We had a full game going on inside the newly crowded living room walls. The ball bounced off the three-dimensional glass-encased waterfall, off the plastic grade-school trophies, and off the gold-trimmed encyclopedias. Soon, Silvia, Angel Jr. and Apá joined. Clark maneuvered the orange ball with his stubby fingers. But, no matter how hard I tried, I was the one Gonzalez who couldn’t bounce anything other than sound. The ball kept rolling away from me. “Man, you’re terrible,” Angel Jr. said.
The tightness of a good cry rose up within my chest, but my dad smiled. “¡Si, se puede!” he said to me as he passed me the ball again and winked.
“YES, YOU CAN is a soccer phrase. That’s the only game she knows how to play!” Angel Jr. interrupted.
“At least I know something!” I shot back.
“YES, YOU CAN applies to everything,” Apá said and smiled even bigger.
The corners of his mouth twitched as he fought a different type of steady rumbling, one which threatened to explode into happy thunder. “It’s like glue.” His contagious laughter finally erupted, and I forgot about feeling sorry for myself. We all laughed until the corners of our eyes started leaking.
Things were good. I didn’t let anything ruin my mood. I was having fun, even though basketball wasn’t my game. Right then and there, I was the happiest girl who ever lived. I hugged my dad hard. Then I told him so over and over again.
We didn’t worry about being loud, even though Amá had warned us. She never stayed mad, especially at Apá. Apá was a strong still oak. We hid under his branches like shadows. Even when he laughed a thunderous laugh, those branches shook only ever so slightly.
That’s how I thought it would always be—before a second stroke of bad luck came to uproot him.
CHAPTER
26
Apá
Amá woke us up for school the next morning, and told us to keep it down because Apá was still in bed. We fumbled around trying to figure out where we’d put things after the move. Never mind that it was late for Apá to be sleeping. He was the one who usually woke the rest of us up. He never complained, but he was probably relieved to get a chance to sleep in.
I snuck into his room and kissed Apá good-bye before leaving for school. He smiled as he slept, and I wondered if he dreamed of something nice. I got the urge to make the sign of the cross on him. My mom always told us to cross ourselves when we went to sleep. I did this as quietly as possible so that I didn’t wake him.
When I got back home from school, my abuelita and her luggage were the only ones around. My grandma had been staying in Juarez with one of my aunts, but my mom hadn’t said anything about her coming to our house.
I kissed her on the cheek. I asked her if she liked the new house, and if she knew where my dad had gone. She was hesitant and answered yes to the house. Then she asked me to sit down. She told me Apá wasn’t home because he was at the hospital. Amá was by his side.
Apá’d had another stroke. A stroke—I repeated the words inside my head. It was a slap across the face that hurt so bad because I hadn’t seen it coming.
We wanted to visit my dad, but Abuelita said that the doctors at the hospital wouldn’t let us in. It was just like before. Only kids older than fifteen were allowed. She gave me that same excuse about some bug going around, and the hospital not wanting kids around the patients.
I wanted to at least wait in the hospital lobby. She wouldn’t let us. She wouldn’t let us do anything. So when she wanted us to say a rosary with her, I refused. She didn’t make Angel Jr. and Silvia do those things. I stomped into our room where Silvia listened to music on her headphones, still unpacking stuff. I locked the door. She just rolled her eyes, turned her back to me and ignored me.
“Niña malcriada. God is going to castigate you!” Abuelita yelled at me from the living room and went off to light half-a-dozen candles with Clark’s help. I heard the muffled sounds of their prayers hit the wall and trickle down to the floor. I went to sleep without even doing the sign of the cross on myself.
Apá had faced the darkness before, and this time didn’t feel the same. Amá didn’t make us stay home from school. She said Apá was talking and everything. Angel Jr. even snuck in to see him. Everyone made it sound like Apá was fine.
The school week went by, and I went about my days like usual.
I even stayed shelving books at the school library with Nora and them on the Friday before our spring break began. I got home at four-thirty. I took ice cream from the refrigerator when no one was looking. I ate it in the bathroom. I ate it fast so it wouldn’t melt and drip onto the new floors to give away my secret.
When my tía Tere’s Impala drove up broadcasting Amá’s return with its whiny wheels, I ran out to meet them. One by one, my mom and my aunts stepped out of the car with their heads down low. I was surprised to see them, especially so early. No one said anything. Then I saw what I hadn’t before. I felt it. Maybe it was my punishment, like Abuelita had said.
There were tears streaming down my aunts’ cheeks. Amá’s own cheeks were stained with tears. Angel Jr. locked himself in his room. One of our aunts took Silvia aside, while Amá held my little brother and said, “Your father got in his pickup and drove it to heaven.”
My heart held itself like a breath caught inside my throat. I ran into the bathroom.
“No, no, NO! Apá was supposed to get better.” I screamed a hollow terrible noise, like an animal. I don’t know when I breathed again. I don’t know when I left the bathroom. I just know I did.
CHAPTER
27
Flowers
I ground my teeth and wondered how something could go so terribly wrong. If Apá had taken real medicine, if he had stopped smoking or stayed on his diet, if we had prayed…maybe this would all be different.
I crossed myself and clasped my hands together tightly. “God forgive me. God FORGIVE me. God forgive ME. God give me. God give me this one thing I ask of you—give me back my apá…”
I heard voices praying in the living room too. It was a thick sad sound, like waiting for molasses. I didn’t like molasses, and I didn’t like that sound.
It was too late. I grabbed my bear from the dresser, lay in my bed and cried until there was no water left in me, only the taste of salt on my face. I thought that no one knew or could know. No one knew unless they knew pain. No knew what it was like not to want to open their eyes again.
I closed my eyes, but I didn’t sleep that night. No one did. We prayed for what must’ve been days, until Angel Jr. came in the room and said it was time to get up and go to the funeral home.
It was spring break, almost Easter, and I wanted to get ready for that instead. I wanted to sit in the kitchen filling eggshells with confetti to dip in vinegar dye. That would’ve meant none of this was happening.
But Amá’s face gave it away. Amá looked a hundred years old. I guess it fit, since Apá once joked that he was a hundred and fifty-three.
At the funeral home, everyone sat by the coffin and prayed even more. They went up and looked at Apá. Everyone told me I should go up to the coffin and pay my last respects. I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to see him lying there dead. Everyone said I had to. They said it to my brother Clark too. They told him he was a man now, so he had to. He did. But I couldn’t.
Amá said there were people who only turned up when someone died, that death made us come together. There were people there like my aunts and Tomás. There were others like my dad’s sister who came and went, and still others I’d never seen in my life. I wanted them to go away. I wanted Apá to come back.
The day of the funeral, my mom pulled on a black dress and pantyhose. Then she laid out church clothes for all of us. I had to wear one of Silvia’s dresses because the ones hanging on my side of the closet didn’t fit anymore. Amá grabbed her rosary, stood by the front window looking out, and waited for us to dress.
When I was ready, I walked into the living room.
“Your father didn’t want
you to cry. Remember what he used to say. Men don’t cry. You’re a man now. You have to remember,” Amá repeated to Clark as she buttoned his best Sunday shirt.
I closed my eyes, and I could hear Apá’s voice say almost the same thing. Cuando me muera no quiero que me lloren, pues por algo pasan las cosas. He didn’t want us to cry when he died; things happened for a reason.
But there could be no reason for something that was this terrible.
My mom handed me a bunch of yellow daisies tied together with a string. I counted eleven, one for every year of my life even if I felt older.
“Put these on the coffin when they begin with the soil,” she told me. Never mind that that wasn’t what Apá wanted. He told us when his sickness began. Quiero que me quemen y tiren mis cenizas ‘pa’l río. Quiero que me dejen allá de donde vine. Yo vine v cerros floridos. He wanted to be burned, to be thrown into the river, to return to where he came from. He came from the florid hills.
We squeezed into my aunt’s Impala, and she drove us to the church. It was stuffy inside St. Ignatius, and the dirt in the air clung to my face. Miss Mickey, the old woman who lit the candles and cleaned up after mass, was extra nice. She smiled at us. I hoped that she knew something I didn’t know because I sure couldn’t smile.
Sunday mass always lasted forever. I thought it would be like that, but it wasn’t. Everything happened fast, like a nightmare with things flashing by. The priest did his thing. My brother and tíos carried the coffin out. We followed them down the church aisle to the car that was driving us to the cemetery. I bowed my head, but still felt people’s eyes on me as we walked by. I wanted Miss Mickey to pinch me so I would wake up.
But it wasn’t a bad dream. It was worse.
We made our way to Everest Cemetery in the funeral home’s car. The driver called it The Limousine. But it wasn’t really a limo, except maybe in a horror movie. Two policemen on motorcycles rode ahead of us. They did this for all funerals.
Sometimes, in the soccer field at school or the park outside, we saw the policemen and the limousine and all the cars following down the Border Highway. We would stand still and be quiet for a minute. Maybe there was a group of kids someplace doing the same for Apá.
At the cemetery they opened the coffin again so that people could say good-bye forever. They told us Apá was watching. He loved us. He was an angel. My father’s name was Angel too. I guess Diosito must’ve planned it that way. But I still couldn’t go up there. I stood back.
My mother was leaning over the coffin with tears running down her face. A woman went up to the coffin, looked in, and shrieked. Then everyone wanted to see what happened. There were flowers everywhere, mostly stamped onto the heels of their dress shoes. Someone fainted. That someone was my abuelita. My tías sprinkled cold holy water in her face to wake her up.
The women said a miracle happened: that my apá was crying. Everyone pushed forward. Someone pulled me over to where it smelled bad of old lady perfume.
The smell was worse than Sundays.
Sundays were sad, but they went just as sure as they came.
Death was a whole other thing.
I didn’t mean to look, but everyone pushed. Rosary in one hand and hat in the other, there was a single tear on his brown rubbery cheek. It slowly slid down to the side of his nose until it disappeared. I quickly looked away and put my hands to my face.
Those tears were not real. That was not my father. I tried to erase the dead picture from my mind. That was not him. That was not my apá.
They prayed again, talked and put the coffin in the ground. Amá reminded me to put the daisies on the casket. I threw them in and quickly walked away because as far as I could tell that wasn’t Apá. Apá told us not to cry and he wasn’t crying either.
I closed my eyes real tight, and saw him exactly as he was. Apá had soft skin, and he was alive.
CHAPTER
28
After the Wake
Amá said we had to mourn and didn’t let us turn on the television. I looked up the word mourn in the dictionary. It meant to feel or show sorrow. I knew we’d be doing that whether the television was on or not. A feeling couldn’t be turned off by a power switch like an electrical appliance.
We were still off from school for spring break, and there was nothing we could do other than feel very sad to know that no matter how long we waited, Apá wasn’t coming home. I waited for him by a tree anyway, pretending to squish berries into the dirt until the sun went down, and Silvia came to tell me, “Come inside, stupid.”
Amá sent away my abuelita and my aunts, telling them she’d manage. Everyone went home with Tupperwares full of leftovers from the funeral reception. Amá had asked for time off from work so she stayed home with us.
In the coming days, I watched the people around me: Amá, Silvia, and my brothers. It made me even sadder to look at them.
Amá got up each morning and pulled on a black running suit. She fed us and did the things that needed to get done. When the sweeping was finished and the dishes were dry, she walked around like a zombie obsessed with finding more things to clean or put away.
Sometimes I caught her staring into the closet. She didn’t move any of Apá’s clothes. It was like she was trying to figure something out. She didn’t talk much. Her lips were small and tight. Once in a while I saw them fighting a twitch. Maybe she was trying not to break down thinking of Apá. I wasn’t supposed to see that, but I saw all kinds of things.
While Amá wanted to swallow the sting, Silvia wanted to holler at the world. She was fourteen, going on eighteen. She feathered her hair at night, and slept very still like a mummy in a coffin. She sprayed it stiff again in the morning. She wasn’t allowed to wear lipstick, but she secretly stained her lips the color of pomegranates with a tube stolen from my tia’s purse. She did it in the bathroom and hid the lipstick in her shoe.
Her friends all had boyfriends who they promised to hang out with at the park during break. They called her on the phone. They begged her to hang out too. They said that if she didn’t, that boy Jimmy, from the Dairy Queen and later the swimming pool, would forget her. She told them that she couldn’t, to keep an eye out, something horrible had happened at home. Then she sobbed loudly into the receiver. We weren’t supposed to use the phone, but she did. She put on her secret lipstick, and cried that all she wanted was a life like everyone else’s.
Angel Jr. acted like he just wanted to forget. He was the only one of us kids to visit Apá at the hospital. Angel Jr. was tall, taller than Apá and bragged that he could even pass for sixteen. He’d snuck in that way. No one knew what Apá had told him, but Angel Jr. hung onto those words anyway.
And, just like they told Clark, they told Angel Jr. not to cry. He hadn’t. Maybe inside or at night he had. He lived inside himself, with no interest in the outside. Soon enough, the disinterest turned to anger. He raged that he was enlisting in the army as soon as he turned eighteen. The army recruiters had a table at the grocery store. They hung around like starving dogs.
“You’ll become a citizen sooner that way. Then you’ll really be able to make all your dreams come true. You’ll be practically American.”
But Angel Jr. was already American, born in Texas, and only fourteen. He just wanted to be far away where Apá’s absence might fade.
Clark, on the other hand, cried and cried and cried. He didn’t play with his toys. He stuffed his matchbox cars in a plastic bag and buried them underneath Apá’s truck. He cried in the bathroom. He cried holding a ball. He cried putting peanut butter on a piece of toast. He cried trying to tie his shoelaces. He cried when someone looked at him straight in the face. He cried because no matter what Amá said, he was still only seven and not even a little man. He cried because they told him not to cry.
None of us were the same. None of us would ever be the same. Being at home was like being in trouble and waiting for Amá to come after us with her chancla. Except: there was no way out of it.
And, on top of an
ger and fear, there was a terrible sadness. I wanted Silvia to talk to me like she did to her friends because only she could know how it felt. I would’ve even settled for one of my brothers, but we didn’t talk. We’d stopped talking long before. There was no real reason—just that our ages had made us different.
I thought about what we’d be doing with Apá. “Maybe we could color eggs,” I told Amá. Then I heard Clark cry again. Amá went to him and hugged him.
“Is there going to be an Easter?” he asked.
“We’ll have a nice quiet dinner,” Amá told him. He was the reason that she finally changed her mind about the television.
She told us a story. Before I had any brothers or a sister, before I was even a shadow, my amá was a little girl in a little town where everyone prayed. She was my age the first time she heard that great American invention: the radio. When her uncle moved to the United States and sent one home as a present, the whole town tuned in. They listened for three weeks straight.
When the town deacon died, they left the house only long enough for the wake. In those times, it was a custom to mourn for at least two months without any diversions. Of course, in those days the radio was a whole other thing. The town prayed and put on their black shawls, but the radio stayed, with its peacock feathers of sound, high up on its perch.
Amá told us she was shrouded in silence, but she was going to turn on the television for us. She turned it on with the volume extra loud. She put on Saturday morning cartoons. She looked at me looking at her.
“You can’t grow up yet,” she said, as if it hadn’t been happening for some time.
She lay down on her bed with the bedroom door open. She held Apá’s picture and whispered something only for him. She didn’t cry in front of us. She didn’t talk to us about Apá. She didn’t give into her heartache. Her silence was truly a desperate song of love.
The Smell of Old Lady Perfume Page 8