by Myriam Gurba
My forehead wrinkled. I hadn’t heard from the kid in months. I set my book down, walked to my parents’ room, and picked up the receiver.
“Bueno?” I heard Libertad hang up the other line.
“Hola.”
“What’s up?”
“I am only a few hours away. In Ventura. I am on my way to see you.”
“What!?”
“I am in Ventura. I am on my way to see you.”
“You can’t! No one invited you!”
“I have your address. I will be there tomorrow. See you when you get out of school.”
Click.
I slammed down the phone and screamed, “Mooooom! Mooooom! Mooo-my!” I stormed into the family room. Mom was sitting on the couch, grading papers, drinking a glass of wine. “Mom!” I announced. “Nito’s on his way here!”
She set down her goblet. “Que?”
“That was Nito. He says he’s in Ventura and he’s coming here tomorrow!”
Mom looked confused. “Hmm. I’ll go call Fe. We’ll find out what’s going on.”
Mom walked to her room, shut her door, and called her sister. Thirty minutes later, armed with the scoop, she came and found me in my room. Mom sat on the bed across from me, and while I wove a nervous tapestry with my hair, she spared me no detail. “Fe says you broke Nito’s heart,” she admonished. “He traveled to the jungle in Oaxaca on a spiritual quest because of this. His father, of course, did not approve of it, and so he cut him off.” Mom paused. “While Nito was living with the Indians, a revelation came to him. He had to come to America and find you.”
I quit twirling my hair and widened my eyes.
“We can’t turn him away…” Mom began.
I fumed, “But–”
“No buts! Nito is family. He’s your cousin. Have pity on him. His legs, Desiree… Don’t you roll your eyes at me!”
I was aghast. She was taking the mi casa es su casa52 thing way too far. Fuck hospitality. This gimp was nuts.
DOUBLE THE RICAN, DOUBLE THE FUN. That’s what the fuzzy, iron-on letters across the front of Laura’s jersey spelled. Across her boobs. Her big boobs. I loved them. I liked the jersey, too. I thought it was clever.
Laura leaned up against an empty bathroom stall and spat. She shook the paper cup she gripped in her left hand, swirling the tobacco juice at the bottom.
“Nito!” she said. “That’s neato! What the hell kinda name is that? It sounds like ‘Neato! That’s so cool! Neat!’“
“I know,” I said. “You’re exasperating me. Shut up about it already. Quit being facetious. It’s like me pointing out you’re double Rican. Duh. Puerto and Costa. Quit with the obvious. I already told you. Nito’s a nickname. His real name’s Nicolas.”
“And he’s your cousin, right?”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “He’s my cousin. But we’re not blood-related,” I emphasized. “We only made out ’cause I was drunk.”
Laura raised her eyebrows suspiciously. “You are a lesbian, right?”
“Yes,” I sighed. “I’m a lesbian.” A Magna smoldered in my right hand.
Laura half grinned. Like a rodeo circuit cowboy, she spat more juice out the corner of her mouth, this time aiming for the toilet bowl beside her. Bull’s-eye.
I checked my wristwatch, a Burger King model, part of The Nightmare Before Christmas series, purple jelly band, bats fluttering all over it. The digital face blinked 2:34.
“One, two, three, four,” I whispered in order to complete the sequence, make it balanced, two numbers on each side. I looked up at Laura. “Hey! We’ve only got, like, five minutes to get back to class.”
Laura sucked the last bit of zest from her chew, spat into her cup, and then reached into her gums, pulling out the hairy blob. She flicked her cud into the toilet bowl and my cigarette butt followed, sizzling as it extinguished.
“Here.” Laura palmed me a slice of spearmint Wrigley’s. She squirted cologne over our heads. With my heel, I flushed the incriminating evidence down the toilet, and we scurried out and back to class, Laura to Consumer Math, me to Living a Christian Lifestyle.
Human Cargo
We’d moved away from the neighborhood where the fugitive had crawled through my window so many years ago. Our newer house was in a fancy neighborhood called Pitt Hills. Dad liked standing on our porch, looking out across our homestead, reaching out his arms, and saying, “Kids, now we’re living in the pits!”
Dad was a big pun man, and he pitched many a witticism that sailed right over Mom’s head. I mean, with distinguishing the difference between “shit” and “sheet” giving her a hard time, Dad’s word riddles were like Aramaic to her. Poor thing. It wasn’t that she was stupid, though. Mom’s a left-brained thinker, a Marie Curie type, a geek. She studied chemistry in Mexico and when I turned ten, she landed her dream job, joining the faculty of our local community college, Babcock. Myself, I hated science, so as far as I’m concerned, what she does all day is teach people how to look good in lab coats and how to blow shit up.
I’ve always appreciated Dad’s right-brained tendencies. They’re more in keeping with my own. Though he’s a Mexican by birth, Dad came over here with his parents when he was like four so I consider him pretty American. And he loves language. Languages. Slavic ones. Germanic ones. Romance ones. Mostly, when he plays, he plays with English. Twisting it around. Having fun with it. Making up tongue twisters. Correcting Mom.
“We’re not going to the bitch,” he quipped at her one summer. “We’re not going to see your mom. We’re going to the beach!”
I laughed, “Ha, ha, ha!”
Mom scowled. She knew Dad was picking on her but it took a good thirty seconds to figure shit out. There’s no need to pity Mom for being picked on like that. It’s just Dad’s way of teasing her to show her he loves her, same as how immature boys who like girls pull their ponytails, and Mom showed Dad how much she loved him by pulling some strings at Babcock and getting him a job there as a linguistics professor.
Because of all the new dough they raked in, they were able to get us the cherry new pad and send me to St. Mike’s. That was what they valued as Chicano nerds: home and education. Both of them drove piece of shit cars, and the clothes me and Libertad and my brother Vincie wore weren’t all that ritzy… but, boy, was our address and schoolin’ to be envied.
The afternoon Nito arrived, I rode shotgun in Candace’s Ford Escort as it pulled in through the gates of my exclusive neighborhood. To make Pitt Hills seem rustic, the streets had no sidewalks and they were lined with tall eucalyptus trees that shed big nutty seeds. The Escort drove over them and they scattered, making popping noises as they ricocheted off the chassis of the car.
Going up Donahue Drive, Sue decreed, “Desiree, your neighborhood’s weird.”
“I know,” I said. “People do stupid things when they have too much money.”
The girls looked at the estates lining my drive, most built on half-acre lots, most having their own unique, grotesque themes. To the right was one all boulders and rock, like a cave. To the left was a gray Tudor castle. Back on the right was a barn, an actual barn. Me and Dad joked that the people living there thought they were living in Hoedown Hills, not Pitt Hills.
Finally we came upon my house. It was a plain old, one story ranch style number. Ordinary. Unobtrusive. A solitary figure in a trench coat limped towards the corner house, the one whose yard was totally invaded by ice plant and bushy pampas grass. I gasped. That misshapen silhouette, I could recognize it anywhere.
Shrieks filled the car: “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God! That’s him!”
Candace drove up beside him. I rolled down my automatic window. Nito stooped and hunched a little to look at me.
Like he was deaf, Laura screamed, “Que pasa53?” from the backseat.
“The police came,” he said to her. “They told me to leave so I–”
“Don’t talk to them,” I commanded Nito. “They don’t speak Spanish. Not even the one who just asked �
��Que pasa?’ Why’d they call the police? What were you doing?”
“I was sitting on your lawn. Reading. Meditating.”
I felt a tiny pang of solidarity with my cousin. Our white neighbors had spied a Mexican with a knapsack studying Hegel on our grass. Highly suspicious. Better nip this in the bud now or soon there’d be drive-bys.
“Get in,” I said.
Laura opened the back door and Nito crowded in beside her. Because he stank, we collectively held our breaths. Candace made a U-y back to my house, pulling up the long, steep driveway, and parked underneath the basketball hoop. Doors opened and we got out and everyone trudged to the porch. I let us in. Quietly, we filed into the family room. I led the way to a couch and Laura and Sue and Candace bunched onto it with me. Nito was forced to sit alone on the opposite sectional. Our coffee table, stained by coffee rings and littered by Time magazines, separated us. A no man’s land.
I reached for the remote and turned on the TV. The Ricki Lake Show. It would get us through this ordeal. The female members of that afternoon’s guest panel were trying to figure out who their babies’ daddies were. DNA testing and accusations of “You a ho! You a ****** ho!” filled the silence till Mom got home.
When she saw Nito, she did the unspeakable. She hugged him. Though we’d offered him a ride up our driveway, we were all still trying to maintain a safe distance. He smelled damn funny. Like sand and foot. Like maybe he hadn’t bathed since Tijuana.
“How did he get here?” Mom asked me.
I looked at Nito. He was sitting with his legs cocked askew, the soles of both his feet placed flat on the ground. I turned to Mom and shrugged. It was a fair question. We lived about five miles out of town, beside a winery. Considering his condition, Nito couldn’t have walked here.
Nito turned and opened the satchel beside him, fishing for something. We watched him pull out a stale piece of bread. He began nibbling at the crust.
“Nito?” Mom asked. “Would you like something to eat?”
“No, no,” he said. “This is fine.” He turned to look at me. He set his bread down on his knee. “Desiree, I have a gift for you.”
Laura buried her face in her knees and giggled.
Nito dug back in his bag and tenderly pulled out a small, black velvet pouch. He handed it to me. His wet eyes looked eager for me to open it.
I took the bag from him and pulled open the drawstrings and slid the contents into the palm of my hand. Two opal earrings, shaped like pregnant teardrops, glimmered. I glanced back at Nito. He was waiting for some sort of thanks. Maybe a hug. A kiss. Or a peck.
“Gracias,” I said. “See you later.”
I turned and made a beeline for my room. I heard footsteps behind me, my girls, my gang.
I pulled out my shiny black chair from under my shiny black desk and angled it so I was facing Laura and Sue, who sat side by side, on my shiny black bed. I lowered myself onto the hard chair and glanced down at Candace. She was sitting on the floor, reclining with her palms flat against my carpet. The damn spot would require disinfection later on.
“Your cousin’s a weirdo,” pronounced Sue.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“You know he wants a kiss,” Laura teased. “You’ve already kissed him before. Just go out there and do it. Slip him the tongue. Let him…”
“Shut–”
Mom rapped three warning knocks on my door but didn’t wait for an answer. She barged right in. I glared at her for not waiting for my permission, but she marched directly up to me and stood, arms akimbo. In English, so that all my friends could hear her, she reprimanded, “Desiree, joo hab hitten in here too long! Nito eez joor guest. Go aut dair ant be a betairr hostess.”
“But, Mommy!” I wailed. “I didn’t invite him!”
“So ghwat! He’s fameely. He cayim oll dis way to see you. Go aut der ant spent some tayeem weet him!”
Laura chuckled.
I mad-dogged her. Mom spun around and left.
Sighing, I peeled myself off my chair and plodded back to the family room. My cronies followed. I saw Nito huddled into the corner of the same long sectional sofa. From her armchair, Mom gestured for me to join him. I frowned, and sat at the opposite end of the sofa. Laura, Candace, and Sue clustered around me. The boy-girl polarity created a lopsided, teeter-totter effect.
Laura waved at Nito and blustered, “Ahoy!”
Nito looked me straight in the eye and whispered, “Hola.”
Mom drank some wine and drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. She’d changed Ricki Lake to CNN and was watching Crossfire. Two enraged political pundits debated on the small screen, and a stare down between Nito and my camp got underway.
“Why don’t you try on the earrings?” Nito asked, in search of a checkmate.
“Later,” I replied.
Stalemate.
The stare down continued.
Dad came home at 6. We sat down at the kitchen table to eat, and since Libertad and Vincie were away at science camp, and I’d invited a gaggle of ingrates over, Mom had opted not to cook. Instead, she’d ordered pizza.
Sitting between Sue and Laura, I grimaced. Mom handed me a flimsy paper plate that I plunked down in front of me with disdain. I stared at the slice on it. It was covered in pepperoni and oozing. Mechanically, I began plucking off the sausage and slipping it into my napkin. Once it was meat-free, I grabbed a new napkin and pressed it to the cheese. It absorbed the bright orange grease. I peeled off the saturated paper and laid a new one down. It turned bright orange, too. I kept doing this, till Dad hissed, “Quit with the paper napkin routine and just eat your food.”
I nodded and set my greasy napkins, along with the one bulging with pepperonis, on a separate plate. Suddenly my diseased subconscious radioed me a ritual. I abided by it, eating my mushrooms first, my cheese second, my saucy bread third, my crust last. I concentrated on following each step and chewing in meticulous multiples of two till my slice was gone. I refrained from any conversation because deviating even slightly from one step could’ve opened a Pandora’s box of consequences–cancer, acne, AIDS, female baldness–that I had no way of shutting.
Nito’s eating habits rivaled mine in strangeness. He refused to touch his slice of pizza, and like some kind of recently emerged desert hermit who hadn’t re-assimilated to civilization yet, he hobbled to his knapsack and fished out the last of that mangy hunk of bread. Dad tried not to stare as Nito carried it back to the table and polished it off, crunching on its staleness.
“Well, we’re going out now!” I announced, carrying my plate, my napkins, and my pepperonis to the trash. “We’re gonna go bowling! Don’t wait up for us. Mom, Dad… have fun with Nito!”
Mom stopped daubing chile onto her slice. She looked up at me and said, “Oh no, Desiree. You’re taking him with you.”
I fumed. I looked at Nito.
“Andale54!” I almost yelled.
Sue and Laura held in their laughter as we walked out to the Escort. They climbed in and let out their guffaws, and I remained, poised by the open passenger door, my arms folded across my chest, thinking.
“Candace,” I suggested, “We can put Nito in the trunk. He’ll fit.”
She was tying a shoelace, and she looked up at me like I was joking. She pulled her knot tight and then stood up and walked to the rear of the car. She unlocked it. The lid popped open.
“Here?” she asked.
“Yup.”
“Nito!” I called. He was loitering by a potted ficus in front of the garage. “There,” I pointed at the trunk.
Dumbfounded at first, Nito soon realized I wasn’t kidding. His facial expression turned to resigned disgust. With no other choice, he limped to the trunk and wriggled in. I followed him and supervised and once his body was curled snugly around the spare tire, I slammed the lid shut on him. I skipped to the passenger seat and hopped in beside Candace.
She pulled out of our driveway and drove us down Donahue Drive, out of Pitt Hills, pas
t oil fields with massive green grasshoppers pumping crude out of the earth.
“Are you sure it’s safe to put someone in the trunk?” Candace asked. “It won’t kill him, will it? The fumes won’t kill him, will they?”
“Your trunk looked well-ventilated,” I assured her.
I gazed out the window at a ramshackle Victorian surrounded by bean fields. Two old ladies, who I suspected were dykes, lived there. One always sat on the weathered porch wearing a flower print housedress and the other, dressed like a man, always tooled around in the yard in big swamp boots.
Candace asked, “What about carbon monoxide?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Candace!” I raised my voice. “He’s used to it! How do you think he got here? He probably rode to this country in somebody’s trunk. Gosh.”
Candace nodded.
We rode into downtown Santa Bonita and took a shortcut through the parking lot of Snappy’s Stop N’ Go, in through the alleyway behind Fujimori Pharmacy. We snaked around Butler Elementary School, winding past brown-shingled tract houses built at the height of tacky American home design, the early ‘80s. Candace lived at 500 McElhany Way, a good number, an even number with two zeroes, and she turned into her driveway, easing her Escort in beside an old Buick Skylark.
“Whose is that?” I asked.
“Paco’s.”
The four of us climbed out and skirted Candace’s dry lawn, taking the concrete path to the front door.
“Who’s Paco?”
“My brother’s best friend.”
“You’ve got a brother?” Laura asked.
“Yeah. Sammy. He got out of jail today.”
Sammy must’ve heard us because the torn screen door flung open and we beheld the jailbird in all his stocky glory, crowned by a Black Pantheresque ’fro. Backlit by a hall light, Sammy looked almost like an angel, but as I got closer, I saw how his beady eyes twinkled behind hidden eyelids. A criminal smile spread across his face.
Candace rushed into his arms. They embraced. Sammy smiled. He was missing a canine. “Heya, sis!” he gushed. He squeezed Candace close to his chest and peeked at the rest of us from over her shoulder. “Who’re these lovely ladies?”
