For my grandparents,
LORENZO EPIFANIO VALDEZ
and JENNY ZAMORA VALDEZ,
and my great-aunt,
LEILA VALDEZ HALLUMS,
with love and gratitude
CONTENTS
Nemecia
Mojave Rats
The Five Wounds
Night at the Fiestas
The Guesthouse
Family Reunion
Jubilee
Ordinary Sins
Canute Commands the Tides
The Manzanos
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NEMECIA
IN MY EARLIEST MEMORY OF MY COUSIN NEMECIA, WE ARE walking together in the bean field. I’ve been crying, and my breath is still juddering and wrecked. She holds tight to my hand and says cheerfully, “Just wait, Maria, wait ’til you see.” I don’t recall why I was upset or what my cousin showed me that day. I remember only that my sadness receded like a tide, replaced by a new quiet fizz of anticipation, and that Nemecia’s shoes had heels. She had to walk tipped forward on her toes to prevent them from sinking into the dirt.
Nemecia was the daughter of my mother’s sister. She came to live with my parents before I was born because my aunt Benigna couldn’t care for her. Later, when Aunt Benigna recovered and moved to Los Angeles, Nemecia had already lived with us for so long that she stayed. This wasn’t unusual in our New Mexico town in those years between the wars; if someone died, or came upon hard times, or simply had too many children, there were always aunts or sisters or grandmothers with room for an extra child.
The day after I was born, my great-aunt Paulita led seven-year-old Nemecia into my mother’s bedroom to meet me. Nemecia was carrying the porcelain baby doll that had once belonged to her own mother. When they moved the blanket from my face so that she could see me, she smashed her doll against the plank floor. The pieces were all found; my father glued them together, wiping the surface with his handkerchief to remove what oozed between the cracks. The glue dried brown, or maybe it dried white and only turned brown with age. The doll sat on the bureau in our bedroom, its face round and placidly smiling behind its net of cracks, hands folded primly across white lace, a strange and terrifying mix of young and old.
Nemecia had an air of tragedy and glamour about her, which she cultivated. She blackened her eyes with a kohl pencil, and wore glass beads and silk stockings, gifts from her mother in California. She spent her allowance on magazines and pinned the photographs of actors from silent films around the mirror on our dresser. I don’t think she ever saw a film—not, at least, until after she left us, since the nearest theater was all the way in Albuquerque, and my parents would not in any case have thought movies suitable for a young girl. Still, Nemecia modeled the upward glances and pouts of Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo in our small bedroom mirror.
When I think of Nemecia as she was then, I think of her eating. My cousin was ravenous. She needed things, and she needed food. She took small bites, swallowed everything as neatly as a cat. She was never full and the food never showed on her figure.
She told jokes as she served herself helping after helping, so that we were distracted and didn’t notice how many tortillas or how many bowls of green chili stew she had eaten. If my father or little brothers teased her for her appetite, she burned red. My mother would shush my father and say she was a growing girl.
At night she stole food from the pantry, handfuls of prunes, beef jerky, pieces of ham. Her stealth was unnecessary; my mother would gladly have fed her until she was full. Still, in the mornings everything was in its place, the waxed paper folded neatly around the cheese, the lids tight on the jars. She was adept at slicing and spooning so her thefts weren’t noticeable. I’d wake to her kneeling on my bed, a tortilla spread with honey against my lips. “Here,” she’d whisper, and even if I was still full from dinner and not awake, I’d take a bite, because she needed me to participate in her crime.
Watching her eat made me hate food. The quick efficient bites, the movement of her jaw, the way the food slid down her throat—it sickened me to think of her body permitting such quantities. Her exquisite manners and the ladylike dip of her head as she accepted each mouthful somehow made it worse. But if I was a small eater, if I resented my dependence on food, no matter, because Nemecia would eat my portion, and nothing was ever wasted.
I WAS AFRAID OF NEMECIA because I knew her greatest secret: when she was five, she put her mother in a coma and killed our grandfather.
I knew this because she told me late one Sunday as we lay awake in our beds. The whole family had eaten together at our house, as we did every week, and I could hear the adults in the front room, still talking.
“I killed them,” Nemecia said into the darkness. She spoke as if reciting, and I didn’t at first know if she was talking to me. “My mother was dead. Almost a month she was dead, killed by me. Then she came back, like Christ, except it was a bigger miracle because she was dead longer, not just three days.” Her voice was matter-of-fact.
“Why did you kill our grandpa?” I whispered.
“I don’t remember,” she said. “I must have been angry.”
I stared hard at the darkness, then blinked. Eyes open or shut, the darkness was the same. Unsettling. I couldn’t hear Nemecia breathe, just the distant voices of the adults. I had the feeling I was alone in the room.
Then Nemecia spoke. “I can’t remember how I did it, though.”
“Did you kill your father too?” I asked. For the first time I became aware of a mantle of safety around me that I’d never noticed before, and it was dissolving.
“Oh, no,” Nemecia told me. Her voice was decided again. “I didn’t need to, because he ran away on his own.”
Her only mistake, she said, is that she didn’t kill the miracle child. The miracle child was her brother, my cousin Patrick, two years older than me. He was a miracle because even as Aunt Benigna slept, dead to the world for those weeks, his cells multiplied and his features emerged. I thought of him growing strong on sugar water and my aunt’s wasting body, his soul glowing steadily inside her. I thought of him turning flips in the liquid quiet.
“I was so close,” Nemecia said, almost wistfully.
A photograph of Patrick as a toddler stood in a frame on the piano. He was seated between Aunt Benigna, whom I had never met, and her new husband, all of them living in California. The Patrick in the photograph was fat-cheeked and unsmiling. He seemed content there, between a mother and a father. He did not seem aware of the sister who lived with us in another house nine hundred miles away. Certainly he didn’t miss her.
“You better not tell anyone,” my cousin said.
“I won’t,” I said, fear and loyalty swelling in me. I reached my hand into the dark space between our beds.
THE NEXT DAY, THE WORLD looked different; every adult I encountered was diminished now, made frail by Nemecia’s secret.
That afternoon I went to the store and stood quietly at my mother’s side as she worked at the messy rolltop desk behind the counter. She was balancing the accounts, tapping her lower lip with the end of her pencil. As always by the end of the day, a halo of frizz had sprung around her face.
My heart pounded and my throat was tight. “What happened to Aunt Benigna? What happened to your dad?”
My mother turned to look at me. She put down the pencil, was still for a moment, and then shook her head and made a gesture like she was pushing it all away from her.
“The important thing is we got our miracle. Miracles. Benigna lived, and that baby lived.” Her voice was hard. “God at least granted us that. I’ll always thank him for that.” She didn’t look thankful.
“But what happened
?” My question was less forceful now.
“My poor, poor sister.” My mother’s eyes welled and she shook her head again. “It’s best forgotten. It hurts me to think about it.”
I believed that what Nemecia told me was true. What confused me was that no one ever treated Nemecia like a murderer. If anything, they were especially nice to her. I wondered if they knew what she’d done. I wondered if they were afraid of what she might do to them. My mother afraid of a child—the idea was outrageous, but it explained, perhaps, the little extra attentions she gave my cousin that so stung me: the brush of her fingertips on Nemecia’s cheek, the way, when kissing us goodnight, her lips lingered against Nemecia’s hair.
Perhaps the whole town was terrified, watching my cousin, and I watched Nemecia, too, as she talked with her teacher on the school steps, as she helped my mother before dinner. But my cousin never slipped, and though sometimes I thought I caught glimmers of caution in the faces of the adults, I couldn’t be sure.
The whole town seemed to have agreed to keep me in the dark, but I thought if anyone would be vocal about her disapproval—and surely she disapproved of murder—it would be my great-aunt Paulita. I asked her about it one afternoon at her house as we made tortillas, careful not to betray Nemecia’s secret. “What happened to my grand-father?” I pinched off a ball of dough and handed it to her.
“It was beyond imagining,” Paulita said. She rolled the dough in fierce, sharp thrusts. I thought she’d go on, but she only said again, “Beyond imagining.”
Except that I could imagine Nemecia killing someone. Hell, demons, flames—these were the horrors I couldn’t picture. Nemecia’s fury, though—that was completely plausible.
“But what happened?”
Paulita flipped the disk of dough, rolled it again, slapped it on the hot iron top of the stove, where it blistered. She pointed at me with the rolling pin. “You’re lucky, Maria, to have been born after that day. You’re untouched. The rest of us will never forget it, but you, mi hijita, and the twins, are untouched.” She opened the front door of her stove with an iron hook and jabbed at the fire inside.
No one would talk about what had happened when Nemecia was five. And soon I stopped asking. Each night I thought Nemecia might say something more about her crime, but she never mentioned it again.
And each night, I stayed awake as long as I could, waiting for Nemecia to come after me in the dark.
ANY NEW THING I GOT, Nemecia ruined, not enough that it was unusable, or even very noticeable, but just a little: a scrape with her fingernail in the wood of a pencil, a tear on the inside hem of a dress, a crease in the page of a book. I complained once, when Nemecia knocked my new windup jumping frog against the stone step. I thrust the frog at my mother, demanding she look at the scratch in the tin. My mother folded the toy back into my palm and shook her head, disappointed. “Think of other children,” she said. She meant children I knew, children from Cuipas. “So many children don’t have such beautiful new things.”
I was often put in my cousin’s care. My mother was glad of Nemecia’s help; she was busy with the store and with my three-year-old brothers. I don’t think she ever imagined that my cousin wished me harm. My mother was hawkish about her children’s safety—later, when I was fifteen, she refused to serve a neighbor’s aging farmhand in the store for a year because he’d whistled at me—but she trusted Nemecia. Nemecia, almost an orphan, the daughter of my mother’s beloved older sister. Nemecia was my mother’s first and—I knew it even then—favorite child.
My cousin was fierce with her love and with her hate, and sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference. I seemed to provoke her without meaning to. At her angriest, she would lash out with slaps and pinches that turned my skin red and blue. Her anger would sometimes last weeks, aggression that would fade into long silences. I knew I was forgiven when she would begin to tell me stories, ghost stories about La Llorona, who haunted arroyos and wailed like the wind at approaching death, stories about bandits and the terrible things they would do to young girls, and, worse, stories about our family. Then she would hold and kiss me and tell me that though it was all true, every word, and though I was bad and didn’t deserve it, she loved me still.
Not all her stories scared me. Some were wonderful—elaborate sagas that unfurled over weeks, adventures of girls like us who ran away. And every one of her stories belonged to us alone. She braided my hair at night, snapped back if a boy teased me, showed me how to walk so that I looked taller. “I’m here to take care of you,” she told me. “That’s why I’m here.”
WHEN SHE TURNED FOURTEEN, Nemecia’s skin turned red and oily and swollen with pustules. It looked tender. She began to laugh at me for my thick eyebrows and crooked teeth, things I hadn’t noticed until then.
One night she came into our bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. When she moved away, she crossed to where I sat on the bed and dug her nail into my right cheek. I yelped, jerked my head. “Shh,” she said kindly. With one hand she smoothed my hair, and I felt myself soften under her touch as she worked her nail through my skin. It hurt only a little, and what did I, at seven years old, care about beauty? As I sat snug between Nemecia’s knees, my face in her hands, her attention swept over me the way I imagined a wave would, warm and slow and salty.
Night after night I sat between her knees while she opened and reopened the wound. One day she’d make a game of it, tell me that I looked like a pirate; another day she’d say it was her duty to mark me, because I had sinned. Daily she and my mother worked against each other, my mother spreading salve on the scab each morning, Nemecia easing it open each night with her nails. “Why don’t you heal, Maria?” my mother wondered as she fed me cloves of raw garlic. Why didn’t I tell her? I don’t know exactly, but I suppose I needed to be drawn into Nemecia’s story.
By the time Nemecia finally lost interest and let my cheek heal, the scar reached from the side of my nose to my lip. It made me look dissatisfied, and it turned purple in the winter.
AFTER HER SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY, Nemecia left me alone. It was normal, my mother said, for her to spend more time by herself or with friends. At dinner my cousin was still funny with my parents, chatty with the aunts and uncles. But those strange secret fits of rage and adoration—all the attention she’d once focused on me—ended completely. She had turned away from me, but instead of relief, I felt emptiness.
I tried to force Nemecia back into our old closeness. I bought her caramels, nudged her in church as though we shared some secret joke. Once at school I ran up to where she stood with some older girls. “Nemecia!” I exclaimed, as though I’d been looking everywhere for her, and grabbed her hand. She didn’t push me away or snap at me, just smiled distantly and turned back to her friends.
We still shared our room, but she went to bed late. She no longer told stories, no longer brushed my hair, no longer walked with me to school. Nemecia stopped seeing me, and without her gaze I became indistinct to myself. I’d lie in bed waiting for her, holding myself still until I could no longer feel the sheets on my skin, until I was bodiless in the dark. Eventually, Nemecia would come in, and when she did, I’d be unable to speak.
My skin lost its color, my body its mass, until one morning in May when, as I gazed out the classroom window, I saw old Mrs. Romero walking down the street, her shawl billowing around her like wings. My teacher called my name sharply, and I was surprised to find myself in my body, sitting solid in my desk. I decided right then: I would lead the Corpus Christi procession. I would wear the wings and everyone would see me.
CORPUS CHRISTI HAD BEEN my mother’s favorite feast day since she was a child, when each summer she walked with the other girls through the dirt streets flinging rose petals. Every year my mother made Nemecia and me new white dresses and wound our braids with ribbons in coronets around our heads. I’d always loved the ceremony: the solemnity of the procession, the blessed sacrament in its gold box held high by the priest under the gold-tasseled
canopy, the prayers at the altars along the way. Now I could think only of leading that procession.
My mother’s altar was her pride. Each year she set up the card table on the street in front of the house. The Sacred Heart stood in the center of the crocheted lace cloth, flanked by candles and flowers in mason jars.
Everyone took part in the procession, and the girls of the town led it all with baskets of petals to cast before the Body of Christ. On that day we were transformed from dusty, scraggle-haired children into angels. But it was the girl at the head of the procession who really was an angel, because she wore the wings that were stored between sheets of tissue paper in a box on top of my mother’s wardrobe. Those wings were beautiful, gauze and wire, and tied with white ribbon on the upper arms.
A girl had to have been confirmed to lead the procession, and was chosen based on her recitation of a psalm. I was ten now, and this was the first year I qualified. In the days leading up to the recitation, I surveyed the competition. Most of the girls were from ranches outside town. Even if they had a sister or parent who could read well enough to help them with their memorization, I knew they wouldn’t pronounce the words right. Only my cousin Antonia was a real threat; she had led the procession the year before and was always beautifully behaved, but she would recite an easy psalm. Nemecia was too old and had never shown interest anyway.
I settled on Psalm 38, which I chose from my mother’s cardboard-covered Manna for its impressive length and difficult words.
I practiced fervently, in the bathtub, walking to school, in bed at night. The way I imagined it, I would give my recitation in front of the entire town. Father Chavez would hold up his hand at the end of Mass, before people could shift and cough and gather their hats, and he would say, “Wait. There is one thing more you need to hear.” One or two girls would go before me, stumble through their psalms (short ones, unremarkable ones). Then I would stand, walk with grace to the front of the church, and there, before the altar, I’d speak with eloquence that people afterward would describe as unearthly. I’d offer my psalm as a gift to my mother. I’d watch her watch me from the pew, her eyes full of tears and pride meant only for me.
Night at the Fiestas: Stories Page 1
