Let Their Spirits Dance (12 page)

“You talked to Mindy? Doesn't that beat all! Probably bad-mouthed me for all you're worth! She probably thinks I'm not fit to be your dad—a real snake-in-the-grass is what she thinks of me.”

“She says you can't force me to live with you. I've got my rights, too.”

“The only rights you have is to a beating. I should take my belt to you—using your brains against me! How did I get stuck with a kid like this?”

“Yeah, use your belt, Paul. The right solution. Didn't you learn anything from watching Dad get mad all the time?” Priscilla asks.

“Stay out of this! You're the one encouraging this kid to make me look like Jack the Ripper. All this brainy stuff is leading him nowhere!”

“Leave him alone!” yells Priscilla. “Just because your brains are gone doesn't mean Michael should be ashamed of his. You should be proud of him, but you don't even have the sense to do that!”

Donna bends down and yanks Paul's shirt, making him sit next to her again. “He's gifted, Paul. You know that,” Donna says.

“Gifted, shifted, this kid's just a smart aleck.”

“You should be nice to me, Dad. You never know if I'll have to defend you in court someday.”

“Defend me? You'd probably send me to the electric chair!”

“Capital punishment is by way of injection these days, besides I don't want to be a lawyer, I want to be a cosmologist.”

Paul slaps the side of his leg. “I knew this kid had some La La in him. See what you're doing to him, Priscilla—making him a sissy. A cosmetologist! What do you say about that?”

“If you'd listen to the word, asshole, you'd know what he said.”

“Don't call me asshole.”

“A cosmologist is a scientist who studies the universe, the cosmos, in case you didn't know,” says Michael.

“I knew,” says Angelo, “and I'm only in third grade.”

“Tell him what a cartographer is, Angelo.”

“A person who makes maps.”

“He's brainwashing Angelo,” Paul says.

“I want to be the first Chicano cosmic cartographer in the world. I'm gonna be like our ancestors the Mayas. They were astronomers like the Egyptians, way back in 1500
B.C.
You'll be coming to me to find your way to Pluto, Dad, and I don't mean Mickey's dog either.”

“What do you think I am, stupid?”

“Actually, you might have learned about some of these things if you had used your time to read while you wasted taxpayers' money in that institution. Where were you? Maximum security, cell block B?”

“Let me at that kid!” Paul stands up and so do I.

“Stop it! Both of you!”

“I'm leaving!” Priscilla yells. “I'll be damned if I let Paul insult Michael in front of my face! That's child abuse!”

“Will you both stop! What am I, some kind of a referee?”

“Paul, please,” Donna says. “We're here for your mom.”

“Exactly, we're here for Mom.
Thank you
, Donna! We're here to figure out what to do about all this. She wants us all to go with her to the Wall. I can see why now. Jesse was the only one she could count on for comfort.”

“What does that mean, Miss Know-It-All? That I'm not any comfort to her?” asks Paul.

“Don't even go there! All you've ever given her is heartache!”

“OK, OK, we all know that,” says Priscilla. “I want to get this whole thing settled about Mom so I can leave.”

“Just
like
you, Priscilla, not to want to stay very long when somebody's sick. Someone waiting for you?”

“Wouldn't you like to know!”

“Is Baltimore down?” Paul yells.

“Yep,” Cisco shouts back.

“A real kangaroo court, all of us! Mom's sick, we all know that. How much more time she has, we don't know.” Everyone is quiet. Nobody looks at anyone else. “She wants to get to the Wall, and she wants to take Irene with her. She won't fly, neither one of them will, so that leaves us to go by car. If any of you think you can stop her, well then go ahead and try!”

“She'll never make it,” Priscilla says.

“She'll make it,” says Donna. “Your mother is the strongest woman I've ever known.”

“Stay out of this, Donna,” says Priscilla. “She's not your mom. I know one thing, if anything happens to her, I'm going after
you
, Teresa.”

“How? With the acrylic nails you just got? You might get them damaged!” Priscilla grabs her purse and stands up.

“Sit down, Madonna!” says Paul. “You ain't going nowhere until we get this thing settled.”

Mom walks into the living room with Lisa at her side. “All this yelling woke Nana up,” Lisa says.

“Here, Alicia, sit here,” says Donna, leading Mom to the rocker. “Now, where were we?”

Paul kneels next to Mom. Donna stands behind her with her hand on Mom's shoulder.

“Por favor, please, don't fight, any of you. I just want to go touch my mijito's name on the Vietnam Wall. It's a promise, una manda I've made with God. I have to go now…don't you see?”

“You're too sick to go, Mom,” Paul says. “Jesse would understand, and God won't get mad either.”

“Go by plane,” Michael says enthusiastically. “It's safer than going by car.”

“No, mijito, your nana can't do that. I'm too old to fly. The only wings I'll ever have are those God will give me if I ever make it to Heaven.”

“Mom, it's over two thousand miles,” says Paul.

“You remembered!” says Michael with a smirk. Paul glares at him.

“Don't be mad at him, Paul. Your son's a genius, pobrecito, he can't help himself.”

“Mom, I don't want you to go there. It'll be too hard for you.”

“But I heard your brother! I heard Jesse—I know it was him!”

“It's the parallel universe talking to you, Nana,” says Michael. “Things we can't see jump into our orbits and start traveling with us.”

“You can't believe everything you read in books, knucklehead,” Paul says.

“How do you know that?” I ask Michael.

“I read about it, Tía, and I believe it's true. It's like when somebody loses a leg and they still feel pain where the missing limb used to be. Energy can't be created or destroyed; Einstein proved that. It only changes into another form. Tío Jesse is out there somewhere, and maybe the energy of his soul crossed orbits with Nana's.”

Don Florencío's words flash through my mind…
a new form, our people have always walked the earth
.

“The kid's crazy!” says Paul.

“No, Paul. Don Florencío told me years ago—that—” Paul doesn't let me finish.

“That crazy old man! He should have stopped smoking peyote. He was stoned half the time.”

“You're one to talk about being stoned! I never saw Don Florencío stoned,
you
I've seen stoned.”

“I have to do this, mijo,” Mom says to Paul. “I've made a manda, don't you understand? Do you want me to end up like the Robles brother?”

“What Robles brother?”

“Some guy who never kept his promise to God and died screaming in pain.”

“Mom, that won't happen to you,” says Paul. Mom grabs Paul's hand and starts to cry. “Please, mijo, your mother is asking you for something, please take me to the Wall. God will do the rest.” Paul is holding Mom in his arms, and she is openly weeping. The rain is splattering on the roof, my mother is weeping, the phone rings in the bedroom, and Lilly yells for Lisa. Cisco walks in. His face is relaxed, as if he just finished yawning. He looks at me like he's throwing me a lifeline.

“What's so hard about getting Nana to the Vietnam Wall?” he asks. “She wants to go, we'll get her there.”

Of course, so reasonable, so simple. Cisco's like Tata O'Brien—nothing to it. We'll get Mom to the Vietnam Wall and I'll be the ambassador to Chile and bring back chili seeds for Tata to plant in his Victory Garden.

“We'll get you there,” Donna whispers to Mom. “Don't cry, Alicia, we'll get you there, won't we, Teresa?”

“Sure, Mom, yes we will.” There's nothing else for me to say. Priscilla stares at me, then looks out the window.

“Can you imagine being together all those days?” she asks.

I
t was pretty scary this morning. I slipped into a pair of Priscilla's shoes. They were in the closet, way in the back. They looked like they were a pair of white sandals I used to wear. Instead, I put on these soft, white leather shoes, flats with small, satin-embroidered oval openings just over the toes, very feminine. Priscilla bought them when she was coming to terms with herself as a woman. What surprises me is that the shoes fit me. Priscilla wears at least one size smaller. Now I'm worried my feet are shrinking, or maybe I've lost so much weight it's affected my feet. Everyone says the divorce has been good for me. I look sexy again. I can feel my hip bones, something I was forgetting I owned. My shoulders are taking form, the bones curving into smooth muscles, and my legs are getting skinnier than I want them to get. But my feet? I wear Priscilla's shoes to school that day just to prove to myself that I can. It's strange to walk around in somebody else's shoes, it makes you wonder if you could ever live out that person's life, or if you would want to. I think of my mother's shoes and the things she's walked through, of Ray's, Paul's, of Jesse's, and El Santo Niño's sandals. I'm imagining walking in Priscilla's white leather shoes all the way to the Vietnam Wall. Isn't white the color of mourning in Vietnam? Crazy thoughts come into your head when you're wearing somebody else's shoes.

 

• “T
HERE'S A BONA FIDE REASON
for everything in the world,” says Brandon. He's talking to Juan, and making himself feel good because his “Word of the Day” is
bona fide
, and he's just used it in a sentence. Most of the classroom is packed away, bulletin boards are blank, construction paper is neatly stockpiled on the shelves, pencil marks in textbooks have been erased, and tomorrow the children will scrub their desks. The usual hustle and bustle of putting things away for summer vacation has started. New shoes the children wore in September have long been outgrown, the squeaky leather now a sagging gray.

A few people told me they liked my shoes, Priscilla's shoes, actually. “Cute, feminine. Are they comfortable?” asked Vicki. “Sure, if you consider I wear an eight and these are a size seven.” I'm still wondering how they fit in the first place, when I get a call over the classroom intercom.

“Your Mom called, Mrs. Alvarez,” Clara announces. “She wants you to call her at lunchtime.” Clara's voice sounds matter-of-fact, but I know she's dying to know what this is all about. My mother never calls the school.

“Is it an emergency?”

“No.” she says. “It's about a letter.”

“A letter? Never mind, I'll call her later.”

“What letter, Mrs. Alvarez?” asks Julissa.

“Oh, I don't know, sweetheart, probably something she got from an office or a doctor. My mother gets confused sometimes and needs a little help.”

Lorena's washing off paintbrushes at the sink. Her plastic apron is streaked with colors that look like an outlandish finger painting.

“Just like Clara to announce everything to the world,” she says. “All she had to say was that it wasn't an emergency.”

“Can you imagine? Half the school will know about the letter by lunchtime. Is there anything we can do about her?”

“Clara's been transferred from two other schools. They couldn't do anything about her either, outside of taping her mouth shut. Three's the charm, though, Mrs. Alvarez, the buck might stop here.”

By lunchtime Priscilla's shoes are feeling tighter. My toes are starting to bulge out of the satin oval openings. Stupid of me to think I could wear them all day. Clara is standing at the front desk talking to Shirley when I walk in at lunch.

“Did you call your mom, Teresa?” Clara asks.

“Not yet. This is the first time I've had a break all day.” She's standing next to Shirley with a box of envelopes in her hands.

“Mail-out?” I ask.

“End-of-the-year stuff,” says Shirley. “By the way Teresa, I hate to break the news to you but Mr. H. is thinking of vacating your room and Mrs. Allen's for the new developmental first grades. Both of you would be moved to the next building.”

“Getting back at me for not working on the stupid CRTs, is he? I told him we just revamped them last summer, and now they're district scratch paper.”

“We're just running out of room,” she says.

Shirley's hair is dark gray, almost blue in some places. She looks like Aunt Bee on
The Andy Griffith Show
, minus the apron. Shirley should be in a kitchen making cookies for the neighborhood kids, not at Jimenez Elementary trying to keep Clara busy. The only thing Clara wants to stay busy with is other people's business. She's got a perpetual smile on her face and eyes that invite you to spill your guts. When you're having a bad hair day, it's all you can do not to come in and confess to everything you've ever done, including the time you sneaked out expensive bond paper from the office for your personal use.

“He can't make Mrs. Allen do anything. Annie Get Your Guns is her best friend.”

Clara's eyes light up. “Annie's so vocal!”

Shirley shoots a look at her. “Just finish the mail-out, Clara.”

I walk into the workroom and place a call home. On the other end, my mother explains that she has a letter from the Veterans Administration in Washington, D.C. She's reading the return address.

“Veterans Admin…something…Veterans of Four Wars.”

“It's probably Veterans of Foreign Wars, Mom, there's only been two world wars, unless I've lost count.”

“Do they know I want to get to the Vietnam Wall, mija?”

“No, Mom, they don't. I can't imagine what this is all about. Who is the letter for?”

“For me, mija, it's addressed to me.”

“Did you tell the lady who answered the phone here at school about the letter?”

“Ay, mija, she's a busybody. She wouldn't stop asking me questions, la metichi.”

“OK, Mom, don't worry. Is Paul there, or Cisco?”

“No one.”

“Just leave the letter for me, and I'll read it after school.”

As I say the last words, Clara walks in to use the paper cutter.

“I thought you were doing a mail-out.”

“I have to get these sheets cut into halves for the PTO meeting tonight. Did you find out what the letter is about?”

“What letter?”

“I thought this was about a letter?”

“Oh, you mean the one from Social Security?”

“Is that all it is?”

“Yep.” Disappointed, Clara walks out with a few sheets cut in half.

“Not very many parents coming tonight.”

“I just remembered the PTO meeting is tomorrow night.”

“Right.”

 

• B
Y THE TIME
I walk into Mom's after school, I'm holding Priscilla's shoes in one hand. Maybe my feet grew from morning to afternoon, or maybe I found out that no matter how hard I try I'll never be able to fit into Priscilla's shoes. Why would I want to?

“You should have worn nylons, mija. You're not supposed to wear dress shoes without nylons. You'll sweat and ruin the shoes. Priscilla won't want them back now.”

“I don't like nylons. It's too hot to wear them, besides I don't care if Priscilla ever wears these shoes or not. Serves her right for leaving them here.”

“I'll get her another pair if she gets mad.”

“Mom, who cares! You're always trying to save us from getting mad at each other. Priscilla will do what she wants no matter what you do.” My mother's got rice boiling on the stove and meat simmering in gravy with potatoes. She finishes stirring the pan of meat.

“Look on top of your dresser, mija, the letter is in there.”

I dump Priscilla's shoes into a corner of the bedroom, cursing them for starting blisters on my feet. I pick up the letter with the insignia of the Veterans Administration. What do they want now? Paul's not a veteran, so it's not about that. It's not for Cisco, he's already signed up for the Selective Service. I want to tear the letter open, and at the same time I want to rip it into shreds. How dare they send us a letter! They have the life of one Ramirez. Isn't that enough?

I'm waving the letter in one hand, standing barefoot in the bedroom, slipping out of my blouse and skirt. I hear the stump of Mom's cane coming up to the bedroom door. She's looking at me in my underwear, angling her head for balance. She peers at me like she's looking over the edge of a blanket.

“You're getting too skinny, Teresa. I remember when I was that size, and it wasn't just your father who was after me either. There were a few others.”

“Then why did you choose my dad?”

She ignores my question. “What's in the letter?” She sits on the edge of the bed. I put the letter up to the light coming in from the window, and notice space between the edge of the letter inside it and the end of the envelope. I tear open the end of the envelope that's free of the letter.

“Another letter of apology? These fuckers can never get enough.”

“Don't cuss, mija.”

“What do you want me to say? I can't make heads or tails of what this means. They're experts at twisting the truth.”

“What truth? Something about Jesse?”

My heart is racing and my hands are suddenly ice cold. “Yes, something about Jesse—but I don't know what it means. What time is it?”

“It's after four o'clock. Why?”

“There's a number here for me to call in D.C. but it's a three-hour difference. The office is closed by now. I'll have to wait until tomorrow.”

“What do they want with my son?” My mother is already in tears.

“Mom, don't cry, this bastard Rothberg probably made a mistake, like they always do. I'll find out tomorrow.”

“The meat, mija!”

I run to the stove in my underwear, grabbing an old T-shirt on my way out. I'm just in time to turn off the pan with the meat and potatoes as the last bit of gravy is disappearing and the meat is starting to burn. I race back into the bedroom and my mother is sitting with the letter in her hand staring at Jesse's name. Under my breath I'm cursing the pain in my feet, red blisters on each little toe from wearing Priscilla's shoes.