Caramelo (36 page)

It only gets worse at the burial. When the time comes to pour dirt on top of the coffin, the Grandmother shrieks as if they’d put a pin through her heart. Then she does what is expected of every good Mexican widow since the time of the Olmecs. She tries to throw herself into the open grave.

—Narcisooooooo!!!

All three of her sons and several husky neighbors have to hold her back. How did the Grandmother become so strong? There’s a commotion of huddled bodies, shouts, yelps, screeches, and muffled sobs, and then I can’t see.

—Narcisooooooo!!!

Please. Too terrible. The Grandmother collapses into a trembling heap of black garments, and this bundle is tenderly lifted and loaded into a car.

—Narcisooooooo!!! the Grandmother hiccups as she is led away. The last syllable stretched out long and painful. Narcisooooooo, Narcisooooooo!!! The “o” of a train whistle. The longing in a coyote’s howl.

Maybe she’s seeing into the future. Maybe she can foresee selling the house on Destiny Street, packing up her life, and starting a new life up north
en el otro lado
, the other side.

To tell the truth, the Grandmother didn’t realize how much she loved
her husband until there was no husband left to love. The smell of Narciso haunts her, his strange tang of sweet tobacco and iodine. She opens all the windows, but can’t get the smell out of the house. —Don’t you smell it? You don’t? A smell that makes you sad, like the ocean.

Days later, when everyone who has tried to help has gotten out of the way and events have settled to a startling solitude, the Grandmother decides.

—The house on Destiny Street must be sold, she says, surprising everyone, especially herself. —There is no changing my mind.

The Grandmother decides everything, same as always.

—And why do I need such a big house in the center of such a noisy neighborhood? It was different when my children were children. But you have no idea how Mexico City has changed. Why, our old neighborhood La Villa is no longer La Villa anymore! It’s flooded with a different category of people these days. I’m not lying. It’s not safe for a woman alone, and with my only daughter abandoning me to be a burden on her daughter, do you think she’d invite me? Of course, I wouldn’t think of imposing on her even if she did, I’m not that kind of woman. I’ve always been independent. Always, always, always. Till the day I die my children will know I never imposed on any of them. But my sons, after all, are sons. And with the three of them up in the United States, what else can I do but suffer one more calamity and move myself up there to be near my grandchildren. It’s a sacrifice, but what’s life if not sacrifices for our children’s sake?

And so that’s how it is that Aunty Light-Skin is summoned back to Mexico City to help the Grandmother say good-bye to the past. And that’s how it is we go back, after the Grandfather’s burial, recruited as involuntary volunteers to help move the Grandmother up north. At least the half of the family still young enough to have to obey Father. The older ones have perfect excuses; summer jobs, graduate school, summer classes. Father, Mother, Toto, Lolo, Memo, and me are stuck with her. That’s how it is we lose another summer vacation and head one last time to the house on Destiny Street.

By the time we arrive, the house has already been sold to the family who rents the downstairs portion, the apartments where Aunty and Antonieta Araceli once lived. The rooms closest to the street, where we always stayed, will be rented to strangers. All that’s left is for the Grandmother to pack up her things and come up north with us to Chicago. She
plans to buy a house in the States with the money from the Destiny Street house and its furnishings.

The Grandmother insists on overseeing every little thing, and that’s why everything takes twice as long. Father has to make sure she is given something to keep her busy, and now she is sorting through the walnut-wood armoire, the doors standing open exhaling a stale breath of soft apples. She pauses at her husband’s favorite flannel robe, holds it up to her face, and inhales. The smell of Narciso, of tobacco and iodine, still in the cloth. She had avoided sorting through his clothes. And now here she is, holding her husband’s ratty old robe to her nose and relishing the smell of Narciso. A pain squeezes her heart.

What does she miss most? She is ashamed to say—laundry. She misses his socks swirling in the wash, his darks mixed with her florals, his clean undershirts plucked stiff from the clothesline, folding his trousers, steam-ironing a shirt, the arrow of the iron moving across a seam, a dart, the firm pressure along the collar, and the tricky shoulder. Here, this is how. That silly girl! Leave my husband’s things. Those I’ll iron myself. Cursing all the while about how much work it was to iron undershirts and underpants, men’s shirts with their troublesome darts and buttons and stitching, but she did them all the same. The complaining that was a kind of bragging. Scrub out the sweat stains—by hand!—with a bar of brown soap and the knuckles stropped raw, scrub with lots of suds, like this. Put the shirts to the nose before soaking them in the outdoor sink with the ridged bottom, the smell of you like no one else. The smell of you, your heat I roll toward in my sleep, your wide back, your downy bottom, the curled legs, the soft, fat feet I embrace with my feet. Your man shirts puffed with air, your trousers hooked on the doorknob, your balled socks shaken out of the sheets, a tie lying on the floor, a robe draped behind a door, a pajama top slouched on a chair. I’ll be right back, they said. I’ll be right back. I’ll be … right … back.

And she misses sleeping with somebody. The falling asleep with and waking up next to a warm someone.

—Abrázame
, he’d demand when she came to bed. Hug me. When she did wrap her arms around her husband, his fleshy back, his tidy hipbones, the furry buttocks tucked against her belly, the bandaged chest, his wound with its smell of iodine and stale cookies, this is when he would sandwich her plump feet with his plump feet, warm and soft as
tamales
.

The talk in the night, that luxurious little talk about nothing, about everything before falling asleep: —And then what happened?

—And then I said to the butcher, this doesn’t look like beef, this looks like dog cutlets if you ask me …

—You’re kidding!

—No, that’s what I said …

How sometimes he fell asleep with her talking. The heat of his body, furious little furnace. The softness of his belly, soft swirl of hair that began in the belly button and ended below in that vortex of his sex. All this was hard to put into language. It took a while for the mind to catch up with the body, which already and always remembered.

Everyone complains about marriage, but no one remembers to praise its wonderful extravagances, like sleeping next to a warm body, like sandwiching one’s feet with somebody else’s feet. To talk at night and share what has happened in a day. To put some order to one’s thoughts. How could she not help but think—happiness.

—Father says I’m to come and help you, I say, entering the room and startling the Grandmother from her thinking.

—What? No, I’ll do it myself. You’ll only make more work for me. Run along, I don’t need you.

All over the floor and spilling out of the walnut-wood armoire is a tangled mess of junk impossible not to want to touch. The open doors let out the same smell I remember from when I was little. Old, sweet, and rotten, like things you buy at Maxwell Street.

In a shoe box full of the Grandfather’s things, a photograph of a young man. A brown sepia-colored photo pasted on thick cardboard. I recognize the dark eyes. It’s the Grandfather when he was young! Grandfather handsome in a fancy striped suit, Grandfather sitting on a caned bentwood settee, his body leaning to the side like a clock at ten to six. Somebody’s cut around him so that only the Little Grandfather exists. The person whose shoulder he’s leaning on is gone.

—Grandmother, who was cut out of this picture?

The Grandmother snatches the photo from my hand. —Shut the door when you leave, Celaya. I won’t be needing your help anymore today.

The key double-clicks behind me, and the springs from the bed let out a loud complaint.

Behind a drawer of stockings, rolled in a broomstick handle, wrapped in an old pillowcase with holes, the
caramelo rebozo
, the white no longer white but ivory from age, the unfinished
rapacejo
tangled and broken. The Grandmother snaps open the
caramelo rebozo
. It gives a soft flap like wings as it falls open. The candy-colored cloth unfurling like a flag—no, like a hypnotist’s spiral. And if this were an old movie, it would be right to insert in this scene just such a hypnotist’s spiral circling and circling to get across the idea of going into the past. The past,
el pasado. El porvenir
, the days to come. All swirling together like the stripes of a
chuchuluco …

The Grandmother unfolds it to its full width across the bed. How nice it looks spread out, like a long mane of hair. She plays at braiding and unbraiding the unfinished strands, pulling them straight with her fingers and then smoothing them smooth. It calms her, especially when she’s nervous, the way some people braid and unbraid their own hair without realizing they’re doing it. With an old toothbrush, she brushes the fringe. The Grandmother hums bits of songs she doesn’t know she is humming while she works, carefully unworking the kinks and knots, finally taking a comb and nail scissors to snip off the ragged ends, holding the swag of cloth in her arms and sniffing its scent. Good thing she thought to burn dried rosemary to keep it smelling sweet all these years.

When the Grandmother had slept in the pantry of Regina Reyes’ kitchen, she’d tied her wages in a knot in one end of this
rebozo
. With it she had blown her nose, wiped the sleep from her face, muffled her sobs, and hiccuped hot, syrupy tears. And once with a certain shameless pharmacist named Jesús, she had even used it as a weapon. All this she remembers, and the cloth remembers as well.

The Grandmother forgets about all the work waiting but simply unfolds the
caramelo rebozo
and places it around her shoulders. The body remembers the silky weight. The diamond patterns, the figure eights, the tight basket weave of strands, the fine sheen to the cloth, the careful way the
caramelo rebozo
was dyed in candy stripes, all this she considers before rolling up the shawl again, wrapping it in the old pillowcase, and locking it back in the walnut-wood armoire, the very same armoire where Regina Reyes had hid Santos Piedrasanta’s wooden button until her death, when someone tossed it out as easily as Santos had knocked out her tooth. As easily today as someone tossing out a mottled-brown picture of a young man in a striped suit leaning into a ghost.

54.

Exquisite Tamales

            —
S
ister, please, I can’t help it Mother wanted me to settle all this.
Pobrecita
. You know how she depends on me. Father says this as he ties another box shut with twine.

The Grandmother, Memo, and Lolo have been gone all morning running errands, and the house is finally quiet. Because the dining room is almost empty, Father’s voice has a strange tinny echo. The big blond dining room table and heavy chairs were sold and carted away before we even got here. The walls are empty. All the Grandmother’s fancy dishes and glassware are gone too. There’s nothing left in the room except the chrome chandelier, a beat-up end table, and some wooden folding chairs.

—And what am I? Painted? Don’t I count for something around here? Aunty Light-Skin says, reappearing from the bedroom with another armload of linen. —I made sacrifices to be here too, but do you think she ever says thank you? I don’t know why I even bother. I should’ve taken off to Veracruz with Zoila and Toto. Zoila has the right idea.

—Don’t be like that. The only reason Zoila agreed to come was because I promised her a vacation. But you and I, we’re blood. Mother expects us here. Don’t take the things she says so hard. And, if it makes you feel any better, I appreciate you. I couldn’t close up this house without you, little sister. Too many—Lala, bring me a knife or scissors—too many memories.

—It’s just that you don’t know. No sooner do I step in the courtyard than I remember why I left. She’s terrible. She won’t throw anything away. Look at these old sheets. Mended over and over; they look like Frankenstein. But what do you think? I found brand-new sheets in the
closet! I swear to you! Brand-new. Still wrapped in their store packaging! What’s she saving them for? Her funeral? Look, I try to help, and when I do, she snaps at me, “This is
my
house, not yours!” Remember those stories Father used to tell us about how his mother hoarded things? Well, that’s the disease Mother’s got. You’re not going to believe this, but I found a slice of birthday cake in the freezer that she’d been saving since your last party, the year the ceiling fell down, I’m not lying. Antonieta Araceli was thirteen then, so that means … seven years ago! What a barbarity!

—Ay, qué mamá
, Father says, shaking his head and laughing. 
—Pobrecita
.

—Don’t start. There’s nothing
pobre
about her.

—
Y
ou’re just like your father. He wants everything he sees, the Grandmother says, scolding me as we dodge, shove, and stumble through the
Zócalo
crowds.

—It’s because it’s been a long time, I explain.

To tell the truth, every trip back it’s like this, whether I’ve been away a long time or short.

What I want is a balloon. The Mexican kind herded in front of plazas or in the parks. Balloons the way I remember them, wearing a paper hat, balloons painted with pretty swirls, or with a clown face. The balloon vendor whistling his shrill balloon-vendor’s whistle. The sound of that whistle calling kids outdoors like the Pied Piper.

—Really, Celaya, don’t you think you’re too old for a balloon? Look at yourself. You’ve got the body of a man and the mind of a child. I bet you’re taller than your father. How tall are you? How much do you weigh?