The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters

by Lorraine López

  You just have to laugh.

  SUBJECT: FERMINA/NAVAJO RAIDS

  WPA: 6-21-38 —DC: HMS

  June 21, 1938

  Words: 451

  LEAVING THE VILLAGE

  Fermina estimates she was about nine years old when the Navajo raided her village. She was asleep, but woke to shouts and sounds of struggle. Her mother pulled her from her blankets and lugged her toward the woods behind the village. Howls and war cries rent the autumn night. Navajo horsemen encircled the village, clubbing anyone in their path. When Fermina’s mother stumbled over a fallen body, one of the raiders caught her in his arms. Another grabbed Fermina’s ankle and dragged her, scraping her elbows and knees. He bound her with rawhide strips and propped her on horseback beside her mother. When the villagers were killed, captured, or driven away, the Navajo ransacked their homes, stealing or breaking what they found. They shattered crockery, splintered looms, and set heavy mantas aflame. They piled their plunder onto horses, along with the captives. The wails of survivors, who had climbed to the rooftops, filled that moonless night as the Navajo finally galloped from the village. They rode all night, stopping only at daybreak to rest.

  Fermina and her mother had been captured with other children and women. One was large with child. All were young, healthy, and strong, while hunger had whittled the Navajo so that the knobs of their joints and notches of their spines jutted through loose flesh, but they shared what dried meat and meal they had with the captives.

  Fermina and her mother traveled with the Navajo for days. By daylight, they hiked eastward, and at night, they slept under the open sky. They climbed to a place where snow fell and camped in canyons surrounded by tall iron-streaked boulders. One night, the woman with child confided to Fermina’s mother that this baby would be her first. The next morning, she escaped. The Navajo sent a party after her. When they retrieved her, the woman was no longer big with child.

  Later, Fermina overheard her say she had slipped away as the pains started that night. She discovered a lair and rested in it, but the cramping wouldn’t stop. She cried out for help, but no one came, so she had to bring the baby herself. She birthed an infant girl on the floor of that cave and covered her with leaves, saying, “If I take you, I will lose you, so I must leave you here.” She slunk away, cupping her ears against the baby’s soft cries. When she had hiked some distance, the mewling sharpened into shrieking. The woman turned back. A thick cloud of crows hovered over the mouth of the cave, and soon the baby grew silent.

  When the Navajo found the woman, she was wading into the river, large stones knotted into her skirt.

  8

  LIKE FALLING IN A DREAM —RITA: 1978

  At noon, Rita slips into the Woolworth on Sunset for a grilled cheese and milk shake before heading to the hospital. Faculty meetings at the high school free her until basketball practice at four. The hike from Woolworth to the Queen of Angels, and later back to school, will fill the time exactly. Rita climbs onto a counter stool, trying to catch the waitress’s eye, when someone calls, “Rita, Rita Gabaldón, is that you?”

  Rita spins to face a pale pregnant woman wearing a stylish helmet of lacquered black hair. A navy leotard stretches over her huge abdomen, but the woman’s arms and legs are spindly, spider thin. She’s pushing a shopping cart, a small boy installed in the toddler seat. Rita stares at both of them blankly.

  “It’s me —Shirley. Don’t you remember? We were neighbors.”

  “Shirley,” Rita says, her heart thudding in her throat, “but I thought you —”

  “I know.” Shirley nods. “I’m okay now, really.”

  The boy bangs his heels against the cart. His hair stands straight up on his small head, like shorn porcupine quills.

  “This is my son, Russell,” Shirley says.

  “Hi,” Rita says to the boy, who thrusts his milk-coated tongue out at her.

  “Behave now,” Shirley tells him. “He’s just turned three, still needs his naps, and it’s almost time right now.”

  He kicks at the cart with force. “No, no, no!”

  “Your grandmother,” Rita asks, over the din, “how’s she doing?”

  “Stop and I mean it.” Shirley puts an arm over the boy’s legs, holding them until he keeps still. “Grandma died over a year ago. How’s your family?”

  “Fine,” Rita says. “We’re living on Montana Street now, up that big hill.”

  “How’s Bette? You know, she used to come over in those days and sit with me. I really wouldn’t have made it without her. I hope she’s doing well.”

  Rita doesn’t want to say that her sister dropped out of college years ago to work in a factory assembling phone books, that she’s still messed up from the miscarriage, that she’s been drinking too much and doing drugs. “She’s married now.”

  “Really,” Shirley says, and she smiles. “I hope she’s happy.”

  “I want to go!” the boy says.

  Shirley fishes in her purse, finds a pen and paper, and scribbles on it. “Here’s my phone number.” She hands it to Rita. “I’m Shirley Tanaka now. We live in Silver Lake, not too far from you. Tell Bette to call me, will you? Tell her I asked about her.”

  “I will.”

  “Great seeing you, Rita, you look . . . so grown-up.” Shirley clears her throat, backs away. “Wish we could talk more, but I better get this little guy home,” she says, and wheels the cart to the register, one wheel screeching in complaint.

  “Shirley,” Rita calls after her. “Shirley, I . . .”

  Shirley barely glances over her shoulder, flutters her fingers, and rushes up front.

  The hospital sits atop a steep hill overlooking Bellevue Avenue, where Rita’s family lived for a few years after moving from the small bungalow on Clinton Street. She stands at the summit of the cement steps leading down to the dead-end street and gazes out at an apartment complex constructed where their house had been. It had been a large, drafty three-storey, with temperamental wiring and unpredictable plumbing, but to Rita, it had been like a castle with intricate molding, turrets and gargoyles, prism-glass windows, hidden chambers, and a wild, overgrown yard in place of a moat. The landlord, though, sold it to developers, who’d razed the structure and those next to it to construct the boxlike apartments. Rita squints, but finds no trace of the old house, no evidence it ever existed, and no hint of the home Ambrose and his mother lived in next door. Erased, she thinks, completely erased.

  Relieved, after seeing Shirley —alive and well —Rita nearly skips the long blocks to the hospital. But it strikes her now that Shirley never mentioned Cathy when they spoke. How can that be? Rita thinks of Cathy every day and imagines what she would be like if she had lived. She’d be sixteen, now, just a year younger than Rita. They might even be friends, trading phone calls and sleepovers. “Hey, Cath,” Rita might say, “want to go to the movies?” Or “Let’s ride bikes up to Elysian Park.”

  As Rita enters Queen of Angels Hospital to visit her uncle, she’s reminded all the more of Cathy, who died here. And now the doctors have told Nilda that José will end his days here, too, predicting he will succumb any time now, though he might slip into a coma and linger for weeks. After all the harm he’s done to her sisters, this doesn’t depress Rita too much. Rita imagines her uncle literally slipping and falling into darkness and silence so complete that she nearly envies him. She pictures him tumbling, his hospital gown flapping as he dives through nothingness.

  That afternoon, she finds Nilda in a chair outside José’s hospital room, skimming a McCall’s magazine. “I get nervous in there with him.” Nilda lilts her chin toward the door. “Like I’m just waiting for him to hurry up and go.” But as she flips through the magazine, her brow is smooth, her eyes untroubled. Even the waves in her brown hair seem softer, more relaxed than usual. “You think Sophie would like this?” She points at a magazine photo of strawberries with whipped cream. “Only seventy-two calories a serving —the topping is sugar-free.”

  Rita shrug
s, and Nilda asks if she wants to see some of the newspaper she has folded on the seat beside her. “How mean they are to that Hearst girl,” she says. “La pobrecita was kidnapped, and brainwashed. You’d think they’d have sympathy. But no, they want to throw her in prison.” She gestures at the editorial page, an article with a headline decrying plans to commute Patty Hearst’s sentence.

  But Rita’s not interested in Patty Hearst’s troubles. She scans the front page for news of space travel. She longs for the day when she will travel to the moon and stroll across its broad, bland face, her feet scuffing the moon dust comfortably, as though this is a homecoming. Nothing here, except a short bit about some jailed Russian physicist, a canceled trip to Moscow in protest. Delay, and more delay, she thinks. Rita refolds, replaces the paper, and Nilda squeezes her arm. “Except for your dad, you’re the only one to visit.”

  “Maybe they’ll come later,” Rita says, knowing this will never happen.

  Nilda shakes her head. “They despise him. Everyone does. My brothers laughed at him because he never went to school. Did you know that?”

  “He seems smart enough to me,” Rita says. Despite what he’d done to her as a little girl and her sisters — now that he is dying — Rita admits to herself that he must have been a clever man. Her uncle got by from job to job with a trunk full of painting supplies and a collapsible ladder. He’d mock her father’s job with the city, bragging that he worked only when he felt like it.

  “Did you know his mother was a prostitute? She worked in one of those houses in Tijuana, raised him there. Made him like a slave in that house. She hired him out, too, when he was just a kid, sent him to work on a rancho. He didn’t have no easy life.” Nilda juts her chin toward the door again. “Go in and see him.”

  “Is it a good time?” Rita nearly wishes she’d gone to school to practice free throws, instead of yielding to this pinch of duty.

  “He ain’t going anywhere, is he? If he’s asleep, just hit his foot a little, like this.” Nilda nudges Rita with the magazine. “He’s in that first bed there.”

  At the threshold, Rita draws a deep breath, as if to dive into murky water. The aquamarine drapes around her uncle’s bed are parted, and she slips through the gap. A monitor beeps nearby. The room is thick with disinfectant fumes. Rita grows light-headed, confused, wondering how this shriveled, jaundiced body can be her uncle’s. Only when she spies the familiar brush of his moustache does she recognize him.

  He’d been a heavyset man with a thick mane of black hair and bristly eyebrows. When he strode, floors shook. His fleshy jowls wobbled like gelatin when he laughed or coughed. Now at his bedside, Rita searches the loose skin —puckered like a deflated balloon —for her uncle’s features. His head, chest, shoulders, and arms have withered and shrunk, only his belly is distended, oversized like an insect’s abdomen.

  “Uncle, can you hear me?”

  His eyes are shut, but sparse, sleep-crusted lashes twitch. He opens one eye.

  “Blink, if you hear me.”

  He closes his eye, and both open.

  “Do you want me to take your hand?”

  Again, he blinks.

  Careful of the tubing inserted in his wrist, Rita lifts his hand and encloses the cool yellowed fingers in hers. His thumb jerks, and Rita feels the pressure of his touch. She gasps, her heart thrashes against her ribs.

  In an instant, Rita is six years old, astride his ankle, which he bobs for her “pony ride.” Then he draws her into his lap. His fingers are little men, Snow White’s dwarfs marching from her ankle to her knee. He whistles their work song. But his whistling is labored, as though he’s climbing steep stairs, straining under a heavy load. Rita giggles because the dwarfs’ footsteps tickle inside her thigh as they make their way to the mine. Rita, weak with laughter, twists to get away. The tickling hurts now. She can’t squirm away. The fingers keep marching. Stop! Please stop!

  Rita drops his hand, stumbles into a chair alongside the bed, shivering. Perspiration crawls between her breasts and under her arms. The tile floor whirls crazily and her stomach plunges like an elevator that’s snapped its cables. She puts her head between her knees, struggling to replace this memory with others.

  He used to work at the now-defunct amusement park by the sea, Pacific Ocean Park, where he leased a stall to sell water turtles and neckties, on which he painted tropical flowers and palm trees. He also sketched portraits in pastels, and he cut silhouettes from thick black paper for people who waited in long lines. And at home, he would draw cartoons for her on the backs of envelopes, on napkins —pictures of ducks smoking cigars, cats dancing, and pigs driving cars —that made her laugh. As his pen flew, his breath grew ragged the way it did when his fingers marched between her legs, and he’d huff his inhaler. The greedy sound of his breathing didn’t bother Rita then.

  But Bette says he bellowed once at their mother because she had served salad on the same plate with roast beef, beans, and mashed potatoes. Only the pigs eat salad on the same dish with the meat. Mama had taken his plate to the sink and pulled open the back door. She held it wide until José stumbled out, cursing in Spanish. Her mother had called after him, “You would be the one to know what pigs do.”

  When Rita’s breathing steadies, she leans to look into her uncle’s eyes. “I can’t remember that many good things about you.”

  He blinks.

  “I should feel bad for you and want you to get better. But I can’t do that, Tío. I forgive you, though, what you did to me. To all of us. I have to, because if I don’t, you’ll always be there, like a splinter in my heart. Do you know what I’m saying?” Rita draws near, takes his hand again. “I can help you.”

  His eyelid twitches, but he doesn’t blink.

  She leans close, cups his hairy ear. “I curse you to die, Tío. Nothing will hurt you anymore.” Rita brushes his clammy cheek with her lips and stands upright. She parts the curtains, and she slips away.

  After practice, Rita sinks into a hot bath. She’s filled the tub almost to the rim. Only her knees and face surface the steamy water. Though her ears are submerged, she hears the telephone ring through the thin walls and raises herself to listen.

  “Hallo? Yeah, well, we knew it was coming.” Her father pauses. “Okay, Nilda, ya me voy.” Then he knocks —two somber thumps —on the bathroom door. “H’ita, that was Nilda. José passed away.”

  Rita remembers a word she’s read on a sympathy card: “condolences.”

  “I’m going to bring Nilda over here to stay the night.” His keys jangle.

  “You want me to come with you?”

  “Nah, just tell Loretta, Nilda’s coming for supper, okay?”

  “All right.” Rita listens to his footfalls, wondering why he won’t speak to Loretta himself. Since her sister started college, their father has become —not afraid —but wary of her. And Loretta, twenty-two now, about to graduate from college and already accepted into veterinary school at the University of Georgia, seems to regard this as deference, as her due.

  Rita dries herself and pulls on a sweatshirt and jeans. She winds her hair in a towel and emerges from the bathroom. Loretta’s door is shut, as usual. Rita knocks. “It’s me,” she says before entering.

  “What do you want?” Loretta’s reclined on her bed, her textbooks and notes spread on the quilt. Her shabby parrot paces the headboard. When it catches sight of Rita, it whistles and squawks, “Shithead!”

  “José just died, and Dad’s picking up Nilda to stay over tonight.”

  Loretta’s glasses, glinting in the lamplight, make her look eyeless, expressionless. “I don’t suppose you had anything to do with that.”

  Rita shrugs. “He wasn’t going to get better.”

  “Bullshit!” the parrot shrieks.

  “Right, so you helped him along.”

  Rita wonders if Loretta is teasing her. “You don’t believe in that stupid gift business. I mean, look at you, reading a science book.”

  “So what?” Loretta sa
ys.

  “There you are. Why not go around like Saint Francis of Assisi himself healing animals, right and left, instead of moving all the way to Georgia for graduate school? You really don’t believe that stuff at all, do you? How can you after the dogs died?”

  “It was too late for them,” Loretta says, shaking her head. “Even at the pet clinic, I could never do much for animals in their death throes.”

  “Besides, if it were true, it would be brujería, witchcraft. You don’t buy that.” Rita’s not sure what to believe, wishes she had some way to know. She often rakes her memory for traces of Fermina, for answers, even clues about this.

  “Maybe I do.” Loretta yawns, stretching. “Maybe I don’t.”

  Rita suspects that behind the blank expression and flat voice, Loretta is laughing at her, amused at the hold this childish belief has over her. But despite Loretta’s mockery, or maybe because of it, Rita struggles for her older sister’s favor. Rita likes to believe they are closer, that she has more in common with the orderly, self-disciplined Loretta than with her other sisters or Cary. In Loretta, Rita sees her future self as she would like to be. They are both reflective, serious types, who usually limit themselves to expressions of fact. They are as unlikely to exaggerate or embellish as Bette and Sophie are to stick to the truth, so her implicit ridicule stings Rita much more than a flat-out insult from anyone else. Loretta purses her lips, arches her brow, and Rita knows her sister is having a bit of fun with her. “What are you going to fix for supper?” she says now, to put an end to it.

  “I’m thinking arroz con pollo and tortillas.”

  “We’ve got tortillas in the freezer. I’ll stick some in the oven.” Grateful for this excuse, Rita hurries from her sister’s room to the kitchen.

  “Shithead,” the parrot cries.

  In the kitchen, she pulls a frosted sack of tortillas from the freezer, and Bette steps in the back door. “Ooh, tortillas,” she says. “Did Loretta make those?”