Crux Page 6
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My mother organized extravagant fiestas on our birthdays, with Astro Jumps, mariachis, piñatas, balloons, ponies, a Disney princess or clown, a tiered cake and a tower of presents. She invited all of the Guerreros, and dozens of our paternal cousins crowded the backyard. Because my sister and I were jealous of each other, we had joint parties each year—one in March and one in September—double the presents. Papi chain-smoked in a solitary corner of the backyard.
My sister and I were opposites. She was a quiet brunette; I was a bubbly blonde. She had a low, hoarse voice; mine was high-pitched and squeaky. She was shy and affectionate, still sleeping with our mother for many years; I had become restless and independent. My sister wore cotton pants and T-shirts; I preferred frilly dresses. We were best friends.
Together, we entered the cage of the dying cockatiels. The blushing creatures slapped our faces with their wings. We begged our mother to domesticate one. What was the point of having so many birds if we couldn’t touch them? She couldn’t bear the thought of taking a newborn from its mother, so she purchased an incubator, stole some freshly laid eggs and warmed them. Out came hideous, pink little monsters covered with spines and purple bulges in place of eyes. Then the bulges cracked open and became eyes and their spines sprouted yellow feathers. My mother gave all of them away except for one. We fed it formula with a syringe, watching its see-through veiny stomach inflate like a balloon. I remember the feel of its tiny body in the palm of my hand, warm as a cupcake straight out of the oven.
The bird grew until it could sit atop our heads and fly around the room. My father arose from slumber to converse with the creature. He named it Piojito, meaning “louse,” because it perched on our heads. Piojito joined us at the dinner table, a talkative little brother depositing feces in our hair. A few years later, he disappeared. Our muchacha said she had left the back door open while sweeping. We had never clipped Piojito’s wings—he had flown away. My mother taped a hundred flyers around the city featuring Piojito’s color photograph and offering a $100 reward for his return. Our phone rang. I answered our see-through Conair phone on the kitchen wall.
Hello? I said in my best American accent, twirling the yellow cord with my fingers.
I have your bird, a man said.
You do? I was ecstatic. I could actually hear a little bird squeaking. It was Piojito! Yes. But listen carefully. If I don’t get five hundred dollars by Thursday, I’m going to kill your bird, he said. Do you hear me? I need—wait, hold on a second. I heard things being moved around, the cage jostling, Piojito screeching. Suddenly: a little boy’s innocent voice. Hello? he said softly. You know, I really don’t think you’re going to get your bird back. I either fainted or hung up. My memory goes black there. We never saw Piojito again.
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Amused by my perpetual inquiries about the afterlife, one of our muchachas told us, in detail, how el Diablo was going to torture us in el Infierno with fire and metal contraptions. Are you sure we’re going to Hell? Why can’t we go to Heaven? I asked anxiously. Because, she said. You’re evil girls. Her prophecies induced nightmares and hallucinations for me and my sister. One night, we observed the Devil’s eyes at the exact same time and place, emerald green, floating outside our bedroom window in the night. Michelle also saw two ghosts: the shadow of a man moving around her room, disappearing into the wardrobe, and a weeping woman in a white dress I can only assume was La Llorona, a legendary Mexican woman who drowned her children to spite her indifferent husband.
The storytelling muchacha, like so many others, was fired. One of her successors was a Nicaraguan girl with an appetite for mourning doves. My sister and I were playing outside one afternoon when she emerged from the house with an empty shoebox. She tiptoed up to a mourning dove perched on our chain-link fence. The muchacha brought the box down onto the dove, ramming it through metal spikes on the fence rim. The gored bird flapped its wings, trying to escape, then perished in a puddle of blood. Traumatized, Michelle and I refused to eat her “chicken soup.”
The only muchacha we ever loved, a Mexican girl named Paola, took us to the movies with her boyfriend, bought us milk shakes and paid for a few shots of the four of us in a photo booth. She had a mole on her chin with long black hairs sprouting from it. She quit to go to community college; on her last day with us, she cut the hairs from her mole and put them in a glass vial, which she gave us as a parting gift.
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I started kindergarten at a private Episcopalian school. In Montessori, I had been permitted to speak Spanish. In the car on the way to this new English-only institution, Mami taught me the phrase “I do not understand.”
The teacher, a pale lady with auburn hair, made us perform what I perceived as stupid, purposeless tasks, such as cutting squares from paper. I took advantage and said, “I do not understand.” The teacher demonstrated. “I do not understand,” I lied again. I hated school. We had to sit for hours on stiff chairs, wasting our bodies, wasting our lives. I wanted to be at home, playing with my sister, creating worlds with our minds. But then the teachers taught us to read and write long sentences. I learned quickly, thanks to my practice at home. I traced each letter of the alphabet with my pencil in neat, clear curves and angles, randomly alternating between capital and lowercase letters, taking pleasure in playing with the shapes. Suddenly, school became a utopia of Scholastic book fairs. I came with cash crumpled in my pockets, buying books with animal protagonists: The Rainbow Fish, Stellaluna, The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, Treasury of Fairy Tales.
The stories were vivid escapes, better than moving pictures, as I had intuited when I first eyed the twisting symbols of bookshelf tomes. Literary worlds swelled beyond the channel of their conveyance, yielding full-body 3-D experiences rather than strictly visual-auditory ones, due to the high-voltage power of strings of text connecting with my brain. Writing became a godlike experience. When Mami bought me a blank book as a gift, I scribbled a story about a ladybug who falls in love with a worm. I felt I was conjuring a literal world with my markers. Drugged with power, I killed the worm I had engendered. I simply made him drop dead. I planned to bring him back to life as a butterfly—his coffin was in fact a chrysalis—so he could fly through the skies with his soul mate. Meanwhile, the heartbroken ladybug embarked on a search for “a beautiful land.” I ran out of pages. My heart plummeted into my stomach. I hadn’t yet brought back the ladybug’s lover. I had killed him. I had actually killed him. The ladybug would be alone forever. I burst into tears. My mother offered to glue additional pages into my book, but they were the wrong color, I kept sobbing. I guess I found a way to cope: I invented a false memory. For years, I recalled that story as one in which I did, in fact, resurrect the worm. Fact-checking, I asked my mother for the book. As I flipped to the last page, I remembered the despair I felt upon realizing I had ruined everything. The worm would be dead forever.
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Most of my roughly twenty classmates were Mexican-American. We all wore uniforms: white button-up shirts, navy blue sweaters, and plaid gray skirts (for the girls) or gray pants (for the boys). But I stood out as one of only two or three blondes. I made no effort to befriend anyone; I was interested only in my sister. I could be completely myself with Michelle, I could overflow with my own sloppy being, make weird faces and noises. With my classmates my body felt out of tune; I had to constantly modify my gestures, my tone, even my emotions—it was taxing. When my sister started school, I was excited: finally we could play together at recess. To our dismay, as soon as the teachers noticed our friendship, they prohibited us from speaking to each other, saying we had to learn to socialize with everyone. My sister sat alone, despondent. I joined my classmates, feeling bound by the rules.
Every evening after work, my mother helped us with our homework, smelling of perfume, brown irises bright.
Unlike my questions about death, my academic questions inspired her, especially the ones related to math and science, the subjects I found most difficult. I volunteered for the class spelling bee, and my mother went through the long packet of word lists with me again and again, until she was falling asleep at the kitchen table. I won first place. To ensure our integration, our teachers prohibited speaking Spanish. If you were caught, you had to write I will not speak Spanish a hundred times in detention. Within a couple of years, after mastering English, I would renounce my native language, associating it with delinquency. I was desperate to impress my teachers and give Mami pride and happiness. I rose to the top of my class. Until I moved to Mexico at age twenty-two, I would not be able to speak Spanish beyond a child’s capacity.
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The neighbor on the east side of our house, Jenny, was a grandmotherly English teacher with glasses and a cotton ball of yellow hair, who became our informal guardian. Jenny taught us English words we didn’t know (menace, mischief, unruly), corrected our pronunciation and introduced us to American snacks: apple slices with peanut butter, Oreo cookies dipped in milk. We jumped from our elevated backyard into hers, tiptoeing so as not to wake her villainous, hen-devouring Rottweiler, Kiki. Jenny tried to make us love Kiki, turning the pages of a mostly wordless picture book called Good Dog, Carl about a friendly Rottweiler. We loved Carl but continued to fear Kiki. A massive yellow garden spider lived on a large web in Jenny’s front yard, and when we expressed our disgust she told us the spider was good. She brought us the David Kirk children’s books Miss Spider’s Tea Party and Miss Spider’s New Car, about a very polite spider. She always gave us books on our birthdays, signing them by drawing a little padlock and heart: Lockhart. I tore off the wrapping paper and pressed the pages against my face, ravenous for the smell of ink on metamorphosed trees. Michelle sketched pictures inspired by the images in the books—the dawn of her painting career. Whenever Jenny grew tired of us, she tried to make us sleep, tucking us into water beds we found so exciting we couldn’t close our eyes.
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The only signs of Papi’s continued existence were his smells and occasional sounds: howling, yawning, snorting, phlegm-hacking. Sometimes, I heard his door open, his footsteps down his dark hallway, the tinkle of urine in the toilet. It caused a mixture of contradictory emotions: comfort that he was alive, fear that he would put some insect on my body, sadness that he no longer seemed to love me, confusion as to why.
One day, feeling brave, I wandered down the hallway to the bathroom as he urinated. I don’t remember my exact intention, only that I had a question. I saw him standing over the toilet. Papi, I said. He jerked his head around. A volcanic eruption occurred in his eyes. He zipped up his pants. I ran away, panicked. He pursued me, roaring in Spanish, accusing me of spying on his nudity, of being a pervert. He unbuckled his leather cinturón, slithered it off. I cowered in a corner, crying. He raised his belt up in one hand. He was going to whip me. Suddenly his irises became a sickly yellow, like old chemicals in test tubes. An unbearable sadness undulated in his eyes, in his lips. He stopped himself and disappeared into his room.
I was six when Mami finally asked Papi to leave. Too many strange, frightening things were happening to us, and she believed he was to blame. Two of her cars, a Pontiac and its successor, a Toyota 4Runner, had been stolen from the driveway. One was found on a nearby horse trail, stripped of everything except a single, crumpled photograph of me and my little sister in frilly pink dresses. The photograph had been burned around the edges.
Strangers were following us. One evening at the mall, my mother started zigzagging me and my sister in pointless directions. Then she dragged us to the parking lot. She told us to get into the car—quickly. Métanse al carro. Somebody has been following us since we arrived at the mall. We jumped into her car. We sped through the streets, making unnecessary turns and U-turns. My sister and I looked over our shoulders. A dark male figure was driving the pursuing vehicle. I can’t recall any of his features except that we could see his teeth—he was either grimacing or smiling at us. Either way, it felt sinister. My mother pulled into the driveway of a house on a busy street to imply that she lived there. Our stalker slowed, as if to memorize the address, then sped off. You got him good, Mami! we cried.
One morning at the pharmacy, my sister and I were picking out stickers for our sticker books while Mami purchased essentials in another aisle. Absorbed by a strip of sparkly unicorns, I didn’t notice Michelle disappear from my side. When I looked up, a white-haired old lady was dragging my sister down the aisle toward the exit. Michelle was staring back at me with a startled look. I ran up to her and yanked her away from the stranger, who abruptly exited. ¿Qué hacías con esa vieja? I asked. My sister said the lady had claimed she had toys in her car.
My mother concluded that my father—who had been unemployed for years—owed somebody drug or gambling money. She asked him to leave. She had tolerated his unhappy presence for years because she loved him; she believed he was a sick man, not a flawed one. She believed he would get better. But her patience had limits. She no longer felt we were safe. Papi moved into her condominium with the wine-colored carpet, which she had been renting out for additional income. She told him he could stay in it for free.
Our birthday fiestas deflated in size and grandiosity. My mother no longer felt comfortable inviting our Guerrero cousins to the house, and she had no family of her own in San Diego. ¿Dónde está Papi? I asked repeatedly.
He’s in the condominium, she replied.
¿Por qué?
Porque sí.
The tautology was confounding, but I could not find a way around my mother’s circular logic. My why questions always exasperated her. Why is the sky blue? Why does two plus two equal four? Why does everything die? Because. Because. Because. She accepted the world the way it was, nonsensical, confusing. Her complacency with the world’s mysteries was the most bewildering mystery of all.
The unknown tugged at me like the gravity in a black hole. Why was Papi gone? What had made him so sad? I needed explanations. My mother would not give them.
I have a vivid memory from what I believe was this time. The succulent in my heart was back, it was growing, pulsating, writhing—alive. I had to move, move, move, move, move, move, move. I paced in socks, hyperventilating, vision blurred by tears. The leaves kept lengthening, wriggling, chomping like fanged worms, the movement of my limbs wasn’t restraining them, I couldn’t breathe, it hurt so bad, I walked into the kitchen, grasped the wooden handle of a steak knife and pressed the tip to my heart. Death. I wanted it. I would send myself to Heaven, see if it was a real place. This world was ugly, anywhere was better than here. My mother watched me from the sink. I remember the watery sight of her through my weeping. She had no fear in her face. She knew what I didn’t know: I wasn’t going to hurt myself. I shouted something. I can’t recall the words, only the scraping in my throat. She didn’t flinch. She just held my gaze. The pain broke inside me like a wave. I cried from the relief.
She did what she could to comfort us. She revived our backyard garden. She cultivated tall shrubs of dahlias and zinnias, which she plucked for her patients, trimming off their leaves and flicking off the greenhoppers. Kneeling beside her, we scattered the papery seeds of strawberries, frijoles and various flowers with our fists. Green strings sprouted from the earth, erupting into pods and leaves, bursting into soft arrays of fragrant petals or edible, brightly colored fruit.
Seven oak trees ringed our backyard, casting shadows with their dark green leaves. Mami purchased buckets of paint, dipped her brush into their bright colors and rushed from tree to tree. She gave the trees toothy, full-lipped grins and sparkling eyeballs. Her pale skin gleamed with sweat; wisps of her curly golden hair stuck to her forehead. She was smiling at the trees as she gave them life, and thus seemed to be instructing them: Like this, see?
When she finished, she fell to her knees beside her buckets of paints. We loved those living trees.
She took us to Home Depot to buy praying-mantis eggs and live ladybugs for our jardín. Somehow, the bucket of ladybugs came open in the car. A mariquita tickled my shoulder. I saw one on my sister’s cheek. Then they were everywhere: crawling, flying, floating. The car filled with them, like winged droplets of blood. At first, we were frightened, and hurried to roll down the windows. But then Michelle started cackling. It was contagious. We rolled the windows back up, laughing like crazy in that tornado of ladybugs. My mother kept driving.
We forgot the praying-mantis eggs inside the house. They hatched, crawling up and down our walls for many days. We found the critters in our cupboards, in our clothes, in our comforters: countless guardians in Christian pose.
The insects brought our fracturing reality into focus. They crystallized chaos into something we could grasp. The insects portended not death or decay, but protection—an army against villains and garden pests. Papi had taught me how to dissolve the fabric of reality with my mind. From Mami and Michelle, I was learning the alchemy of interpretation. We could make our anguish luminous.
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The separation reinvigorated Papi. He felt he had done something good for once: he had freed us of his presence. With a loan from my mother, he launched a Mexican drive-through restaurant called Saguaro’s. He hired an artist for the logo: a humanoid saguaro cactus, smiling in a sombrero. The saguaro is the tallest cactus in the world, growing to over seventy feet high and living as long as a hundred and fifty years. In late spring, its long, spiky limbs sprout enormous, mobile white flowers with yellow tongues. The flowers unfurl for the moon and curl closed in the afternoon. Their nectar feeds bees, bats, doves. My father had always liked the saguaro: how it thrived in the most austere environments, providing sustenance to more sensitive life-forms.