—Don’t laugh so hard, the Grandmother scolds.
—You’ll swallow your tongue. Watch, see if I’m wrong. Don’t you know whenever you laugh this hard, you’ll also cry as hard later the same day?
—Does that mean if we cry hard first thing in the morning, we’ll laugh just as hard before we go to sleep?
I ask and ask, but the Grandmother won’t answer.
The Grandmother is too busy supervising the tables and chairs being carried out to the courtyard. She’s ordered the hi-fi placed on the other side of the living room and turned around to face the courtyard windows. The entire dining room has been replastered and repainted for the occasion. For weeks workmen have trooped in and out, leaving a trail of white footprints from the dining room, across the covered balcony, down the stairs, and over the courtyard tiles to the green iron gates. The Grandmother has scolded them daily; first for being such cochinos, and finally for being lazy and slow. Only yesterday, wearing newspaper hats and speckled work clothes, did they finish their work, just in time for tonight’s party.
But now that they’re gone, it’s the grandchildren she shouts at for being everywhere they’re not supposed to be; playing army hospital in her larder, spitting at passersby from the rooftop, running outside the gates and into the street.
—Barbarians! Never, never-never-never step outside the courtyard gates! You could be stolen and have your ear cut off by kidnappers. How would you like that? Don’t laugh, it happens every day. You could be hit by a car and worn on the bumper like a necktie! Someone could put out your eye, and then what, eh? Answer!
—Sí.
—Yes, what?
—¿Gracias?
—How many times do I have to tell you? You’re to say, “Sí, Abuela.”
It’s Father’s birthday. All week the Grandmother has been marketing for everything herself because she can’t trust the servant girl Oralia to buy the freshest ingredients for Father’s favorite meal—turkey in the Grandmother’s mole sauce.
When the Grandmother goes to the market, she samples from each vendor, pinching, and poking, and pocketing their wares. She makes believe she doesn’t hear them cursing when she walks away without buying anything. The Grandmother couldn’t care less. It’s mijo’s birthday.
This year, because there are already so many people in the house, only a few guests have been invited, some of Father’s boyhood friends—his compadre from Juchitán they call Juchiteco, or Hoo-chi, only I hear it as Coo-chi, like the word in Spanish for “knife” almost.
Throughout the house, the Grandmother shouts her orders from the balcony overlooking the courtyard, above the laundry fluttering on the rooftop, from the apartment upstairs rear where she and the Little Grandfather sleep, from Aunty Light-Skin and Antonieta Araceli’s rooms below, to the two front apartments facing the street where both tenants have been let go this summer so that her three sons and their families can visit all at once. Imagine the sacrifice. The Grandparents aren’t rich after all. —There’s just the rents, and Narciso’s pension, and the little earnings from his tlapalería, which is hardly anything, to tell the truth. But what’s money compared to family? the Grandmother insists. —Renters come and go, but my sons are my sons.
Every year Father’s birthday is celebrated in Mexico City and never in Chicago, because Father’s birthday falls in the summer. That’s why on the mornings of Father’s birth we wake to “The Little Mornings,” and not “Happy Birthday to You.” The Awful Grandmother makes sure to personally shake everyone awake and assemble them to serenade Father while he is still in bed. Every year a record of Pedro Infante singing “Las Mañanitas” booms throughout the house, across the courtyard, through the front and back apartments, upstairs and down, beyond the roof where Oralia lives, to the grimy mechanic’s pit next door, above the high walls capped with broken glass, over to the neighbor’s rooftop chickens, across the street to la Muñeca’s house and the Doctor Arteaga’s office three houses over, and down Misterios to the Grandfather’s tlapalería shop, beyond the sooty walls of la basílica, to the dusty little derby of a hill behind it called Tepeyac. Everyone, everyone in La Villa, even the rooster, wakes to Pedro Infante’s dark and velvety voice serenading the little morning of Father’s birth. Estas son las mañanitas que cantaba el rey David, a las muchachas bonitas, se las cantamos aquí …
Because he was made to wake up early every day of his childhood, Father is terribly sleepy. There is nothing he likes better than to sleep late. Especially on his birthday.
And so, everyone else is already dressed and ready to greet the morning of his birth with a song. —Despierta, mi bien, despierta … But this means everyone. The Awful Grandmother, the Little Grandfather, Aunty Light-Skin and cousin Antonieta Araceli, the girl Oralia, exhausted from having to cook and clean for eighteen more people than usual, and even Amparo the washerwoman and her beautiful daughter, Candelaria.
Everyone else who can be forced to pay their respects—the cousins, the aunts and uncles, my six brothers—all parade into our bedroom while we are still asleep under the sheets, our crusty eyes blinking, our breath sour, our hair crooked as brooms—my mama, my father, and me, because I forgot to tell you, I sleep in their room too when we are in Mexico, sometimes on the rollaway cot across from them and sometimes in the same bed.
—You all behave like ranch people, the Grandmother scolds after the birthday singing is done with. —Shame on you, she says to me. —Don’t you think you’re big enough to sleep alone now?
But who would want to sleep alone? Who on earth would ever want to sleep alone unless they had to, little or big?
It’s embarrassing to be sung to and then yelled at all before breakfast while you are still in your scalloped T-shirt and flowered underwear. Is Mother embarrassed too? We’re pinned to the bed, unable to get up until everyone has congratulated Father on his birthday.
—¡Felicidades! Happinesses!
—Yes, thank you, says Father, blinking. His chin is gray with stubble, his T-shirt not quite white enough, Mother thinks, and why did he have to wear that one with the hole?
—Guess what I’ve saved just for you, mijo! The nata from today’s milk! Would you rather get dressed and come and have breakfast, or shall I bring you a tray?
—Thank you, Mamá. I’ll get dressed. Thank you all. Thank you, many thanks.
Then, after what seems like a very long while of the Grandmother nodding and supervising everyone’s well wishes, they all file out.
Mother leaps up and looks at herself in the dresser mirror.
—I look awful, she says, brushing her hair furiously.
She does look terrible, her hair sticking up like it’s on fire, but no one says, —Oh, no, you don’t look terrible at all, and this only makes her feel worse.
—Hurry up and get dressed, she says to me in that way that makes me do what I’m told without asking why.
—Your mother! I bet she thinks she’s pretty funny barging in every year without even knocking. She gets the whole neighborhood up earlier and earlier. If she thinks I don’t know what’s going on she’s got another “thing” coming …
Father pays no attention to Mother’s complaints. Father laughs that laugh he always laughs when he finds the world amusing. That laugh like las chicharras, a laugh like the letter “k.”