The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters

by Lorraine López

  “Really?” I’d never heard this before. “How did she know Fermina?”

  “She heard about her somewhere or another, maybe church. I think Heidi was writing a book. She asked Fermina all these questions, like you’re asking me, to write the answers down for this book.” Nilda squinted, straining to remember.

  “Did you ever see the book, Tía?”

  “No, I never did. Maybe she didn’t finish it. I remember she got married to one of the Vigils —Óscar, the oldest one —and moved to his ranch just west of Santa Fe, so she stopped coming to visit, and Fermina was kind of sad after that.”

  “She missed her.”

  “Yes, she did. Heidi was writing this book or whatever, but they became real close during those visits.” Nilda entwined her two fingers again and held them up.

  “Is she still alive?” I asked. “That woman, Heidi Schultz?”

  “Heidi Vigil, you mean. She was much younger than Fermina, so she’s probably still around.”

  “What else do you remember?” I said in a casual way. “Do you remember, say, meeting my mother? What was she like back then?”

  Nilda nodded at me, as if to say, now I get it. “Your mother was different from anyone I ever met. Pues, she was big, you know that. I never saw a woman that big, tall and heavy, and your father, you know, is a skinny little thing, so I thought they looked kind of strange together. Plus, your mother, rest her soul, was plain, plain, and Juan Carlos was muy guapo. He was even cuter than Santi, the baby. He still is. But back when he had hair, all the girls chased after him. You’ve seen those pictures.”

  I nodded. My father photographed well. He resembled a young Clark Gable, but without the jug ears. No doubt that had attracted my movie-loving mother to him. “How did they meet?” I asked.

  “On the bus,” she said. “They were coming from Albuquerque. Your mother was just fourteen, like you, and your dad was nineteen, about to go in the army. I was twenty-nine, just married. I married late, you know. Esperanza, your mama, was with her girlfriends in the back, and he was up front, wearing this Panama hat he just bought. He was so proud of that hat. But your mother and her friends, oh, they thought it was hilarious. As a joke, she went to him, grabbed the brim, and pulled that hat over his eyes. Esperanza laughed so hard, she fell into the seat beside him. He took off that hat and they got started talking, just like that.” Nilda’s eyes shone and her cheeks grew rosy. “Your mama loved to kid around and joke, just like la Sophie —exactly like her.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. I’d always imagined my mother silent and thoughtful like me. “I thought she was quiet.”

  “Ay, no, Esperanza was bien popular. Always talking, always laughing. Everybody liked her. Your dad was the quiet one, muy callado, and obedient —oh, he would do anything he was told to do. Once she met him, he didn’t have a chance. They were engaged before he shipped off.”

  “What else do you remember about her?”

  “Well, she was honest, even what they call blunt. If you were drunk, she’d tell you. Esperanza didn’t like drinking. If your skirt was too tight or you had too much lipstick, she’d say so. And she was honest about other things, too, like if they gave her too much change at the store, she’d hand it right back. One time she drove all the way back to Bullock’s when they forgot to charge her for some stockings.”

  “What was she like after she married my father?”

  “Well, she changed a little. Esperanza loved children, wanted a baby more than anything. But it was nine years before Bette was born, and your mama didn’t have too much to do. She went to beauty school and learned to cut hair. Used to cut my hair.” Nilda fingered her brown tresses. “They’d moved out here, away from family and friends. That wasn’t good for her. She went to the movies all the time by herself because your dad doesn’t like going to the show. He likes cards and horse races, things like that.”

  “He could have gone with her.”

  Nilda shrugged. “I was afraid she wouldn’t make it after losing the twins.”

  “What?” For a moment, I thought I’d misheard my aunt. “What twins?”

  “I shouldn’t say this, but you’re older now, you can understand. About a year before Bette was born, your mother got pregnant, and she lost those babies.”

  “Like my brother Anthony Gerard?” I asked.

  Nilda nodded. “Miscarriage in the sixth month. The doctor said they were girls. Válgame, Dios, I never seen anyone so heartbroken. She wouldn’t leave the bed. They lived right in this building, across the hall. She got that pleurisy and then pneumonia. I had to work. I couldn’t be with her except on weekends, so she stayed alone in bed, with a pillow against her side for the pain.” Nilda crossed her fingers again. “We were like sisters, like this.”

  “Poor Mama.” My throat thickened.

  “Esperanza was strong, though, stronger than I thought,” Nilda said. “Next year, she had Bette, and you right after that, then Cary and the little girls. She was a good mother. She cared about all of you. La Bette is like that, too, you know. She takes care of you. Your mama would be proud of her. She’d be proud of all of you.”

  Footfalls sounded in the outer hall, my uncle’s familiar, heavy-footed gait. I still hadn’t found out what I wanted to know. “Tell me about Fermina again,” I said. “Did she, say, know any, um . . . magic?”

  “Now, don’t you start on that silly business. La Bette already asked me about those gifts, or whatever, Fermina talked about. It’s a bunch of nonsense.” Nilda cleared her throat, pushed the microphone away. “That’s enough, m’ija, that’s enough for now.”

  The door swung open, and Uncle José appeared in the doorway, swaying on the balls of his feet and reeking of liquor. He glanced at me and at the recorder on the table. “What’s she doing here?”

  “She’s interviewing me,” Nilda told him. “It’s for a school project.”

  José rolled his eyes and shrugged off his jacket, a new leather blazer, to hang in the closet. “I want to eat,” he said.

  “Stay for lunch, m’ija,” Nilda told me.

  José combed his hair in the mirror mounted on the closet door.

  “I better go.” I wound the tape onto one spool. “Can I take this? Or will we have time for another interview before you move?”

  “Move?” José said over his shoulder. “Who’s moving?”

  “We are, hombre. Don’t you ever listen?”

  “Qué loca,” he said.

  Nilda handed me a box for the tape.

  I hugged her and stood to leave. “Bye, Tía.” I slipped out the front door and heard Nilda say, “I told you we’re moving back home.”

  “Shut up. We ain’t moving nowhere!”

  As I walked home, I thought about my mother. Who she must have been and who I’d thought she was seemed two completely different people. And the mother I remembered was distinct from both the giggling, friendly girl Nilda knew and the quiet, reflective woman I’d imagined. She was twenty-nine when Bette was born and nearly forty when she died that winter before I turned ten. What I recalled most about her was the music of her voice, lilting and inflecting like song when she spoke. Her scent also stays with me, the aroma of corn masa, fresh cilantro, and lime. Food smells, warm smells. I loved to cook, to conjure up my mother’s fragrance. Her face and body were likewise imprinted in my memory. That she was tall and heavy, everyone knew. I remembered the details: the strawberry birthmark on her forearm, her well-shaped dark eyebrows, the way her nose protruded at the tip, and how long, lean, and shapely her legs were for a woman of her girth. And I’d never forget her pillowy softness, the comfort of her embrace, like slipping into a warm bed for the profound absolution of sleep after a troubling day.

  I shook my head to clear these images and focus on the streets. It was easy for me to lose myself in thought and take a wrong turn or miss one. Cars whooshed by, occasionally honking or shrieking to stop at intersections, the sidewalks were crowded now, especially near bus stops as I approa
ched Alvarado and Sunset. Many people gathered around the kiosks chattering in the Spanish my ears no longer registered, it had been so long since I’d spoken it. I stole glances at these people, many far from home and separated from family, and I thought again of my mother, envisioning her in that apartment across from my aunt’s, by herself in an unmade bed, clutching a pillow to her side. I’d had pleurisy once. I knew the knife-twisting pain in just drawing breath. But Bette had been with me while I was sick, and we’d stretched out on the sofa watching television together. What had it been like for my mother so far from family, so completely alone, while she grieved for the baby girls she’d lost?

  I nodded at a harassed-looking woman pushing a stroller past me. A short, emaciated man stepped toward me. His windbreaker was dingy and his linty corduroys torn and grimy. He revealed a row of rotted teeth, brown pinholes dotting the yellowed enamel, when he smiled. “Perdóname. ¿Hablas español?” I shook my head, fearing he needed directions, which I had trouble giving in English, let alone in Spanish.

  He thrust a piece of notepaper at me, and I glanced at him in sympathy, thinking how frightened I would be to find myself lost and alone in a place where I could not communicate with others. I opened the note: Will you fuck with me?

  I balled up the paper and flung it at his feet. Bile roiled up to my throat. I swallowed hard and shoved past him, running without stopping until I’d flown down the steps near the hospital. My lungs flamed. I had to stop to catch my breath before trudging down the steps to our house. Of course, he wasn’t chasing me. No doubt someone had given the man the note as a cruel joke. If he couldn’t speak English, he surely couldn’t write, or even read, what was written in that note. I wondered what he made of my reaction to what he likely thought was a request for directions. As I approached our yard, a curious silence greeted me. The dogs didn’t throw themselves at the fence, barking in glee at my return. Had they escaped again? I hurried to the side yard. The bicycle chain held tight. I tumbled the lock and pulled open the heavy gate. “Anthony,” I called. “Gerard!”

  High-pitched whimpering sounded from the crawl space. I crouched and reached under until I found a collar, and pulled at it until Anthony emerged, dust-covered and rigid, but whining, his muzzle foamy with spittle. “God, no!” I thrust my arm again into the shadows. This time, I hauled out Gerard, his thick, bullet-shaped body inert and his one eye walled, frozen in its socket. I turned back to Anthony. His eyes rolled back, and he was struggling to breathe. His muzzle emitted a heavy, chemical stench, a hot noxious fog. I reached into his mouth to clear his windpipe. In panic, he bit my hand hard, but there was no obstruction in his throat. Blood dripped from my knuckles as I rushed for the hose. They’d been poisoned, I knew it. I had seen a poisoned cat at the clinic. I’d watched helplessly as she convulsed before dying. But I thought I could save Anthony. I would force the nozzle into his throat and flush his stomach out. When I rounded the corner with the hose, Anthony took a few stiff steps and toppled over, his legs scissoring spasmodically. I sank beside him and laid my palms on his cool fur. “I will cure you,” I said over and over. “I will make you well.”

  Anthony’s head jerked as though he’d been called to attention. Then it lolled in my lap, his tongue spilling out with a wash of sticky froth, as his muscles released and a last foul gust whooshed from his mouth.

  Bette cleaned my wounds with peroxide and bound up my hand with gauze and adhesive. “You should go to the doctor,” she said. “You could be in shock.” I shook my head, my arms felt rubbery, and I couldn’t shake that phosphorous odor. It thickened my mouth and scorched my throat. But I said I’d be fine. My father wanted to call Animal Control to dispose of the bodies. When I heard this, I stormed out of the house to the toolshed for a shovel, Cary following at my heels. “I want to help,” he said.

  We had only one shovel. “I’m using this,” I told my brother, and I searched for a spade or pick for him. On the shelves over the lawn mower, I spied a row of dusty jars and cans, among these I found a brown-tinted bottle. I turned it to read the label: RODENTICIDE. It was nearly empty.

  “I can use this,” Cary said.

  I turned to face him. He held up a hoe. “Where should we dig?”

  “Way back,” I said, “near the ivy by the back fence.”

  We dredged up the coffee-colored earth in silence until Cary said, “What do you think made them sick?”

  I shrugged, stabbed my shovel into the ground.

  “Maybe some dog virus,” he said. “Or asthma.” Asthmatic himself, Cary stopped hacking at the ground, put a hand to his chest. “Do you think it was asthma?”

  “No,” I said. “They didn’t have asthma.” Something in Cary’s wide eyes and trusting face kept me from telling him that the dogs had been poisoned.

  “How come you didn’t cure them? I thought you could make them better.”

  My shovel clanged against a buried stone. “I do not know.”

  By sunset, we’d scooped out a grave deep enough for both dogs. I wanted to bury them together, so they would never be alone. We hammocked empty burlap sacks to carry Anthony and Gerard to the hole. Cary and I placed them side by side in the earth and covered them with more sacks before spading earth into the small pit.

  When the grave was covered —a mound of mealy earth and weed clods —Cary leaned on his hoe and looked at me. “You should say something, like a prayer.”

  But I shook my head and dragged the shovel back toward the house.

  In the weeks that followed, I nearly quit the clinic. I almost couldn’t bear to handle the dogs that were brought in for vaccinations and well care. The only reason I stayed was that I couldn’t imagine what I’d do with my afternoons without the job, without my dogs. When the vet offered me a spotted puppy from a litter of strays, I looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. It was as though I was just recovering after a fall from a skyscraper, and he’d asked me if I’d care to leap off a cliff this time.

  Ultimately, José had his way, dashing Nilda’s plans to move home. They stayed in the tenement building on Boylston Street, but after the dogs died, I didn’t have the heart to do much more than work and go to school. I lacked the energy to return to ask more interview questions, and Nilda, in disbelief and disappointment over José’s refusal to move, never inquired how the project had turned out. I shoved the tape deep in a drawer up in the attic bedroom I shared with Bette. Besides, I had no machine on which to play the tape. Soon I nearly forgot it altogether.

  But I never forgot finding that bottle of poison in the shed. He couldn’t have done this, I told myself again and again. But what if he had? Before the morning of the earthquake, I hadn’t realized that his dislike of me had hardened into hatred. And I hated him, too, in a cool and cautious way. I would never strike out at him, but I wouldn’t speak to him or look at him or touch his things, as though he were an invisible, contaminating presence, foul and deadly as a poison gas.

  On his part, he continued going to work, coming home, eating meals, watching baseball games, doing charitable work for Saint Vincent de Paul, and gambling with his friends in the Loman Club on Saturday nights. Except for working and gambling, he usually dragged Cary along with him when he left the house, especially when he hauled donated furniture from wealthy or deceased parishioners to poor people in our parish.

  One Saturday, they returned earlier than usual from Saint Vincent de Paul activities, and Bette, who’d slipped out to meet her boyfriend, Luis, hadn’t yet returned home. I worried she’d be in trouble for leaving without permission, but my father was too tired and preoccupied to register that she was missing. Cary, holding an ornate birdcage, trailed behind him into the house. “Look what we brought you, Loretta,” he said before I could pick myself up to vacate the room my father had entered.

  I stood and peered in the cage at a large, molting green-and-yellow parrot with a crusty beak. “What’s this?” Rita and Sophie drew near.

  “Mr. O’Toole died,” my father said, his first
words to me in weeks. “This was his bird. I don’t know the name.”

  “Dumbshit,” the bird said.

  “I am not,” Sophie told the parrot.

  My father shook his head. “He’s got a bad mouth.”

  “We brought it for you, Loretta,” Cary said.

  “Como sueño.” My father yawned and collapsed on the couch, likely to shore up strength for that evening’s card game.

  Cary and my sisters helped me clean out the cage. I lifted the bird out to examine it. It was a male and not very young, though such birds can live long lives. We shut the bird in the bathroom while I scrubbed out the bottom tray and the girls shredded newspaper. Cary scoured the rusted bars with a Brillo pad. The bird cried from the bathroom. “Asshole! Asshole!”

  “What are you going to name him?” Cary asked me.

  I shrugged. The bird was old. He probably already had a name he was used to, though I hoped it wasn’t one of the words he knew.

  “How about Polly?” Rita suggested.

  “No,” I said.

  “Call him, ‘Cusser,’ ” Sophie said. “Dirty Cusser.”

  “No.” I would call him Saint Vincent, after the charity, something that might help steer him in a better direction.

  When the cage was clean, I retrieved the parrot from the bathroom. Despite his foul mouth, the bird had a sweet disposition. When I lifted him, he rubbed his balding head under my chin. “Vincent,” I said as I ran a finger down his shabby breast. Parrots can molt year round, but this case was severe. I would keep him quiet and calm in my attic bedroom and feed him hard-boiled egg whites, cottage cheese, nuts and vegetables with plenty of flaxseed oil, so his plumage would come in thick and glossy.

  “That’s a good name,” Cary said. “You come up with good names, like Anthony and Gerard. They lived up to their names. They were like friends, like brothers.”