“Hey, pocha, watch for scorpions,” said Maria. “Sometimes they hide under the toilet paper.”
I stopped.
“En serio,” Maria added. “Out here there’s scorpions, and spiders and snakes too.”
I looked at Abuelita for a sign to see if mi prima was messing around with me or if she was telling the truth. Abuelita rocked back and forth in her chair and blew another smoke ring, not giving me one indication either way if there was reason to be afraid.
“Late at night when I have to go, I usually dig un poso,” Maria offered.
“A hole?” I said.
“Like a cat. It’s safer,” she answered. “You could be our pocha gato.”
A smile came to Abuelita’s face when Maria made the cat joke. I thought about just holding it in until morning, but there was no way for me not to pee. And usually I got up at least once or twice in the middle of the night too. Dios mío what was next, wrestling a rhinoceros when I got my period?
I tippy-toed toward the wooden shed. There was no light once I got inside. I closed the door and sat on the toilet seat in complete dark, terrified that a rattlesnake was going to pop its head up and bite me in the privates. My goal, once I sat down, was to pee fast and leave, but even though I really had to go wee-wee bad, I was too scared to tinkle, so I just sat there on the hard toilet seat with nothing coming out.
I tried to calm down.
Come on, Sonia…pee. There could be a hornets’ nest.
I gave a good effort but couldn’t make anything happen. Then the noises started getting louder. Crickets. Birds. Rustling in the bushes. At any moment I expected there to be a gigantic tarantula headed for my cooch.
A minute later I heard laughter coming from the porch. Obviously, my cousin and grandmother were talking about me. I felt low. In Mexico I was nothing more than a stupid American.
How funny, I thought, because in America I was nothing more than a stupid Mexican. No matter where I was, I was an outsider.
Finally I tinkled.
After I closed the door to the shed I walked up to the sink by the side of the house, washed my hands, and headed back inside.
“Are you sure you don’t want to join us, pochat?” asked Maria.
“No,” I said.
“You know, around here we have a saying: The porch, it turns everyone into poets,” said Abuelita. “Maybe you too are a poet,” she added.
“No,” I answered. “All I am is tired. Very tired. Buenas noches.”
I turned to go inside and saw Abuelita staring at me with an intense look on her face. I guess I hadn’t noticed before, but my grandmother had deep, penetrating eyes that knew how to stare right into the core of a person. The hazel-colored tint around her pupils almost seemed to glow. After a moment, her look was so intense, I couldn’t handle her gaze anymore and broke eye contact. For a second, it felt as if she had just looked into my soul.
Slowly I walked inside.
“Buenas noches, pocha.”
“Buenas noches,” I said, and closed the door.
chapter diecinueve
Being in the middle of nowhere, I wouldn’t have been shocked to have been woken up by a rooster. Or even a chicken. But by an egg?
“Buenas tardes,” said Abuelita as she stood over me, holding a huevo. “Now, let’s see what wrong with you.”
“Huh? ¿Qué bora es?” I asked, wanting to know what time it was.
“Temprano,” she replied, pulling the sheets off of me. “Muy temprano.”
With one eye open I took a look toward the window. It was still completely dark outside. No duh it was muy temprano. The sun wasn’t even out yet.
“Come on, get up,” she ordered, in Spanish. “No such thing as a lazy Mexican.” Abuelita laughed at her joke and pulled me up to a seated position in the bed. When she smiled, the thought crossed my mind that her one remaining tooth looked kind of lonely in her mouth, and I wondered how long it would be before it joined the rest of her other teeth and fell out, too.
“Now, let’s find your problem,” she said.
“¿Qué problema?” I answered, not having any idea what she was talking about. “There’s nothing wrong with me. Please, Abuelita, one more hour of sleep.”
“Soy una curandera,” she explained as she began to do all sorts of weird motions over my head with the egg. “Let’s see if I can fix you.”
I had heard about this superstitious witch doctor stuff before, but I’d never actually seen it in real life. Something about how curanderas could move an egg over your body and then crack it in a glass to identify your sickness. Supposedly, if the egg yolk settled at the bottom of the glass, everything was fine. If the egg floated, the curandera would know how to read the yolk, see what signs were present, and then take steps to choose what herbs would best cure the problem. If you ask me, it was just a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Give me a doctor with a stethoscope and some X-ray machines any day of the week.
“Por favor, Abuelita…” I pleaded. But even though Abuelita wasn’t a physically big woman, she was the type of old lady that not even a 350-pound truck driver could say no to, and she continued waving an egg over my head, my ears, and my arms in some kind of prayerlike fashion. The egg didn’t seem very holy to me—it was just a regular old egg—but Abuelita was very, very serious about the whole process. I decided to just let her do her thing. The quicker she finished, the quicker I could go back to bed.
Abuelita took her time. She waved the egg. She listened to the egg. She talked to the egg. And for some reason, this kooky old woman thought that the egg was going to talk back. As she went on and on, I hoped the egg, if it was going to say anything, would mention that I needed more sleep. This was getting ridiculous.
Abuelita moved the egg across my throat, over my heart, then paused. I looked down. The egg was trembling. She watched as the egg shook, almost as if something were happening on the inside of the shell. Abuelita raised her eyes to look at me.
Was something wrong?
She didn’t speak. Instead she looked back at the egg and paid careful attention to its every tremble. Slowly she began to move the egg over my stomach.
Then it exploded!
Egg yolk splattered on my chest, sprayed across my thighs, and landed in my hair. Goopy, yellow egg yolk even dripped from my chin. Gross!
“Abuelita,” I said, “why’d you squeeze it?” I was sitting in such a big mess I didn’t even know where to begin to start cleaning myself up.
“I did not squeeze it,” she replied.
“Ugh…Look at this.”
“But I have located your problem.”
“What problem?” I said. “Yo no tengo un prob-lema other than there is egg all over me.”
“Mija,” said Abuelita. She reached out and softly touched my arm. “Es serio.”
I raised my eyes. Serious?
“You hold something inside. Deep inside. But it grows.”
Abuelita paused. For the first time, she didn’t seem four hundred years old anymore.
“And soon, if you do not deal with it, it will…” Her voice trailed off and she didn’t finish the sentence.
“It will what?” I asked.
She took a moment before answering, then looked at me with eyes that seemed to glow.
“It will, like the egg, explode.”
Abuelita bowed her head, rose from my bed, and left. She didn’t offer any advice. She didn’t offer any herbs. She didn’t offer an ear to speak to or a shoulder to cry on. All she did was offer the facts and leave.
I sat alone in wet, yolky egg drippings, wondering what she was talking about. Suddenly an idea came to me. I bit my lower lip and paused.
“No,” I said to myself, pushing the idea out of my brain. “Can’t be.”
A moment later I climbed out of bed, stripped off my clothes, and went to clean myself up.
Good thing I didn’t believe in all that mumbo jumbo egg stuff, I thought to myself. I stopped and caught a glance of myself in the mirror.
Whoa, I looked horrible. Really horrible.
“Yeah, good thing,” I told myself a second time.
After washing up, I went to the kitchen where Maria was preparing some food while Abuelita added a small log to the fire roaring underneath an old-fashioned, wood-burning stove. The two of them moved quietly yet purposefully. There was no conversation. I helped myself to a banana.
Maria hurriedly finished her task, scooped up her things, and headed for the door.
“Me voy,” she said. “I’ll be back after lunch.”
“Llévate a Sonia,” Abuelita said, not looking up.
Maria paused, obviously not happy about what she’d just been told. It was clear she didn’t want to take me with her. Heck, I didn’t want to go anywhere anyway, especially with her. However, Maria knew better than to talk back to her grandmother. If Abuelita said to take me, she would be taking me.
Maria turned and scowled. “Come, pocha. And grab those,” she said, nodding to a pile of clothes on the floor.
“What?” I asked. “Where? Can I at least shower first?”
“Shower?” she said. “Don’t worry, we’ll shower. But apúrate; Abuelita smells the rain.”
I looked at Abuelita to see if I really had to go, but she didn’t look up from under the stove.
“Ahorita, pocha, didn’t you hear me? Abuelita smells the rain.” And with that, Maria zipped out of the room, carrying a bag of food and a pile of clothes. I eyed the pile she had ordered me to take. Mine was much bigger than hers.
Figures, I thought.
“I’ll meet you outside,” she said. She left the kitchen and disappeared.
I paused and looked again to Abuelita for an explanation, but my grandmother still didn’t lift her head from under the stove. It seemed that she was intent on building the perfect fire. I stood there like an idiot for ten seconds, not knowing what to do. Finally I grabbed the pile of clothes Maria had pointed to and went to meet my cousin out front.
Great, my new best friend and I were off to do the laundry. No breakfast. No coffee. No shower. Cinderella was back, south-of-the-border style.
Maria exited the house, and suddenly I discovered I was wrong. It was not going to be just me and my new best friend on this little journey. It was going to be me and my new best friend and her ten-month-old baby daughter, Isabella.
Maria was a mother?
Goodness, my cousin couldn’t have been more than seventeen. The only thing I could think of was that the baby had been asleep last night in the other room when everyone was over for dinner. But sleeping through all that noise?
Maria tossed her daughter into an old-fashioned pouch, slung it over her back, and grabbed the pile of laundry. With the baby, the food, two bottles of water strapped around her neck, and her own pile of laundry under her arm, the amount Maria was carrying had suddenly grown to twice the size of my stuff. She didn’t complain, though. Or ask me to share more of the load. I would have at least carried a water bottle, but she didn’t say a word. Obviously, Maria was the hardheaded type.
We began walking.
The morning sun rose over the mountains. Fresh, frosty breath blew from my mouth. Dew dripped off the grass. I guess it would have been a beautiful scene if I wasn’t being forced to experience it with a person who hated my guts. We moved along in total silence, the baby as quiet as a plastic doll the whole way.
As we hiked farther and farther along, I became more convinced that this whole “wisdom of the elders” thing was completely overrated. I mean, first Abuelita breaks an egg on me at four o’clock in the morning, then she scares me into thinking that I have some sort of “deep” problem, and now I’m walking to a river to hurry up and do laundry before the rain comes, which, by the way, she had smelled.
I looked up. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
Didn’t Abuelita know that times had changed and the world now was a place filled with the Internet, text messaging, and downloading music? Walking to rivers to do laundry was something that people had done a thousand years ago. Hadn’t anyone down here ever heard of Maytag?
It was a really long walk to where we were going, and as we moved along without conversation, I realized more and more how much I hated the mentality of the people down here. Sure, to my cousin I was a pocha, nothing more than an arrogant, stuck-up American, but to me, Maria was a small-town, oppressed little village girl. I mean, she already had a baby (with no father around, of course), and in my eyes—my pocha eyes—Maria was yet another victim of Mexican poverty and oppression. No education. No money. No hope for any kind of good job. No nothing.
As Isabella bounced in her pouch on her mother’s back, I wondered if Maria had gotten knocked up during a one-night stand, or whether she’d had a short relationship with a novio that ended with her getting pregnant and the father bailing, like so many guys do, not wanting to take responsibility for a child that was half his.
Maybe he was one of those wolves who was about twenty-five years old and had told Maria that he was really sixteen and he’d love her forever just so he could pluck her cherry like the wolf-boys do back in America. As we continued along, I thought about how mi prima might as well be living in the eleventh century. I mean, jeez, she’d probably never even been on the Internet before.
Isabella sure was quiet, though. She hardly made a peep. The baby just bounced along on her mommy’s back as if she didn’t have a care in the world. After a few more minutes of my cousin not talking to me, I decided to hang back and take a closer look at her daughter.
Isabella looked up, and her beauty caught me off guard. “Wow, was she cute. Of course, most babies are cute, but this baby was really cute, like with big, brown eyes and a perfect nose and thin, pretty lips. I smiled. Isabella smiled back. Her smile made my smile grow even bigger.
Yep, I thought. Though I would never tell it to mi prima, this baby was gorgeous. I made a funny face, and the baby giggled. What a great laugh, I thought.
“Hi there, cutie-pie,” I said to Isabella as we cruised along. “Hello there, gorgeous.” I spoke in English because I had heard that it was good to expose babies to as many languages as possible, because their brains are like sponges and languages will soak in. Some English would be good for her, I thought.
“Are you a happy baby?” I asked. “Goo-goo-gaga?” Isabella turned her head and stared off at the passing trees. “Hey, Isabella,” I said, trying to grab her attention. “Isabella, look, over here,” I said. “Look.”
She didn’t look.
“Isabella…over here.” I switched to Spanish to see if that would work. “Hola, bebe…mira aquí... Isabella…”
She still didn’t look. I guess she didn’t know her name yet.
“No use talking to her, pocha.”
No use? That’s kind of harsh, I thought. I mean, just because Maria didn’t like me didn’t mean that I couldn’t talk to her baby, did it? After all, wasn’t I like some sort of aunt or something?
“Yap all you want,” Maria continued. “She’ll never hear you.”
How rude, I thought. It was obvious that Maria was the type of mom who—
“She’s deaf,” Maria added, interrupting my train of thought.
I paused. “Deaf?” I said.
“Yeah, you know, deaf. She can’t hear. You’ve heard of it, haven’t you?” Maria said in a snippy tone of voice.
I stared at Isabella as she bounced happily along.
“Like I said, talk all you want, but she’s never going to hear.”
Maria made a left and followed the trail as it moved downhill. I followed, but the silence between us became thicker. A thousand thoughts raced through my mind, all of them sad.
Deaf? How horrible, I thought. Probably didn’t get immunized. Children not having proper immunization was still a big issue with people who lived in poverty, and everyone knew that serious problems could develop when kids didn’t get their shots.
As we marched along, the anger inside of me started to grow.
They should require people to have a license to have a kid, or something, I thought. I mean, some folks are just not fit.
We finally arrived at the river, and before I knew it, I was washing clothing on rocks like they had done back in the Stone Age. Maria stood next to me, knee-deep in water as we both dunked and slapped clothes against big stones, scrubbing the dirt out of the cotton fabrics with small bars of soap. Maria made a few hand signs at Isabella as she sat on a blanket in the shade, playing with a cup and spoon. Isabella was the most content baby I’d ever seen. Happy. Fun-loving. Quiet. Then again, she was still too young to know how hard she would have it later on in life. A deaf, poor, fatherless Mexican girl living in a home with no money…Come on, how many more strikes could a person have against them?
Enjoy it while you can, baby, I thought as I watched Isabella bang things together. Enjoy it while you can.
After about forty-five minutes of scrubbing in silencio, Maria finished with her pile and looked to inspect the clothes and bedding I was washing. I think she expected to find a half-assed job, but I never do anything half-assed, especially when it comes to cleaning, and I was sure that the things I had scrubbed were spick-and-span. She checked out my clothes with a close, scrutinizing eye, then turned away without saying a word. A moment later, she stripped off her shirt and bra and dunked her tits in the water.
It caught me totally by surprise.
Maria’s breasts were full and perfectly shaped. She had dark round nipples and a firm lean stomach. I couldn’t help but stare, her body was so beautiful. A moment after that, she grabbed a bottle of shampoo, stripped down to her thong, and began bathing herself, top to bottom, then up, over, and under. When she was finished washing her hair, she took off her underwear, washed them and the rest of the clothes she had been wearing, then walked naked to the shore, where she spread everything out to dry and sat down on the blanket.
The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez Page 10