Caramelo (42 page)

Amor and Paz complained the most, because they had to share a room, and there was very little they enjoyed sharing except for an intense dislike of each other. It seemed to the Grandmother the girls had too much of everything—clothes, spending money, boyfriends, and their parents indulging them further with each birthday. She tried to give them some badly needed instruction, but they were lazy, ungrateful girls, beyond reach. She wondered how much Spanish they really understood when they nodded at everything she said, even when it wasn’t appropriate.

—Always, always, keep a neat bed, the Grandmother said, pinching and tugging the chartreuse bedspread until it was taut. —You can tell the character of a woman by how she makes her bed. Show me her bed, and I’ll tell you who she is.

Anything the Grandmother said always made Amor and Paz feel miserable. They wondered if their father had been telling stories about how they often forgot to make their beds, because they woke up too late
and had to rush off to school, and then came home after dark when it seemed pointless to make a bed for just a few hours.

—An unmade bed is the sign of
una mujer cochina
, the kind who catches lice, do you hear me? No man wants to marry a woman who can’t make a decent bed.

Oh, brother!
the girls thought, but they were only allowed to nod and say, —
Sí
, Abuela.

Her sons had too many children and too many things. It made their apartments crowded. And they rented, but didn’t own. None had the foresight nor the resources to buy their own home. Stupid children! Why didn’t they think?

Baby and Ninfa were too busy spending on home furnishings, furnishing their daughters like princesses. Fat-Face and Licha spent all the money on their flea market weekends, the way others play the slot machines, and then transporting all this junk to Mexico, spending the profits on their vacation, and coming back to buy all over again. And Inocencio, though he was a very good upholsterer, was never as excellent with figures as he was with tufted cushions. With seven children and with Zoila at home as homemaker, there was never enough for a house, though Zoila argued that if only Inocencio would let her work they could save for a down payment. —Real estate! That’s the ticket, she said. But Inocencio countered with his own argument, —What! A wife of mine work? Don’t offend me!

The Grandmother’s sons were busy. All week long they worked, and on weekends they took turns escorting her to look at houses, a horrible business of looking into other people’s bathroom cabinets. The new houses were too far away and beyond her resources. And houses within her budget were in neighborhoods with all kinds of riff and raff.

—Here you’ll feel at home, they said, but she couldn’t say she did not feel at home in the crowded squalor called the Mexican
barrio
. —This isn’t home. This is a slum, that’s what this is.

Something happened when they crossed the border. Instead of being treated like the royalty they were, they were after all Mexicans, they were treated like Mexicans, which was something that altogether startled the Grandmother. In the neighborhoods she could afford, she couldn’t stand being associated with these low-class Mexicans, but in the neighborhoods she couldn’t, her neighbors couldn’t stand being associated with her. Everyone in Chicago lived with an idea of being superior to someone
else, and they did not, if they could help it, live on the same block without a lot of readjustments, of exceptions made for the people they knew by name instead of as “those so-and-so’s.”

To visit Chicago is one thing, to live there another. This was not the Chicago of her vacations, where one is always escorted to the lake shore, to the gold coast, driven along the winding lanes of traffic of Lake Shore Drive in the shadow of beautiful apartment buildings, along State Street and Michigan Avenue to window-shop at least. And perhaps taken on an excursion on the lake. How is it she hadn’t noticed the expression of the citizens, not the ones fluttering in and out of taxis, but the ones at bus stops, hopping like sparrows, shivering and peering anxiously for the next bus, and those descending wearily into the filthy bowels of the subway like the souls condemned to purgatory.

At first the Grandmother was thrilled by the restaurants and the big discount chains—but then the routine got to be too familiar. Saturdays in search of houses that were not to her liking. Dark brick houses with small, squinty windows, gloomy apartments, or damp little bungalows, everything somber and sad and not letting in enough light, and no courtyards, a dank, mean gangway, a small patch of thin grass called a garden, and maybe a bald tree in front. This wasn’t what she had in mind.

And as the weeks and months passed, and she was still without a house, the rainy, cold autumn weather began and only made her feel worse. There was the Chicago winter coming that everyone had warned her about, and she was already so cold and miserable she didn’t feel much like leaving her room, let alone the building. She blamed Ninfa, who kept lowering the heat in order to save money. The Grandmother confined herself to bed, satisfied only when she was under several layers of blankets.

The city was such a nuisance. Everything was so far away and hard to get to. She couldn’t take the bus—no, no, even though she had wandered about alone in Mexico.

Now it was her sons’ turn to say, —Alone? How? No, wait till the weekend. But when the weekend came, they were exhausted, and Amor and Paz for some reason were so rude to her. They grunted, they scurried off without greeting her when she entered a room. They mumbled in their atrocious
pocho
Spanish with English words minced in. She suspected they were hiding from her. —
¿Y
la Amor
?
—Amor
se fue a la …
library. Like that.

Her sons fought like cats and dogs. Where did they get such cruelty? Only weeks had passed since Inocencio had traveled to Mexico to fetch her, but in that short amount of time Inocencio was astonished to find the neat order and fastidious habits of the Tapicería Tres Reyes shop dissolve as easily as polished chintz ripped off an old love seat.

—
S
ince when does Tres Reyes do chrome kitchen chairs? Inocencio begins.

—Don’t be such a snob, Fat-Face shrugs. —Money’s money.

—I told you, Baby says to Fat-Face. —I told you he wouldn’t like it, but who listens to me?

—He’ll like it all right when the dough starts rolling in.

—Idiots! Inocencio shouts, a vein on his forehead throbbing. —Don’t you two stupids understand anything? Tres Reyes has always stood for custom work, for quality. The day we trade in our hammers for staple guns we’re ruined. We’ve made a name for ourselves restoring fine antiques, by hand! Not pumping out cheap kitchen chairs. I turn around and now look what you’ve done! Next thing you know we’ll be making plastic slipcovers.

—As a matter of fact, Baby says proudly, —we’ve practically landed the Casa de la Raza Furniture Store on Cermak. If they agree to our proposal we’ll be doing all their slipcover work!

—Please, Inocencio says, —kill me already!

—Don’t create a drama, Tarzán. You know as well as I do we’re running a business here.

—Well, for you it may be a business, but for me it’s like a religion. I don’t put my name on work that looks like … dirt.

—Spare me your stories. We can’t rely on little old ladies from Winnetka. It may be all well and fine to make a beautiful chair, but it’s not enough volume to make us rich.

—Not now, but soon, soon.

—Soon? When? I’m sick and tired of waiting for soon. Tarzán, listen to me. If you would only let go a little and let me manage things for a while. You live in the clouds. You don’t have a head for business, you never have …

—Let you manage! I leave for a few weeks and look what you’ve done! You’re crazy!

—You’re the one who’s crazy! You never let me do anything. You can’t boss me around like when we were kids. You live in the past, do you hear me? You think it’s easy to work with someone like you? Ha! You want the truth? Tarzán, you drive me nuts! You get on my nerves! You make me sick! Do you realize you call out Zoila’s name at least twenty times an hour? I’m not lying. Like the hiccups. And that’s not all. I didn’t want to tell you, but we’ve lost more upholsterers from you making them rip up something they just did and having them do it over just because it doesn’t meet your standards. And let me tell you another thing: I can’t even put a hammer down without you picking it up and putting it away. You’re worse than
una vieja!
I’ve had it with you …

I
nocencio tells all his troubles to his mother. —You know what Fat-Face says, Mamá. He says he and Baby are already thinking of opening up their own business.

—Is that so? says the Grandmother. —And let them. You don’t need them,
mijo
. You’re better off working for yourself.

—I’d like to see them try. I give them one month, and then they’d be begging to come back. Mamá, you don’t know them. They’re my brothers, but they’re terrible upholsterers. It’s that I can’t make a go of it with them. Fat-Face is always cutting corners, and Baby’s sloppiness is making us lose our best customers.

—You don’t need these mortifications. Listen to your mother, start your own business. The customers will follow. They know good work when they see it.

—It’s that I don’t have the
centavos
just now. Maybe one day.
Ojalá
.

B
ut nothing, nothing in the Grandmother’s imagination prepared her for the horrors of a Chicago winter. It was not the picturesque season of Christmas, but the endless tundra of January, February, and March. Daylight dimmed to a dull pewter. The sun a thick piece of ice behind a dirty woolen sky. It was a cold like you can’t imagine, a barbarous thing, a knife in the bone, a cold so cold it burned the lungs if one could even believe such a cold. And the mountains of filthy snow shoveled in huge heaps, the chunks of ice on the sidewalk that could kill an
aged citizen. —Oh, this is nothing, you should’ve been here for the Big Snow, the grandchildren bragged, speaking of the recent storm of ’68.

Big snow or little snow, it was all the same after the novelty of snow had worn off. A nuisance, a deadly thing, an exaggerated, long, drawn-out ordeal that made one feel like dying, that killed one slowly, a torture.
Let me die in February, let me die rather than have to step out the door again, please
, the Grandmother thought to herself, dreading having to dress like a monster to go outside. —
Ay, ya no puedo
. I can’t anymore, I can’t. And just when she could no longer, when she could no longer find the strength, the drive, the will to keep on living, when she was ready to fold into herself and let her spirit die, just then, and only then, did April arrive with sky the color of hope and branches filled with possibilities.

59.

Dirt

      O
n Sunday mornings other families go to church. We go to Maxwell Street. —
Vamos al Más-güel
, Father announces, and starts to sing “Farolito” in a happy voice. He sings while he’s shaving. He sings so loud we can’t stand it. Father flicks the light on in the rooms where we’re sleeping. —Wake up.
Vamos al Más-güel
. He tears open curtains and raises venetian blinds, dust spinning in his wake, the summer sunlight killing us.

The Grandmother has already had her toast and coffee by the time we pick her up at Uncle Baby’s. She climbs in the van with a hairy
ixtle
shopping bag and her old maroon umbrella with an amber handle. —To protect me from the sun. Thanks to you sleepyheads it’s already so hot. No doubt we’ve missed the best buys by now, she adds, settling in. She’s wearing her market dress, a shapeless, faded shift. —The better to haggle with, the Grandmother insists. —This way they feel sorry for me.

But Father wears his good clothes even though Maxwell Street is filthy. Flies on crates of rotten cantaloupe. Rusty coffee cans filled with rusty nails. A plastic Timex box filled with gold molars. Boxed lemon meringue pies with the meringue a little squashed. Beyond the trash are real and not-so-real treasures. A man playing an accordion with a live chicken on his head. Strings of plastic pearls the colors of Easter eggs. A china shepherdess statue with a crack like a strand of blond hair, —From Paris, gimme ten dollars. The finest homemade
tamales
in the world from that Michoacán widow the police keep hassling because she doesn’t have a food permit.

Father hates used things. When we bring home toys from the Goodwill
and the Salvation Army, we have to lie when he asks where we got them. —This? You bought it for us, remember? But Maxwell Street is different. It reminds Father of the open-air markets in Mexico.

Mother and the Grandmother are just glad to get out of the house. They wander the streets like prisoners escaped from Joliet. Everything amuses them. The blues musicians twanging away on steel guitars. The smoky scent of grilled barbecue. The medicine man wearing live snakes. They don’t care if they don’t buy a thing. They’re happy just to eat, to stop at 18th Street for
carnitas
and
chicharrón
, or at Taylor Street for Italian lemonade on the way home.

But Father is shopping with a purpose. He’s looking for his British wing tips, the Cadillac of
zapatos
, with pinhole designs along the toe and ankle, along the lace-ups, shoes so heavy if you dropped them on someone’s head, you’d kill him. But these are the shoes Father prefers, classic wing tips of oiled and waxed calfskin, a rich tobacco color.

It’s over to Harold’s we’re headed, corner of Halsted and Maxwell, across the street from Jim’s Original Hot Dogs.
^*
Harold has been there since … —Since before you were born, girlie. Up a narrow, dark flight of wooden stairs. On each sagging step, a strip of aluminum so that your footsteps coming up or down announce you.
Tap, tap, tap
. The stairs creak. The walls are stained. The banister, dark from the oil of hands, is sagging. Everything is sagging like a pile of shoe boxes—building, shelves, steps, Harold.