Two Stories

Defending Your Life

On the bus ride back to Abuela’s house from Guanajuato, I tell Mamá I am dying. I figure the timing is never right—especially not stuck in a clay cabin in Guanajuato visiting my Tío Raul—but a confession en route to Abuela’s is better than one whispered over my uncle’s sick bed. Mamá screams something fierce into my skull—she wants me to stop bromeando—and I say, “I’ve been dying all this time. I just didn’t have the courage to tell you.”

Mamá asks me where I learned such weakness. We walk hip-to-hip on the sidewalk, avoiding street vendors and beggars, until we reach Abuela’s door. Mamá makes her way through the foyer, not bothering to drop her suitcase, and asks me the same question over. She treads ghostlike through the house and manages to find her way outdoors, no walls to confine her abrasive voice. Mamá plucks a banana from a tree in the backyard and hands it to me. She says it won’t be ripe for another four days; I will have to wait that long to die.

“I shouldn’t have raised you there,” she says, “en ese mugre lugar.”

Mamá mutters to herself, curses my father. She is convinced that he has poisoned my thoughts, turned them American like him. I attempt to leave Mamá to her rambling, but she follows me indoors. I place the unripe banana on Abuela’s kitchen countertop.

“¡Te vas con el plataño!” she yells, swatting at the back of my head.

I think of our trip, a blatant escape from my father and the inevitable divorce. Never mind Tío Raul or Abuela or family I haven’t seen in years. This trip is about my father.

“We just need time, mijita,” my mother says, “just a little time away. That’s all.”

I imagine my mother waking up to two empty bodies: mine and the banana’s, and some sick part of me hopes my body waits for the banana.

***

We eat in silence at the dining room table. Abuela asks if I am enjoying my enfrijoladas. I say I am and shift the onions to the right side of my plate.

No one mentions death or my father.

“¿Te acuerdas de tu abuelo Manuel?” Abuela asks.

I tell her I don’t.

“Good,” she says. “Era un malvado. Don’t be stupid like I was and marry young.”

Abuela’s accent is thick and intentional. Her ms and rs linger long after she switches syllables. She toggles between languages to comfort me, her English louder and slower as if she’s trying to reinforce the urgency in her speech.

After Abuela discards memories of my grandfather, she asks about our visit to Guanajuato and if Tío Raul is doing better. Mamá scowls at her ceramic bowl, chews in defiant silence. Abuela hesitates to reach for her fork again and looks away as she speaks.

“Hijita,” she says. “Tu mamá me dice una cosa muy horrible. Algo que dijiste hoy.”

“Si, Abuela,” I say. “Perdóname.”

I tell Abuela that I was insensitive earlier, that Mamá started waving around that banana and I forgot my manners. Abuela says she knows that I didn’t mean to hurt Mamá; she is just trying to understand why I would say such a gruesome thing. I tell Abuela that struggling to breathe is harder when my parents are fighting all the time, when my family members are distant and short of encouraging words. I forget my Spanish and weep in English.

“I don’t want to be alone,” I say.

“We are all alone,” Abuela says, “but never truly alone, mi amor.”

Mamá excuses herself from the table. I notice a new stiffness in her gait as she hikes up the stairs. I ask Abuela why Mamá always walks away from pain. Abuela wraps me in her strength. Her arms form centuries of forgiveness around my shoulders.

“She blames herself for your hurt,” she says. “Te duele mucho el corazón cuando es tu criatura.”

I ask Abuela how to make the pain stop, and she hands me another tortilla.

“Defend your life!” she says. “We are all dying every day. Fuerza, pequeña.”

I think about the banana ripening on the granite countertop and all of the fiber and potassium and magnesium it could give. I think of Mamá upstairs, waiting for my darkness to pass, and the way the floorboards creak as she paces.

I think, “My life could be longer than the banana’s,” and I finally want to believe it.

Spirits

I.

Mamá says, “No elbows on the table.”

For years, I get fuzzy bits from my sweater sleeves stuck in edges where I rest my wrists. I remind Mamá she whispers too loud—that her murmurs are screams to the masses—her voice shrill in my left ear. I insist that I keep my elbows off the table, look down at my hands to ensure this is true. Still, she swats at my arms and scowls. Mamá speaks in spaces that do not empty.

“¡Ay!” she yells across the kitchen, spatula waving. “Mijo, ¡los codos!”

Then, “¡¿Otra ves?!”

Mamá mutters something about my behavior being synonymous to a caveman.

II.

I tell Mamá she smells like cilantro y limón when she leans over a plate of black beans and Mexican rice, stained red. She asks me to pass more tortillas.

“¿Como?” she asks.

I raise my hands in surrender.

“No lo quise decir de esa manera, Mamí,” I say. “Lo dije con cariño.”

“Cariño, my ass,” she says. “You live to mock me, a true payaso.”

She raises her hands above her head. Her tortilla unravels on her plate—maize unfolding, striking porcelain, and bouncing twice like rubber before settling flat. I am tempered glass; Mamá looks through me and forms fissures in my edges. She strings curses into the linoleum. Christo. ¡Hijo de tu padre! Julio Ignacio Ortega-Hernández II. ¡Pura tontería!

I imagine Mamá as a stone pillar, the kind that can weather eons of rain and weight and heartbreak. The kind that never crumbles.

III.

When I break a porcelain plate while washing dishes, Mamá says, “¡Qué torpe eres! Watch what you’re doing!”

            I have to remind Mamá I am sixteen, not three. She asks me if I need to write that down, so I can recall it to memory, and hands me rubber gloves and a dishrag.

“What?” she says. “Did you think you were going to get out of your chores? ¡Ándale!”

            Mamá polishes the kitchen countertops with a massive bottle of Fabuloso. She hums as she works, spreading lavender fragrance over every surface in the house. I watch her scrub away memories she can no longer keep.

IV.

Mamá makes mole poblano on winter days when her bottom lip splits and bleeds into her pillowcase. She chops twelve dried ancho chiles, adds six pasilla chiles, four tablespoons of sesame seeds, a teaspoon of dried thyme, and half a teaspoon of dried marjoram. Mamá gathers the ingredients and mixes them, loves them together. She crumbles dried bay leaves, breaks cinnamon sticks, and chokes on the powder they release.

“¡Ay!” she says. “La mantequea.”

I hand her a half stick of butter and begin to remind her that mole poblano doesn’t require butter, but stop when I see she has other plans. She chooses to cook the chicken in a frying pan. The chicken cools down quicker this way and is much kinder on tender fingers that seek to shred pieces apart before adding sauce. I am conscious of this compassion, because I am the fingers that burn as Mamá blends and blends a world of spices.

I ask Mamá if my father liked mole poblano. Not Papá, just father. I do not remember him well enough to call him by a Spanish name.

“Leave,” she says.

“Mamá,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“I am empty,” she says, no accent.

V.

Mamá believes in spirits. She says our shadows are remnants of our ancestors’ sadness—their salt and tears and bones. When Mamá looks at me, she says she sees my father’s shadow and my grandfather’s shadow and my great grandfather’s shadow.

“Ortega or Hernández?” I ask.

“Hernández,” she says. “It’s your father’s sad blood, not mine.”

Lately, Mamá is seeing shadows everywhere. The shadows form craters around her eyes and settle in the creases of her brow. I notice how they make a home of her worn body. Mamá looks older now, her eyes shifty and strained. I place a hand on her shoulder and ask how she has been sleeping. She rambles on about the varying shapes and masses of shadows. Mamá claims she can no longer see her own.

“Does that mean you’re dying?” I ask.

“Mijito,” she whispers, “claro qué no. I am stronger than a stalled ox.”

“You’re right,” I say. “You’re too stubborn to die.”

I remember a Bible verse that used to hang on a welcome sign outside of a Presbyterian church on East Lenoir Street. When I was twelve, I would pass the sign every weekday on the way to school. Mamá doesn’t know about the verse, because we are Catholic and Catholics don’t read signs outside of Presbyterian churches, but I remember. Proverbs 15:17. “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.” It was one of those times when I memorized something I didn’t fully understand, because I felt like it might be important one day.

Now, I wonder if Mamá knows this Bible verse and whether her stalled ox is full of hatred from years of bitterness.

Mamá smiles at the prospect of embodying a stalled ox, the natural manifestation of a stubborn Mexican woman.

“Sí,” she says. “It’s my Ortega blood. We bear no shadows.”

Mamá refrains from discussing spirits for a while. She fixes her eyes on a corner of the dining room table that she swears is in need of scrubbing. She mutters under her breath and grips her bottle of Fabuloso and neon sponge. Her gloves dance like rubber chickens on her fingers, too large for her spindly figure. As Mamá scours the carcass of our home, I wonder if my shadows will always follow me and remind me that even my own grief is not my own.

_____

Patricia Patterson is an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. When she’s not reading or writing or thinking about tamales, she enjoys spending time with her most loyal companions: the birds. Her work is featured in Cotton Xenomorph and BorderSenses, among others.