Let Their Spirits Dance (10 page)

The children constructed a mural of the Vietnam Wall and taped it to the brick wall just outside the classroom door. A long strip of butcher paper is colored entirely with black crayon, a background for names that are etched in with a popsicle stick. The first name on the wall is Jesse A. Ramirez.

I stare at the medals over and over again from wherever I am in the classroom. Houdini escaping death, the voices my mother heard, El Santo Niño's solemn face staring at me from between the flickering veladoras, Don Florencío's prophecy,
your brother will come back in a new form
, now this. I'm pinned under the medals, wearing them when I don't want to, caring all over again about something I couldn't do anything about.

The children come into class.
Oooo…Ah! Look at Jesse's medals. How many did he kill, Mrs. Alvarez? POW, POW
! Juan, Andy, and Brandon are pointing imaginary guns at one another. “Did you know the AK-47s were better than the M-16s?” That's Brandon talking. His dad is a know-it-all, and they talk about everything.

“My uncle went to Vietnam, and my mom says he's crazy,” Julissa says.

“Did you see anything, Li Ann?” Charlotte asks. “Anything?”

“She didn't see anything,” Lorena says, putting one arm over Li Ann. “She was born in America. Her mother, her grandmother saw it all.”

Li Ann's mother Huong (her name means perfume in Vietnamese), walks in behind the children, bringing in a medal given to her uncle by the South Vietnamese Army. She's not too much taller than the children. My arms tingle like a draft of cold air just hit me. I feel my body go rigid and force myself to walk up to her, smiling, putting out my hand to touch her shoulder. I wonder if she looks like the woman Jesse knew in Vietnam. I want to ask her if her family knew any American soldiers in
Vietnam. As soon as I think about asking her, I change my mind and don't say a word.

“That why my family come here,” she tells me. “Communist kill. Dey kill if you don' do what dey say. My uncle was killed fighting like Jesse.” There are tears in her eyes, but she's smiling. I know it's the Asian face masking tragedy.

“Come share with us,” I tell her, even though I don't feel so bad that her uncle died. She's one of the ones my brother fought to protect, and where did that get him? I know her answer will be no. She shyly hands me her uncle's medal so I can display it with Jesse's medals. The next day she sends us a Vietnamese dessert that reminds me of arroz con leche, except there's no brown sugar in it. She explains it is simmered in coconut milk.

I start a private dialogue with the medals while the children settle into their desks.

It's Ray's fault I'm like this, Jesse, the son-of-a-bitch took everything I had and ran with it as long and as hard as he could, then threw it all in the garbage. Maybe I turned to him to forget you. Married him because he was there and you weren't. Why did you go, Jesse? What were you thinking? Was the war more important than us? I can't make it here anymore, Jesse. Take me away from here to wherever you are. I trust you. Yes, Jesse…please say yes
.”

“Mrs. Alvarez? Are you OK?” Lorena is leaning over me. I'm sitting at my desk, staring at the attendance sheet without writing anything down. My breastbone is aching like somebody just hit me in the chest. I want Lorena to hold me tight, to take all the pain out of my breastbone, but I don't want to prove Mr. H. right, the little plastic doughboy, all protected at home while my brother did all his dirty work.

“I'm leaving…I mean…I'm going to the bathroom. Uh…have the kids start working in their groups.” Lorena looks closely at me.

“Let me ask someone to cover the class.”

“No, hell no,” I whisper, “and have Mr. H. find out?”

I make it to the door. Li Ann is watching me. I see her tiny face staring at me while the other kids are oblivious to anything except Lorena's voice, telling them what to do next. Li Ann knows. She looks deep into my eyes, her pencil poised in her hand, not intrusive, just knowing. I smile, weakly. She only stares, never changing the contours of her heart-shaped face.

I'm out the door, out into a February morning that has turned gray. I brush up against the Vietnam Wall mural, unsealing the taped corner closest to Jesse's name. I pause to fix it, running my fingers over Jesse's
name. Everything else is a blur.
Please God, don't let anyone be around. Don't let anyone see me
. I walk as normally as I can into the teacher's lounge, then race into the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I run the water full blast and cry into a paper towel. My whole body is aching.

Your mouthpiece, Jesse. Your mouthpiece—where was it? Did you fall and break all your teeth? And me nowhere near to help you. Oh, Jesse—where was the wound? The wound that took your life? The hole in your body that made you bleed to death. Where were the medics, the bandages, the helicopter? Why didn't they move fast enough? Saved my brother. MY BROTHER! I'm sorry about everybody else's brother, but that was MY BROTHER fighting for political monsters who could give a shit if he lived or died. MY BROTHER brought back in a sealed coffin with a plastic lid. Your body all swollen, your face disfigured. Too many days. So sorry. He was sent to the wrong family. Can you believe the bastards didn't even get our address right! So sorry. The U.S. Army apologizes for such a tragic error. APOLOGIZES! What a trip! They should have gotten on their fuckin' knees and begged our forgiveness. And don't ever let me find out it was friendly fire, that some asshole from our side murdered MY BROTHER! Oh, God, I can't take this anymore
.

I remember their faces, family friends—who is she? That one, over there. The one screaming like that? That's his sister, Teresa. She was the one closest to him. The paper towel is in shreds. I wring my hands together, pretending one is Jesse's.
Pray for me, Don Florencío, tlachisqui of the Mexica Nation, pray for me, Virgen de Guadalupe. I need some tea, Don Florencío, the tea from the yellow flower, yoloxochitl, to heal my broken heart! Now, oh God, I need it now
!

I'm ready to start the wail Don Florencío said was the sound of my soul weeping. I feel it catch in my throat and swallow hard to make it go away. Someone is knocking on the door. It's Lorena. I let her in, and if it hadn't been for Lorena Padilla that day, I would have proven Mr. H. right.

 

• T
HERE WAS A
balance owing in my life that day—a debt of tears, pleas, cries, energy pushing to the surface. How can you owe a debt to the universe? But I did. And the universe wouldn't be conned into taking anything less than the cold chill in my heart, strange payment for the warmth that was to follow.

I
rene is sitting across from me at the kitchen table. Mom's at the sink washing dishes. Irene's there almost every day visiting Mom. The two ward off loneliness by talking about the old days and comparing aches and pains. Irene has her legs massaged at least once a week by an old man who advertises himself as a “sobador.” Irene has diabetes and says she needs massages on her feet to keep the blood flowing. Who knows, without the sobador she might have to have her feet cut off, especially with crazy doctors who don't care whose feet they cut off as long as they make money.

Irene says Doña Carolina would rise from her grave if she knew how much the old sobador is charging. “They're not healers anymore, Teresa, they're in it for the money. Doña Carolina would die twice if she knew how this old man works. He never says a prayer when he gives us medicine. I pray anyway when he's massaging me with ordinary lotion, Jergens, can you imagine, that he buys at Walgreens! He's as bad as the crazy doctors who killed Lencho by giving him so many pills. They poisoned him!”

My mother and Irene used to dance at the park on the 16th of September for Las Fiestas Patrias in the old days. I can't imagine them light on their feet, clicking castanets between their fingers. “Cree lo,”
Irene says, “Believe it. We were young once before your father and Lencho made us get old.”

Irene wears the same medallion my mother does, the image of La Virgen de Guadalupe, engraved on a gold-plated disc. They'll be Guadalupanas until the day they die, the sodality is that strong. The women are a comadrazgo, a sisterhood bound together by spiritual ties to the Church and to La Virgen de Guadalupe. Nana used to point to the picture of La Virgen's image hanging in our living room. “She's the only woman who has ever been given the sun, moon, and stars by God Himself,” she would say. “Look at her face. Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?” I didn't say anything because Nana was right. La Virgen's face was small and peaceful. Her eyes were partly closed but I wanted them to be open. I wanted big, brown pools of eyes I could swim in and see God from the inside out.

Legend holds that the sacred image miraculously appeared on Juan Diego's rough woven poncho, which in Spanish is called a tilma, centuries ago in the mountains outside Mexico City. The Mother of God appeared suspended in the heavens, a crescent moon at her feet, clothed in a mantle of stars like an Aztec princess. She presented Juan Diego with roses that grew miraculously on the cold, barren ground. He collected these in his tilma. By the time he showed them to the bishop, the image had impressed itself on the rough cloth and remains so to this day, hanging at the Basilica of La Virgen de Guadalupe in Mexico City. Besides the gold medallions, the old women wear ribbons on special occasions, listónes, red, white, and green that hang like tassels over their shoulders. Nana told me that a Guadalupana wears her medallion and listón even in her coffin and is accompanied by una guardia, one woman at the head of her coffin and one at the foot until her body is lowered into its grave.

Nana Esther was president of Las Guadalupanas for years. As a child, I watched the old women proceed down the aisle of St. Anthony's, black shoes laced up to their ankles. The younger women, those under seventy years old, stepped lightly in black or white pumps. Long skirts and dresses hung over stockinged legs, short legs, most of them, extending from lumpy hips exhausted from bearing many children, instead of just one like La Virgen. Here and there, you caught the glint of eyeglasses on a wrinkled nose, the whiff of perfume from the younger women, and the bland smell of aged skin untouched in widowhood by husbands' hands and children at the breast. The air was filled with the authority of many women's hearts beating at the same time for the same reason. The soul of motherhood, the hidden treasure of la raza, was passing by on its way to
the altar set with red roses, white linen, and candles. Not even a demon shot from hell would have dared disrupt the shuffling swaying procession of mothers united in the victory of La Virgen with Nana at the head. I heard the opening verse of “Paloma Blanca” and broke into tears. The lusty voices of el mariachi and their Spanish guitars released such a rush of emotion, I held onto the pew with one hand for support. Pride burst inside me over my brown skin and my regal Indian Mother.

On Sundays, I drive Mom and Irene over to St. Anthony's, where they go to mass. On special days, they still walk in procession with other Guadalupanas behind the silken banner of La Virgen. They look like they did at the airport when Jesse flew out to Vietnam, gray swallows weighed down by earth's gravity, measuring their progress in slow, sacred steps. I walk in with Mom holding on to the arm that's free of her cane. The singing is loud, and everything moves slow like in the old days. The songs are the same, “Paloma Blanca,” “Adios Reina Del Cielo,” “Las Mañanitas.” I look around and wonder if Las Guadalupanas will run out of old ladies to replace the ones who have died. It doesn't look like they will. Women live longer than men, into their eighties, their nineties. My mother is seventy-nine.

My twins, Lisa and Lilly, are not so patient with Irene and Mom. They can't stand it when Irene comes over, looks at them unblinking, and says things like, “If I had dressed like that to go to school, my father would have beaten me with a club.”

“It's not the old days, Irene,” my mother says. “Girls nowadays have babies at the age of fifteen. May God forbid that happens to the twins!” She makes the sign of the cross over herself, then into the air, blessing Lisa and Lilly whether they're in the room or not. I was glad when the girls went in for the “baggy look.” Irene feels better when they wear loose clothing.

I'm watching my mother wash dishes, something she insists on doing by herself even though it takes her a long time to finish. She drags the dishrag over each dish and utensil, barely wiping its surface. Her elbows lean heavily on the white enamel surface. Her face is not too many inches above the soapy water. Poor circulation causes great pain in my mother's legs. Her heart medication controls the swelling, but there is always stiffness and pain, sometimes numbness in her feet and toes.

“Mom, let Lisa and Lilly clean up the kitchen. They're coming here after school today. They'll be moving in soon anyway, so they might as well get used to it.”

“No, mija. They have so much homework. I hate to bother them.”

“Well, then let me help you.”

“No, you're busy, too. Every night you bring work to do. Ay, mija, why do you have to work so hard?”

“The curse of being educated, I guess.” I've got papers stacked on the table, spelling tests, book reports, crossword puzzle worksheets I'm grading.

“The truth is your mother wants to do the dishes herself, Teresa,” says Irene. “She's been stubborn all her life. Me? I let my daughters do them. What are they there for anyway? They never helped me when they were young.”

“Manuel called for you today, mija,” my mother says. “Pobrecito, he's always liked you, since you were children in school. Remember, Teresa? That stepmother of his, Matilde, curse her for all she did to him! Now she's sick with her bladder. He told me she had an operation on her bladder. I said to him, tell her to drink agua de maize. Cut off the fibers on the ears of corn, those long threads, el pelo del maize, that's what you boil. What did our ancestors live on if not corn? They said it was the gift of the gods. She should add sugar if she has to, that will open her kidneys and help her pee. Manuel says the doctors have her convinced she has to take these big, red pills that look like they should be given to an elephant. That's the way doctors are, always doing something unnatural and laughing at our remedies. I guess it's not her fault she listens to them. She's ignorant, la tonta.”

“I had a horse once who was the same color as those pills,” Irene says. “Terrible horse too, he bucked me off three times, no wonder Santiago was born blue, that horse messed up my womb when I was a girl. The cord, el ombligo, got tangled up inside me and Santiago almost choked on it.”

“He did not!” says Mom. “You were too old, Irene, that was your problem.”

“Don't tell me about being old—why—”

“What did Manuel want, Mom?” I interrupt Irene, knowing their argument will end up in a stand-off. Neither one ever admits to defeat. I grip the red pen tighter. “Can't he take no for an answer?”

“Don't be mean to him, mija. He was an orphan. He's always been good to you. He joined the choir at St. Anthony's just to be near you.”

“How could I forget?”

Mom had a thing about kids who had been orphaned. The truth was that Manuel did have a mother, but she ran away with a heroin addict when Manuel was still a baby. His aunt Matilde and her husband adopted
him and loved him all the way up to the fourth grade, when his aunt delivered her own baby. After that, nothing Manuel said or did was better than Eliseo, their real son. They started ignoring Manuel and regretted adopting him in the first place. It was a sad life for Manuel. Besides all that, his mother was never found. Some suspected she had ended up an addict herself and died of an overdose.

Manuel was nicknamed Casper by his aunt Matilde, because she said he was always disappearing. Disappearing to where? Matilde and her husband didn't really care. Later, Manuel told me he would hide in the boxcars of the Santa Fe freight trains and play marbles by himself. He met all kinds of hobos, and one time took such a long nap that he ended up in Flagstaff and didn't know where he was, until one of the hobos woke him up just in time for him to jump on the other track and come back to Phoenix.

“His ex-wife Regina already has a boyfriend,” Mom says, “and it's only been a year since they divorced. Poor Manuel, he was never the kind to run around. His daughter, Maria, helps him now in his accounting business. He's always been such a hard worker, pobrecito, not like your father. That's the kind of man you need, Teresa. Good, hardworking.”

“First of all, what does being an orphan have to do with anything? And can you imagine me with Manuel? From a musician to an accountant!”

“Give people a chance, mija. Don't close your heart.”

“Oh, Mom, please. Just thinking about another man makes me sick. Manuel knows I'm getting a divorce. He's biding his time to see if I'll give in to him.”

“You still love Ray?”

“I don't know. I don't know if I ever loved Ray, but I know I've never loved Manuel. He's a friend, that's all.”

“Muy mulo,” Irene says, “like all men, stubborn. Look at Lencho, he never let me go, and your father never let your mother go either. Men don't like to lose.”

“In the old days you women didn't have much to say about anything. Men chased you, and caught you like you were some kind of prize. Manuel isn't right for me. He's just a friend. Besides, I thought you wanted me to stay here with you, Mom.”

“Yes, mija, but I won't last forever. Look at me, I can barely walk. I'm glad Consuelo's not around anymore. I would have hit her over the head with my cane!”

“No, you wouldn't. You sent her soup when she was dying.”

“Yes, admit it,” says Irene. “You had pity on her even though she went after Pablo Jesús. If it were me, I would have put rat poison in the soup, cree lo.”

“I had to feed her, she looked awful. She was a stick by the time she died. Don't you remember? And all her worthless kids standing around with their hands in their pockets waiting to take the house right from under her feet.”

“Talking about kids…my kids at school really liked Jesse's medals.”

“What did they say, mija?” My mother stops wiping the dishes and turns around to look at me. Two safety pins stuck onto the frazzled edge of her apron jiggle slightly.

“That he was brave. They didn't even touch them. That's how much they respected them.” I don't mention the comments about the AK-47s and the M-16s. “They drew a wall like the real Vietnam Wall and put Jesse's name first.” I reach under one of the stacks of papers I'm working on and pull out a photograph of the Vietnam Wall I cut from a calendar sent to me by the VFW.

“Look, here's a picture of it.” I walk up to her, holding up the photograph. Remember the wall they have here in Phoenix with the names of our guys on it? Well, this is the big one in Washington.”

My mother is looking at the photograph, poised in position over the sink full of dishes. She drops the cup she's holding and it clatters down onto the sink's white enamel. I'm always thinking strokes and heart attacks. I react instantly, putting my arm around her.

“Mom, what is it? Are you OK? Mom?” She lets the dishrag slip back into the water and presses her hand up to her breastbone. She looks up at me.

“Que pasa? What's wrong, Alicia?” Irene is up on her feet.

“That's it, mija! That's it!”

“What's it?”

“The Wall, mija. Where is it?”

“In Washington, D.C.”

“I have to get there!” Suddenly, her eyes are the same ones I saw when she hid surprises for me and Priscilla behind her back when we were kids, teasing, joyous.

“Mom, it's too far away! You can barely get to the doctor and back. Mom, what are you saying?”

“Remember the voices?”

“What voices?”

“At Christmas! The voices I heard in my room. It was my mijito! It
was Jesse and his friends, the ones on the Wall!” She points to the picture. Irene crowds in next to her.

“Faustino's name is on there too!” she says, pointing to the picture. “He was talking with Jesse that night.”

“Nobody was talking to anybody! Mom, they're only names!”

“It was him, Teresa! It was Jesse. Don't you remember he promised me I'd hear his voice again?”

“When?”

“At the airport! Don't you remember? Your nana was there, too.”