When Daniel was a young boy his mother had taken him to four separate doctors, pediatricians. Finally she had taken him to a fifth, a geriatrician, looking for some answers about the arthritic-like pains Daniel was experiencing in his joints. “Just growing pains,” they all said. “He’ll outgrow them.” They all said this with a smile. They all patted him on the head and called him “Sport.”
Daniel had yet to outgrow his growing pains. He was now ten years old. Whenever the weather changed, whenever the air was thick and wet, Daniel felt his joints swell and stiffen. When he was younger the ache had been so bad he’d had to soak in steaming hot baths for hours at a time. He often wasn’t able to sleep and instead would sit and cry until his mother came into his room with the Ben-gay. Now, at his older age, Daniel had come to accept the pains like one does an annoying relative: just put up with them, they’ll eventually go away. In his sock drawer he kept his own tubes of Ben-gay, two of them, just in case one ran out.
Cool air from his mother’s open window swirled around Daniel and his pains. The car had no radio and instead his mother sang Smokey Robinson tunes one after another—“Baby That’s Backatcha,” “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage.” She hummed the words, stopping only for a Newport inhale, or when she suddenly seemed deep in thought.
“Mom, can’t you close your window?” Daniel asked. His mother was quiet for the moment, driving, looking straight ahead. Daniel could see the distance his mother’s gaze often assumed, like on days off when she parked herself in front of the TV and watched The Price Is Right, or Friday nights, when she watched Dallas. Daniel hated that look of his mother’s. He thought she looked dumb at those times, helpless.
“Mom,” he said again.
“What, baby?” his mother asked. She reached across her body and tapped her cigarette on the top edge of her window.
“Your window,” Daniel said. “Can’t you close it?”
“Oh. Sorry,” she said. She took one last inhale, then made a motion to throw the cigarette out. Just before releasing it she stopped and brought it back for a quick, final tug. Then she tossed the butt out the window. In the light of the expressway, Daniel caught sight of the faded green tattoo on the web of his mother’s right hand. It was small, a six-pointed star with a T in the center. The tattoo had been there since before Daniel was born; he’d grown up with it, but it never failed to catch his eye. When he’d asked about it in the past, the only answer he’d gotten was that it was a club his mother used to belong to. “We did stupid things,” his mother said. Daniel knew the truth, that his mother had actually been in a street gang. The Tokers didn’t even exist anymore as far as Daniel knew. But some of their graffiti, old and faded, was still scrawled on the factories and warehouses back in their neighborhood.
The fact that his mother’s gang no longer existed made Daniel wonder how old his mother really was. She was twenty-eight, Daniel knew. But age wasn’t what he thought about when he considered her “being old.” Instead Daniel felt like his mother had been someone else entirely before he was born. Someone he wished he knew more about.
His mother exhaled as she rolled up her window. Daniel coughed and waved a hand in front of his face. His mother stared at the road and began humming.
The pains continued. Gradually, with his massaging, the ache transferred from his knees to his hands, and he began kneading his palms. This was how the process usually went. On a bad night he’d go through a massage of nearly every joint in his body, the pain switching locations constantly, as if his rubbing actually chased it to the next set of joints. Alongside him his mother fell silent again. Daniel began concentrating on the car, listening for the pangs that announced the engine was about to smoke and stall.
He was happy to be going to the airport. The last time he’d been there was two years earlier, when he and his mother had gone to pick up Birdy, his mother’s childhood friend. Birdy and his mother had grown up as neighbors. Birdy had worked for Bell Telephone and been transferred to Sacramento, California. Sacramento. The word had always sounded warm and tropical to Daniel. His mother had had the opportunity to go. At least according to Birdy. “Sunny California,” Birdy said that first night of her visit. “You guys could be living there right this very second, blue skies, valley air.” Daniel was sitting across from Birdy. He had been listening to her tell stories about his mother’s past. “Could’ve taken you, Maggie.” That’s what Birdy called his mother, that’s what most people called her, friends she would see on the street, friends from a long time ago. Magdalena was her real name. “Could be working right next to me,” Birdy continued. “Partying like the old days. But nope, never, can’t do the easy thing, right?” Birdy reached for her rum and Coke. At the table his mother rattled the ice in her glass. “I offered,” Birdy said to Daniel. She leaned over the table and whispered, “I think there was a man involved.” Birdy’s breath was sharp with liquor. Daniel smiled. He knew she was talking about his father. Birdy leaned back again. Daniel wanted to hear more. “But hey,” Birdy continued. “Don’t want no help, don’t get no help, right, Maggie?” Birdy sighed and shook her head. She took a sip of her dark drink.
“I’m doing fine right here,” Daniel’s mother said. She wasn’t mad, Daniel could tell from her voice, but he could tell also that she was about to get mad, like this was a warning shot, the kind she gave him about dirty socks, a messy bedroom. “Clean that room or your ass is grass,” she often said.
“Uh, yeah, right,” Birdy responded. “I like working for asshole lawyers too, my favorite. File this, copy this, get me coffee. Fuck that,” she said. She looked to Daniel as if giving him the opportunity to add to the list. Yeah, Mom and I love our house too, I mean apartment. Especially how the toilet leaks, those roaches, great. Daniel didn’t say a word. Birdy took another sip of her drink. Daniel felt his mother’s temper then. He felt it take shape in the blank space, after Birdy’s last word.
“You think I need to hear from you how my life is going?” Daniel’s mother asked. Her voice started to rise. “I got enough people think they know what’s good for me.” Daniel wondered who his mother could be talking about. “Fuck California,” his mother said sharply. “You think I give a shit about California…” Daniel rolled his eyes.
“Maggie, calm down. I was just saying. Relax,” Birdy said.
“Who do I need to relax for?” his mother asked. “You? You come into my house and tell me how to live. Fuck you. Fuck California.”
Daniel put his chin down on his arms.
“Maggie, calmate. I was just talking, girl. It’s my opinion. Don’t do anything, do whatever you want. I don’t care.”
“I know I can do what I want. I don’t need you to tell me what I can do. Fuck all of you think I need guidance.” Daniel watched as his mother fumed. Her forehead was wrinkled. She looked ready to smack somebody’s head off.
After a moment Birdy leaned into Daniel. “You know, she used to be worse,” Birdy said. “You think she’s bad now.” She raised her eyebrows.
There was a long silence. Eventually Daniel got up and went to his bedroom. Later that night he awoke to music. “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” He could hear his mother singing. Birdy too. He knew his mother was happy. He fell back to sleep.
His mother turned off the expressway. A few more minutes and they were at the airport entrance. A sign over the right-hand lane said what seemed like fifty different things:
BAGGAGE PICK-UP
UNITED PARCEL SERVICE
TERMINALS 1, 2, 3, 4
INTERNATIONAL TERMINALS 1, 2, 3, 4
CAR RENTAL
HERTZ
INTERNATIONAL
Beneath each number, in even smaller print, was a list of the airlines each terminal serviced. Over the left lane another sign read: PARKING, OVERNIGHT PARKING… Daniel couldn’t read the rest. His mother pulled into the left lane and followed it around a curve.
“Did you see Mex-a-cana up there?” his mother asked.
“No,” Daniel
replied.
His mother started to ask another question, started to say something, but Daniel caught sight of a large, bright billboard and stopped paying attention. AIR JAMAICA, the sign read. In the background were palm trees, sky-blue water, a pink flamingo. Daniel thought the billboard was so huge passengers taking off could read it. Then Daniel saw another billboard, this one to the left, across the road. UNITED AIRLINES. In the corner a British flag blew in a breeze. Big Ben stood in the background, bold and bright—Daniel had read about Big Ben once in school. He turned his head to follow the sign. As his mother drove past, the sign’s backside showed up pitch-black like a lost opportunity. He wondered if people came to the airport with nowhere to go. He wondered if there were some people so rich they could just look at a billboard and say, “Ah, England, that’s where I’ll go, see Big Ben.”
“Mom,” he said. “Would you ever go to England?”
“Sure,” she said. “You going to take me?”
“Yes,” Daniel said.
“Fine,” she answered. “I’ll pack when we get home.” She turned into the parking garage. “We’ll leave your grandma here.”
They found an empty spot after three floors of searching. Daniel stepped out of the car. Immediately he recognized the smell of airplane exhaust. He took a deep breath. Back home the slightest whiff of truck or car exhaust started him retching, prompted an instantaneous headache. But here, airplane exhaust, he didn’t mind. It meant travel, long-distance travel. And there was noise. Even at this hour, 1:15 a.m., people were walking. There was luggage. There was traffic. Not delivery vans grinding through gears, not sixteen ice cream trucks playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” over and over, but a different kind of traffic, a quiet traffic, things moving, flowing, like air pressure releasing when a bus comes to a stop.
The terminal’s automatic doors slid open. Daniel’s mother walked fast. She was oblivious. Daniel, on the other hand, walked slow, pimped even, strutted, like the gangbangers did out in front of his apartment building. At one point his mother stopped and held out her hand for him. She snapped twice rapidly, her bright red fingernails reflecting the sharp, fluorescent light of the airport. Daniel caught sight of his mother’s tattoo. He took her hand and followed her for a quick few steps. Then he let go and began strutting again.
His mother walked to one of the monitors hanging high in metal cabinets behind the benches.
“Mex-a-cana. Mex-a-cana.”
She was saying it wrong. Daniel knew. Me-he-cana, it should’ve been pronounced. Daniel repeated the word to himself.
“Mom, how come we don’t speak Spanish at home?”
His mother sighed. “I don’t know, Daniel. We’re late. If your grandmother has to wait five fucking minutes I’ll hear about it for the next two months.”
They walked quickly through the terminal. His mother’s short heels snapped hard against the tiled floor.
In the week before his grandmother’s arrival, Daniel had heard more about his grandmother than ever before. In the past she had always been an unmentioned subject. He knew he had a grandmother; he’d seen pictures. But she was never talked about. The few times his grandmother had ever called, long-distance, Daniel hadn’t known until after his mother had hung up. “That was your grandmother,” his mother would say, exasperated. Then she would take a seat on the couch and stare at the television set, that distant look on her face, never a word about the actual conversation.
But in the last week there’d been a grandmother story for every day. “She’ll say anything to get what she wants,” one story went. “She won’t even say she’s hungry. Instead she says, You look hungry. What is that? Don’t trust her. I don’t. Why do you think I left?” Daniel had heard that one before. How his mother, when she was eleven, had left Mexico to come live with her uncle in Chicago. He had heard the story from his cousins. How his mother had left his “crazy” grandmother. How his mother had taken a bus alone all the way from Monterrey, Mexico. During that conversation his cousins had made small, biting comments—“Why do you think his mother’s so crazy?” “Like mother like daughter.” When Daniel asked his mother about what his cousins had said, his mother replied, “Yeah, well, your cousins are nuts too. Don’t forget I left them also.”
Daniel had heard this story before as well. How his mother’s pregnancy had angered her great-uncle. How the family had stopped talking to her. Soon after Daniel brought up what his cousins had said, his mother stopped dropping him off there for babysitting.
That was two years ago. They’d seen his cousins again recently, stepping out of Providence of God Church while he and his mother were driving to the laundromat. “Duck,” his mother said. “Your cousins.” And he and his mother sped by completely unnoticed.
Where they had gone before, when Birdy had arrived, was upstairs. Mexicana Airlines flights seemed to arrive in the airport’s basement. There were no windows in the terminal, just rows of orange padded seats, and more people, it seemed to Daniel, than he had seen in the entire airport. The room smelled of perfume and it all reminded Daniel of the supermarkets back in his neighborhood, the crying babies, the cowboy hats.
“Vuelo diez-cuarenta,” his mother said to the attendant behind the counter. Daniel was startled. He was always startled when he heard his mother speak Spanish. He knew she could speak the language, but she did it so rarely that whenever Daniel heard her, how crisp and sharp she could sound, he was surprised.
The attendant said something back. She said it so fast Daniel couldn’t understand.
“Whew, not here yet,” his mother said.
Daniel’s mother turned. He followed, listening to her heels, watching her part the sea of people the way she’d always been able to do.
She stopped at the end of a row of seats. All were taken.
“Por favor,” a man in a cowboy hat said. He rose from his chair at the end of the row. “Please, sit down here.”
“Gracias,” Daniel’s mother said. She walked to the chair and ushered Daniel into it. She put her purse down in his lap. The man remained standing next to Daniel’s mother. Daniel waited for the man to start speaking. In the clinics at home this always happened. Men offered his mother seats and they wanted conversation in return. Daniel knew they probably wanted more, a phone number, a date. His mother flipped her dark hair over her shoulder in the direction of the man next to her.
There was definitely something confusing about Mexicana. Every few minutes the attendant behind the counter made an announcement and each time some of the crowd moved to the left, and a new group filled in the open spaces. Along a glass wall people were standing, duffel bags hanging from their shoulders. Suitcases lay on their sides on the floor, and on some of these children sat.
Another announcement and Daniel’s mother reached out her hand. Daniel got to his feet. The man stepped aside and watched them leave. They walked down a long corridor. Before turning into a separate room, Daniel took one last look behind him. The man was still staring. Daniel almost raised a hand to say goodbye.
The room was already packed. Daniel’s mother got up on her toes and looked around. “There she is,” his mother said. She led him though another maze of people. Daniel had never seen his grandmother in person. In her pictures she had looked nice enough, normal. Still, after all he’d heard, he’d expected to see an ugly, gnarled brute of woman. He was surprised when he finally saw her.
More than anything, she was short. She had her head away from him but Daniel recognized her, her glasses, how the stems connected high up on her frames then dipped to become the earpieces. Of all the things Daniel had heard, nothing really prepared him for how tiny she was. She was barely taller than him, like it could’ve been her shoes giving her a boost. His mother said fifteen children had come from this woman. Daniel wondered how that was possible.
Her arms were long. She looked strong, compact, wide. The closer Daniel got, the more he figured she could knock down a tree if she wanted. She looked nothing like his mother. His moth
er had soft features—her eyebrows, her nose all seemed to mold into each other, but his grandmother was chiseled, sharp and defined. The lines in her face were deep and more like scars than wrinkles.
“Hola, mamá,” his mother said. “Comó estas?”
His grandmother jumped. “Ay, mija, me asustastes. Comó estas mi vida?”
His mother leaned in and gave his grandmother a kiss. His grandmother returned the kiss, then said something Daniel couldn’t understand. He saw an angry look on his mother’s face.
“Y tú?” his grandmother said to him. “Éres Daniel, verdad?”
“Sí,” Daniel said. And she gave him a kiss and hugged him. He still couldn’t believe how short she was. Daniel tried to hug her back but he felt like he couldn’t get a grip. He felt like he was hugging a building. When his grandmother backed away, he wasn’t satisfied.
She rubbed the back of his head. “Tan flaquillo, te pareces a tú abuelito.”
“Mípapá no era flaco, mamá,” his mother said.
“Enflacó antes de morir. Pero tú ya no estavas.”
Daniel had no idea what his mother and grandmother were saying to each other, but he could tell there was an edge to it. His mother shook her head and without a word picked up his grandmother’s suitcase and began walking away. His grandmother looked to Daniel as if she had something to say, but all she did was pull him close. Together they walked in his mother’s wake.
This had all happened one week ago. Since that time they had visited his great-uncle exactly once. There had been more tension in the air than ever before. Hardly anything had been said during the visit. Voices were hushed. Daniel was the main topic of conversation. “Is he doing good in school?” “Summer break, huh?” “Make sure he drinks a lot, dehydration, you know?”
During the visit his great-uncle said a total of two words to his sister, Daniel’s grandmother: “Hi” and “Bye.”
Painted Cities Page 12
