The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters

by Lorraine López

  I rush home to tell Luis, and he’s like, “Cool, we’re going to have a kid.”

  I flip out. “You dumbass, we can’t have a kid! How about the acid I dropped? How about the smoking and drinking and taking the fucking pill the times I did remember to take it? All that will hurt a baby. Besides, I’m not ready to have a kid. I don’t know how to be a mother, and I don’t have anyone around to show me.”

  “How about my mom?” he says.

  “Get serious.” I roll my eyes. “And what kind of father would you make? Drunk on your ass all the time?”

  Good, sweet Luis takes me in his arms and says it’s normal for pregnant women to get uptight. He wipes my cheeks with his shirttail, tells me not to worry. Everything’s cool. I repeat this to myself like a prayer, so everything will be cool —really, deeply, and truly.

  SUBJECT: FERMINA/FOLKTALES

  WPA: 6-21-38 —DC: HMS

  June 20, 1938

  Words: 386

  BAD CATS

  Fermina remembers another folktale she heard on the First Mesa: the story of cats that made trouble for villagers in Old Oraibi. They played with the weavers’ yarns, tangling and soiling them, and they got into the sheep’s innards being prepared for feasting. The Hopi shooed them with curses. This so enraged the cats that they decided to build their own village. There, the cats lived well. The cat men hunted, and the cat women cooked mutton stew and made piki. The cats didn’t behave as they had in Old Oraibi. Here, they were industrious and treated each other with respect. They worked together before the Piktotokya celebration, preparing for the dance performance. They helped one another with costumes, lending this and that.

  The day of the dance, the cats were delightful-looking in their costumes. The cat dancers emerged from kiva to sing and dance. But because they were only cats, they had just one song. This is how it went:

  We, we are little cats

  We protect your food —

  Corn and peaches.

  We would be kinder,

  But you were cruel to us,

  Women and men.

  Poor us. Poor us.

  We dance delicately.

  Cat, cat

  Meow, meow, meow.

  Cats from far away arrived at the cat village. There was plenty of food for these newcomers. But other visitors came, too. Several frogs hopped into the village. The sleek, graceful cats looked down on the bumpy, oily frogs. These creatures were not welcome. But the cats could do nothing about them during the ceremony.

  The performers continued dancing, and the frogs enjoyed watching, but the cat dancers were furious. They decided to alter the song to reveal their feelings, so this is what they sang:

  Cat, cat is ripping

  Cat, cat is ripping

  Cat rips frog’s back legs

  Cat rips frog’s back legs

  Cat, Cat

  Meow, meow, meow

  The frogs wondered why the cats threatened them in the song. Was this a joke? One of the frogs suggested they all croak, which is how frogs laugh, as the cats sang. Together they croaked and croaked. No one could hear the cats over the frogs.

  Then clouds rolled over the mesa, blocking the sun. Rain fell in heavy sheets. The downpour flooded the cat village, flushing out drowned cats while the frogs swam away, croaking merrily.

  7

  BENDÍGAME, MADRE PURÍSIMA —SOPHIA: 1977

  If you are like me, you wake up every morning with the same prayer stamped in your heart that is burning on your lips: Dear Virgen Madre (you don’t believe in God, never have, but you don’t dare ignore la Virgen), help me shed some weight here! Please! Oh, and while you’re at it, can you do something about my eye? So you have two prayers really. But you try to collapse them into one, so you won’t seem greedy, like you were last night, smuggling buttered tortillas into bed. Now, if you are like me, you’ve got grease spots on your pillowcase, which will probably never come out. So you throw in an extra part to the usual prayer: And, Virgen, help me remove the stains from the pillowcase, if you can. But more important, work on the weight thing and the eye. Blessed Mother, I humbly beg your intercession.

  Then, being like me, you roll out of bed and fumble for your eye patch and glasses on the nightstand. The patch, a beige-colored adhesive job, is quite the fashion statement. It’s meant to look natural, like a flap of skin that just happened to grow over your eye, but it goes with your shock-white face about as well as a splash of cocoa on snowy linen, but even worse than the patch is having that wild eye show. Lazy eye, the optometrist with abundant nose hair, told your father. The truth is —that eye is about as lazy as a hummingbird on Benzedrine. It jumps and flinches, priming to leap out of the socket and bounce like a Super Ball for Tijuana. It’s the only part of your slothful body that isn’t lazy. It’s not a lazy eye; it’s a crazy eye. You pull the plastic backing off the adhesive and stick the patch over the wild eye and slip on your glasses.

  Now, you have begged the Virgin Mother (and your father) for more attractive “granny-style” wire frames that every self-respecting glasses-wearing person owns. After all, this is the late seventies, and people —especially fourteen-year-old girls —don’t want to look that much like Walter Cronkite anymore. But Fuzzy Nostrils has vetoed this. While your exposed eye is neither lazy nor insane, it is quite peaceably, even legally, blind, requiring a lens of magnifying-glass density. So you had to choose between a mannish tortoiseshell and industrial-strength pink-plastic deals. The pinks are rhinestone studded, but no doubt safe for welding in. The horn-rims resemble those worn by Clark Kent, the glasses he tears off when he turns into Superman. The very act of ripping these from his face signals his transformation from a timid frankfurter into a Man of Steel. Having little desire to resemble Clark Kent, the wienie, you picked the pink plastics, which, with the patch, suit you to seek employment as Captain Hook’s maniacal secretary.

  “Ahoy, matey,” Cary says when he emerges from the bathroom. He doesn’t dare tease you about your weight because, truth is, he is even fatter than you, and though you are more than four years younger, you can fling weight insults with greater zest than he can muster. But, if you are like me, you avoid slitting open that particular vein of discussion.

  Instead, you say, “What do you do in there?” Your brother spends more than half his time in the can, but he doesn’t flush, run water, or turn comic book pages. You know this because you’ve knelt with your ear pressed to the keyhole. “What do you do in there anyway?”

  Of course, Cary won’t say. He just starts singing, “Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum . . .” These are the only words to the ditty he knows, so he sings them over and over.

  You ignore this, fill the tub, and try to enjoy your bath, likewise paying no heed to Rita, who pounds on the door. If it’s urgent enough, she’ll burst in to piss while you shave your legs. But when your father starts yelling “Sophia Loren, please, h’ita. I got to go!” it’s high time to grab a towel.

  What a sour joke it is for your mother to have named you for one of the most gorgeous women to grace the planet. She died (your mother, not Sophia Loren) when you were a tyke, so you don’t remember her much. You can’t even cry for her when the others get to boo-hooing on her birthday, especially not with this tontería of a patch threatening to curl off at the first trace of moisture. But you’d like to meet the woman and trade a few words on this subject. It’s not so bad for your older sisters to be named Bette Davis, Loretta Young, and Rita Hayworth Gabaldón. Even your brother can pull off being called Cary Grant. But when people find out your full name is Sophia Loren Gabaldón, they just have to laugh.

  Your eye patch wilts with the steam. You press it back, but it sags away from your damp skin. You’ll need another before school. You hate waste, but it’d be worse if Cary, or your father, catches sight of that wacky eye and starts feeling all sorry for you.

  “Híjole, muchacha, I thought you’d never come out.” Your father gets a load of your flushed skin and toweled hair, and emits a s
nort of laughter.

  “Hey, what’s so funny?” you ask, imitating Minnie Mouse, so he will have something legitimate to laugh at.

  Here, he yuks it up as he pushes past you.

  You make a beeline for the nest of bills atop his dresser. You pluck a dollar for lunch, just in case. You’re committed to fasting all day, but you never know what’ll turn up in the cafeteria. If it’s taquitos con guacamole, forget it, you’re a goner, even though the guacamole is as thin as gruel and a shade of green that suggests some level of radioactivity.

  On the way to the kitchen, you stop in the laundry closet and flick on the iron. You wash your uniform at night and iron it every morning. For sure, you are the neatest, best-groomed, overweight, eye patch–wearing teenager in the world, though you don’t know why you bother. Maybe you hope people will be so blinded by the brilliance of your blouse, so mesmerized by the razor pleats in your skirt, that they will overlook the eye patch and the sixty pounds you need to shed.

  But wait, what’s that buttery aroma wafting from the kitchen like a vaporous finger beckoning hungry cartoon characters? Can it be? Yes, your sister Loretta is diabolically sizzling slices of batter-dipped bread —French toast, your favorite food in the world, especially the way she prepares it, with finely grated orange peel, cinnamon, and nutmeg beaten into the egg. You hustle to the kitchen, determined to commence fasting tomorrow.

  Already seated at the table, Cary juts a thumb at your towel. “You going to eat in that?”

  “I’ll take it off, baby, if that’s what you want. I’ll take it all off!” And you begin humming the striptease song while plucking at the knot. “Ta-da-da DUM, ta-da-DA-DUM, DUM, DUM, DUM-DA-dum-dum-dum!”

  This cracks Loretta up, but Cary, suddenly transfixed by his plate, turns blister red to his hairline. You drop the towel at your ankles and start gyrating, wiggling your boobs like a tassel twirler having a seizure. You grab up the towel and swing it over your head. You consider hopping on the table, but it may not take your weight. When the towel catches on the light fixture overhead, you interrupt the performance for a brief tug-of-war, which you win when the mothy globe loosens and shatters on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Nilda asks as she enters from the back door. Her face is blanched with horror. “Válgame, Dios. You’re naked and you’re breaking the lights! Are you insane?”

  Now, you and Nilda have a lot in common when it comes to praying. She talks to God at least as often as you summon the Virgin, but she never asks for anything. She just tells God to appreciate her. “Válgame, Dios” is her favorite saying. Literally it’s “value me, God,” meaning: You must notice, God, how I’m surrounded by lunatics. That must count for something. Really, she’s saying, “Save me, God. Save me from this bunch of nuts. And send me to heaven when the time comes.”

  But just because you and Nilda are prayerful people doesn’t mean you’re chums. Bette says that Nilda just doesn’t “get it” about you. Most people laugh their heads off whenever you open your mouth, or just step into a room, which can be disturbing. Only Nilda is immune to your jokes and funny faces. This is why you think Loretta was full of baloney when she used to go on and on about your gift, supposedly from Fermina, the old woman you barely remember, the one you thought was your fairy godmother. You’d like to catch up with her in the afterlife, and ask, “Hey, what gives? Is this some kind of joke?” At odd moments, you catch yourself thinking about the old woman, wondering just who she thought she was anyway, saddling you with this ridiculous gift.

  And if you’re so great at giving everyone a laugh, why is Nilda just staring at you and shaking her head?

  Never in a million years could you explain why you were nakedly pulling down the light fixture with a towel. You’re not quite sure yourself, but it’s not something that bothers you the way it upsets her. She’s calmer now, after a cafecito and a plate of French toast —your serving —which she eats while Loretta sweeps up the glass and you iron your uniform, hoping to erase the earlier impression with superior laundry habits.

  When you return to the kitchen fully dressed, Nilda takes your hand and looks into your good eye, which is also a bad eye, and says, “Looks like I’m just in time.” She hands you a flat package.

  “What’s this?” You’re pretty sure it has something to do with dieting. Nilda’s a great one for telling you how much you’ve gained since she saw you last. Her favorite greeting: “My God, you’re so fat!”

  “Pues, it’s a record, one of those albums. Go on, open it up.”

  You pull off the bag to reveal a bald priest smiling at a bunch of zombielike teenagers on the cover. The neon yellow print under the photo reads: Father Cochran —The Straight Dope on the Birds and the Bees. Great waves of laughter roll to your throat, but you swallow them back because Nilda is so wholly embarrassed.

  “It’s about the —you know,” she whispers, “the facts of life.”

  The title alone makes your eyes sting with merry tears. “Thanks, Tía.” You bite the soft skin inside your cheek, so as not to giggle. “You want to listen to it with me?”

  “Oh, no, no, no.” Nilda shakes her head. “Absolutely not. You and la Rita listen together. You can get some good information for teenage girls. You’ll see why you shouldn’t be fooling around naked in the kitchen, breaking lights. Válgame, Dios.”

  Maybe Rosa and Aracely can drop by today for a few laughs. “I’ll play it this afternoon.”

  “You mind what it says, muchacha,” Nilda says.

  Cary laps at the syrup on his plate. “Maybe I ought to listen to it, too.”

  “No,” says Nilda, “this is not for boys. This will only give them ideas.”

  “But I need ideas,” your eighteen-year-old brother says, and, boy, does he ever. He lunges for the record, but Nilda smacks his paws away.

  Now, if you’re like me, it’s not enough for you to have an appalling appearance; you must have grotesque friends as well. Owing to their bizarre looks, it doesn’t take you two seconds to spot Rosa and Aracely in the crowded school yard before first bell. Rosa is over six feet tall in her bare feet, and Aracely’s lucky if she reaches five feet in heels. It’s not just size that makes them odd. Rosa looks like she could be Frankenstein’s monster’s fraternal twin —not his bride, because her black braid hangs lank and dull as a dusty theater rope. But she could easily be his sister. Her olive skin is so seamed and pocked by acne scars, pits, and blips that she produces susto, when encountered unexpectedly, until she opens her mouth, that is, and the whining starts. Yes, she’s the monster’s cranky sister, the one who almost didn’t escape the laboratory because she was so busy complaining. Then there’s Aracely, a brown terrier of a girl, who gets so worked up shooting off her mouth that she actually pants, the tip of her pink tongue pulsating. A-huh-a-huh-a-huh.

  These are not easy friends to be saddled with, but what can you expect? The three of you blend in about as well as a trio of clowns at a Junior Miss pageant. Mother Mary, how about some new friends, say some normal-looking humans to hang around with? Would that be too much? Today Aracely has a new hairstyle, or maybe she’s just had some misfortune with her cream rinse. Her short blue-black tresses spike up from her scalp, giving her the look of a startled hedgehog.

  You amble over as they’re gabbing about their favorite subject —sex.

  Rosa whines, “But my mamá says the only reason to do it is to get babies.”

  “I’d say that’s a sad commentary on your old man,” you observe.

  Aracely laughs, but then says, “Like you’re an expert. You never even got a hickey before.” Her one claim to sexual expertise: Javier Rivera planted a love bite on her during Rocky when he returned from the restroom and mistook her for his date in the darkened theater.

  “Well,” you say, pulling Nilda’s record out of your book bag, “I’m no expert, but check this out —The Straight Dope on the Birds and the Bees.”

  “What’s that?” Aracely asks.

  “A sex educati
on record,” you say.

  Rosa sulks. “My mamá won’t let me listen to sex records.”

  Virgin Mother, about those friends, could you snap it up?

  “Ooh!” Aracely grabs the record and turns it over to read the back. “When can we listen to it?”

  “After school,” you suggest.

  “I’ll get in trouble,” Rosa says. “I know it.”

  “But where?” asks Aracely, panting in excitement. “Where?”

  “Mamá will find out, and she’ll tell Papá, and I’ll get a punishment. You and Aracely don’t care, but I’m always on punishment because of you guys.”

  “Let’s go to my house after sixth period. We can use Cary’s record player.”

  “Will Cary be there?” Aracely’s fascination with your brother is as profound as his dread of her. “Will he?”

  “If he is, he’ll probably be in the bathroom.”

  “They’ll be all pissed off and make me watch my sister’s kids the whole weekend. You guys don’t even care if I get in trouble.”

  You and Aracely turn to Rosa at the same time. “Shut up!”

  “Okay, okay, but where are we going to meet after sixth?” she asks.

  You plan to meet by the Chalice Hidalgo Memorial Bench —named for a studious lesbian, a junior who was beheaded when a semi jackknifed into her family’s Volkswagen on their way to Chula Vista. This bench —shunned by most due to morbid association and because some girls fear contracting lesbianism from its wrought-iron seat —is obscured by a huge willow. From there, you can observe who gets picked up by whom and in what, without being seen in the company of your oddball friends.

  After first bell, the three of you separate for class. You climb the stairs for college preparatory English, while Aracely, in business careers, trots off to typing class on the main floor. Rosa, la pobrecita, slinks down to the basement for manual arts, where she will weave lanyard key chains until lunchtime. On your way to the stairs, you make a brief stop to collect your books. You share a locker with Lydia González, a petite sophomore, who keeps things like leg makeup, lip gloss enhancer, and sun streak alongside the thin picture books on her shelf. While you don’t despise Lydia, you’re suspicious of anyone who thinks to put makeup on her legs. On her legs, Virgen! You can’t imagine what she makes of your eye patch, bizarre glasses, and thick body.