American Chica (30 page)

No. This wasn’t rambunctious or noisy. This was coal fire, silent and eerie, smoldering just below the earth’s surface. Burning, with time on its hands.

We were told that the prairie could fool you. Sage and grass sitting innocently out there as if all were right in the world. Mirages. Beneath them, a quicksand inferno. One wrong step—like Persephone’s encounter with Hades—and you’d drop to the hellfire below.

There were stories about trucks crossing to Hanna, between Walcott and Medicine Bow. Without warning, the earth had caved in and swallowed them up with a yawn. We imagined the drivers descending. We imagined trucks sinking and rocking, the way camels go down on their knees. We imagined men watching their cars melt, just before they were sucked into ash.

On one of those anxious evenings when worry festered behind an illusion of calm, I burned my mother’s incense and prayed that no harm would come to cousin Nub. He had been known to get in cars and take off across prairies with a bottle or girl by his side. I blew on the incense and watched its red eye wink at me from under a pointy white hood.

“What are you doing, Marisi?” my father asked me.
Qué haces?

“Thinking about Nub,” I said. George was on the floor, pushing a toy truck down an imagined road.

“Come here, then; I have a job for you.”

“What?” I said, and walked over to where he lay on the couch with a newspaper, the
Saratoga Sun,
splayed out on his chest.

“Aquí.”
He bent his neck up and motioned me under it. “Sit, put my head in your lap.”

I did as I was told.

“You see what this grand all-American vacation is doing to me? You see those white hairs on my head?”

I leaned in and saw them—a dozen, not more—sprouting from the V of his hairline. “Yes,” I said, and smiled at the thought of him searching the mirror. An engineer with nothing to do.

“Pull them out. I’ll give you five cents for each one that you show me.” And greedily, I set to work.

I was like this, curled over my father’s head, when Mother and Vicki came in. “They did it,” said Mother, lowering herself into a chair. “They took her off to the hospital.” My father patted my hands and sat up.

“Unconscious?”

“Barely breathing,” Mother said. Her eyes were sunken, jaundiced.

There was a silence then, as we shouldered the weight of her news. Papi folded his newspaper into a neat square and set it carefully on his lap.

“Well, well,” Mother said at last. She took a deep breath and glanced around the room. “And what’s new with you two today?” She looked from George’s face to mine and back again.

“Georgie has a new girlfriend,” I said, and there was truth to it. A girl in George’s class at school had followed him home, giggling and grinning like an imbecile.

“I do not,” George said, and scowled at me.

“He does?” My mother’s face brightened. She sat up in the chair as if a harness had been lifted from her.

“Oh, yes, you do,” I said, standing up and facing him now, my hands on my hips like a martinet. “And she’s a real princess, too. A
narigona.”
One with a big honker.

“She is
not
my girlfriend,” George screamed. Red was climbing his neck, red as the eye of the incense. His tic was dancing, wild.

I was exhilarated by the sight of my brother’s quaking face. Perhaps it was because I was bored, perhaps because I’d had a surfeit of gloom. But I felt a perverse pleasure in goading the god I had worshiped so long. Blow the cone, make it glow. It felt good to bicker. Felt right.

“And another thing,” I gloated. “She’s a
potona.”
A fat ass. I jumped up and waggled my tail.

“Ya, ya,
Marisi,” Papi chuckled, in spite of himself. “That’s enough.”

George sputtered.

“I don’t know why you find it so surprising,” said Mother, “that Georgie would have a new girlfriend—that is,
if
he does—”

“Do not!” he screeched.

She winked at him knowingly. “Remember when you told me how you loved Antonio, Mareezie? Do you remember that? And do you remember when you fell in love with the young man who called on Tía Chaba?”

“Now I’m in love with Nub,” I confessed.

“Nub? Your cousin?” said Papi.
“Dios mío.
What next? You’ll have to get a special dispensation from the Pope. Your great-great-grandparents on my side were first cousins, too, you know. That’s what
they
had to do.”

“Well, maybe she’s not thinking of marriage just yet, honey,” Mother said. “Maybe just love between friends, eh?”

“Love friends,” I said, and nodded.

“Aha, I see,” said my father, smiling. “Better not tell your husband about those,” he added, and winked.

“Love friends, my butt,” said George under his breath. “There’s no such thing.”

“Is so!” I barked.

“Is not!”

“Is so! Mother has one!”

And then a hush fell over the room as I gaped around like a stunned animal.

“Mother has one,” I repeated, more softly this time. There was a scent of danger in the air, but I yipped my way through it. I wanted to prove to them that I knew what I was talking about.

“A love friend?” Mother said, and leaned into the room, smiling thinly, her elbows on her knees.

Fermata.

And then me again. “Yes. You have one. A love friend. In Cartavio. I saw you sitting with him on the couch. You were staring in each other’s eyes. One of the
solteros.
The tall one with the yellow—”

“Enough!” yelled my father.
Presto.
He stood now, a coal fire behind his eyes. Georgie was frozen on the floor, his shoulders hunched up to his ears. Vicki got up and banged her way into another room.

“I can’t imagine who you think you saw. In Cartavio or anywhere else, Mareezie,” my mother said in a voice full of calm. “I can’t imagine.”

“It’s true!” I yelled. “You were over there! He was over here! I saw you. You
know
it’s true!”

Papi whirled around, slapped the newspaper down on the table, and lunged for the front door. The screen door snapped back with a loud slam, then shuddered against the frame. My mother stood and walked into the dining alcove. Her back to us,
she pressed her knuckles down against the table, pushed her shoulders up into a shrug. But she didn’t say a word.

He didn’t come home for dinner that night. I lay in bed sick with worry that he would never come home again. That I had driven him out to a hellhole in Hanna, somewhere between Walcott and Medicine Bow. When he staggered back through the front door at about four o’clock the next morning, I heard a sharp
thwack
and then a
whoosh,
as if air were rushing out of a tire. I crept from my bed, peeked into the living room, and saw an empty bottle with a dapper little man on its side, doffing his hat, swinging his cane. It was planted on our coffee table, where an angry hand had smacked it. Beside it on the couch, laid out and pickled as a corpse, was my father.

Dawn brought one more thing. The news of Grandma Lo’s death.

I
’D
SEEN A
photograph of Abuelita’s dead sister. I’d come upon it in her family albums, pasted in between portraits of my be-whiskered ancestors in their starched collars and fancy top hats. Her little sister had been laid out in white lace on her funeral bier with garlands of roses cascading about her, a cluster of lilies in her hair. In the photo, her white shoes point like a dancer’s, her arms lie peacefully across her chest, her curls are combed down on her brow, her eyes stare out, wide open. My Great-Grandfather Cisneros stands behind the body, and, above his black cravat, his face is long and gaunt. His eyes seem to be sliding down his cheeks like stones in a mountain
huayco.
His oldest daughter, my grandmother, stands beside him in a veil of black lace. Her eyes are dry but haunted. Although she is seven, her little face appears even smaller than her sister’s. Her sister cannot be two.

I had seen this. I had seen funeral biers of the poor go by in
Peruvian streets, the women wailing and staggering after, their heads draped in black cloth. I had seen men of society file into a church alone, their wives too delicate to see an inert body—for all the fragrant blossoms tucked in around it. But I had never seen a cadaver stretched out, serene, staring up into the ether.

Grandma Lo’s body was set out for family viewing at Frank Wooten’s Funeral Home, three days after it expired at the Rawlins Hospital. “I’m taking the children there,” Mother said, sitting in front of her mirror, pinning a hat to her head.

“You’re what?” I heard Papi say. “You can’t be serious. Funerals are not for children. You’re going to make them sick. Twist their minds for life.”

Mother turned, her head tilted down like a bull’s, one hand jabbing a long hat pin in the direction of her brain. “Jorge, I’m taking them with me. You want to talk about twisting? Let’s talk about your
borrachera.
Your stinko night out on the town.”

A truck rumbled down Buffalo Street, speeding its way out of Rawlins. My parents stared at each other and then Papi started again. “We’re talking about the
dead
here,” he said. “Where I come from you wouldn’t dream of taking a child to see one. Children are too impressionable. Even grown women don’t go.”

“Well, where I come from you learn to look death in the eye,” said my mother. “They might as well learn it right now. It’s an important lesson.”

The mortuary was on the outskirts of town. It was a clapboard house, dove gray and windowless, with no greenery save a struggling azalea in a clay pot by the stoop. “Clam-Hand” Wooten, the undertaker, lived on the right, behind two thick white pillars and a fusty porch. On the left, where the viewing parlor led into the embalming lab, was Grandma Lo.

She had died on the morning of Mother’s Day. Clam-Hand had slid her into his refrigerator and gone off to Laramie. Three
full days crawled by before we could trudge up the steps to view his rendition of my grandmother.

The Wooten parlor was set up like a schoolroom. There were four rows of wooden chairs behind a raised platform. Twenty-four chairs in all. The room’s ceiling was low, its walls hung with blue wallpaper, fleur-de-lis against yellowy cream. The carpet was dingy, worried by prairie grit, thinned by the boots of the bereaved.

Mr. Wooten’s pocked face met us at the door. He was wringing his hands in dismay. His fingers were long, cool as fish when he slipped them around our wrists and into our palms. “On Mother’s Day, of all things,” he whispered. “Terribly sorry.” A wan smile coiled across his face and was gone.

Mother pushed past him into the parlor. There were candles set out on a table and a body behind them, under glass. The lady was dressed in flowered cotton, her hands folded neatly over her still heart. A white satin sheet covered her legs. I saw no more than that at first. A quick glimpse, and then my eyes were back on my patent-leather shoes.

We were the only ones there. Grandpa Doc was nowhere to be seen. When we hurriedly whispered to Mother, asking her where he was, she simply turned and rapped one gloved fist on her left breast, over the chambers of her heart.

As we filed into the last row of chairs, the candles flickered against the warm May breeze and Clam-Hand spun around to shut the door behind us. A fat black fly buzzed in. We lowered ourselves onto the hard-edged chairs and looked out at the table in front.

“That’s not Grandma Lo,” said Mother in a voice that seemed somebody else’s. “That’s just her body. She’s off with God now. I wanted you to see it for yourselves.”

It was clear she was right. The woman up there was pink and smiling. Her hair was in tight little curls. On her mouth was a
smear of vermillion, on her cheeks powdery circles of rose. She looked more like Mrs. Birdseye than my grandmother. She was puffed out, painted, and pert. Any minute now, she was going to roll over, prop her chin on one hand, raise the glass case with the other, eye the fly, and say in Mrs. Birdseye’s earnest little voice, “Well, dear ones, everything in this world has a sound explanation. There’s nothing wrong with dying. Nothing wrong with it at all!”

Where had Grandma Lo gone?

Off. Like Grandma Clapp, clanking downstairs in the Ferguson Building, flapping out Cedar Street, chasing the ghosts of her past.

Off. Like Nub’s mother on her sprees from the loony bin, bolting through gardens into the night. Down, down, to the
rum-drumdrum
of the road.

Off. Like Joe Krozier’s woman. Never to be seen again. Off, down some great stretch of highway, as Americans were wont to go.