I do not slide into this new life easily. All things are different from my pueblito. Los Angeles is crazy with noise. And people and cars racing all over the place. At home some people still ride horses and donkeys.
Toño is a magnificent teacher and brother. “Magnificent” is one of my English words and I am proud of it. The trouble is that he is usually not with me. Nights, he works cleaning office-building bathrooms. Days, he sleeps like a big possum. Me, I am a day guy.
Always when I get up, though he is like a stone with sleeping, he has left a Post-it on the floor. A Post-it in a place so I have to step over it and cannot miss it. On this sticky little scrap is written carefully my word-of-the-day, which I must keep in my memory and use whenever the chance pops itself up.
Toño chooses these words by opening a little book he got from an English class. He took lessons to learn this language. He starts just any place, closing his eyes and letting his finger run down the page till it stops wherever it feels like it. As if his finger is choosing! This is how Toño is.
So far some of the words are: “hover,” “flamboyant,” “swoop,” “rind,” “trophy,” “yikes,” “stupendous,” “cheese,” “wyvern.” “Wyvern.” “Yikes” is right. A wyvern is a long-ago made-up creature with wings that is like a two-legged dragon. Just where I will use these strange words I cannot think. Maybe at McDonald’s I could order a wyvern with special sauce on a sesame-seed bun.
“Toño,” I say, “make your finger choose me some normal words. With yours nobody will understand me.”
“Maybe not, little brother,” says Toño, his eyes sparking like crazy, his Pancho Villa mustache in vigorous motion, “but you will have a fantastical vocabulario.”
True. And, apart from other ways, I know from this game of words that my brother loves me.
Like I said, I am a day guy. Toño is nocturnal (word-of-the-day). Only on weekends we do things together, along with his octopus-cooking girlfriend. Even though she is from Durango, this novia is named Sinaloa, for another Mexico state. In a big originality, her parents chose it, she says, for the beautiful sound. I believe they are right. Sinaloa. Beautiful. Like falling water.
These two, they are not married, so Sinaloa has her own place. Through our home she comes and goes, a crisp and sparkling breeze.
Like my friend Cejas from The Beast, this one she has a good smile. One that is open and true, not meaning some other thing. When she smiles at Toño, it is very warm, very loving. When she smiles at me—once she knows me—it is loving but in a different way.
Whenever I am with Sinaloa I think of Cejas. I wonder how her dream is going.
I first know that Sinaloa likes me when she helps me with the dishes. I wash. She dries. Toño, in a big clatter, he puts stuff away. It is a weekend so he is not working. I say nothing, but the hot water hurts my hand. After all this time the scar is still tender.
While we work, Sinaloa teases me a little, but with good humor.
“What crazy hair you have, Manuelito. It is like it has its own all-over-the-place life.”
“Yep,” I say. “It grows however it feels.”
We laugh about my hair’s wildness. But she never mentions the whiteness.
One day, like my Señor Santos, Sinaloa attacks my hair with scissors. Me in my complete clothes, in the bathtub. “So your pelo loco, like clippings of grass, will not disarrange this house,” she says. She talks in a sparkling way, and fast, while the scissors chomp chomp, and I worry she may be chopping chopping big holes where there should not be any. But when she does her inspection of this work, she flares her honest smile again. She pats my face. “Qué guapo,” she says. How handsome.
Another good thing about Sinaloa, she can cook things apart from octopus. Things of my home. My favorite is just plain guacamole which even I can make and which goes like this:
Into a bowl scoop some avocados from their skins. Have ready chopped-up tomatoes, onions, serrano chiles—not in exceso—and sí, an exceso of cilantro. (The cilantro leaves, I pick from the stems with my fingers. Sometimes I crush a leaf and hold it to my nose. ¡Qué rico! How delicious is the smell! Squash the avocados, then toss in the rest. Salt and a little lime juice come last. Then mix mix, but not too much. And there you have your guacamole. (Unless you eat it in one fast craziness, you can put in avocado seeds, so it does not go brown.)
At home, when we had the money, we made tacos of guacamole and little fried red grasshoppers. (Not the big ones whose legs get stuck in your teeth.) Very crunchy. Very tasty. These grasshoppers do not seem to live in The Angels. ¡Qué lástima! What a pity!
When I prepare this guacamole with Sinaloa, the smell of the warm tortillas for tacos rises, perfuming the kitchen. Then real as anything I can name, Abue ghosts into the room. Hold on to my hand. . . . In my heart I do, and I yearn myself home.
Each meal, before I eat these beautiful foods, I remember times of hunger on The Beast journey. As I look at my plate full full—or even at one lone taco—I think of my own luck and of those still struggling, or dead. Like Papi over the simple things of life, I bow my head.
Those two, Toño and Sinaloa, think I should go back to school since here I do not work a milpita. School. A dream. But over me always hovers a gloom, that I will be noticed one day—from my hand maybe—and sent to Mexico again. Fear is always a little bit crawling down my back.