“Okay, Sofia, it’s time. You’re starting to go around like a ghost. It’s time to take your papa’s ultimate cure for homesickness.” Marcos popped the tequila worm out of the bottle and dangled it.
“Only if you two take a bite too.” They looked queasy. “I’m serious. And I’ll take the middle, since I’ve had the head and butt before. I want to finally eat the whole tequila worm.”
So Marcos bit the head off, Brooke the butt, and then I popped the soul of the tequila worm in my mouth and started chewing slowly.
“Ay! Sofia!” Marcos said, “This works better than eating three disks of chocolate. I don’t feel homesick for McAllen or anyone anymore.” He looked at me with his bright dark eyes and then kissed my check. We all laughed and hugged each other.
As we walked back to the dorm, I did feel lighter, relieved, so glad to have such friends.
I thought of Papa’s bean cleaning and cooking, about the Christmas nacimiento, and about the nine days of rosaries to get Papa’s soul to heaven. These were all rituals that connected me to something higher. And now, eating the tequila worm had worked its own power.
As I climbed the steps to my room, I smiled, feeling— with my soul—that now I could finally begin the tequila worm story for Papa.
The PLaza
YEARS later I returned to my old barrio for a visit.
I was living in San Francisco, where I worked as a civil rights attorney, writing stories every chance I got. Lucy was a schoolteacher in Austin. Berta still lived in McAllen, with Jamie and their two boys. We called and visited each other all the time.
Mama was right, though: our barrio was nothing like I remembered it.
As the kids I had played with had grown up and moved away and most of their grandparents and then parents had taken ill and died, the simple clapboard houses had been torn down and replaced by one- and two-story apartment buildings. Our barrio had faded away, and gangs and graffiti had moved in.
The few original families still living there, mostly quite old, didn’t feel safe anymore, but what could they do? It was as if the city were deliberately destroying the barrio by putting far too many people there. The old families didn’t have anything against the new people: most were hardworking and were only trying to survive. But to pile six families on a lot that had once housed one was loco.
Years back I had moved Mama to a safer house in town.
We drove to the old house, and Mama and I started picking up the broken glass in the yard. “Mama, what do you want done with the house?”
She shrugged. “Ay, mi’ja, I hate the thought of selling it to only have another apartment built. It’s such a rough place now.” She shook her head and sighed.
“I loved visiting all my comadres and sharing plates of food and picking fresh limes from Doña Virginia’s tree. We were always sharing, trading, borrowing chilies, cribs, tamales. There was such a calmness then too, and it was especially nice in the evenings when it cooled and the scent of orange blossoms sweetened the air.
“Remember,” she continued, “how this was the time when all the families came out to their porches, especially when Clara was in town with her big bag of stories? And it was especially nice when the full moon shone and the sky dazzled with stars.
“Now the new buildings block the sky. Trucks screech and radios blare.
“And to think I once dreamed that you and Lucy and Berta would grow up and settle here too, so we could always continue being one big family.”
I nodded, hugging Mama.
And that is how it all began. We drove city hall and the mayor crazy, telling them that they were destroying our families, our barrios, and our future by letting more and more apartments be built, that it was like putting too many cats in one house. We called and wrote letters to all the families and neighbors who’d since moved out.
Then I bought one house, tore it down, and built a new brick house for Mama. As for our old house, I had it torn down too, but there I created a little space, with orange trees on each corner and plantings of roses, hibiscus, beautiful red and purple bougainvillea, and in Papa’s memory, Mexican jasmine. There were wooden benches, too, and even a small wooden gazebo at the very center that I painted bright pink. I built a tall white picket fence all around it and bolted the gate shut.
I made keys to the placita and gave a key to each of the old families still living there. When I visited, I saw that slowly, slowly, they started coming to sit there, to talk, to see each other. They started to help water the plants and trees and cut the grass. I’d find seven, sometimes ten people sitting and talking in the evenings. They said it reminded them of long ago, and that the scent of the orange blossoms, Mexican jasmine, and roses brought back sweet memories of their childhoods and the plazas in the towns where they’d grown up.
Then little by little they started inviting some of the new families to the placita too. One Sunday afternoon, I saw some of these new young faces strumming guitars and singing love songs in the pink gazebo. I saw families, fresh from Mass, enjoying picnics of tacos and roasted chicken, sitting on blankets on the new-mown grass. That day I blew up a blue balloon and attached it to the gazebo.
Only a year later I received a call from Mama. “Mi’ja, would you please take the fence down? Everyone knows each other now—so it’s just in the way.”
After that call, I flew to McAllen and we pulled the fence down. Then I took the four little wooden saints from my pocket, the ones Papa had carved for me years before. I prayed that the rituals I’d experienced as a child—the very ones that Mama, Papa, and the comadres had worked so hard to instill in me—would be nourished and shared and spread from the heart of that little plaza.
It had taken years, many years, for me to finally see the true meaning of becoming a good comadre. The first glimmer of this was after Papa died so suddenly. His death had completely flipped my world upside down. But Mama had kept her balance and serenity in this darkest of times, because of her comadres.
Later that year, I went home for the Day of the Dead. Mama, Lucy, Berta, Jamie, Noe, Tía Belia, Berta’s father, and I prayed and then placed a dozen hot tamales and a cup of freshly made pinto beans on Papa’s grave. I smiled, for now I understood that it was not an obsession with death that Mexicans had after all, but rather an acceptance of it—woven like a thick vine throughout our lives, helping us transcend death itself and compelling us to live even richer, more meaningful lives.
That evening we all gathered again on the porch of Mama’s new house, and I brought out Clara’s old burlap bag. I reached inside to pull out a small paper box and took out Papa’s secret cascarone, the one I had finally opened at Saint Luke’s. It was not filled with confetti, but rather with all the memories of Papa and of our lives together as a family, a barrio, and as comadres and compadres.
And as Papa’s secret cascarone went from hand to hand, person to person, we vowed that we would always come together to create the family’s Christmas nacimiento each year. Now the responsibility had passed on to Mama.
Before I went to bed, I called my comadre Brooke and my compadre Marcos and told them the happy news, that Mama had just appointed me the Christmas madrina for the year.
Published by Wendy Lamb Books
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.
New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
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[1. Family life—Texas—Fiction. 2. Neighborhood—Fiction. 3. Mexican Americans—Fiction.
4. Catholics
—Fiction. 5. Boarding schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction.
7. Texas—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.C161643 Te 2005
[Fic]—dc22
2004024533
First Trade Paperback Edition
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43401-2
v3.0
The Tequila Worm Page 14
