the red stems between her fingers, making the ballerinas kick higher and higher. Bette and Loretta will be sorry if a kidnapper turns up to offer Rita some candy. She gazes at the street with longing. Soon enough, she’s sure, Bette and Loretta will fight —they always do —and one or the other will emerge to play ballerinas with her.

  But this time her sisters don’t quarrel. They don’t leave their room until noon, and then they won’t speak to her. They whisper to Cary, and he gapes at Rita, wide-eyed and silent, while they eat lunch. Even Sophie will have nothing to do with her. As Rita winds tepid spaghetti strands on her fork, she imagines Cathy’s intestinal tubing —twisted and knotted —her potbelly cramping in pain. She crams the pasta between her lips. Without thinking, she bites down on her tongue, splitting the skin. Blood floods her mouth, tasting like the sun-warmed sea.

  After a few days, her father comes home —nose swollen, glasses fogged —and takes her hand. “H’ita, I got bad news,” he says. “La Cathy passed away this morning.” Rita’s head feels loose, then heavy, and everything turns black. When she wakes, a wet towel on her forehead, Rita clenches her teeth until her jaw aches. She pictures the shelf in the cuartito that holds a blue-and-yellow tin of lighter fluid, brown bottles of insecticide, and an aluminum flask of turpentine —all with their skull-and-crossbone labels. She belongs perched behind cobwebs on that stained, splintery plank: Dangerous. Hazardous. Lethal. Her words have poisoned Cathy as surely as a swig of bleach.

  Every time sirens wail, even on television, dread jolts through her. Rita expects a squad car to screech into their drive, the police to hammer on the front door, cuff her, slam her in a cell, and then strap her in the electric chair. She’s seen a movie about this: the murderer yanked from bed, arrested, and then hauled, screaming and begging all the way to The Chair. The image of that wood-frame seat, with its tangle of wires and worn leather cuffs and straps, is seared into Rita’s memory, along with the hair-raising howls of the condemned.

  Rita’s convinced she, too, will be arrested in the night; so after the others are asleep, she rises from bed. She tiptoes to the doors to make sure they’re latched and checks all the windows before slipping back
in bed and rubbing her cold feet. Just as she drifts toward sleep, she rouses herself to try the locks all over again. One night, Rita isn’t satisfied with checking and double-checking. She pushes her father’s recliner to block the front entry and wedges a dinette chair under the knob of the kitchen door. Still, she can’t sleep, so she rises to lodge sofa cushions in the living-room windows and blockades the door to her and Sophie’s room with a nightstand.

  In the morning, her father grumbles about the furniture against the doors, the cushions in the windows. Sophie crashes into the nightstand when she gets up for the bathroom. But Rita can’t help that. Night after night, she repeats the ritual. By day, Rita dozes over her lunch, her head in her hands. She naps in front of the television and falls asleep once in the bath. Finally her father takes her in his arms. “H’ita, what’s wrong?”

  Rita shrugs.

  “You want to see the doctor or something?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Then you got to stop getting up in the night like this.”

  Rita nods, swearing to herself she will stop.

  But that night, she twists and turns in bed, like a fish caught in a net. Her legs twitch and her feet tingle with the urge to kick the covers off so she can check just one door, one window. Shadows in her room swell, guttering as thin shredded clouds scud by, veiling and unveiling the bland face of the moon. On the news, Rita has seen photos of the moon sent by the Surveyor to planet Earth. In them, the orb looks even more like a face, sallow and blemished, impassive and cold. She imagines this uncaring mask unfazed by the sooty cumulus swirling below. A slow-moving cloud casts an umbra near the ceiling that sharpens into her mother’s silhouette, but her expression is hard. Rita turns toward Sophie, whose snoring signals her deep, enviable sleep.

  Rita struggles, ready to give in and check the house, when she faces her mother’s profile again. The shadow has shifted, transforming the silhouette into an owl with horned feathers and a crooked beak. The owl tenses, poised to strike. But a fresh bank of clouds dissolves the image. Now Fermina’s bumpy profile issues from the shadowy stucco. Her mouth moves: M’ija, you know what to do. Rita bolts upright in her bed, smacking herself on the forehead —it is so simple.

  “Goddamn police,” she whispers. “You won’t ever catch me.” Her muscles loosen, and she sinks back into bed. Then she shoots up again. “You’ll never put me in the electric chair.” She falls onto her pillow, feeling light enough to float, like she could raise the window, push out the screen, and loft out into the night.

  That September, Rita starts first grade at Sacred Heart Elementary. She should have gone to kindergarten the year before, but in the confused time after her mother’s death and Fermina’s long illness, no one bothered enrolling her in school, so Rita stayed home an extra year with Sophie. Born in spring, Rita is well over six when her father finally registers her. Even so, the mother superior hesitates to accept Rita as a first grader. She peers at her over wire-framed glasses, her doughy face pleated with doubt. “She’ll have to pass the entrance test. Very few youngsters who don’t attend kindergarten can pass.” She sits Rita at a desk and hands her a sheet of paper and pencil. “Write the alphabet, young lady.”

  Rita writes quickly, both in upper and lower case. She’s about to begin another set in cursive when the nun stops her. “So she knows her letters.”

  Of course, she does. Her mother taught her before she died, and both Fermina and Shirley harped on Rita to practice these during the long days they watched her. When Nilda took over after Shirley quit, she was even stricter about Rita’s written work.

  “Now write your name,” Mother Superior says.

  My name is Rita Hayworth Gabaldón, Rita prints at the bottom of the page.

  “Turn the sheet over and draw a picture of a girl.”

  Rita reverses the paper and draws a straight horizontal line, then two angles dangling from each end of that: a roof. Then she sketches a rectangle, places two windows and a door within it.

  “That is not a girl,” Mother Superior observes. “That is a house.”

  Her father leans over to regard Rita’s work.

  “Where is the girl?” the nun asks.

  “She’s right in there.” Her father presses a nail-blackened finger on the page.

  The nun squints. “Where?”

  “She’s inside with her daddy. They’re eating chicharrones and watching the fights on television. Right, h’ita?”

  Rita nods.

  Mother Superior barks with laughter, clears her throat. “Can the child speak?”

  “Well, she don’t talk a whole lot. She used to talk more, but these days, she’s pretty quiet. It’s kind of nice. The rest of my kids —except Loretta —talk both my legs off, so I enjoy the quiet from this one.”

  “Ah, Loretta,” the nun says with a smile, “now Loretta behaves very nicely.” She pulls out a packet of forms, and Rita’s father enrolls her in first grade.

  Rita’s teacher is a petite, girlish woman. She wears the modern-style habit —shortened skirt and, instead of a wimple, a headband veil that reveals her pink ears and mouse-brown curls. Sister Rose Ellen chirps when she speaks, punctuating her sentences with “honey” or “sweetie pie.” She often wears her guitar, strung on a strap and banging against her backside. She sings folk songs when the mood strikes her.

  “But she’s s-o-o-o big!” Sister Rose Ellen says when she meets Rita. “She’s absolutely huge.” Her tone suggests Rita ought to be unloading trucks instead of entering the first grade.

  “Why won’t you talk, honey?” Sister Rose Ellen asks after a few days. “Little girls have to let out that sugar and spice sometime.”

  Rita stares until the nun’s smile flattens.

  “Let’s hear what Rita has to say,” Sister Rose Ellen tells the class at reading time. “Rita, what color is Harold’s crayon in the story? Surely, you can answer that.”

  Rita gazes from the nun’s grinning face to the book’s cover, where the boy displays a deep purple crayon. Then she looks back at Sister Rose Ellen. The nun’s face pinkens, and she calls on another child.

  Sister Rose Ellen corners Rita after class, saying, “Maybe you’ll sing with me, if you don’t feel like talking. How about ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’?” She toots a recorder for pitch before strumming the first chords. Rita sinks into a too small desk, lips compressed. After a few verses, the teacher dismisses her.

  One afternoon while the class is having an art lesson, Sister Rose Ellen announces the forthcoming Christmas pageant. “Everyone will have lines to say —nice and clear —for all the families and other students to hear.” She smiles. “That goes for everyone.” Rita paints a boat while the teacher speaks. She dips her brush in blue tempera and strokes wavy ribbons under its hull.

  “If you’re not in the pageant,” Sister Rose Ellen says, “you will miss the Kris Kringle gift exchange and the party —cookies, punch, candy —and that’s just too bad.”

  Rita swishes her brush in a water-filled coffee can, tinting the water sapphire.

  “Does everyone understand?” The nun looks at Rita.

  “Yes, Sister,” the other children reply.

  Rita paints the sun, swirling a thick mustard-colored blob. She streaks the ball with orange, painting a sun fiery enough to ignite the classroom, hot enough to turn it into a dustpan full of ash.

  The morning before the pageant, Rita wakes up retching. She vomits in bed. Bette helps her out of her soiled bedclothes, and Loretta wipes her face. Rita’s father gathers her pajamas, linen, and blankets and hauls them to the cuartito to wash, before calling his work. Rita spends the day huddled in a quilt on the couch, watching game shows and soap operas.

  “Ah, the life of Riley,” her father says when he brings her ginger ale and saltines.

  Rita flashes him a weak smile.

  During Lent, Sister Rose Ellen orders Rita to stay after school nearly every day. Rita’s penance: she must kneel while Sister Rose Ellen sits at her desk, �
�silently praying.” One rainy afternoon, her father leaves work early, driving the utility truck out to pick up Rita and the others from school. He ducks into her classroom, his yellow slicker dripping. “What are you doing?”

  “Praying,” Sister Rose Ellen says.

  “I got the truck running out here, so we better go. Come on, get your books.” He notices Rita’s reddened knees. “How long you been kneeling?”

  “Oh, not that long,” Sister Rose Ellen says quickly. “She’s just begun praying.”

  “How come no other kids are praying?”

  “They aren’t stubborn like Rita. They speak when spoken to.”

  “Is that right? How come you ain’t kneeling? You’re a nun. I’m sure the prayers would fly higher from you with all your training in the church.”

  “I am praying, but I can’t kneel. I have a condition —my back.”

  “Is that right? Well, tell you what, Sister, I got a condition, too. It’s kind of a thing where I get mad when you mess around with my girl, you understand?”

  “If that’s your feeling, Mr. Gabaldón, I can’t be responsible for her progress. Children who won’t speak aren’t adequately prepared to pass to the next grade.”

  He shrugs. “Then I guess you’ll have her again next year. But I think she knows her lessons. She does fine on her tests and that homework you give. I never noticed no section on the report card for how much she talks. I could ask the principal about this, but I think she’s probably going to pass.” He takes Rita’s hand, and they dart out of the classroom, dodging sheets of rain sluicing from the roof.

  The next year, Rita has Sister Albert George, a tough nun in full habit and wimple. Her missionary years in the Sudan have leathered her face. Now it is the texture of turkey wattle. A yardstick dangles from her belt like a sword. Sister Albert George appreciates tall, quiet children much more than the spritelike chatterers who irritate her ancient nerves.

  Though her silence agrees with the old nun, Rita finds no pleasure in school. She keeps to herself, dreading what she might blurt in a flash of anger, and the other children avoid her. Somehow they sense that she is hazardous, and they don’t dare tease the large, mute girl. But there is no way they can know she’s killed someone with poison so potent it has contaminated the dead girl’s mother and the old woman, too. La vieja rarely leaves the house since Cathy’s funeral, and almost overnight, Shirley has become elderly herself —hunched and pale as a specter as she wanders from her bungalow to the mailbox at dusk, her nightgown billowing like vapor with each step.