The Little Grandfather died on a Tuesday in the time of rain. He had an attack of the heart while driving on the periférico and crashed into a truck filled with brooms. The Grandfather’s face looked startled. This was not the death he had imagined for himself. An avalanche of plastic brooms of all colors spilling onto the windshield like crayons. The thwack of brooms under car wheels. The thunk-thunk of their tumbling on metal. Brooms twirling in the air and bouncing. The Grandfather, who never lifted a broom in his life, buried under a mountain of plastic brooms, the ones Mexican housekeepers use with a bucket of sudsy water to scrub the patio, to scrub the street and curb. As if Death came with her apron and broom and swept him away.
At first the family thinks they can outrun Death and arrive in time to say their good-byes. But the Little Grandfather dies in his automobile and not in a hospital room. The Grandfather, who paid so much attention to being feo, fuerte, y formal in his life, backed up traffic for kilometers; a feo diversion, a fuerte nuisance for the passing motorists, a sight as common as any yawning Guanajuato mummy, as formal as any portrait of Death on the frank covers of the ¡Alarma! scandal magazine.
When they dug him out from under the brooms, they say he mumbled a woman’s name before dying, but it was not the name “Soledad.” A garbled swamp of syllables bubbled up from that hole in his chest from the war. That’s what the periférico witnesses said. But who can say whether it was true or simply a story to weave themselves into that day’s drama.
He had a bad heart, it will be explained when explanations can be given. —It’s that we have a history, we Reyes, of bad hearts, Father says. Bad hearts. And I wonder if it means we love too much. Or too little.
The brothers Reyes hurry to make their reservations south. In our family it’s Father and me who fly down for the funeral. Father insists I go with him even though it’s almost the end of the school year and the week of my finals. Father talks to the school principal and arranges for me to make up my exams later, so I can be promoted to the eighth grade. I’ll miss the end-of-the-year assembly where my class is to sing “Up, Up, and Away.” —I can’t go without Lala, Father keeps saying. Father and me on an airplane again, just like in the stories he likes to tell me about when I was a baby.
The Grandmother is already beyond grief by the time we get there. She busies herself making great pots of food nobody can eat and talking nonstop like a parrot that has bit into a chile. When she’s exhausted her stories with us, she talks on the telephone to strangers and friends, explaining again and again the details of her husband’s death, as if it was just a story that happened to someone else’s husband and not hers.
It only gets worse at the burial. When the time comes to pour dirt on top of the coffin, the Grandmother shrieks as if they’d put a pin through her heart. Then she does what is expected of every good Mexican widow since the time of the Olmecs. She tries to throw herself into the open grave.
—Narcisooooooo!!!
All three of her sons and several husky neighbors have to hold her back. How did the Grandmother become so strong? There’s a commotion of huddled bodies, shouts, yelps, screeches, and muffled sobs, and then I can’t see.
—Narcisooooooo!!!
Please. Too terrible. The Grandmother collapses into a trembling heap of black garments, and this bundle is tenderly lifted and loaded into a car.
—Narcisooooooo!!! the Grandmother hiccups as she is led away. The last syllable stretched out long and painful. Narcisooooooo, Narcisooooooo!!! The “o” of a train whistle. The longing in a coyote’s howl.
Maybe she’s seeing into the future. Maybe she can foresee selling the house on Destiny Street, packing up her life, and starting a new life up north en el otro lado, the other side.
To tell the truth, the Grandmother didn’t realize how much she loved her husband until there was no husband left to love. The smell of Narciso haunts her, his strange tang of sweet tobacco and iodine. She opens all the windows, but can’t get the smell out of the house. —Don’t you smell it? You don’t? A smell that makes you sad, like the ocean.
Days later, when everyone who has tried to help has gotten out of the way and events have settled to a startling solitude, the Grandmother decides.
—The house on Destiny Street must be sold, she says, surprising everyone, especially herself. —There is no changing my mind.
The Grandmother decides everything, same as always.
—And why do I need such a big house in the center of such a noisy neighborhood? It was different when my children were children. But you have no idea how Mexico City has changed. Why, our old neighborhood La Villa is no longer La Villa anymore! It’s flooded with a different category of people these days. I’m not lying. It’s not safe for a woman alone, and with my only daughter abandoning me to be a burden on her daughter, do you think she’d invite me? Of course, I wouldn’t think of imposing on her even if she did, I’m not that kind of woman. I’ve always been independent. Always, always, always. Till the day I die my children will know I never imposed on any of them. But my sons, after all, are sons. And with the three of them up in the United States, what else can I do but suffer one more calamity and move myself up there to be near my grandchildren. It’s a sacrifice, but what’s life if not sacrifices for our children’s sake?
And so that’s how it is that Aunty Light-Skin is summoned back to Mexico City to help the Grandmother say good-bye to the past. And that’s how it is we go back, after the Grandfather’s burial, recruited as involuntary volunteers to help move the Grandmother up north. At least the half of the family still young enough to have to obey Father. The older ones have perfect excuses; summer jobs, graduate school, summer classes. Father, Mother, Toto, Lolo, Memo, and me are stuck with her. That’s how it is we lose another summer vacation and head one last time to the house on Destiny Street.
By the time we arrive, the house has already been sold to the family who rents the downstairs portion, the apartments where Aunty and Antonieta Araceli once lived. The rooms closest to the street, where we always stayed, will be rented to strangers. All that’s left is for the Grandmother to pack up her things and come up north with us to Chicago. She plans to buy a house in the States with the money from the Destiny Street house and its furnishings.
The Grandmother insists on overseeing every little thing, and that’s why everything takes twice as long. Father has to make sure she is given something to keep her busy, and now she is sorting through the walnut-wood armoire, the doors standing open exhaling a stale breath of soft apples. She pauses at her husband’s favorite flannel robe, holds it up to her face, and inhales. The smell of Narciso, of tobacco and iodine, still in the cloth. She had avoided sorting through his clothes. And now here she is, holding her husband’s ratty old robe to her nose and relishing the smell of Narciso. A pain squeezes her heart.
What does she miss most? She is ashamed to say—laundry. She misses his socks swirling in the wash, his darks mixed with her florals, his clean undershirts plucked stiff from the clothesline, folding his trousers, steam-ironing a shirt, the arrow of the iron moving across a seam, a dart, the firm pressure along the collar, and the tricky shoulder. Here, this is how. That silly girl! Leave my husband’s things. Those I’ll iron myself. Cursing all the while about how much work it was to iron undershirts and underpants, men’s shirts with their troublesome darts and buttons and stitching, but she did them all the same. The complaining that was a kind of bragging. Scrub out the sweat stains—by hand!—with a bar of brown soap and the knuckles stropped raw, scrub with lots of suds, like this. Put the shirts to the nose before soaking them in the outdoor sink with the ridged bottom, the smell of you like no one else. The smell of you, your heat I roll toward in my sleep, your wide back, your downy bottom, the curled legs, the soft, fat feet I embrace with my feet. Your man shirts puffed with air, your trousers hooked on the doorknob, your balled socks shaken out of the sheets, a tie lying on the floor, a robe draped behind a door, a pajama top slouched on a chair. I’ll be right back, they said. I’ll be right back. I’ll be … right … back.
And she misses sleeping with somebody. The falling asleep with and waking up next to a warm someone.
—Abrázame, he’d demand when she came to bed. Hug me. When she did wrap her arms around her husband, his fleshy back, his tidy hipbones, the furry buttocks tucked against her belly, the bandaged chest, his wound with its smell of iodine and stale cookies, this is when he would sandwich her plump feet with his plump feet, warm and soft as tamales.
The talk in the night, that luxurious little talk about nothing, about everything before falling asleep: —And then what happened?
—And then I said to the butcher, this doesn’t look like beef, this looks like dog cutlets if you ask me …
—You’re kidding!
—No, that’s what I said …
How sometimes he fell asleep with her talking. The heat of his body, furious little furnace. The softness of his belly, soft swirl of hair that began in the belly button and ended below in that vortex of his sex. All this was hard to put into language. It took a while for the mind to catch up with the body, which already and always remembered.
Everyone complains about marriage, but no one remembers to praise its wonderful extravagances, like sleeping next to a warm body, like sandwiching one’s feet with somebody else’s feet. To talk at night and share what has happened in a day. To put some order to one’s thoughts. How could she not help but think—happiness.
—Father says I’m to come and help you, I say, entering the room and startling the Grandmother from her thinking.
—What? No, I’ll do it myself. You’ll only make more work for me. Run along, I don’t need you.
All over the floor and spilling out of the walnut-wood armoire is a tangled mess of junk impossible not to want to touch. The open doors let out the same smell I remember from when I was little. Old, sweet, and rotten, like things you buy at Maxwell Street.
In a shoe box full of the Grandfather’s things, a photograph of a young man. A brown sepia-colored photo pasted on thick cardboard. I recognize the dark eyes. It’s the Grandfather when he was young! Grandfather handsome in a fancy striped suit, Grandfather sitting on a caned bentwood settee, his body leaning to the side like a clock at ten to six. Somebody’s cut around him so that only the Little Grandfather exists. The person whose shoulder he’s leaning on is gone.
—Grandmother, who was cut out of this picture?
The Grandmother snatches the photo from my hand. —Shut the door when you leave, Celaya. I won’t be needing your help anymore today.
The key double-clicks behind me, and the springs from the bed let out a loud complaint.
Behind a drawer of stockings, rolled in a broomstick handle, wrapped in an old pillowcase with holes, the caramelo rebozo, the white no longer white but ivory from age, the unfinished rapacejo tangled and broken. The Grandmother snaps open the caramelo rebozo. It gives a soft flap like wings as it falls open. The candy-colored cloth unfurling like a flag—no, like a hypnotist’s spiral. And if this were an old movie, it would be right to insert in this scene just such a hypnotist’s spiral circling and circling to get across the idea of going into the past. The past, el pasado. El porvenir, the days to come. All swirling together like the stripes of a chuchuluco …
The Grandmother unfolds it to its full width across the bed. How nice it looks spread out, like a long mane of hair. She plays at braiding and unbraiding the unfinished strands, pulling them straight with her fingers and then smoothing them smooth. It calms her, especially when she’s nervous, the way some people braid and unbraid their own hair without realizing they’re doing it. With an old toothbrush, she brushes the fringe. The Grandmother hums bits of songs she doesn’t know she is humming while she works, carefully unworking the kinks and knots, finally taking a comb and nail scissors to snip off the ragged ends, holding the swag of cloth in her arms and sniffing its scent. Good thing she thought to burn dried rosemary to keep it smelling sweet all these years.
When the Grandmother had slept in the pantry of Regina Reyes’ kitchen, she’d tied her wages in a knot in one end of this rebozo. With it she had blown her nose, wiped the sleep from her face, muffled her sobs, and hiccuped hot, syrupy tears. And once with a certain shameless pharmacist named Jesús, she had even used it as a weapon. All this she remembers, and the cloth remembers as well.
The Grandmother forgets about all the work waiting but simply unfolds the caramelo rebozo and places it around her shoulders. The body remembers the silky weight. The diamond patterns, the figure eights, the tight basket weave of strands, the fine sheen to the cloth, the careful way the caramelo rebozo was dyed in candy stripes, all this she considers before rolling up the shawl again, wrapping it in the old pillowcase, and locking it back in the walnut-wood armoire, the very same armoire where Regina Reyes had hid Santos Piedrasanta’s wooden button until her death, when someone tossed it out as easily as Santos had knocked out her tooth. As easily today as someone tossing out a mottled-brown picture of a young man in a striped suit leaning into a ghost.