At the funeral, only Gramma cries louder than I do, probably because she kept his insulin from him as punishment for his last bender and didn’t mean to kill him, not really.
Chapter 4
CURSES
When we received the chain letter, it took my parents one or two days to discuss it with the rest of the family and organize a response. This freshest of hells was met with the same resignation that every other ill omen to strike the family had been received, as we were hit often with the relentless misfortunes of Catholic beliefs.
That the chain letter was simple and idiotic superstition would never occur to Dad or Gramma or even Mom: They played by the rules of faith, and faith, like everything else, has a positive and a negative side, a good and a bad, a yin and a yang, Budweiser and Miller Lite.
So it naturally followed that their prayers for good fortune would sometimes bring them bad. In this, they were unquestioning.
The whole family was therefore collected one dark and eerie evening (What made it eerie? The television had been turned off) around the typically cluttered and unused dining room table, and we were each asked to produce what we could. The chain letter called for twenty-five duplicates, each to be mailed off randomly and within the week of the letter’s arrival. We were slow in writing out the unfamiliar words of the badly written chain letter because none of us, save the preteen girls, were too confident in our writing, in either English or Spanish. So we sat there, that night, as a large Catholic family in the yellow dining room light, with the somber reverence of pilgrims genuflecting before a particularly testy saint.
I was about eight, so I was required to produce only one copy, if that. My sisters proudly cranked out about five each, in that large, pouty-lipped flowery script of the junior high nymphet.
Personally, I was in dire trouble. My left margin drifted dangerously toward the center of the page and then drunkenly over-corrected back to the left, the letter stumbling like a tourist pouring himself out of a Mexican bar, ending in a tired, horrible scrawl of, well, an eight-year-old.
See, I wanted to do my part to set this right, to participate in the salvation of the family, because continuing the chain would bring better fortune and ignoring it would bring the bad, the chain letter explained. This became very important to me that night.
When I finished, Mom looked at my work and remained characteristically quiet, but I could immediately see she wasn’t exactly satisfied, though she accepted it, also very characteristic of her at this time.
We had to reproduce the twenty-five copies of the chain letter like fifteenth century monks, writing them out in long hand because the technology of copier machines had not yet infiltrated the barrio. Mom folded my work and reluctantly stuffed it into an envelope to be mailed to some unfortunate soul with a last name like Salazar in McAllen, Texas. I kept wondering the whole time, if it was illegible, if that recipient didn’t take it seriously, would the curse still take hold? Would my childish scrawl disqualify the magic number twenty-five and would it be my fault the family was still spiraling toward indigence? It frightened me to consider that we had left this to chance.
Seven years later, my older brother Dan pulls me aside and says, “Do you remember the chain letter we got right after Grampa died?”
Of course I remembered the fucking thing. I had to smile inwardly at the idea of a chain letter written by an eight-year-old landing in the mailbox of what was probably an equally superstitious Catholic family (chances were) and the fear that it would trigger, the Exorcist-type horror that would settle upon the person opening the envelope. He would struggle at first to make out the childish script, very likely wrestling with a language barrier. Then the weight of the potential curse would settle coldly into his heart, its evil beyond measure because it was written with the hand of a dreadful, pestilence-bringing child, like in that other movie, The Omen. . . .
“I think that’s what started this whole thing, was that letter,” Dan starts telling me in quick secret. It’s morning, before school, and we’re helping a very panicked Dad change tires on one of his trucks.
“Grampa died right before that, the business started to fall apart, and things just got really bad, right? It was right after we got that letter,” he says.
“But we sent out all the letters.”
“I don’t know what happened, but something went wrong.”
Immediately I thought of my work, somehow unacceptable to the cosmic decorum of chain letters because of the bad margins, the cross-outs, the candy stains, the little drawings of an X-wing fighter I made at the end—had it all been my fault?
“But it’s been seven years now,” he says. “I think it’s almost over.” He is very satisfied with this, convinced, and I can see he’s serious.
I almost join in his little moment, am almost convinced of the same thing, if I weren’t still turning over the possibility of being single-handedly responsible for all that we are going through, all the panic and fear and shame.
That’s when Dad appears around the corner dressed in a torn, veil-thin V-necked cotton undershirt that is covered in oil, stinking that high, gamey smell of still-metabolizing Budweiser and threatens to throw a grease-covered half-inch wrench at Dan for wasting time. We were supposed to be rotating the bad tire that couldn’t hold a charge with the good one that could hold half of one before we got off to school. We both immediately get back to work, me crawling under the truck to assemble the hydraulic jack under an axle while Dan, because he was stronger, loosens the huge bolts. Dad stops, leans against the door of the cab, takes a long drink from a glass of cold gritty water. He is eventually satisfied we’re back on task and returns to reinstalling the water pump, muttering curses continuously with every breath.
Dan and I don’t talk again, lest we should become the focus of the real curse that befell us when Grampa died seven years ago, and the family’s care was left to our father, the unattended boy-tyrant now in charge of our lives.
Chapter 5
VULGARIA
El Jardin was the happiest I’d ever been, as a child. Every memory surrounding that school was like an afternoon spent in an idyllic garden of innocence, like the name suggests, if you know Spanish.
I even remember coming down with a terrible fever once and being picked up at school by my father and mother, who brought me home and showed me the sort of attention no single child in our family ever dared ask for, with soup and compresses and blankets arranged on a couch. My older brother Dan came and quietly attempted to play tic-tac-toe with me and showed me his new Dallas Cowboys picture book. My sisters brought Blackie to me and sat him in my lap. But the dog would always fuck off in less than a minute, and I would lapse, awake later on my back, looking up at my mother’s face. She’d have a look of sadness, a smile pressed into her face like she was looking at . . . I’m not sure. I wasn’t sure, then. It couldn’t be me, was one of the first things I thought when I woke up and saw the look on her face. It was almost a look of loss, of letting go. The sadness of a mother worried for her sick child, a display of tenderness. I was unfamiliar with it.
I quickly became accustomed to school and the long days, though I have a clear memory of one morning, in kindergarten, of looking out the window and watching the cars slip by with muted sound on the road parallel to El Jardin. It’s the very heart of the morning, the dew is about to be singed off the ground by the South Texas sun, and I remember feeling like something was dying, something was changing, and the day, how it carried on with us indoors as we learned numbers and the alphabet and recited the dates (I still remember the first day of 1980, in the immersion English program, trying to get my mouth around that number). I remember the sadness that I felt that day, some type of dread tugging at my heart, looking out in that morning, like I wasn’t sure I was where I was supposed to be. I still have that feeling every few years and it has lost nothing of its dread intensity after all these years, like it’s dug a trench back to that very first time I noticed it.
Wha
t I could never adjust to at that time was CCD, the “church” school. These classes were on Saturdays, and I didn’t see why I had to go to church school after having been to elementary school all week long. Catechism was spent in a dirty room in the Christ the King Church complex, and I was mingled with city kids that I wasn’t comfortable around, and I answered every question asked like Hermione Granger until the church leader wouldn’t pick on me anymore. I was annoyed for having to be there, because it annoyed my mother to have to drive me there, too. Christ the King Church was a clear fifteen miles or so from our house on Oklahoma Avenue, way in the bad part of Brownsville, but Dad had a reverence for the reverend, Father Juan Nicolau, because Father Nicolau would let the congregation go early on the Sundays the Dallas Cowboys were playing. The shepherd knew how to play to his sheep; you had to hand it to him.
CCD for me ended one Saturday evening, when it began to grow dark and I had spent over twelve hours waiting for my mother to pick me up.
After dropping me off at 8:30 that morning, the family had gone about their business and Mom had completely forgotten the youngest of her brood, as I was not numbered among the muster for dinner, haphazard as dinner might be. I didn’t show up, no one had seen me all day, and I’m sure Mom must have had one hell of a shock when she realized she had forgotten to pick me up at ten that morning.
The first part of that day, immediately after class, I spent reassuring the people there that my mother would show. She was usually late, I said, but I was used to it. Not to worry.
When they left, though, they were worried.
I sat and went where I usually did, into my head, and imagined all sorts of ways to get myself ingratiated into the story lines of popular movies I’d seen. “How to fix it so that an eight-year-old can wield a gun and fly an X-wing in Star Wars” was my usual pastime, and I liked to be alone to do it. This lasted a few hours. But by two that afternoon, I was starving, bored with the goddamned Wookies, and throwing rocks at cans. The next car will be mom, I thought. Next car. OK, next car. Next one. Stupid fuckin’ church school. Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that they’d forgotten about me; I thought that they were just late, so it didn’t occur to me to call. I just had faith they would show. They were just busy with other things at the moment.
The afternoon grew very hot, and soon I was sweating, delirious with hunger, and cursing my family in a way I don’t think many children are capable of cursing. I lay on my side on the concrete steps and watched the entrance to the deserted church compound and cried, my resentment growing with each passing car that was not the family Bonneville.
By nightfall, I was done crying and was in a sort of stoic trance, sitting up against the door of the classroom, watching the sulfur lights of the parking lot come on one at a time. Mosquitoes were swarming and I put my arms inside my thin T-shirt, using my shoulders to squish them from my face. My heart started to grow firm here, my resentment metastasizing into a cold jelly around it, and I went into a sort of fugue. I don’t even remember being picked up by my mother, or what she said. I have a dim image of the car finally turning into the parking lot, with its lights on and two people in the car, I think Mom and Dan. There was no tug at my heart to see them.
The summer before the third grade, a new school starts to go up in a field about two miles away, near my friend/enemy Charlie’s house. In a matter of a few months, the new school starts to take shape. It’s flat, laid out in straight geometrics and smells of fumes. I see it out the window of the dump trucks when we drive by, new landscaping and wire fences and concrete pillars holding up a concrete veranda.
I dread the idea of leaving El Jardin, think it couldn’t possibly happen. El Jardin is old, tactile, made of red brick, and built in the 1940s with a large auditorium and wooden hallways. It’s one of the very rare things in Brownsville that is old, has history. My father went to elementary school there, it’s so old. It’s our area’s own little Oxford. There are trees all around it, paths and hidden trails, with a snack bar run by an old woman from her house next door.
At El Jardin, I was one of the top students. Kids from all aspects of suburban Texas life mingled there—the farmers’ kids and the field hands’ kids and the kids from families who didn’t live off the land, whatever it was they did. It was like Sesame Street there. We coexisted happily, and every three days there was something called “bilingual education” and the kids who had trouble with English would be taken into a different class and helped along while the rest of us—all the white kids and me—would work on different projects, usually a book we’d all read together or a fun word problem. It was blissful learning like that. Every few months, the Mexican kids would take a reading test from a counselor to determine their ability in English comprehension and whether they could be relieved from the “bilingual” status, as it had an air of dishonor to it. I was never “bilingual.” I did my best to forget Spanish from the start.
That was because my brother and sisters had already made the conversion to speaking English and I was bringing up the rear, humiliated constantly because I couldn’t distinguish the “ch” sound from the “sh,” and it became very competitive in our house, learning as much of Our Master’s language as we could. English in that area was the language of money, domination. Six-foot Mexicans would wither when its sounds were spoken by a five-foot-tall white man, make them hunch their shoulders, lower their heads, and move in the direction opposite of the English. Even my father, who understood its themes and suggestions, spoke it reasonably well for the area—even he would send me to collect payment from white people because he was frightened to get into conversations. English was power. And I was doing very well with it at El Jardin.
I was really confused growing up in Brownsville; I didn’t identify with the Mexican culture. We were Americans, we were light skinned, and we spoke English: I thought we were white. I was sure of this. So much so that, when I am around ten years old and Dan and I are watching Eddie Murphy doing stand up, and Murphy lapses into the tried-but-true “black people dance like this / white people dance like this” schtick, I laugh loudly and say to Dan, “He’s right! He’s so funny! We really do dance like that!” Meaning us white people.
Dan doesn’t miss a beat, says, “You stupid motherfucker; we’re not white.”
Here, my world collapses. “We’re … not?”
The new school is finished at the end of summer. It’s called “Vermillion,” named after an unpaved side street that runs parallel to it. No one knows what vermillion is. I look it up in the dictionary and find it’s a color, coppery red like mildly coagulated blood. I don’t want to go there. Just have a bad feeling about it.
But then comes the notice to our home about bus-scheduling changes and redistricting. My parents cower from anything written in form letters and in English so it’s decided: I go to Vermillion for the third grade and on. I can’t believe it. I know no one else who’s going there except a cousin or two. I might as well be moving to a new city at ten years old.
The first day of school at Vermillion is confusing, like an internment camp for foreigners. I had been redistricted into the city’s new school for poor, immigrant families. These kids have been told by their parents to be appreciative of the chance they’re getting, to listen to their teachers and administrators, so the kids are solemn, like they’re in church, frightened of the opportunity just given them.
Hardly anyone here speaks English but the principal. The teachers can hardly carry on the day’s curriculum without lapsing into the pidgin Spanish spoken in border towns so that the kids can understand.
All the kids wear their one new shirt or pair of pants bought for their third-grade year. They look like tiny replicas of their parents, tiny old men in guayabera shirts and women in loose cotton dresses. I’m at my desk in the front, lightheaded from the fumes of the new paint and the adhesives on the linoleum floor. The morning sun is a violent, yellow thing that floods the room undeterred because the
fucking school is in the middle of a field and there are no natural obstructions to keep the sun in check, so the windows, when shut, glow like they’re about to blow. The whole thing just made for a migraine.
I’m there for an hour, and I can’t help but start crying from exasperation. It’s like starting all over again. I don’t know anyone and my Spanish is really, really bad now because I was told that it was wrong to speak it in America, and we are in Texas. I just put my head down and sniffle. After all that work I put into it, I would regress back into speaking Spanish and be humiliated, left behind by my family, I felt.
After a few days, though, things turn routine and I take a look around. These are tough kids, the sort of ten-year-olds even adults are afraid to correct, and classes are quickly divvied into the kids near the front who are willing to learn and listen, and the kids who don’t see a reason to be here and are waiting to get home to get back to work, in the back. Or they’re here for the two free meals. There’s one white girl from the trailer park and I immediately align myself next to her. “Shannon.” I like Shannon—she’s kind of trashy though she’s just a kid, but we get along fine. We share pencils and paper and write notes to one another and the other kids immediately start calling us “the gringos.” Not an optimistic launch.
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