The Moths and Other Stories (12 page)

I realize all that time is lost now, and I find myself searching for it frantically under the bed where the balls of dust collect undisturbed and untouched, as it should be.

To be quite frank, the fact of the matter is I wish to do nothing but allow indulgence to rush through my veins with frightening speed. I do so because I have never been able to tolerate it in anyone, including myself.

I watch television to my heart's content now, a thing I rarely did in my younger days. While I was growing up, television had not been invented. Once it was and became a must for every home, Dave saved and saved until we were able to get one. But who had the time? Most of mine was spent working part time as a clerk for Grants, then returning to create a happy home for Dave. This is the way I pictured it:

His wife in the kitchen wearing a freshly ironed apron, stirring a pot of soup, whistling a whistle-while-you-work tune, and preparing frosting for some cupcakes so that when he drove home from work, tired and sweaty, he would enter his castle to find his cherub baby in a pink day suit with newly starched ribbons crawling to him and his wife looking at him with pleasing eyes and offering him a cupcake.

It was a good image I wanted him to have and everyday I almost expected him to stop, put down his lunch pail and cry at the whole scene. If it wasn't for the burnt cupcakes, my damn varicose veins, and Marge blubbering all over her day suit, it would have made a perfect snapshot.

Snapshots are ghosts. I am told that shortly after women are married, they become addicted to one thing or another. In
Reader's Digest
I read stories of closet alcoholic wives who gambled away grocery money or broke into their children's piggy banks in order to quench their thirst and fill their souls. Unfortunately, I did not become addicted to alcohol because my only encounter with it had left me senseless and with my face in the toilet bowl. After that, I never had the desire to repeat the performance of a senior in high school whose prom date never showed. I did consider my addiction a lot more incurable. I had acquired a habit much more deadly: nostalgia.

I acquired the habit after Marge was born and I had to stay in bed for months because of my varicose veins. I began flipping through my family's photo albums (my father threw them away after mom's death) to pass the time and pain away. However, I soon became haunted by the frozen moments and the meaning of memories. Looking at the old photos, I'd get real depressed over my second-grade teacher's smile or my father's can of beer or the butt-naked smile of me as a young teen, because every detail, as minute as it may seem, made me feel that so much had passed unnoticed. As a result, I began to convince myself that my best years were up and that I had nothing to look forward to. I was too young and too ignorant to realize that that section of my life relied wholly on those crumbling photographs and my memory, and I probably wasted more time longing for a past that never really existed. Dave eventually packed them up in a wooden crate to keep me from hurting myself. He was good in that way. Like when he clipped roses for me. He made sure the thorns were cut off so I didn't have to prick myself while putting them in a vase. And it was the same thing with the albums. They stood in the attic for years until I brought them down a day after he remarried.

The photo albums are unraveling and stained with spills and fingerprints and are filled with crinkled faded gray snapshots of people I can't remember anymore. I turn the pages
over and over again to see if somehow, some old dream will come into my blank mind. Like the black and white television box does when I turn it on. It warms up then flashes instant pictures, instant lives, instant people.

Parents. That I know for sure. The woman is tall and long, her plain black dress is over her knees, and she wears thick spongelike shoes. She's over to the right of the photo, looks straight ahead at the camera. The man wears white baggy pants that go past his waist, thick suspenders. He smiles while holding a dull-faced baby. He points to the camera. His sleeves are pulled up, his tie undone, his hair is messy, as if some wild woman has driven his head between her breasts and ran her fingers into his perfect, greased duck-tail.

My mother always smelled of smoke and vanilla and that is why I stayed away from her. I suppose that is why my father stayed away from her as well. I don't ever remember a time when I saw them show any sign of affection. Not like today. No sooner do I turn off the soaps when I turn around and catch two youngsters on a porch swing, their mouths open, their lips chewing and chewing as if they were sharing a piece of three-day-old liver. My mom was always one to believe that such passion be restricted to the privacy of one's house and then, there too, be demonstrated with efficiency and not this urgency I witness almost every day. Dave and I were good about that.

Whenever I saw the vaseline jar on top of Dave's bed-stand, I made sure the door was locked and the blinds down. This anticipation was more exciting to me than him lifting up my flannel gown over my head, pressing against me, slipping off my underwear then slipping into me. The vaseline came next, then he came right afterwards. In the morning, Dave looked into my eyes and I could never figure out what he expected to find. Eventually, there came a point in our relationship when passion passed to Marge's generation, and I was somewhat relieved. And yet, I could never imagine Marge doing those types of things that these youngsters do today, though I'm sure she did them on those Sunday afternoons when she carried a blanket and a book and told me she was going to the park to do some reading and returned hours later with the bookmark in the same place. She must have done them, or else how could she have gotten engaged, married,
had three children all under my nose, and me still going to check if she's sufficiently covered?

“Mother?” Marge's voice from the kitchen. It must be evening. Every morning it's the ball of wool, every evening it's dinner. Honestly, she treats me as if I have an incurable heart ailment. She stands under the doorway.

“Mother?” Picture it: She stands under the doorway looking befuddled, as if a movie director instructs her to stand there and look confused and upset; stand there as if you have seen your mother sitting in the same position for the last nine hours.

“What are you doing to yourself?” Marge is definitely not one for originality and she repeats the same lines every day. I'm beginning to think our conversation is coming from discarded scripts. I know the lines by heart, too. She'll say: “Why do you continue to do this to us?” and I'll answer: “Do what?” and she'll say: “This”—-waving her plump, coarse hands over the albums scattered at my feet—-and I'll say: “Why don't you go home and leave me alone?” This is the extent of our conversation and usually there is an optional line like: “I brought you something to eat,” or “Let's have dinner,” or “Come look what I have for you,” or even “I brought you your favorite dish.”

I think of the times, so many times, so many Mother's Days that passed without so much as a thank you or how sweet you are for giving us thirty years of your life. I know I am to blame. When Marge first started school, she had made a ceramic handprint for me to hang in the kitchen. My hands were so greasy from cutting the fat off some pork chops, I dropped it before I could even unwrap my first Mother's Day gift. I tried gluing it back together again with flour and water paste, but she never forgave me and I never received another gift until after the divorce. I wonder what happened to the ceramic handprint I gave to my mother?

In the kitchen I see that today my favorite dish is Chinese food getting cold in those little coffin-like containers. Yesterday my favorite dish was a salami sandwich, and before that a half-eaten rib, no doubt left over from Marge's half-hour lunch. Last week she brought me some Sunday soup that had fish heads floating around in some greenish broth. When I threw it down the sink, all she could think of to say was: “Oh, Mother.”

We eat in silence. Or rather, she eats. I don't understand how she can take my indifference. I wish that she would break out of her frozen look, jump out of any snapshot and slap me in the face. Do something. Do something. I begin to cry.

“Oh, Mother,” she says, picking up the plates and putting them in the sink.

“Mother, please.”

There's fingerprints all over this one, my favorite. Both woman and child are clones: same bathing suit, same ponytails, same ribbons. The woman is looking directly at the camera, but the man is busy making a sand castle for his daughter. He doesn't see the camera or the woman. On the back of this one, in vague pencil scratching, it says: San Juan Capistrano.

This is a bad night. On good nights I avoid familiar spots. On bad nights I am pulled towards them so much so that if I sit on the chair next to Dave's I begin to cry. On bad nights I can't sleep, and on bad nights I don't know who the couples in the snapshots are. My mother and me? Me and Marge? I don't remember San Juan Capistrano and I don't remember the woman. She faded into thirty years of trivia. I don't even remember what I had for dinner, or rather, what Marge had for dinner, just a few hours before. I wrap a blanket around myself and go into the kitchen to search for some evidence, but except for a few crumbs on the table, there is no indication that Marge was here. Suddenly, I am relieved when I see the box containers in the trash under the sink. I can't sleep the rest of the night wondering what happened to my ceramic handprint or what was in the boxes. Why can't I remember? My mind thinks of nothing but those boxes in all shapes and sizes. I wash my face with warm water, put cold cream on, go back to bed, get up and wash my face again. Finally, I decide to call Marge at 3:30 in the morning. The voice is faint and there is static in the distance.

“Yes?” Marge asks automatically.

“Hello,” Marge says. I almost expected her to answer her usual “Dave's Hardware.”

“Who is this?” Marge is fully awake now.

“What did we…” I ask, wondering why it was suddenly so important for me to know what we had for dinner. “What did you have for dinner?” I am confident that she'll remember
every movement I made or how much salt I put on whatever we ate, or rather, she ate. Marge is good about details.

“Mother?”

“Are you angry that I woke you up?”

“Mother. No. Of course not.”

I could hear some muffled sounds, vague voices, static. I can tell she is covering the mouthpiece with her hand. Finally, George's voice.

“Mrs. Ruiz,” he says, restraining his words so that they almost come out slurred, “Mrs. Ruiz, why don't you leave us alone?” and then there is a long buzzing sound. Right next to the vaseline jar are Dave's cigarettes. I light one though I don't smoke. I unscrew the jar and use the lid for an ashtray. I wait, staring at the phone until it rings.

“Dave's Hardware,” I answer. “Don't you know what time it is?”

“Yes.” It isn't Marge's voice. “Why don't you leave the kids alone?” Dave's voice is not angry. Groggy, but not angry. After a pause I say:

“I don't know if I should be hungry or not.”

“You're a sad case.” Dave says it as coolly as a doctor would say you have terminal cancer. He says it to convince me that it is totally out of his hands. I panic. I picture him sitting on his side of the bed in his shorts, smoking under a dull circle of light. I know his bifocals are down to the tip of his nose.

“Oh, Dave,” I say. “Oh, Dave.” The static gets worse.

“Let me call you tomorrow.”

“No. Its just a bad night.”

“Olga,” Dave says so softly that I can almost feel his warm breath on my face. “Olga, why don't you get some sleep?”

The first camera I ever saw belonged to my grandfather. He won it in a cock fight. Unfortunately, he didn't know two-bits about it, but he somehow managed to load the film. Then he brought it over to our house. He sat me on the lawn. I was only five- or six-years old, but I remember the excitement of everybody coming around to get into the picture. I can see my grandfather clearly now. I can picture him handling the camera slowly, touching the knobs and buttons to find out how the camera worked while the men began milling around him expressing their limited knowledge of the invention. I remember it all so clearly. Finally, he was able to manage the camera
and he took pictures of me standing near my mother with the wives behind us.

My grandmother was very upset. She kept pulling me out of the picture, yelling to my grandfather that he should know better, that snapshots steal the souls of the people and that she would not allow my soul to be taken. He pushed her aside and clicked the picture.

The picture, of course, never came out. My grandfather, not knowing better, thought that all he had to do to develop the film was unroll it and expose it to the sun. After we all waited for an hour, we realized it didn't work. My grandmother was very upset and cut a piece of my hair, probably to save me from a bad omen.

It scares me to think that my grandmother may have been right. It scares me even more to think I don't have a snapshot of her. If I find one, I'll tear it up for sure.

 

Aura Rodríguez always stayed within her perimeters, both personal and otherwise, and expected the same of her neighbors. She was quite aware that the neighborhood had slowly metamorphosed into a graveyard. People of her age died off only to leave their grandchildren with little knowledge of struggle. As a result, the children gathered near her home in small groups to drink, to lose themselves in the abyss of defeat, to find temporary solace among each other. She shared the same streets and corner stores and midnights with these tough-minded young men who threw empty beer cans into her yard, but once within her own solitude, surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence, she belonged to a different time. Like those who barricaded themselves against an incomprehensible generation, Aura had resigned herself to live with the caution and silence of an apparition, as she had lived for the past seventy-three years, asking no questions, assured of no want, no deep-hearted yearning other than to live out the remainder of her years without hurting anyone, including herself.