Let Their Spirits Dance (8 page)

M
y mother keeps Jesse's medals hidden away in a cabinet where the ballerina with the purple sprinkles is frozen in a perfect pirouette. The ballerina has her own story to tell. We bought her from a descendant of Carlos Peña Arminderez, the patriarch of a band of gypsies who owned an empty field west of the railroad tracks. The gypsies never stayed very long anywhere. When they were gone for more than three years, the Black brothers of Two Doors Gospel Church thought that meant they had abandoned the property. Two Doors Gospel took over the land, claiming it as church property, until a city slicker from Buffalo came by flashing authentic-looking land deeds. He swore he was a direct descendant of Carlos Peña Arminderez and that the land belonged to him. He set up a store on the property and sold imported knickknacks of windup porcelain ballet dancers that spun around in glass containers filled with liquid sprinkles. He didn't make any sales on the ballet dancers and reverted to selling beer until the Black brothers from Two Doors Gospel convinced him that the only door left for him, for all eternity, was the one leading to Hell. They preached so loud and so righteously and sang so many songs that the descendant of Carlos Peña Arminderez finally took off in the middle of the night, leaving all the ballet dancers behind. For the longest time, we had one of the figurines standing on a shelf my dad built. Every once in a while I would wind it up and turn it upside
down to see the purple sprinkles float around the delicate ballet dancer. Years later, Mom transferred the ballerina to the glass cabinet she bought for Jesse's medals at the secondhand store. The ballerina doesn't dance anymore, but if you turn her glass container upside down the purple sprinkles float over her head and make you think she's watching over Jesse's medals.

 

• I
N THE SUMMER OF
'57, Brother Mel Jakes set up a big canvas tent on the field vacated by the Arminderez clan. I was nine and Jesse was twelve. Under Brother Jakes's direction, the congregation sent evangelists in pairs to scour the neighborhood looking for sinners, mostly homeless people, to fill up the tent. The revival was a call to repentance, a time for the brothers to usher in candidates who might walk a few yards down the way and join the Two Doors Gospel Church after the revival was over. The tent was a circus attraction, except it had no man on the flying trapeze for the crowd to ooh and ahh. Instead, Brother Jakes told the crowd what would happen to pleasure-seekers who passed their time away looking for excitement while forgetting to prepare for life beyond the grave. The part about worms crawling out of dead people's eyes stayed in my mind the night we went over to hear Brother Jakes preach.

“It's as easy as one, two, three to be free!” Brother Jakes shouted, sticking his fingers up in the air for emphasis. “There are two doors, two gates, and two pastures where yo' all can end up. And some of yo' all may already be penned up where you ain't supposed to be! There ain't no use trying to hide. Once you is in the wrong place there's no way out!”

Brother Jakes's tent was off-limits to me and Jesse, because we were Catholic. We were supposed to be suspicious of tambourines and people who jumped around speaking gibberish and falling all over the place, but our curiosity got the best of us. On regular Sunday evening services, we spied on the congregation through the open windows. Jesse sometimes gave me a step up with his hands crossed one over the other so I could get a better look.

Looking over the windowsill, I searched for Hanny, an enormous Black woman who lived next to Wong's Market. Chong Wong's backyard faced Hanny's dilapidated shack. Chong Wong had secured it with a six-foot chain-link fence and his own brand of burglar alarm, his Doberman, General Custer. Chong Wong's son, Willy, was one of Jesse's
best friends. Willy had read the history of the United States to his father, translating it into Chinese. Since Mr. Wong loved the part about General George Custer and how the Indians surrounded him at Little Big Horn, he named his Doberman General Custer. Neighbors asked daily, “How's the General, Chong?” Chong Wong would answer, “He vely fine. Eat much meat, chase injuns all day!” Then he would laugh and show all his black teeth. I wondered why his teeth were black when all the rice they ate was white. His wife Xiu had gray teeth that never went all the way to black. I watched them sometimes, having dinner in the store, with their rice bowls poised right under their noses. They used the chopsticks like shovels, pushing the rice into their mouths a mile a minute. In between, they would talk Chinese that sounded like they were arguing with each other. Willy's real name was Willard and he hated it. His father said he named him Willard because it sounded like the name of an American president. Willy's parents made him wear suspenders, and none of the other kids wore suspenders. I felt sorry for Willy when I saw him wearing his older brother's pants, held up by two red suspenders.

The Wongs were fans of
The Ed Sullivan Show
and watched it every Sunday night. They loved to see Sammy Davis, Jr. perform and wanted Willy to imitate him. They bought Willy a suit with a fake carnation on the lapel. Willy sang into a broomstick microphone, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and all kinds of old-fashioned songs. Chong Wong and Xiu clapped for him, but his brothers and sisters only laughed. Willy told me later that the only good thing about the suit was that it covered up his suspenders. The Wongs finally gave up on Willy and said America would never accept a Chinese Sammy Davis, Jr.

The Wongs saved some of their money in the bank, and some of it Willy said in the big walk-in refrigerator that kept their meat cold. “It's a big secret,” Willy said. “Don't tell anybody, Teresa.” I told him the refrigerator was a weird place to hide money. “My dad says if they break in they'll take the meat and forget to look for money. That's the Chinese way. Let them think they're winning!”

Willy did lots of things other Chinese guys didn't do. He signed up for the Marines right after Jesse signed up for the Army, even though Chong Wong told him the Chinese had already been to Vietnam and nothing good had come of it. It was un escandalo, a scandal in their world when Willy signed up with the Marines. In America, the Chinese were known for using their brains, not their fists, to make a living, but Willy only wanted to be like one of the vatos from El Cielito. Chong Wong
kept a picture of Willy in his Marine uniform at the cash register and never stopped saying, “Dis boy tink he Amelican. Dis boy find out in Vietnam, he vely Chinese!”

On their way to Wong's Market, neighbors could hear Hanny in her shack stomping and clapping out the old church melodies. The smell of cornbread baking and chicken frying issued from Hanny's shack and made everybody's mouth water. One day, I asked my mom what Hanny's real name was, but she said that was all that had ever been given to her by her folks down South. For all I know, there's a tombstone somewhere with
HANNY
written on it.

Hanny always wore the same huge straw hat with ostrich feathers around the brim to church. I loved the graceful waving of the ostrich feathers and wanted to touch them, but Jesse said no. No matter how much Hanny clapped and stomped her feet, the ostrich feathers kept their own fluid movement around her face. I figured they had been plucked off an ostrich's tail while it dug its head in the sand.

“Bring them po' Mexican chil'en in…Jeeesus loves them, too!” Hanny had seen me peering over the windowsill. She motioned us with her hand, and one of the brothers was kind enough to oblige her by bringing us in, except Jesse and I had already run off into the night. Running away from the Two Doors Gospel Church was like walking out of a real live movie screen into an empty theater. It took a few minutes to clear our heads of the rush and movement of the congregation.

Jesse and I compared notes on what we had seen. One brother's eyes were ready to pop when he cried out “Hallelujah!” and claimed that “the ol' tempter has done left my soul.” The kids were dancing and hollering right along with the adults. The whole place was lit up, packed and swaying with sweaty bodies that leaped, jumped, danced, and lifted their hands up to an enormous bare cross. Jesse said the cross was bare because they couldn't find one with a black Jesus.

We got to see the congregation up close the night Mom went with our neighbor, Blanche Williams, to Brother Jakes's revival services. Blanche had convinced Mom that the only way she would ever be rid of her migraine headaches was through the power of Jesus Christ. My mother tried to hide the pain of her headaches from my father, because she knew he had no patience for any pain except his own. Doña Carolina treated my mother's migraines with yagaby leaves simmered into a tea. Willy Wong always said that in the Chinese world, Doña Carolina was the ying and Don Florencío was the yang of the neighborhood because they were male and female, old folks who knew lots of secrets. Don
Florencío never recommended yagaby leaves for Mom. He said her problem was right in front of her face, and later I found out what he meant.

The yagaby tea helped Mom but at times the fury of the headaches was so intense we ended up taking her to Dr. Camacho, who had a small office off skid row. The only remedy for her then was to get a shot that put her to sleep. Dr. Camacho gave shots for everything, for colds, flus, cuts, and even ingrown toenails. Mom slept for two days after the shot. Jesse and I made sure Priscilla had enough to eat and something to wear. We tiptoed around the house and closed all the curtains, because my mother's eyes hurt when she looked out into the sun. There was a hole in the house when Mom got sick, right in the middle where she sang, cooked, and cleaned. The hole had power to suck me into itself and hold me prisoner. My dad never noticed it, but I could tell you exactly where it was and how I felt when I put my hands over it and didn't feel the floor underneath.

My parents were opposites in almost everything, which was probably why my mother got her migraines in the first place. Energy spun around her in circles as she tried to please my father. Sometimes the path of energy went right to her head like the picture of a muscle man I once saw, slugging away at a heavy weight and making it go all the way to TNT. The muscle man won the prize when the alarms went off and the red lights were blinking. My mother won her migraine when she tried to get my father to stay away from Consuelo and couldn't do it. Then she gave up and let all the energy fly up like electric sparks to her brain where it turned into a migraine.

When my dad heard my mother was having “another one,” he came home from Consuelo's house. Consuelo reminded me of the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. Her limbs were stiff from the six children she had carried at her hip. The last two everyone knew were definitely Ramirezes. Consuelo walked like a wooden soldier with knees that never bent as they should. When my dad went over to Consuelo's he said he was only going to visit his brother, Tío Ernie, who lived next door to her. When we saw him at Consuelo's, he said it was because the poor woman had no one to fix her broken windows, seal her leaky pipes, and nail down the tar paper on her roof that the wind had lifted up at the corners.

Consuelo's house sloped down on one side, making one of the windows almost level with the ground. Her six kids used the window like a door. I wondered why they didn't just put a doorknob and hinges on it.

Her front yard looked like a cemetery of old cars, some with their hoods and doors missing. Her kids played in them. One time one of them was bitten by a black widow spider that made its home in the worn-out seats. Nana said Consuelo's yard was puro yonkie, nothing but a pile of junk.

“I'm going over to your Tío Ernie's” were the words that started the strange energy in my mother. They started something in me and Jesse, too. One part of us said, “Get on your knees and beg him to stay,” the other part said, “Jump him.” It was as if he had just marched Consuelo into our kitchen and sat her at our table. There was nothing we could do but watch him go. Sometimes Tío Ernie would visit us. He was jolly and loud like a Santa Claus, but his eyes were shifty, and he couldn't look Mom in the face, because he knew. He wanted everyone to think he was good, very good, giving us sticky candy suckers, but there was a bitterness to it all and a sense of life gone bad.

My father was dark and stocky with rounded shoulders that had once been muscular and a limp that favored the hip the Germans shattered with an exploding grenade. The government had a surgeon stick pins into my dad's hip, then the doctor said he was healthy enough to go to work. Under his shaggy brows, my father's black eyes were alive, alert, penetrating every face, taking in everyone else's eyes. My father could do that. He could absorb your eyes into his until you were only a reflection in his pupils. I guess that's how he held on to Mom. She could only see the world through his eyes. If he couldn't capture your eyes, he didn't want anything to do with you. Power was a thread stretching taut and brittle between my parents, a tug-of-war that went in my dad's favor. The struggle ended when Mom walked away shaking her head, wringing her hands.

Mom's skin was light with a few freckles on the soft flesh under her arms. Her hair was sandy red. After Kennedy was elected president, she dyed it dark brown and brushed it into a flip to imitate her idol, Jackie Kennedy. Her head came up to my dad's slumping shoulder and her body smelled like Frosted Flakes. She wore different colored aprons, fringed by a collection of safety pins around the hem. Mom said you never knew when you would need a safety pin. Mom noticed everything. She saw dust bunnies under the dresser and the crooked part down the middle of my hair that looked like a road crew's idea of a joke.

“God is God, no matter where you go.” I heard it with my own ears. My dad said this to Mom when he gave us permission to go to the Two Doors Gospel Church with Blanche. He sat at the table with a full plate of chili con carne and beans. I could tell my mom was getting ready for
World War III by the way she went from one end of the kitchen to the other doing nothing more than picking up plates putting them back down again and rearranging forks and spoons. This was the nervous energy of her migraines. My dad was sullen, quiet, his mustache drooping. His attitude was “I don't care, leave me alone.” So careless. I looked closely at him and knew he was ready for another trip to Tío Ernie's. I glanced out the window, but there was no rain in sight. “Construction crews don't work in the rain,” was one of the excuses my dad used for visiting his brother. Jesse took odd jobs all over the neighborhood to help support Mom and us when my dad was over at Tío Ernie's. We depended on Jesse for so many things, we forgot my dad was supposed to be the man of the house.