The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters

by Lorraine López

  Copyright © 2008 by Lorraine M. López

  Reading Group Guide copyright © 2008 by Hachette Book Group USA, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group, USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

  First eBook Edition: October 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-446-54310-1

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue: Los Angeles — 1966

  1: Dog Party — Loretta: 1966

  2: To Tell It Slant —Bette: 1967

  3: Cursed and Cast Out —Rita: 1967

  4: Once a Pint of Time —Sophia: 1968

  5: They Were Like This —Loretta: 1971

  6: Real, Deep, and True —Bette: 1974

  7: Bendígame, Madre Purísima —Sophia: 1977

  8: Like Falling in a Dream —Rita: 1978

  9: The Mini-mart and the Temple —Sophia: 1981

  10: -Miasma —Rita: 1982

  11: Snapshots from the Mother Road —The Gabaldón Sisters: 1983

  12: Fish and Flowers —Bette: 1985

  13: Las Posadas —Loretta: 1987

  Reading Group Guide

  Una Guía para Grupos de Lectura

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PRAISE FOR THE GIFTED GABALDÓN SISTERS

  “Hilarious and intensely moving . . . When you put the book down, you know you’ve been somewhere that mattered: into the heart of a family bound by (beautiful, annoying, riotous, bold) women in love. What a brilliant, original, powerful book.”

  —Heather Sellers, author of The Boys I Borrow

  “A beautifully written, zesty family chronicle, THE GIFTED GABALDÓN SISTERS covers over a century of women’s lives, pieced together like a Southwest quilt.”

  —Teresa de la Caridad Doval, author of A Girl Like Che Guevara

  “Funny, fierce, and wise.”

  —Judith Ortiz Cofer, author of Call Me María

  “It has been a long time since I have cared for the characters of a novel as much as I care for the Gabaldón sisters. Their individual perspectives and personalities are woven together to create a three-dimensional world full of promise in spite of the daily obstacles familiar to us all. Lorraine López moves effortlessly between humor and heartache, opening us up to the possibility that what seems coincidental is truly magical.”

  —Blas Falconer, author of The Perfect Hour

  “THE GIFTED GABALDÓN SISTERS is about secrets and lies, dramas and scandals, big losses and deep resentments — the very stuff that makes life worth living. It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered such a rambunctious and motley bunch of characters. And in López’s hands, through her finely calibrated prose, they lift off the page with dignity and soul, and she makes you root and ache for each of them until the very end.”

  —Alex Espinoza, author of Still Water Saints

  For Debra López, Kenneth López,

  Frances López Whyte, Sylvia López,

  and in loving memory of Adelina “Luguarda”

  Martínez de López

  PROLOGUE

  LOS ANGELES — 1966

  The Sea Breeze Bungalows, on Clinton Street off Alvarado Street in Los Angeles, were constructed in the early 1940s to provide housing for single working women and bachelors. Though the Sea Breeze units are some forty miles from the Pacific Ocean, the developer, clearly torn between Art Deco and beachcomber styles, compromised by constructing these peach-colored cottages with one porthole window apiece and then raising a sign decorated with painted seashells on the front lawn. The largest of the five bungalows, originally inhabited by the owner, sits at the tip of the pentagon, farthest from the street.

  Two decades after construction, this three-bedroom home is now rented by the Gabaldón family: a widowed utility worker, with five children, and an elderly Pueblo woman. The four girls in the family share the largest bedroom, while the one boy, the middle child, sleeps in a youth bed in his father’s room. The smallest bedroom belongs to Fermina, the aged housekeeper. Crammed into her quarters are a battered oak dresser with mismatched knobs, a flecked and clouded mirror, an oval hook rug at the center of the dark wood floor, and a single bed, heaped with folded quilts, near the wall. Beside the bed and aligned with the outer wall, just under the window, sits a bird’s-eye-maple trunk. The blond trunk is draped with a Navajo blanket patterned with red and black thunderbirds against an emerald background.

  The house, empty of its inhabitants this Sunday morning while the family attends mass, sighs now with a gust buffeting the curtains and then groans at the joists, like an exhausted woman loosening her girdle in a private moment, as it settles into the foundation. The worn and lumpy pieces of furniture moan softly against rusted springs and frames. Even the maple trunk seems to slump, readjusting itself and resettling its contents. Among these are photo albums, framed family portraits wrapped in newsprint, wedding and baptismal gowns encased in plastic, quilts, shoeboxes containing letters, an ebony case holding costume jewelry and some turquoise and silver pieces, a scattering of cedar blocks, stacked high-school yearbooks, a manila envelope in which marriage, birth and baptismal certificates, high-school diplomas, and report cards are stuffed, and a parcel of yellowed pages, printed in fading ink and bound together with twine.

  The first page in this stack reads as follows:

  SUBJECT: FERMINA/WALPI

  Work Projects Administration: 6-8-38 —Data Collector: Heidi Marie Schultz

  June 6, 1938

  Words: 261

  FERMINA

  Fermina is a petite woman with a corona of braided gray hair coiled atop her head. Unlike many ancianos in the Rio Puerco Valley, her posture is upright and her neck long and graceful. Yet she takes small, uncertain steps when she walks, and she favors knee-length gingham dresses and thick white ankle-socks. Though she appears much younger, Fermina is in her seventies. She was born in the 1860s in Walpi, a Hopi village located on the First Mesa in northeastern Arizona.

  When she was a child, her father contracted a fever and died. Soon afterward, her newborn brother also succumbed to an unknown malady that may have been measles. Her paternal grandmother blamed Fermina’s mother, a Tewa of Hano, for the death, claiming the young woman had encountered a snake. The Hopi believed a woman with child who looks upon a snake will deliver a baby born with spots. Raised blotches covered the infant’s body for the few days he lived. He died before he could be sung into the clan, before his grandmother could perform the head-washing ceremony.

  Fermina claims to remember stroking the baby’s cold, pimpled cheeks and whispering her name in his ear, so he would know her when they met in the underworld. Later, family members, as dictated by custom, hurtled his swaddled corpse over the edge of a northeast cliff. The blanket unfurled like the wings of a hawk sailing a sudden current. A sandy gust stung Fermina’s cheeks. She cupped a hand over her eyes, and her brother was gone.

  1

  DOG PARTY — LORETTA: 1966

  The best thing about Randy Suela was his dog, Flip, a lanky Dalmatian mix, with pink-rimmed eyes and a long, rubbery tongue. Flip would jig on his hind legs, wriggling like a belly dancer, when he saw me and then roll on his back, so I could strum his liver-spotted belly. I’d invited both Randy and Flip to my tenth birthday party, but only Randy, wearing a crisp madras shirt, appeared on the threshold that morning. I ba
rred the doorway, my hands on my hips. “Where’s Flip?”

  “My ma said I couldn’t bring him.” Randy lowered his head. His black hair was so stiff with Brylcreem that combing had etched hard furrows clear to his scalp. He scuffed one loafer into the other, and brought his hands from behind his back to offer a cylinder-shaped parcel wrapped in pink paper. “I got you something.”

  My eyes on the gift, I said, “You aren’t invited without Flip.”

  Randy shook his head. “But, Loretta, my ma says dogs don’t go to parties.” He leaned to the left, trying to slip past me into the house.

  “Yes, they do.” I shifted, blocking him. “Mr. Huerta’s bringing his Chihuahua to my party, and he’s the landlord, so he should know.”

  “But my ma —”

  “Tell your mama it’s my party, not hers. I can invite whoever I want.”

  “Get the dog, boy,” called Fermina from the bedroom. Her voice scraped through the bungalow like a bad saw on green wood.

  “What was that?” Randy backpedaled, stumbling on the black BIENVENIDOS mat.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “That was spooky.” He peered over my shoulder into the house.

  “It’s just Fermina, her voice. She’s a really old Indian.”

  Randy’s eyes widened. “You have an Indian? Can I see?”

  “Not unless you bring Flip. That’s the deal.”

  “Maybe I can sneak him over.” He turned to leave.

  I grabbed his elbow. “Give me that first.” Something sloshed against glass under the pink paper. “What is it?”

  “Pickles.”

  My mouth went juicy. “Ooh!”

  Randy smiled. “You like them, huh?”

  “Dile gracias,” called Fermina.

  “Thanks,” I said, ready to push the door shut. “Now, go get Flip.”

  When Randy returned with Flip, the dog lunged at me. His black claws raked my legs, scribbling chalky streaks on my thighs. I crouched, pulling him close, and he lapped my face with his fishy tongue. In the kitchen, I opened the box of dog biscuits I’d bought and tossed one for him before leading Randy to Fermina’s room.

  The door whined open, and the floorboards groaned under the carpet, as we tiptoed toward her bed. “¿Estás durmiendo?”

  “No, venga.” She propped herself up on the pillows. “Bring me my rosary, hija.”

  I opened the top bureau drawer. “Glow-in-the-dark or wood?”

  “Wood. Glow-in-the-dark is for night.”

  I untangled the carved ebony beads from a nest of scapulars, thread, hairpins, and the greenish glow-in-the-dark strand.

  “Dame agua, hija, with ice.”

  Randy stood frozen at the heart of the oval hook rug, staring. His jaw hung so low that silvery fillings glinted from the back of his mouth. I swung my gaze toward Fermina and imagined seeing her, as he was, for the first time.

  To him, she must have made the gargoyles in fairy tales seem smooth as babies. Her skin was the color of cocoa, but the texture of oatmeal, puckered and bubbled with clots and lumps. Her pleated eyelids had avalanched over her eyes, leaving dark wet quarter-moons from which she peered at us. The few snowy hairs remaining on her head were tucked under a hairnet, which made her look both wise and weird.

  I was used to Fermina, how she looked and the creaky way she spoke. I enjoyed curling up with her in bed and reading Stories for Young Catholics to her. But when I spied Randy wrinkling his nose, I, too, whiffed the sour mustiness of her sheets, the dry old woman smell that overpowered the joss sticks burning in her shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. The tang of spoiled fruit wafted from Fermina’s mouth, like a cantaloupe husk at the bottom of the trash can. The same sweetish stench had risen from my mother’s blackened toes.

  I handed Fermina the glass, and she sat up to sip the water. Had she always made these strangled, gurgling sounds? I turned to Randy. “Okay, let’s go outside.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Come on, Randy.”

  “Can I . . . touch her?” he whispered.

  Fermina set the glass on her maple trunk. “No.”

  “How old are you?” Randy asked.

  “Ten years old,” she told him with a wink.

  I leveled my gaze at her. “Tell the truth.”

  “Today is my birthday,” she said.

  “It is not. It’s mine!”

  “Entonces ven aca a recibir un besito.”

  I leaned in and her lips rasped my cheek.

  “Happy birthday, hija,” she said. “When I am gone, you will get a gift from me.” On our birthdays, Fermina always promised my three sisters and me that we’d receive our present from her after she died.

  “You know what I want,” I said.

  She nodded. “The glow-in-the-dark rosary.”

  “No, not that.” Though I loved how the milky pellets absorbed light to gleam at night like the moon’s own lonely tears, what I really wanted was for Fermina to find my mother in that underworld and tell her that she never said good-bye to me. The morning they took Mama back to the hospital, I woke up late and threw on my uniform. My father yelled at me to hurry, and I had no time to slip into my mother’s bedroom and hug her before we piled into the car for school. She never kissed me, never said good-bye. I asked Fermina to find her in that place she calls Maski and tell her she has to come back, that she forgot something —something important. “I already told you what I want. Remember?”

  Fermina nodded. She kissed the crucifix at the top of the rosary and mumbled her prayers. I tugged Randy’s arm and led him outside, where my oldest sister, Bette, stood with a cluster of her girlfriends. They’d just arrived, handing her cards and presents because Bette had lied to them, claiming it was her birthday.

  For human guests, I’d invited Randy, only because of Flip, and two girls from school: Gloria Quon, who’d be late because of her violin lesson, and Nancy Acosta, a Jehovah’s Witness, who would not come at all because celebrating birthdays was against her religion. Mr. Huerta promised to bring his Chihuahua, Baby, and our neighbor Mrs. Lucas said she’d let me borrow her golden retriever for the party.

  The day before, my father had bought a bakery cake, a burro-shaped piñata, bags of Tootsie Rolls and butterscotch disks with which to fill the donkey, two packets of balloons, and party favors from Woolworth. When Randy and I slammed out the screen door, we found him tossing a clothesline to string the piñata on the avocado tree.

  This was the first birthday party since my mother died in February, and my father was trying to do it right, though he’d never before given a party by himself. My mother had been the one to write out the invitations, bake and ice the cake, weave pastel-colored crepe paper into the trellis over the driveway, and blow up the balloons. It felt strange to see my father boiling wienies on the stove so early that morning that now they bobbed in the cold salty water like bloated fingers, odd to watch his hairy-knuckled hands measuring jelly beans into pleated candy cups. When he’d catch my eye, he’d wink, saying, “Real nice, ¿qué no?” He didn’t even seem to mind that Bette had invited her friends, pretending it was her birthday. He was probably relieved to have more people for guests, as I had wanted to invite only dogs.

  “Dogs?” he’d said when we first discussed it. “Like from the pound?”

  “Not strange dogs —dogs I know, dogs from the neighborhood.”

  “You won’t get presents that way,” Bette had warned me, shaking her head. “Invite all the dogs on earth. Not a single one will bring a gift.”

  I couldn’t care less for gifts, though the pickles were nice.

  I shoved Randy toward my father. “Help him put up the piñata.”

  “Catch the other end of that rope, boy,” my father said as I skipped toward the house, my shiny new Mary Janes stiff and slippery on the pavement. Flip panted behind the screen door. I pulled it open, and he shot out almost tumbling me. I caught his head in my hands and kissed his cold, salty nose. Then we bolted, racing around and around �
��the house, the carport, the patio. I shrieked, and Flip barked, stinging my shins with his thick, ropy tail when he overtook me near the trash cans, and then I charged after him. My seven-year-old brother joined in, but Cary, a husky asthmatic, soon grew pink in the face, huffing and wheezing until he had to stop.

  My father called me to eat, and I begged a few more minutes, please. He hollered, “Get over here, girl!” And Fermina called from the side window, “Stop running with that dog. You will make him sick.” I spun around to see Flip sink onto one haunch, panting. I tied his leash to a post near the trellis and refilled the water bowl for him to slurp while cooling his belly on the shaded concrete.

  While Flip and I were racing, Gloria Quon had arrived. She, Bette, and Bette’s friends had finished eating and were whispering together near the cuartito that housed the washing machine, not far from where my father had set up the picnic table for the party. At the patio, Cary helped himself to a second hot dog and more potato chips while Sophie kept him company. I had no idea where my younger sister Rita was.

  There were five of us children, but once there had been six. With one exception, my mother named all of us for her favorite movie stars. First she named my oldest sister and me, Bette Davis and Loretta Young Gabaldón. Then she named the brother that followed me the English version of her father’s name, Antonio Gerardo, to honor him, as he had died just before the baby’s birth. But she switched back to movie star names when she lost Anthony Gerard, naming my brother and the two sisters that followed him, Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth, and Sophia Loren Gabaldón.

  My mother used to say she “lost” Anthony Gerard —never how or why —when telling how many children she had and their ages. When she said it, her lips barely moved. Her voice seemed to come from another place, like she was hypnotized or as if she were a ventriloquist without a dummy.