Caramelo (48 page)

Ito called from Chicago and said that except for the below-zero temperature, they were all fine and managing without us, and that we should count our blessings to be living in Texas right now. True, but we didn’t expect temperatures in the twenties to feel so cold
inside
the house.

—Shouldn’t be freezing in San Antonio in winter, Mother says, bringing in her potted aloes and
plonking
them on the kitchen counter. She has to climb over Wilson, who is curled up in front of the stove.
—¡Quítate, animal bruto!
Like all people from the country, the Reynas believe animals belong outside. But because of the drop in temperature tonight, Wilson has visitor’s privileges. When we negotiated for Wilson to come to Texas, I’d promised Mother he’d be no trouble. Now there’s newspapers and Pine-Sol all over the kitchen floor because of Wilson and his no trouble.

—It’s not normal for it to freeze in Texas, Mother goes on. —If you ask me, must be more of that nuclear monkey business. That’s what causes the planet to act weird. It’s those secret underground tests the FBI are doing in West Texas and New Mexico and Arizona. I heard about it on public TV. Why the hell did we pick up and leave Chicago if it was going to be just as cold here? Yuck, it feels colder. At least up north the houses are insulated. I knew moving to Texas was a bad idea. You hear me, Ino? I’m talking to you.

She hollers this toward the front of the house where Father is lying in bed watching TV.

—El cuarenta-y-uno
, Father shouts to his mother, to our mother, to anyone who will listen. This means the Grandmother should punch the remote on her bedroom portable to channel 41, and Mother should turn the dial to 41 on her kitchen TV. —Hurry, Father adds urgently. —María Victoria
^*
is about to appear.

—I don’t care about that crap, Mother growls, but only loud enough for me to hear. —No intelligent life around here except my plants.

I’ve pushed two chairs next to the space heater in the dining room, and this is where I’m trying to read a book on Cleopatra. I’ve got no privacy to hear my own thoughts in this stupid house, but I can hear everyone else’s. Voices echo because the house is still only half furnished, even though Father promised to make us all new furniture as soon as we got here, but that was back in August.

My Cleopatra book is a fat one, which is all I ask from a book these days. A cheap ticket out of here. Biographies are best, the thicker the better. Joan of Arc. Jean Harlow. Marie Antoinette. Their lives like the white crosses on the side of the road. Watch out! Don’t go there! You’ll be sorry!

Mother marches through on her way to her bedroom, but she doesn’t yell, —You’re going to go blind, or, —Get away from that heater, you’ll get an early arthritis. She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at me and shakes her head. She’s still mad about the tampons.

—Don’t you know tampons are for floozies? Mother had said when she found them in the bathroom, and then she got even angrier because I didn’t hide them well enough, but left them in the cupboard under the sink “advertising for all the world” instead of stuffing them in the bathroom closet behind the towels where she’d taught me to bury the purple box of Kotex. —Don’t you know nice girls don’t wear tampons till they’re married? And maybe not even then. Look at me, I wear Kotex.

—Ma, I told you and I told you. I’m sick of wearing those thick
tamales
. And anyway I’m in high school now. Lots of the girls wear tampons.

—I don’t care what other girls do, I’m talking about
you!
We don’t send you to private school so you can learn those “filthy ways.”

Only she uses the Spanish word, which is more like “pig ways,” and worse.

—El cuarenta-y-uno
, the Grandmother shrieks from her room. —There’s a black-and-white Libertad Lamarque
^†
film.
Se ve que está buena
.

—That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Father shouts from the other end of the house.

Every night it’s like this. The TV’s always hot, the radio with its aluminum-foil, coat-hanger antenna jabbering on top of the refrigerator next to the slouched plastic bag of sliced bread, my brothers stomping up and down the stairs that had a carpet when we moved in, till Mother got the bright idea to toss it because—It smells like a wet dog. Father shouting to his mother to watch what he’s watching on TV. They never think of getting up and watching TV together. Maybe because the boys always hog up the big TV in the living room, or maybe because they just like to watch TV in bed. There isn’t any room for Father to watch TV in the Grandmother’s little bed, and Father would never dare to ask her to his room without Mother starting up.

Father promised me the Grandmother’s apartment would be ready soon, and I’d have my own room finally. In the meantime I’m stuck next to the stairs where my brothers thump up and down like a football team in training. And they never talk in a normal voice, they’re always yelling.

—We’re not yelling, this is how we talk, Lolo says, yelling.

The boys thunder up the stairs to their room, making sure their footfalls are even louder.

—Yeah, and this isn’t a library, Memo booms. —If you don’t like it, move.

—I wish I could … so I could get away from
you
. But by the time I think to add the second part, he’s already galloped upstairs, two steps at a time, and doesn’t hear me.

I have to wait till everyone is in bed to get any privacy around here. I can hear Father’s snoring, Mother’s whistled breathing, the sighing and gulping and wheezing coming from the boys upstairs. The Grandmother sleeping with her mouth open, hogging the air like a drain swallowing water, then waking herself up and rolling over with a groan. The house with all its faucets gargling.

I pull down my blankets and sheets from the closet and make my bed on the living room couch. Bury myself under three blankets tonight because of the freeze—a fake-fur leopard blanket Father’s seamstresses gave him as a good-bye present, an itchy Mexican wool blanket that weighs a ton and smells like mothballs, and a nubby blue blanket with satin trim that we’ve had since we were babies. Then I turn off the light.

Somewhere in the middle of all the bubbling and gurgling water, in the middle of the coldest night of the San Antonio winter, the Grandmother gets sick. I mean really. When she doesn’t wake up the next morning, Father says she’s probably tired,
pobrecita
, and we have to tiptoe around the kitchen till noon. After the breakfast dishes have been washed, Father starts to worry, and finally, he thinks to knock.

—¿Mamá?

We wait, but there’s no answer.

Father rattles the doorknob, but the door’s locked. It’s not one of those hollow doors, but a real door, an old one with four panels, solid, part of the original house, or from some other old house. Father sends Toto around the house to look in the window, and he reports the Grandmother is slumped in her bed. There’s some argument about knocking out the window as opposed to knocking down the door, but by then somebody has had the good sense to call the fire department.

They’re big guys, these firemen. They come into our house and the house becomes small, their tallness grazing the ceiling, their elbows poking out from windows. They come in with their big voices as if no one is sick and this is just another fire drill, as if it’s any other winter morning. The tree by the curb with its tiny golden leaves like melon seeds. This they bring in with them, because firemen never wipe their shoes.

I look around ashamed. The sheets on the couch still warm, my bedding a crumpled mess because I didn’t have time to clear it. The bathroom door open, a towel draped sloppily over the shower rod, a T-shirt bunched on the floor.

Crack!
The door opens with a crowbar and a good hard shove, and then it’s just bodies hovering over her.

Did she take her pills for her high blood pressure? Did she remember to order her medicine? Was anyone watching her?

But as the Mexicans would say,
sólo Dios sabe
. They wheel the Grandmother out on a gurney, but the Grandmother can’t answer. She can’t say a word, except to stick the tip of her tongue out between her thin yellow beak and give a weak sputter.

^*
María Victoria, a Mexican entertainer, was famous in the fifties and sixties for draping herself on a piano and wearing skintight dresses that gathered at the knees and flowed out into a fishtail skirt, which made her look like a magnificent mermaid. Her voice was soft and sexy and not especially strong, but her outfits and her body were unforgettably campy. In a time of blondes, she was dark; black-black hair and the voluptuous body of a Mexican goddess, and this to me makes her wonderful
.

^†
Libertad Lamarque was an Argentine singer and film star with a voice like a silver knife with a mother-of-pearl handle. Supposedly she was Perón’s lover, and for this they say Eva had her ousted from the country. Libertad settled in Mexico, where she had a long and flourishing career. She died in 2001, working till the last on a Mexican telenovela, una señora grande y una gran señora, as beautiful and elegant in her old age as ever, perhaps more beautiful
.

67.

The Vogue

      N
ot class like Frost Brothers, but definitely not cheese like the Kress. —Verrry rrritzy, verrry fancy, verrry Vogue, Viva says in a snooty fake accent she makes up from I don’t know where. —Formals, shoes, gloves, hats, hose. Whenever you shop for a special occasion, head over to the Vogue, corner of Houston and Navarro Streets, downtown San Antonio, Viva says breathlessly as she swirls through the doors like a TV commercial.

—We’re shopping for the prom, Viva says to the saleswomen trailing us. Not true, but that’s how we get to play dress-up for an hour, trying on beaded gowns we can’t afford. Viva pulls a purple crocheted number over her head and shimmies until it falls into place, the pearl spangles sparkling when she moves, the neckline plunging like an Acapulco cliff diver.

—Oh, my God, Viva, you look just like Cher!

The Vogue saleswomen have to wear prissy name tags that say “Miss” in front of their first names, even if they’re a hundred years old! Miss Sharon, Miss Marcy, Miss Rose.

Viva asks me, —And when you’re on your period, do you get real
cacosa
?

—Shit, yes!

—Ha! That’s a good one. Me too.

Miss Rose hovering about, knocking on the dressing room door too sharply, and asking a hundred times, —Everything all right, honey?

—Gawd! Can’t we have a little privacy here? Viva says, squeezing her
chichis
into a serve-’em-on-a-platter corset gown.

The Vogue is Viva’s choice. Mine, the Woolworth’s across from the Alamo because of the lunch counter that loops in and out like a snake. I
like sitting next to the toothless
viejitos
enjoying their grilled tuna triangles and slurping chicken noodle soup. I could sit at that counter for hours, ordering Cokes and fries, a caramel sundae, a banana split. Or wander the aisles filling a collapsible basket with glitter nail polish, little jars of fruit-flavored lip gloss, neon felt-tip pens, take the escalator to the basement to check out the parakeets and canaries, poke around Hardware looking for cool stuff, or dig through the bargain bins for marked-down treasures.

Viva says who would ever want to shop at the Woolworth’s when there’s the Kress? She has a way of finding jewels even there. Like maybe picking up thick fluorescent yarn for our hair over in Knitting. Or a little girl’s purse I wouldn’t ever notice in a thousand years. Or the funkiest old ladies’ sandals that turn sexy when she wears them.

But it’s over at the Vogue that Viva’s happiest. I can’t see the point in spending so much time in a store that sells nothing for less than five dollars. —But who cares, says Viva. —Right? Who cares.

We try on every formal dress in the store till I complain I’m hungry. No use. Viva pauses in Jewelry and tries on a pair of gold hoop earrings almost bigger than her head.

—Gold hoops look good on us, Viva says. She means Mexicans, and who am I to argue with the fashion expert. We do look good. —Never sleep with your gold hoops, though, Viva adds. —Last time I did that I woke up and they weren’t hoops anymore, but something shaped like peanuts. I’m going to write a list of twenty things you should never do,
nunca
, or you’ll be sorry, and on the top of that list will be: Never, never, never sleep with your gold hoop earrings. I’m telling you.

Number two. Never date anyone prettier than yourself, Viva says, trying on a rhinestone tiara. —Believe me, I know.

She still has to pester saleswomen to help her get her hands on a felt fedora, fishnet pantyhose, pearl hair snoods, strapless bras. I’m slumped on a bench over by the elevator when she finally reappears, sighing loudly and snapping, —Number three. Never shop for more than an hour in platform shoes. My feet feel like zombies, and this place bores me to tears. Let’s cut out.

—I was hoping we could stop at the Woolworth’s for a chili dog, I say. —But it’s late. My ma will be pissed.

—Quit already. We’ll tell her … we were at my house bathing my mother.

Viva is braying over the genius of the story we’re going to tell, exaggerating worse than ever, yakking a mile a minute when we push open the heavy glass doors of the Vogue and step out onto the busy foot traffic of Houston Street.

And then the rest, I don’t remember exactly. Some big clown in a dark suit behind us barking something, a dark shadow out of the corner of my eye, and Viva’s yowl when one grabs her by the shoulder and the little one hustles me by the elbow, escorting us real quick back inside the Vogue while a bunch of shoppers stare at us, and Viva starts cussing, and me mad as hell saying, —Take your hands off her! It happens so fast I really don’t know what’s happening at first. Like being shaken awake from a nightmare, only the nightmare is on the wrong side.