I’M WAITING FOR MY GRANDFATHER, relieved because today, finally, he has gotten up and dressed for the city: plaid shirt buttoned all the way up his thin tortoise neck, bolo tie with the silver dollar set in a ring of turquoise. Face scrubbed, white hair combed in lines over the brown crown of his head. He’s in the house rinsing our coffee cups and wiping toast crumbs from the oilcloth.
I am ready, too, wearing my blue dress (though the sleeves no longer cover my wrists), white tights (dingy and loose at the knees), and my sneakers. In my pocket is the address for the VA clinic, which I have copied from some papers in my grandfather’s desk. This morning my grandfather braided my hair and fastened the ends with rubber bands from the newspaper. Because I’m tall, I sat at the kitchen chair, and he leaned over me, his trembling fingers slowly working the braid into shape. When I was younger, he would tease me as he combed out the knots, pretend to find things in the tangled mass. “A jackrabbit!” he’d cry. “My pliers!” I’d laugh as the yank of the comb brought tears to my eyes.
Behind me, the porch sags under the weight of the refrigerator and the gyrating washing machine on legs that my grandparents bought during a good year in the fifties. There are places we cannot step, because the boards are gray and fragile with rot. “I’ll fix the porch,” my grandfather says. “One day I’ll find the time and shore it up.” But the truth is that for years he has been unable to do jobs that he once did without even thinking.
Every day for a week I have dressed for Albuquerque, and every day he has shivered and shaken his head. “Not today, mi hijita. Perhaps the weather will be better tomorrow.”
He spent those mornings in his pajamas, blanket pulled tight around him. It’s late spring, the sky above the swaying cottonwoods so blue it has a texture, but he wore his wool cap, sweating. He would not let me go to the neighbors or the priest.
But today he is up and dressed, preparing for our monthly trip to Albuquerque. We will shop for what we need, and we will have lunch in a restaurant, and my grandfather will see the doctor, though he doesn’t know this yet.
I touch the slip of paper in my pocket. I catalogue every detail of my grandfather as he is now, as if by leaving nothing out I can keep him safe. I catalogue the smooth, pink mole on his neck, the brown spots like smudged fingerprints on his temples. His eyebrows, gray and wiry and curled. Often a drop of clear fluid hangs from the end of his nose. My grandfather’s nose is large now, almost a beak, but it wasn’t always that way. In my cigar box, I have a picture of him as a slight, handsome soldier in the army, his features delicate: serious mouth, light eyes, black lashes.
THERE ARE A FEW families still in our town—mostly old people, no other children—and those of us who are left are used to the high weeds, the crumbling houses of neighbors, the plaster that falls like puzzle pieces. The exposed mud bricks dissolve a little more each time it rains.
Across the road from where I sit is the dance hall that belonged to dead Uncle Fidel. It hasn’t been a dance hall since long before I was born—hasn’t been anything but empty and overgrown with branches—but there is still the green silhouette of a bottle painted on the cracked wooden door. When he was young, my grandfather tells me, there were bailes every Saturday night, and, if he’d had a drink and his shyness left him, he would dance until he was breathless and sweaty, twirling the girls, clapping and stomping with the rest of the town through cuadrillas and polcas. In those days they sprinkled water on the ground to keep the dust down, and dirt clotted on the black toes of his shoes.
At night I imagine I can hear the accordions and fiddles and guitars across the street, but it takes effort, and soon I am weary and overcome with the sense that I have arrived too late. I long for that other Cuipas, for the families and the river. I want to have known my grandfather as he was then, to have been with him all those long years.
THE SUN STRETCHES ALONG the road and warms my legs in my tights. If I turn my face to its heat, I must close my eyes, and in the drowsy redness behind my eyelids I remember what makes me uneasy. Last night I lay stiff in my bed—which I used to share with my mother, which I imagine still smells of her—kept awake not by the ojo, but by a sound I’d never heard before. Instead of my grandfather’s steady sleeping breath from across the kitchen and through the open door of his bedroom, I could hear a rattling, chattering gurgle. The sound, so much like an animal—but an animal I have never heard and cannot picture—kept me tense and afraid until dawn, when my grandfather stirred, his bed creaked, and his slow footsteps assured me that he was okay.
SOME DAYS I GO to school, some days I don’t; like a fever, the ojo comes and goes. I try not to bother my grandfather with it. When I am well enough, I ride the bus into Estancia, listen to what they tell me. I buy my lunch in the cafeteria and sit with the younger children, who don’t ask questions when I am silent.
My grades aren’t good. I struggle to form letters on the page. Three times a week I’m called from the classroom by the resource teacher, a young woman—as young, perhaps, as my mother—whose skirt swishes against her hose when she walks. She and I sit together under a fluorescent light in a room that was intended to be a closet. She shows me flashcards, asks me to write sentences, tries to make me explain what I am thinking. I tilt my head. When she tires of waiting, she’ll pat my hand and sigh and give me a chocolate wrapped in red foil. I learned this during my time at school: they want to replace the past with their rhymes and procedures, their i before e and carry the one.
When I was in kindergarten, I used to beg my grandfather to move us to Estancia, because it is a town with a store and a school and a senior center, where he and I can have lunch for a dollar, dessert included. Now I understand what he has never told me, that we must watch over Cuipas until it shrinks to nothing, until the houses are mud once more, and dead Uncle Fidel’s bar collapses to splinters.
SOMETIMES, WHEN MY GRANDFATHER is well and I skip school, we walk together, and he tells me again the history of this place: the original land grant, thirty thousand acres given years ago to my grandfather’s great-great-great-grandfather, parceled smaller and smaller through the generations, until our piece, my grandfather’s and mine, which he put in my name on my seventh birthday, became twenty-five acres, and not the best twenty-five, but grassland. I wish it were in the mountains, with a spring and tall, fragrant piñon. I would walk there in the fall and gather the dropped nuts, roast them to eat through the winter, sell the surplus in bags along the road. But my land is good only for cattle, which I do not have.
“When I was a boy,” my grandfather said last time, as we stepped across the dry riverbed, “the water ran all the time. My cousins and me, we used to catch tadpoles and crayfish in jars.”
“Where did the water go?” I asked.
My grandfather squinted as if trying to remember. “Perhaps it was diverted into the bean fields. Perhaps it rains less now. Perhaps it all happened when I was at war.”
My grandfather has told me that Cuipas was one place before he left and another when he returned. Though he was in the Army for two years, the war had already ended, so he lived in Rome, an eighteen-month vacation, he said, on the government’s dime. Each day he swam in Mussolini’s pool. It was the first and best pool he’d ever seen, huge, lined with marble smooth under his feet. My grandfather was strong, glistening, brown muscle in blue water.
He almost married a girl there. Silvia Donati. As we walked along a furrow in the bean field—the plants no higher than my calf, leaves broad and soft and heart-shaped—I asked him to tell me about her again.
She had buckteeth, my grandfather said, and the palest, rosiest skin he had ever seen, and black-black hair. She lived with her mother above their hat shop, and she made ladies’ hats.
Each afternoon after his swim—back in his uniform, wet hair combed—my grandfather sat across from her at the table by the open window, waiting as she finished her work. He listened to the sharp scissors pressing through wool felt and to voices in the street below, watched her pale hands as s
he steamed and formed the pieces on faceless wooden heads. When my grandfather left Italy, she gave him a hat for his mother in Cuipas: gray with pink velvet roses. For years my great-grandmother and Silvia Donati wrote each other, one in Spanish, the other in Italian, until my great-grandmother died. I often wonder if Silvia Donati heard about my grandfather’s marriage, or my mother’s birth, or my grandmother’s death in one of those letters. I wonder if she heard about me, if she knows that these days we live alone.
She would be an old woman now. I like to think she does not dye her hair. I like to think she has kept a trim figure and pink cheeks, perhaps remained a virgin for my grandfather. (This is important, I know, from the romance novels my mother left behind.) I imagine they marry, raise me in Italy beside the sea. They hold hands and walk along the beach, and I trail behind, all of us wearing hats that were fashionable once.
MY GRANDFATHER’S UNIFORM is folded in the cedar chest in the crowded back bedroom where I sleep, and which I once shared with my mother. This is my grandmother’s wedding veil (netting torn), my grandfather’s garrison cap. I don’t know what became of my great-grandmother’s gray hat, whether she wore it until it lost its shape and color, or it was trampled by a horse, or a gust of wind caught it and flung it across fields and mesas. Perhaps she left it on a bus in Albuquerque. Perhaps she gave it away.
There are some papers here, too, records of business long since concluded. And here, the baptismal gowns of lost children, like limp little ghosts.
WHEN THE RIVER DOES RUN, after the late-summer storms, I sometimes pull on a pair of my mother’s old shorts and wade in the muddy water, thinking of Mussolini’s pool. I cup the water in my hands and fling it in a sparkling arc around my head.
If the old women see me walking home, calves muddy, shorts wet, they will shake their heads at my bare legs and call me a cabrasita. Bad little goat. But they don’t blame me too much for my wild ways; they tell each other I am not at fault for being raised by a man alone. They don’t know that I am at fault.
OUR TOWN IS SURROUNDED by grass. Yellow grass on land that shifts and dips like waves. Distance is difficult to judge; the grass is deceptive. The Manzanos rise just beyond our town. I have tried to walk to the mountains, where a man lived for weeks after killing his father-in-law with an iron poker. My grandfather’s father was part of the posse that searched for him. My grandfather has taken me in the car, pointed to the distant spot among the juniper and piñon where they found the murderer’s camp: fire burned down, dusty bedroll. They never found him, though; I imagine him running from their excited voices and the clomp of hooves in dry soil.
Once when I was seven, I played a game that I was the murderer and would be safe when I reached the mountains. The mountains loomed, and I ran through the tall grass and into the sun, burrs catching on my socks and pants. When my breath burned my throat and I could no longer run, I walked, my pursuers getting closer, and fear and guilt clogged my heart. At a barbed fence I parted the wires and slid through, snaring my shirt above my shoulder blade. Long-horned cattle, black and white and mottled, backed away from me, the calves close to their mothers. Two rattlesnakes slithered from my footsteps, sounded a warning. Even the breeze knew what I’d done. When the sun sank behind the Manzanos, Cuipas was small behind me under a depthless violet sky, and the mountains were no closer.
HERE ARE THE PLACES I’ve seen my mother: crossing the field behind the courthouse, hair loose and tangled in the winter wind; through the front window of a bank, filling out a deposit slip; in the school library, glimpsed through the stacks. When I see my mother, it is always from afar or from behind or through glass. Each time my heart flips like a fish in my chest, and each time she is someone else.
My mother left us seven years ago to live in Albuquerque. Perhaps she is there still; perhaps she has moved on to other places: Los Angeles or Chicago or England. She would choose someplace big, I’m sure. She was too young, my grandfather tells me. Never could take responsibility.
MY GRANDFATHER KNOWS the stories of every grave in the dirt churchyard: This is a great-aunt, this a cousin, this a whole family killed by the Spanish flu. The murdered man is here, here a woman who hung herself from a viga in her kitchen after her third stillborn child, but they buried her in sacred ground nonetheless. Profirio Narciso, Nacio Valentin. Maria Candelarita. Maria Ascension. And this here, beside the plaster statue of the Blessed Mother, is my name: my grandmother, whom I never met. When my mother was thirteen, my grandmother left for Santa Fe, where she found work in the post office. My grandfather went after her several times, but each time she refused to return. She came home only to be buried—a heart attack.
Once I asked my grandfather why she left, but he shook his head.
Some of the graves have iron fences around them, with little gates as though for children. Some are decorated with plastic flowers, petals bleached from the sun. I imagine I know which spot will be mine in the churchyard: pressed between my grandfather and the boy whose neck was snapped so many years ago when he was thrown from a horse. Once we are gone, the memory of my mother will be extinguished as well. I wish I could reorder the graves in the yard, straighten the slanting stones, arrange them by date or name.
I CAN FEEL THE OJO in my bones, which ache in the morning and at night, and in my skin, which is prickly and electric. Growing pains, the doctor at the clinic tells me. Still, I must put my affairs in order. First, there is the problem of the land. When I’m gone it will go to the distant offspring of a cousin of my grandfather’s. My grandfather doesn’t know I know this, doesn’t know I won’t have children of my own.
I have toys and books that must be disposed of, too. A collection of stones.
THE OLD WOMEN SAY the ojo is caused by a covetous glance, by looking overlong. The man who gave it did not admire me, however, and looked for only a moment. The one thing of mine he desired, he took.
These are the symptoms: At night heaviness crouches on my chest and I wake gasping for air. Occasionally my eyes blur for no reason and Cuipas slants and washes away. At my worst, I shiver and burn, and my grandfather wraps my feet in cold rags.
My memories of my mother are insubstantial. I see her lying on her back on the living room floor, a beauty magazine held above her head as she reads, limp pages rustling. Holding me in the yard at night, bare feet, my hand gripping the flannel nightgown at her breast as I follow with my eyes her pointed finger to the moon. A dish of yogurt cracked on the board floors of the kitchen, my mother crying. I do not know if my grandfather remembers these moments, but he must remember others: my mother as a laughing toddler, perhaps, my mother at her first communion, my mother too young and pregnant with me. Possibly he remembers the sound of her voice.
ONCE A MONTH we drive west to Albuquerque, once a week we drive east to Estancia. In Estancia we buy groceries and the newspaper. At home my grandfather prepares our favorite lunch: cheese and mustard sandwiches and a glass of milk. We wash our dishes, and then it is time for the paper. We turn to the back, to the comics, but we don’t read them. Very carefully my grandfather tears out the puzzles, the spot-the-differences for me, the word search for him.
We sit, working with our pencils.
“These are good for my eyes,” he tells me. “They keep my mind sharp.”
His favorites are the ones that match English and Spanish words. Sometimes my grandfather disagrees with the paper’s translation. “Moths are palomitas,” he tells me, “not polillas,” and I look up, try to remember. When I finish my puzzle, I stand beside my grandfather’s chair and point out words he’s missed.
At night, if I can’t sleep, I creep to the kitchen and take the paper from the crate by the woodstove. I spread it on the bedclothes. Somewhere north of here they are building a new casino. They are angry about the economy. In a country far away something has changed. I lie back on my pillow and try to imagine living in the world where these things matter. In the morning, when my grandfather wakes me for my oatmeal, he gathers the p
aper and replaces it beside the stove.
Sometimes my grandfather remembers church, and if it is Sunday, he shakes me awake and braids my hair, and we walk to the chapel. We sit in the pews with our neighbors and try to listen. The priest talks about the soul, as beside me my grandfather’s chin sinks to his chest. The soul is a ball of light or a jewel that must be treasured, given to Jesus.
“Christ calls for our souls though we are foul in body,” says the priest.
Jesus looks down on us from the cross, mournful and distant and preoccupied with his own story.
I feel my soul inside me, made of thin, pale paper, fragile as a Japanese lantern, resting above my heart. I move with care and take shallow breaths so as not to crush it.
Christ’s frozen eyes gaze at the ground. He declines to see my sleeping grandfather; He declines to see what He has abandoned. Rage rises in my chest, threatening to crumple my soul. Christ has no time for Cuipas, no time for my grandfather.
“Peace be with you,” the priest says, and my grandfather wakes, squeezes my hand.
I HAVE NEVER SEEN a Japanese lantern, only read about them in my mother’s novels. Used chiefly at night parties, they sway from strings above wide lawns, while music plays and women in backless gowns sip champagne.
MY GRANDFATHER OWNS nine vehicles, several of which run, though none are insured. When we go to Albuquerque, he lets me choose the car. Usually, I pick the old blue truck or the heavy brown ancient Mercedes with the rat’s nest in the heating vent, which a man up north gave my grandfather as payment for a stone fireplace in his guesthouse. These are cars my mother will recognize.
Together my grandfather and I walk behind the house, where the vehicles sit, some with cracked tires, some parked on blocks. I hear him breathe beside me, even and smooth, familiar.
Night at the Fiestas: Stories Page 22