The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters

by Lorraine López

  So I stay put, my head bowed like I’m about to receive a blessing, or a blow.

  The back doors slam shut, and the younger kids lumber for the house. My father says again, “Tell me why you said that.”

  I’m still confused, so I go, “Said what?”

  “How come you told Monsignor your grandmother died?”

  “He misunderstood or something. He probably just assumed she was our grandmother because she’s old. What’s the big deal?”

  But he doesn’t answer. Instead, he hauls himself out, leaving me alone in the car, staring at the glove compartment.

  In the living room, Aunt Nilda and my uncle José, The Nasty Thing, are on the couch. Nilda’s crying on the phone while The Nasty Thing watches roller derby on television with the volume turned low, though everyone knows that when a person dies, we’re supposed to observe luto, and that means no television, no record players, and no radio. Even the mirrors are supposed to be covered with towels, so you don’t get distracted from your sorrow by trying out new hairstyles and lipsticks. Turning the volume down must be The Nasty Thing’s one concession to luto. I’m surprised Nilda lets him get away with it, but she’s all absorbed in her phone call.

  The Nasty Thing sips whiskey from a Flintstone jelly glass. The smell of it stings my nostrils from across the room. In fact, he reeks like a bullfrog that’s been swimming in a barrel of booze. Loretta says he looks like Hitler would have looked if he’d let himself go to pot, and I can see this in the razor-parted black hair, the broom-bristle moustache, and those fanatical eyes. But really, he’s just a lardy, liver-splotched bullfrog in a gabardine suit. He’s what would have happened if a princess kissed a toad and it became human in all its “toadishness.”

  Loretta slinks in from the kitchen and climbs onto Nilda’s lap. At almost eleven, she’s too old for this, but does she care? Her eyelids are pink and puffy, but she looks pretty snug, nesting her head in the hollow of Nilda’s shoulder. The Nasty Thing stares at the skaters thundering around the rink, trying to throw one another over the rails. He sips his drink and strokes the ceramic panther with fake emerald eyes that we keep on the coffee table. When a commercial for Alka-Seltzer flashes on the screen, José’s gaze slithers around the room. “Where’s Rita and Sophie?”

  I shrug. “No idea.”

  “Qué mentira,” my father says, entering from the hall. “You know they’re in the kitchen with Cary, eating everything in sight.” Lately, Cary, who turned eight in the fall, has been given the job of feeding Sophie and wiping up after her, since he’s pretty useless otherwise.

  “Pues, I know,” Nilda says into the phone. “Es que, she was really suffering con el bronchitis and then the pneumonia. She could hardly breathe toward the end. But never did she complain. Nunca. Not even once.” She smooths Loretta’s wavy hair, listening a moment before repeating, “Pues, I know.”

  Rita and Cary, who’s got Sophie by the hand, wander in from the kitchen. Cary has grape jelly commas in the crooks of his mouth, but at least he’s run a washcloth over Sophie’s face. Her dark curls are still damp at the hairline.

  Rita flings herself into my uncle’s lap. Loretta and I have a tough time getting through to her. We’ve told her over and over that even if it starts out all cozy —with him tickling your knee, squeezing your thigh —sooner or later the funny business starts. By then, it’s too hard to get away. Though he tries to wait until he’s alone with one of us, he’ll start this stuff in front of anyone. I bet he’s proud of how sly he is, pinching, grabbing, and wheezing like that busted harmonica Cary found in the park.

  Loretta and I stay clear of The Nasty Thing. In fact, Loretta looks at him as though he’s the dark spot on the carpet where Cary vomited after too much Halloween candy. She won’t even talk to him, but I will, just to show I’m not afraid. It’s been years since he’s tried that crap on me. I never snitch, but I do bite, and he still has white scars from my teeth on his knuckle.

  “Come on, Rita.” I tug her arm, try to lead her away. “Time to go out and play.”

  “No.” She burrows in The Nasty Thing’s shirt, and he gives me a look that is the adult equivalent of Nyahh, nyahh!

  “Now,” Loretta tells her. “You better go with Bette right now.”

  “Shut up, you sonamabitch,” she says.

  Nilda drops the phone and lunges from the couch. “What did you say?”

  Wisely, Rita shuts her trap. Her eyes, already huge, bulge out more, as if ready to pop from the sockets. She knows she stepped in it big-time. Since our neighbor Shirley started babysitting Sophie and Rita, Nilda hasn’t been around much. She doesn’t know about Rita’s latest habit: cursing. She picked it up from the construction workers who came to remodel the front bungalows before Mr. Huerta’s daughters moved in. The old man thought it was cute at first to see this little kid swearing like a sailor, but the rest of us got tired of it mighty fast. He’s finally getting fed up, too. “Don’t talk like that,” he murmurs from the recliner, where he’s settled himself behind the newspaper. The headline reads: ALI WON’T SERVE; LOSES BOXING TITLE, and under it is a photo of that good-looking boxer, the one who used to be called Cassius Clay, arms up and fists clenched, in a boxing ring. I can just barely make out the words “cowardly,” “stripped of title,” and “criminal prosecution” in the column. None of it makes any sense.

  Nilda shakes her head like she can’t figure out why Dad doesn’t paddle the kid on the spot. She’s his oldest sister. Like me, she’s used to taking matters into her own hands. Since he doesn’t budge, she tears Rita off The Nasty Thing and hauls her into the bathroom to wash out her mouth.

  Before Rita’s feet hit the floor, she’s sobbing. “No! No! I didn’t mean it!” and “Fermina, help me!” Rita’s howls shake the house. My father folds the paper, tucks it under his arm, and exits through the front door. His lighter clicks as soon as he steps on the porch.

  “It’s about time,” Cary says.

  Four-year-old Sophie wags a finger. “She’s a weally bad wabbit.”

  “Come here, cutie.” The Nasty Thing pats his lap. “Let me hold you a tiny bit.”

  “No!” I grab Sophie’s arm. “Nap time. Loretta, it’s your turn to read.”

  As I lead Sophie to the bedroom, I peek in the doorway at Fermina’s room, her mattress already stripped and folded in half, and her maple trunk bound with hemp for storage. After that strange business in the car, I’m wondering, who was she and where’d she go? I always tell the younger kids that our mother flew up to heaven when she died over a year ago. But any dummy can tell that’s pure bullshit. How the heck would I know where dead people go? All I can say for sure is that Fermina’s not here with us. Only this morning, she gave me a dry peck on the cheek before school, and a few hours later, her bare mattress is doubled over like a fat man enjoying a joke.

  “Here.” I hand Loretta The Story of Ferdinand when we get to the bedroom we share with Rita and the baby. I kind of hate thinking it, but now that Fermina’s gone, Sophie and Rita will probably move into her small bedroom. Loretta and I will have this room to ourselves. “You read,” I tell Loretta.

  She plops on her bed, opens the book. Sophie kicks off her shoes and climbs beside her. I sit on my bed, my face in my hands. “Fermina’s really gone,” I say to Loretta, who hasn’t bothered to ask how I’m bearing up, let alone throw an arm around my shoulders to comfort me, as I would have done for her.

  Instead, she begins reading, “Once upon a time in Spain . . .”

  “Fermina’s gone. Don’t you get it?” I tell her. “We’ll never see her again.” But Loretta continues reading until Sophie’s milky, blue-veined eyelids flutter shut.

  “Don’t you even care?” I whisper because Sophie’s nearly asleep.

  Loretta reads to the end, even after Sophie’s slow breathing thickens into snoring. Then she shuts the book and smiles, as though pleased by the way the story turned out.

  “Why are you like this?” I want to knock Loretta all t
he way back to Ash Wednesday. She was the same when our mother died. Acting all calm and well-behaved, so Nilda had to go on and on about what a good girl she was, what a big girl she was, while the rest of us —even the baby —acted like cartoon characters who’d had rockets shot through their stomachs, leaving only the landscape showing. But we couldn’t grab our collars and shake ourselves out like those characters can to make themselves whole again. We had to walk around for months with that big gap in the middle and the ache of the wind whistling through.

  One morning, right after our mother died, I rushed up and tackled Loretta from behind on the way to school. Books and papers scattered, her lunch box flew, landing with a splintery crack. I tore into her like a tornado —bloodied her nose, mangled her glasses, split her lip, pulled her hair until she cried like a decent person. Now I say, “I’m not going to kick your ass this time. You can choke on your tears, for all I care.”

  Loretta slips out of the bed and crooks a finger like she wants to show me something. I’m still pissed, but I’m curious, too, so I trail her out to the kitchen. She springs open the silverware drawer, and, naturally, a roach, fat and waxy as a date, plops out. She taps it with the toe of her shoe, making a crunching sound.

  And I say, “So what?”

  She stoops to touch the mess lightly with her finger. The cucaracha gathers itself up, shivers, and streaks toward a crack in the baseboard. Loretta looks up at me. “See?”

  “You didn’t kill it all the way.”

  “Fermina’s gift,” she whispers.

  “Come on. That thing was barely stunned.”

  “At school,” Loretta says, “I touched a fly trapped in a spider’s web, and it wriggled free. And then, they called me to the office to tell me Fermina died, and that’s when I knew I cured that fly. I’d gotten her gift.”

  “Ugh! Why would you touch a fly?” I never heard such bullshit. Why would Fermina give Loretta the gift of . . . gift of what? Curing bugs? What kind of gift is that? If she could kill insects, especially the mega-tropolis living under this roof, then that might be a gift worth having.

  “She knows I love animals and bugs, so she gave me the gift to make them well.” Loretta grins, looking all dopey and dreamy. “I bet you got a gift, too, maybe something to do with what you’re already good at.”

  To be honest, I never believed poor old Fermina when she talked about our gifts, figuring she made it up because she had no money for presents and didn’t want us to think she’d forgotten about us. I know how it is when you have to stretch things, slant them sideways, so you don’t look bad —nothing wrong with that.

  On the other hand, what if I did get some kind of gift? If Loretta got one, I would, too. What kind of gift would that be? I’m a pretty good fighter, but jeez, I wouldn’t want boxing skills. How embarrassing it would be if I rose up the ranks in Golden Gloves! What if I had to climb in the ring with Lance and knock him cold? The world title’s up for grabs now, and no one would try drafting me into the service. What if I stepped into old Cassius Clay’s shoes?

  Maybe my gift is love, true love, like between me and Lance, whose older brother, Frank —come to think of it —is also pretty cute. I shake my head. Sometimes my thoughts are so goofy you’d think I was the little kid who didn’t know any better.

  “Filth!” Nilda shrieks so loud that my back teeth ache. It’s Saturday. The Nasty Thing dropped her off at our house superearly with her fuchsia travel case, and she’s been going after the dirt in our house ever since. Rita and I linger over our bologna sandwiches, watching Nilda clean the kitchen. There’s something weirdly relaxing about watching someone scrub, scour, and scream in horror, even if it hurts your molars. Now she’s got her head stuck all the way under the kitchen sink, where she’s wiping —of all things —the wall behind the pipes. “Filthy, nasty!” Every speck of grime shocks and thrills her at the same time. “I never seen such mess! I don’t know what your father’s paying that . . . that . . . marana cochina, that beatnik, but somebody should grab her by the ankles and shake every penny out of her pockets. It’s a pigsty here. No wonder you got cucarachas galore.”

  “Tía,” I say, remembering the exchange with my father in the car, “was Fermina related to us?”

  Bam! Nilda conks her head on the bottom of the sink and crawls out backward from underneath, rubbing her crown. “Bah! What kind of nonsense is this?”

  “Yesterday Dad said —”

  “Fermina, rest her soul, was nothing to us.” Nilda crosses herself and kisses her gloved thumb. “You know that. She worked for the family. That’s all.”

  “Yeah, but —”

  “She was la criada. And that’s all there is to it,” Nilda says, her voice rising.

  It’s pretty weird for a maid to stay in bed all day and have her meals brought in on a tray, the way we did for Fermina toward the end, but I say, “I didn’t mean anything.”

  She points at me. “Don’t you start spreading this around, you hear me? And you, too, Rita, you forget about these fairy tales.” Nilda dives back under the sink. “Instead of making up stories, you girls ought to mix up some boiling water with Clorox . . .”

  This is my cue to get the hell out, unless I want to find myself going at crud behind the stove with an old toothbrush. I tug Rita’s sleeve. She’s still sulky about yesterday’s mouth-washing, but she knows what’s up when Nilda mentions boiling water and Clorox. We tiptoe out the screen door, easing it shut so it doesn’t slap against the frame. Loretta’s in the bedroom —she can help Nilda wage the war on filth and keep an eye on Sophie, too, while the old man and Cary are getting haircuts. We make our way next door, where Shirley, who cleans house and babysits for us, lives with her old grandmother and her daughter, Cathy.

  Our house is in this courtyard behind four stucco houses. The bungalows face each other, and ours, the largest, sits behind these and looks out onto the street. Shirley has the small two-bedroom bungalow on the right-hand side, which is identical to the one it faces on the left, where Ethel, a nice drunk lady lives. The front houses are occupied by the landlord Mr. Huerta’s two grown daughters and their husbands.

  Rita can play with Cathy, while Shirley practices on me. She’s studying to be a beautician and needs all these practice hours for her certificate. Though she’s already old —almost twenty-five —Shirley is more of a friend to me than a neighbor. We watch American Bandstand together and compete with each other to learn the new dance steps. Much as I love dancing, I look forward to the beauty sessions in Shirley’s bathroom even more.

  We round the courtyard toward Shirley’s bungalow, and there’s her grandmother Señora Trejo hollering her brains out in Spanish from the side yard. “¡Huevón, perezoso, sinvergüenza!” And I figure she’s cornered another lizard with her garden hoe. The old lady is hell on lizards. She chops them in the middle, so the two halves writhe apart. We have a mess of lizards around here, and I have seen her chop at least a dozen, but I never heard her talk to one before, other than saying “¡tómalo!” as she brings down the hoe. We make our way around the side of Shirley’s bungalow, and there’s the old lady raising her hoe, but not over some doomed lizard.

  A man I’ve never seen before lifts his hands in surrender. He’s wearing a black bowling shirt with gray panels in the front, shiny pants, also black, and pointy patent leather shoes with —give me a break! —tassels.

  “Oiga,” he’s saying. “Watch it with the hoe.”

  This releases a high-pitched stream of Spanish from Señora Trejo. She slices the air, promising to halve his heart.

  He steps back, shouting, “Hey, Shirley! I got to talk to you!”

  In the bungalow’s front window, a beige curtain flutters and drops, like an eyelid blinking open, then shut.

  Shirley’s grandmother charges forth on her sturdy viejita shoes, black dusty leather jobs that lace all the way up the ankles. She raises the hoe over her tight nest of braids and brings it down —blade upturned —with a muffled thunk on the meaty part
of his shoulder.

  “¡Ay, vieja!” He spins around, and she strikes him again on the nalgas. “Stop, okay! I’m going already.”

  Señora Trejo lands a last blow to the ribs before the guy stomps off, muttering curses. Even after his car’s engine churns, the old woman keeps waving the hoe, looking —except for her flower-print housecoat, support hose, and old-lady shoes —like Saint Michael driving off a dragon in Rita’s Catechism in Pictures storybook.

  Señora Trejo spits in the dirt. “¡Basura!”

  Then she notices us staring at her, and her brown face softens, pleating like crepe paper. “Pues, vengan, vengan. Pasen p’a dentro.” Though violent with lizards, and apparently with strange men, too, she’s usually kind to us. Today she makes me nervous, especially since she’s still armed with the hoe. I ask if we should come back later.

  “Pues, vengan.” She climbs the concrete steps and opens the door for us. “¿Tienen hambre?” Señora Trejo leans the hoe against the wall, so it will be handy for next time.

  Rita and I shake our heads. “No, gracias.” Watching a man beaten with a hoe does not make a person think of food.

  Once inside the darkened kitchen, Rita heads for Cathy’s room, while I exercise my Spanish with the old woman. I listen to her lo sientos y qué lástimas about Fermina’s passing and ask about her reumatismo, until Shirley hollers that she’s ready for me. Relieved, because I have run out of small talk at the same time as I have run out of Spanish, I slip into the bathroom.

  Shirley points at her makeup tray, hairdressing kit, manicure bag, and stack of folded towels. “I saw you guys in front and started laying out stuff.” She whips an old sheet over me, clipping it with a hairpin. “What’ll it be today, Bette?”

  “How about you?” I say. She looks so pretty with her black hair all fluffy around her pale powdery face and her dark eyes lined so they tilt like a cat’s.

  “You choose —geisha, Cleopatra, secretary.”

  “I mean I want to look like you —your hair, your eyes, everything.” I’m thinking if she does me up good, I might look like I’m related to her.