On Sunday mornings other families go to church. We go to Maxwell Street. —Vamos al Más-güel, Father announces, and starts to sing “Farolito” in a happy voice. He sings while he’s shaving. He sings so loud we can’t stand it. Father flicks the light on in the rooms where we’re sleeping. —Wake up. Vamos al Más-güel. He tears open curtains and raises venetian blinds, dust spinning in his wake, the summer sunlight killing us.
The Grandmother has already had her toast and coffee by the time we pick her up at Uncle Baby’s. She climbs in the van with a hairy ixtle shopping bag and her old maroon umbrella with an amber handle. —To protect me from the sun. Thanks to you sleepyheads it’s already so hot. No doubt we’ve missed the best buys by now, she adds, settling in. She’s wearing her market dress, a shapeless, faded shift. —The better to haggle with, the Grandmother insists. —This way they feel sorry for me.
But Father wears his good clothes even though Maxwell Street is filthy. Flies on crates of rotten cantaloupe. Rusty coffee cans filled with rusty nails. A plastic Timex box filled with gold molars. Boxed lemon meringue pies with the meringue a little squashed. Beyond the trash are real and not-so-real treasures. A man playing an accordion with a live chicken on his head. Strings of plastic pearls the colors of Easter eggs. A china shepherdess statue with a crack like a strand of blond hair, —From Paris, gimme ten dollars. The finest homemade tamales in the world from that Michoacán widow the police keep hassling because she doesn’t have a food permit.
Father hates used things. When we bring home toys from the Goodwill and the Salvation Army, we have to lie when he asks where we got them. —This? You bought it for us, remember? But Maxwell Street is different. It reminds Father of the open-air markets in Mexico.
Mother and the Grandmother are just glad to get out of the house. They wander the streets like prisoners escaped from Joliet. Everything amuses them. The blues musicians twanging away on steel guitars. The smoky scent of grilled barbecue. The medicine man wearing live snakes. They don’t care if they don’t buy a thing. They’re happy just to eat, to stop at 18th Street for carnitas and chicharrón, or at Taylor Street for Italian lemonade on the way home.
But Father is shopping with a purpose. He’s looking for his British wing tips, the Cadillac of zapatos, with pinhole designs along the toe and ankle, along the lace-ups, shoes so heavy if you dropped them on someone’s head, you’d kill him. But these are the shoes Father prefers, classic wing tips of oiled and waxed calfskin, a rich tobacco color.
It’s over to Harold’s we’re headed, corner of Halsted and Maxwell, across the street from Jim’s Original Hot Dogs.* Harold has been there since … —Since before you were born, girlie. Up a narrow, dark flight of wooden stairs. On each sagging step, a strip of aluminum so that your footsteps coming up or down announce you. Tap, tap, tap. The stairs creak. The walls are stained. The banister, dark from the oil of hands, is sagging. Everything is sagging like a pile of shoe boxes—building, shelves, steps, Harold.
Two hundred and forty pounds of Harold is standing with a shoe box in one hand, tissue paper gaping over, one shoe in the other hand. —Those costs you double in the Loop, Harold is saying to a black mother who is buying a pair of red high-tops for her lanky baby-faced boy.
Harold’s best shoes come in strange sizes, display shoes from the windows, tiny as a Cinderella. “Good lucky” for Father he has small feet.
It smells sweet in Harold’s, dusty and sweet as leather. The box window fan revolving slowly. All of Harold’s salesmen are young boys in ties, the place too hot for ties, especially today. Everyone sweating. Harold, tie-less, standing among a pile of messy boxes, talking too loud. How does he find anything here? He does. It’s not a fancy shop. The grime, the dirt, the sweet leather smell. Harold wiping his face with a handkerchief. He knows shoes like Father knows sofas.
There are only a few chairs, the ones with seats that lift up like in the movies. Mother and the Grandmother have already claimed the last two, Mother fanning herself with a shoe box lid, the Grandmother flicking a limp handkerchief.
Harold demands you step on a box lid when you try on a shoe. It’s a bit dim and dark, and there’s a real disorder that nobody minds, which makes finding a pair more exciting. At any second another Chicago fire could start, a spontaneous combustion of shoe polish and paper and shoehorns and dirty shelves. At any moment the place could collapse in a sea of flames. A speckled light enters from the windows that have been painted over in green paint. The windows yawning open. Noise of street hucksters and hawkers. The sticky scent of pork chop sandwiches rising from Jim’s Original Hot Dogs.
But at Harold’s Father forgets that British wing tips mean excellence. —Dirt, dirt, he says in Spanish, when examining the slippery leather soles, the fine stitching, the sweet scent of real Italian calfskin. —Trash, he keeps muttering in Spanish. —Mugre. Porquería. ¡Fuchi! Father feels it’s his duty to insult the merchandise. He’s furious whenever we pay the first price quoted for anything. —Fools! Store owners expect you to haggle.
—How much, my friend? Father asks.
—Them cost you fifty, Harold says, already talking to another customer.
—How much? as if he hadn’t heard.
Harold, sweating, looks at him, disgusted. —Amigo, I already told you, fifty bucks. Cincuenta. Cinco and oh.
Father: —Fifty? Then that look he is famous for, that eye of the rooster, head tilted a little as if he has razors tied to his talons and is about to attack in a gleam of green-black feathers and bloody foam.
—Fifty dollars? For this dirt …
Harold brings his 240-pound body of businessman over and plucks the shoe box from Father’s hands. —For you, not for sale.
—Get outta …
—You get out of here, Reyes. Don’t bother me, I’m busy selling shoes.
—Twenty-five. I give you twenty-five.
—I already told you, forget it. They’re the best, those shoes.
—Sheet on you. Get outta … Son of a mother … Muttering as we all step down the rickety aluminum-tipped steps that tap-tap with our defeat.
Father is a man possessed. We talk to him, but his eyes are spirals. We tug his sleeve and point at items we’d like to buy—popsicles, bandanas, felt-tip pens. It’s useless.
After we’ve walked around the block and touched bunches of socks, six pairs for one dollar, after we’ve reached for a cold bottle of strawberry cream soda bobbing in an ice cooler with chunks of ice floating like icebergs, your hand numb when you finally fish it out, after we’ve heard the preacher man shouting for us to receive the Lord, He is coming, but he’s not here today at Maxwell Street, after we’ve walked past the doorways with big, busty women in halter tops and purple satin hot pants, after we’ve eyed sacks of Ruby Red grapefruit, a plaster Venus di Milo, a geranium plant growing in a coffee can, we do go back, we will go back, we must go back. Must we? We must! It’s terrible to have to climb the aluminum-tipped crooked stairs the second time.
Mother asks for the car keys.
Humiliating the third.
When we get to Harold’s, the Grandmother camps on the first step and says, —I’ll wait here.
—How much? Father asks Harold once more, as if this was the first time.
—Forty-five, Harold snorts. —And you’re getting them dirt cheap, too!
—Thirty! Father says.
—Forty! That’s what I paid for them.
—Thirty-five!
—I said forty and get outta here, you heard me!
Father pays his money, muttering, —Dirt, dirt, for this dirt. All the while Harold is stuffing the bills in his shirt pocket and waving him off, waving his arms as if saying, —You’re nuts, get lost, forget it. Both of them terribly angry, ruined even, all day. Enraged. Disgusted.
Triumphant!
* Taquitos de Pine-Sol.
Father’s favorite taquería is a place on Halsted Street called La Milagrosa, a few blocks south from Jim’s Original Hot Dogs on Maxwell. Father likes to tell the story about the first time he took Mother there. They were still newlyweds. Mother was not impressed.
A hungry mob stands next to a greasy steel counter and waves plastic numbers in the air to butchers who dispense orders beneath a neon Virgen de Guadalupe and a dusty bull’s head with glass eyes. Curly strips of flypaper hang from the ceiling like streamers at a children’s party, the steady death drone of flies making the room jump.
—How can you bring me here? This place looks like a dump, Mother says.
—It is a dump, says Father. —That’s how you can tell the tacos are good.
—I mean how do you expect me to eat here? Mother asks, eyeing the sawdust on the floor behind the butcher counter. —This place looks like it has bugs and mice.
—Well, so does our house, but we eat there too, don’t we?
At this, Mother can think of no clever response. It’s true. They live in the only neighborhoods they can afford, where the rent is cheap and the fauna resilient. Mother tries not to look at the seams where the floor meets the wall. She orders a chile relleno taco and a taco de cabeza. Father asks for three brain tacos and two tongue, and a rice-water drink.
At the moment their food arrives, almost as if on cue, a man appears with the ubiquitous mop and pail† and starts to mop with Pine-Sol. The mop is a sweet stinky, as if it hasn’t dried properly, the Pine-Sol so strong it makes you blink. That smell, the sad smell of Saturday mornings, of hallways shared with other tenants, of nursing homes, of pets or people who have had accidents, of the poor who have nothing to clothe themselves with but pride. We may be poor, but you can bet we’re clean, the smell says. We may be poor. It is no disgrace to be pobre, but … it’s very inconvenient.
† Even Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of Hernán Cortés’ foot soldiers, cites in his wonderfully detailed chronicles the Mexican obsession with cleaning. This is true even today. You have only to arrive in the Mexico City airport, step off the plane into the waiting area, and your first encounter with Mexican culture will be to dodge someone furiously mopping. Especially if it’s the middle of the day. ¡CUIDADO! WATCH OUT!—warns a plastic yellow sign with a stick figure of a person falling on his back.