Though the prospect of her landing a decent, well-paying job seemed far-fetched, she never let on that we should worry about rent or food. Not even birthday cake.
* * *
—
That November I turned thirteen. “You’re my everything, mi vida,” my mother said as she pushed a cart through the grocery store. She wore a large shoulder purse and dirty platform sandals. Her black liner was smudged around her eyes, and I worried she had been crying. That morning she gave me a shoe box. Inside was a sheet of white paper on which she had written: Once I get a job, this will be whatever you want. Love, Mama. I carried the note in my pocket as the cart rattled and whined throughout the aisles. Sixties pop music played from the ceiling speakers. My mother’s hips swayed to the sounds, only pausing when she held up various items—Milano cookies, ice cream bars, tres leches cake.
“Any of these?” she asked.
Beside us a white woman in shiny sandals glared in our direction. I lowered my voice. “We don’t have the money, Mama.”
“Come on, Neva. Whatever you want. It’s your day.” She waved a box of Nutter Butters in my face. “These are your favorite.”
I shook my head. “But we can’t.”
My mother kissed my forehead, leaving the waxy feeling of her peach lipstick. I turned away while she threw the cookies into the cart. She went through the aisles, tossing in more items—cupcakes, scented candles, avocados, olives, maraschino cherries. After some time, my mother pushed the cart behind a pyramid of canned soda. She unzipped her purse, and it swallowed everything as though it were a bottomless, hungry mouth. When she was done, the only items in the cart were the Nutter Butters and a jar of mayonnaise. My mother smacked her gum as the clerk rang her up for $7.34. From her bra, she handed over a limp ten-dollar-bill. I looked to the floor at my jelly sandals, at the grime in the grooves of the polished cement, at my mother’s pristine blue toenail polish. Then I saw flip-flops. Casey stood behind us with a basket of hummus and eggs.
“Must be a party tonight,” he said, eyeing our cookies and mayonnaise.
My mother turned, brightened her eyes with a smile. “It is a party. Neva’s turning thirteen today. We’re going to Balboa Park to celebrate.”
“Welcome to your teen years, chica.” Casey held his fingers above different chocolates along the register, said he was feeling them for vibes. He tossed a packet of M&M’s onto the black conveyor belt along with his hummus and eggs. “Happy birthday, kid. Hope you like the kind with peanuts.”
“I’m allergic,” I lied.
My mother bumped me with her purse. “If you’re not busy, why don’t you join us?”
On the eastern edge of Balboa Park, the three of us sat on a Mexican blanket in the grass near a pond of koi fish. My mother set out the stolen food, and if Casey knew we didn’t pay, he said nothing. He lay there with his arms folded beneath his neck, his green eyes cloudy and his smile slightly crooked with his chemically whitened teeth. With my mother nestled beside him, he spoke of surfing accidents, killer earthquakes, and all-night beach bonfires. My mother told him she loved the ocean and that as a little girl she’d dreamed of its deep and bright creatures. As the sun lowered in the sky, a warm breeze tugged at the pond’s surface and the two of them sang “Happy Birthday” to me. I blew out a stolen candle stuffed into a stolen cupcake and worried the entire time that strangers might mistake us for a family.
* * *
—
Casey didn’t work. He could barely fix our drains when they clogged with ropes of black hair. Mostly he collected rent checks from the different properties his parents had given him down by the border and further inland in those neighborhoods I never saw. Each morning he cut through the horror-movie fog of the city, running alongside the shores of the Pacific. When he returned, he would shower and then knock on our door, where he flirted with my mother, leaning against our doorframe, the sky behind him blisteringly white. By mid-October he cut us a deal on rent, and by November there was no rent to pay at all.
Thanksgiving, a time when the mountains of Saguarita were bleached with snowfall, our yard in California was an eruption of fuchsia flowers and mazelike palms. I was relieved that school was out for break. Though I was friendly with a few girls who read Teen Beat and YM magazines during lunch, I kept mostly to myself. Perhaps that’s why my teacher always called me Natalie or Maria—anything but my name. When I told my grandmother about this over the phone, she groaned with irritation. “And has your mama found a job yet?” I didn’t tell her that my mother wasn’t looking for work anymore. That she wasn’t doing much besides spending time with Casey.
It was early December when I walked home from school one Friday afternoon and heard them arguing in the front house. The windows were open and the sounds of classic rock and my mother’s cries spilled into the street. You promised us a deal, she kept saying. I’ll have to go back to dancing. A group of boys from my middle school walked home across the block, toward one of the trash-filled gullies. Two boys giggled, patting the others on the shoulders, pointing for them to listen. I tossed my backpack on the sidewalk.
“Hey, morons,” I shouted, “mind your own business.”
The boys turned to look at me. They blinked, scrunched their faces. One of them mouthed What the—. He held up his right hand, displaying an orange Game Boy as bright as a flare. They weren’t listening to my mother and Casey; they were trying to beat a high score. With my cheeks burning red, I looped around the block three times before I went home.
When I got back, Casey stepped onto his porch in sunglasses, a beach towel slung over his arm. My mother appeared behind him in the darkness of the house—her arm slithering down his chest. “Do you want to go to Mission Beach with us?” she asked. “There’s a roller coaster there.” They were both obviously drunk or stoned, maybe both. My mother asked again if I’d go. She walked outside and kneeled down to me. She ran her long fingernails along my neck, sending warmth down my spine. “Please come,” she said. “I’ll get you a kite. Everyone loves a kite.”
At Mission Beach, Casey bought me a funnel cake and gave me quarters to play old-timey arcade games. We went out on the pier and my mother got a kite with a plastic handle. She started it in the wind before handing it to me. It shifted up and dropped before it got caught beneath the pier. I left it dangling in the surf. On the boardwalk, we waited in line for the roller coaster. Casey slipped his hand in my mother’s back pocket. She giggled and leaned into him. We rode the roller coaster before the sunset. I sat behind them, marveling at the way they both jerked a little too much and a little too late as the coaster curved.
* * *
—
That Sunday my mother slept until the evening. While she was in bed, I read a mystery paperback on the living room floor. Children were science experiments gone wrong. They had broken wings and X-ray vision. Their parents were mad researchers. I finished the book just before the room faded from dusk to night in several slow minutes. I tried waking up my mother then, first by shaking her and then with something to eat. On the gas stove, I warmed flour tortillas, covered them with butter and sugar, and brought them to her side. She let out a few wet snores, turning herself over and away from me. I ate the tortillas myself before crawling beside her. When she woke up later, I asked what was wrong.
“Everything stays the same,” she said. “Nothing changes. It makes me feel like I’m dead.”
“You’re just sad today, Mama. You’ll feel better tomorrow.” I hugged her and after a long silence, I said, “Tell me a story?”
“About what, Neva? You know all my stories.”
“How about me? What was it like when I was born?”
My mother moaned and adjusted herself. I reached for her hand, weaving her slender fingers, limp as lace, into mine. “It was snowing. I was so tired and Grandma was so tired. They cut you out of me because you wouldn’t come fo
r hours.” She took our hands, moving them beneath the blankets and sheets, halting at her cesarean scar. “Here. This is where you came from. You cried and cried. The doctors said you cried so much you’d never need to cry again. They were right. You never cry, Neva. You’re always tough.” She paused a moment, and we both were quiet.
“Now you,” she said in a tone of rising hopefulness. “You tell me a story.”
I had no idea what to say. All my stories were her stories. I considered the things I knew that I wanted her to know, too. Like how much I hated California, how little I knew or liked Casey. But instead, I told her this: “Did you know the palm trees in our yard and all over this neighborhood, they aren’t from San Diego? They aren’t even from California. We learned about it in school. They don’t belong here. Someone just thought they looked pretty.”
“No,” my mother said. “I didn’t know that.” She then stopped talking and fell asleep. I would have stayed there with her forever if not for the knock on our door an hour later when Casey stopped by, inviting us to dinner.
When I told my grandmother about my mother’s new boyfriend and her staying in bed until nighttime, she wanted us home immediately. She called my mother every day to talk sense into her. It wasn’t good for me, she claimed. I needed structure and family. She said my mother should attend Mass regularly, visit confession. When my mother stopped taking her calls, my grandmother sent letters addressed to Desiree Leticia in elegant, shaky script. Though she didn’t have the money for a flight and she was too old to drive any further west, my grandmother made sure we felt her presence. In one of her letters, she begged my mother to remember her father. “He let the world beat him down, break him,” she wrote. “He allowed the world to fill up on his sadness.”
* * *
—
A week before Christmas, Casey and my mother ate sunflower seeds and passed a bottle of whiskey between them on the beach. They took long swallows, wilting into one another, sloppy and euphoric. We were near the pier, the underside of its wooden belly bleached. Surfers in bodysuits ran beneath the stilts, their boards in hand. Faded blue tattoos winked across the backs of old men with salty hair. The ocean’s howl was wild.
“Neva,” Casey said. “It means snow, right? In Latin or something?”
I shrugged, slipping my hand beneath the cool sand.
“Sure does,” said my mother. “Her grandma picked it out. It was blizzarding when Neva was born. If we lived here, maybe we would’ve named her Sunshine or Sunny.” My mother giggled, a seed flying from her mouth.
“I like it,” Casey said. “It’s different. You like the beach, Neva?”
I told him the beach was all right.
“That’s not true,” my mother blurted out. “You love the beach.” She turned to Casey. “The first time we came here I couldn’t pry her away from the water. She kept splashing and screaming when the waves hit her little toes.”
Casey laughed. “How about for Christmas Eve we drive up the coast? There’s a beachfront motel in Solana. A buddy of mine can get us a deal on a boat. I figure since you have no family here and my folks are in Florida we could go together.”
My mother fell into him, landing a kiss mostly on his mouth. “Sounds perfect, baby.”
Casey nudged me with his shoulder. “Come on, chica. It’s my treat.”
I rose from our beach blanket and headed toward the water.
“Be careful,” I heard my mother shout. “It’ll be freezing.”
There was no line between ocean and sky. White gulls appeared black in the clouds’ shadows. I unzipped my jacket and rolled my jeans to my knees. Though the sand was uneven and fine and the water dim, I walked ahead until my legs were soaked. It only burned a moment before my skin went numb. In school we learned the entire southwest desert was once underwater. Everywhere was a shallow sea. My mother sometimes told me she felt like she was drowning. She had dreams of waking up dead, dreams of sleeping forever. But what about me? I asked more than once, and she always said I was lucky. Lucky because I knew how to swim. As I moved through the waves, my mother and Casey were still on the shore, their legs entangled like four pale links in the same gate. One of the surfers bobbed past me, shouting for me to head back.
At the beach blanket, I stood above my mother and Casey. The sun had come out, my shadow long over their faces. “You were right, Mama,” I said. “It’s freezing out there.”
* * *
—
“It will be a great Christmas,” my mother said as she packed four bags for our one-night stay in Solana Beach. “Probably the best Christmas we’ve ever had.” She stood at her closet, selecting summer dresses for the dead of winter. Wedge heels, corked sandals, and floppy sunhats. I lay across her bedspread, wondering at the way her back disappeared into darkness as she pushed forward into her clothes. She turned around with an armful of bathing suits. She asked me to choose one. I pointed to a bikini with red polka dots. My mother changed before me, sliding her panties down her legs beneath her T-shirt. She pulled on the suit bottoms, secured the top’s strings, and sheepishly turned to face me, her left arm over her stomach.
“This one?” she asked. “It doesn’t make me look fat?”
“Of course not, Mama.”
Though her figure was tight and trim, a holdover from her years as a dancer, in nature there were no forgiving club lights. There was only the sun and its unrelenting shine. My mother reminded me of this as she twirled, all black hair and swinging arms. “What about my scar?”
“I’ve seen it a thousand times.”
“But Casey hasn’t. I never let him see it in the light.”
“Who cares?” I suggested.
My mother had me pick another bathing suit. In the end, she went with a one-piece, all white with scooped-out hips. She then disappeared once more into her closet. She reemerged with a small wooden box. She set it before me, urging me to open it. I unlatched the brass clasp delicately, but my mother laughed, taking my hands in hers. “No need to be gentle, baby. It’s not the box that’s special.” Inside was a charm bracelet with only three charms. A baby rattle, a chicken, a locket. My mother spun the bracelet around my wrist, stopping at the locket.
“When you were two, you came down with this bad fever,” she said. “You were so hot that I could barely touch you.” My mother opened the locket, revealing two tufts of dark hair. “Grandma said you’d die if we didn’t bring it down. I gave you cold baths. You didn’t cry at all. You just sat in the tub shivering. I prayed all night and in the morning, just like that, you were better. Calm and smiling and the right temperature. So you know what I did?”
“No,” I said, “I can’t remember.”
My mother kissed my head. “I cut off a piece of your hair. Fever hair, I called it. I put it in this locket with a piece of my own hair. I don’t know why, but it makes me happy to have us together like that.”
I felt the weight of the bracelet on my wrist. I thought of how strange it would be to touch someone so hot with fever you could barely hold them. I had never felt someone like that, and I wondered if I ever would.
* * *
—
That night, TV static like snow played in my mind as I moved between sleeplessness and dreams. I imagined laughter, the kind you hear walking alongside playgrounds with small children making use of every object, a stick to the fence, a foot to the ear, their telephone call home. I saw lush flowers, lemon and orange trees, and volcanic rock gardens that were beautiful instead of strange to me at Christmastime. I pictured Casey driving us to Solana Beach, whizzing past lurching shorelines and multimillion-dollar glass houses. I felt the salty mist of La Jolla’s cliffs and heard the enormous barking seals. I thought of my mother. I thought of napping beside her in a large motel bed beneath windows open to the sea.
But Casey didn’t come for us, and while I wasn’t surprised, my mothe
r went through stages of disbelief. She sat very still in our kitchen, drinking what little vodka she found in the freezer. Maybe he was sick? Maybe there was an accident? Maybe he needed help? She smoked a pack of Marlboro Lights without bothering to open the windows. A single line emerged between her eyebrows, difficult to read beneath the resting smoke. When she eventually realized he wasn’t coming, she called him every name in the book, chaining together the insults like an endless train of cocksuckers and motherfuckers and assholes. “He’s a bad guy,” she said firmly with her final cigarette between two fingers, resting against her temple. “Just another piece of shit.”
I tried to stop her as she barreled down the cement steps, heading toward the front house. She was going to destroy something, herself or otherwise. I watched in awe as she slipped into rage as easily as she had slipped into her bathing suit. She pounded with her fists on his windows and tossed rocks at his mailbox. She threw mud across his door. When she finished, her fingernails broken and lined with dirt, there wasn’t much to do but sit on the stoop and watch as one by one Christmas lights flickered along our block. After some time, my mother began to cry, quietly at first until she heaved uncontrollably, her back to me, her shoulder blades quivering in their jagged way. I kneeled down to her, holding her face to mine with both hands. We were matted together in her tears.
“Will you nap with me, baby?” she asked.
Sabrina & Corina Page 16