Page 4 of And Still Her Voice
In the dim hallway, I bumped into Mom and backed away, my whole body prickled at the sight of her unusually puffy morning face hidden in the shadows. “You should have taken in more material, mija, but I do like how you’re losing your baby fat.” What about my boobs? I’d given up sweets for Lent and hadn’t been trying to lose weight but then I’d come to a place where I couldn’t tell if I was hungry or not. Grandma told me I was unconsciously trying to become untouchable and disappear into thin air. Could be.
“Where are your socks?” I didn’t think she’d noticed my nicked-up legs, so now I was in for it. “Who gave you permission to shave?” She stared into my eyes, something she rarely did. Her eyes were so dark I couldn’t see her pupils, but I could definitely see she had a black eye. “Was it Phoebe said you could?”
“No.” I’m capable of making my own choices, sometimes.
“And why did you give Dad permission to hit you again?”
“Sin verguenza.” But I felt no shame that morning, turning to face her, standing my ground, the opaque light streaming in from a window behind me cloaking me with a false sense of power. Just because she didn’t shave, much less do other things until she got married, didn’t mean I needed to wait. Why should I? My face burned when she raised her hand. I thought she might take a swing at me, but instead, she said, “Que la fregada. Anna, you can’t go barelegged in la casa de Dios. Wait here.” Noticing the limp as she stepped back into her bedroom, I immediately felt sorry for causing more drama. She returned to hand me a pair of her silk stockings and a garter belt, something else for me to try and figure out.
I did learn a lot from Mom, especially when she shared what she learned in her GED night classes which proved challenging because Spanish was her first language. But for the most part, especially as the oldest, I had to figure a lot of stuff out for myself. Driving was one of those things I had to teach myself. Mom never learned and because we lived in the rural part of Glendale and the closest mercado and our church was more than an hour’s walk away, leaving us with blisters every time, she was happy when I learned to drive. Plus, I could drive her to school without my father ever knowing. So, it was my decision as to when it was time to shave or kiss boys.
But when you’re stuck at home all the time, what does it matter? You really don’t even get a chance to talk to the cute boy who lives around the corner unless you sneak the car out of the garage again when your parents have locked the door to their bedroom after they’ve finished fighting. Then you’re terrified of getting caught so you don’t even slow down when you see him standing in his front yard tossing a football with his dad, Mr. Krüger, who wore the Easter Bunny suit over at the park, and you make your tattletale sister sitting shotgun swear she won’t tell and you know she won’t because she’s already kissed three boys and Mom would kill her if she were to somehow find out.
The stockings, so satiny and shimmery over my newly naked legs, made me feel grown up. And then just before we left for Mass, I pushed my luck even further by refusing to wear a silly hat like my sisters’; that flowered bonnet with an elastic string under your chin in case you don’t have enough sense to hold it down should a strong wind blow in during the Gospel of Paul. “Cover that red hair!” Mom yelled like it was an even bigger sin to have hair color the same as Mary Magdalene—like I asked to be born with the same hair color as a puta, like I asked to have something else in common with Grandma. There’d been a feudbetween my mother and my grandmother since before my birth and I was just about done being stuck in the middle. As far as she was concerned, I was too much like Grandma. More and more, I wished I’d never been born.
“Acuérdate de donde vienes,” Mom would say whenever she thought I forgot where I came from or if I acted too white or if my head got too big as if it were some helium filled balloon that needed the heft of my Mexicanness to weigh me down. This confused me because she always pushed me to do better than she had with her limited education, with her limitations period.
“Si Mamá.” She didn’t like being called “Mom.” Too gringo.
“Remember you’re also a Verdugo.” As if that made us Spanish royalty or something. “And we were landowners here long before any white man, before the LeMars.”
Curious, because my mother also told me more than once that her Mexican people had owned this land first as part of the Verdugo Land Grant of the 1700s. I spent a lot of time in the library reading everything I could about our local history and the people who inhabited this land going back thousands of years before the Spanish settlers arrived, and then how we came to live on it.
“We were Tongva long before we were Verdugos,” my mother told me.
Verdugo or not, as far as white Grandma was concerned, my mother could be doing a better job making my father happy. Mom should have been more grateful. I mean, just look where we lived. Look at all we’d inherited. Look at all Grandma had sacrificed. If there were a way for me to sacrifice Grandma to the god of her choice, I’d do it.
Mom handed me a lacy white mantilla to cover my head and I felt guilty for making so much trouble. With all of her kids and my angry Dad, she probably didn’t have any more energy to dealwith a rebel and a heathen in the making, plus it was Easter and she’d just been to Confession, so she didn’t want to start sinning already before stepping into church and taking Communion.
Mostly, I wanted to make Mom happy, plus I did like going to church where I could breathe uninterrupted for at least an hour every week. I loved the sulfury smell of incense. To me it represented comfort. It also canceled out other unpleasant senses. Grandma despised it worse than church—not a fan of Catholicism and all of its rituals. She didn’t believe in the concept of heaven or hell, the transformation of blood into wine, much less Jesus’s resurrection on Easter Sunday from the dead, but she thought it was better than nothing as far as religion went. And so, for sixty minutes every Sunday, she checked out, leaving me in peace. Except for some of the liturgy and songs that seeped in like an earworm, the space in my head was so quiet, you literally couldn’t hear a church mouse, and at least for a space in time, I didn’t have to sit through hell. All angelic-like in our best Sunday outfits, we slid into our wooden seats for the ten o’clock Mass, Mom in a belted, peachy flowered-dress and one of Grandma’s old fancy hats, the one with fake crepe orchids attached to it. Around her neck and jawline, she’d been extra generous with her Maja face-lightening powder and cologne, a blend of citrus, spice, flowers, and woods. With her Coty red lipstick, I thought my mother looked pretty even under a pair of cat-eye sunglasses to hide the fresh bruise Dad had given her on Good Friday. If only someone had kept her mouth shut and I don’t just mean Mom.
Michael, my seven-year-old brother, a little man and Mom’s pride and joy after having birthed only girls, much to Dad’s disappointment, hair all slicked back with Mom’s Dippity-do, showed off in the same starched white shirt and pressed pants he’d wear, as long as he didn’t get mas gordo, for his First Holy Communion coming soon.
My sisters sparkled in their new white patent leather shoes that were supposed to last until the next Easter, lacy socks, hats with plastic flowers and an elastic band stretched under their chin.
Three-year old Josie, the product of the rhythm method I’d heard Mom complain about on the phone to Sister Bernadette, wore the frilly pastel-colored dress first worn by me before it got passed down to Maggie, eleven months younger than me, and then Patty, three years younger than me. Behind her coke bottle glasses, Maggie already had her eyes on my outfit from the JC Penney.
My father wasn’t always Catholic—his mother had tried to bring him up as a Unitarian or a Scientologist or in some Hollywood “cult” like Mom called it—but to make Mom happy and to keep her quiet after an awful weekend where he crashed the car into the “Welcome to Glendale” sign, and ended up in jail with a DUI a couple of years ago, he got baptized. We had a few good months of not tiptoeing over too many eggshells after that.
For this special Easter Sunday, though, as penance for another bender and a sign of his contrition, he didn’t just sleep off the hangover in the car while waiting for us. He attended Mass with us wearing the white guayabera shirt Mom bought for him in Mexico and set out for him, the one with the pocket to hold his cigarettes.
Afterward, we hopped into the yellow Ford Falcon station wagon. I’d barely shut the door when Dad, a Camel dangling from his lip, fired up the engine and sped across the parking lot. I lurched sideways when he turned right onto Brand Boulevard. Obviously, we weren’t headed home.
“Donuts?” Michael asked, leaning forward in between the two front vinyl bucket seats. Sometimes when Dad messed up, we also made out with treats.
“No, Piggy,” he said, reaching around to muss Michael’s hair.
Michael bawled, smoothing back the do he’d worked on so hard making sure the sides stayed down.
“We’re going to the park, you little sissy. Quit your bawlin’. Sons of sailors don’t cry.”
Michael hadn’t yet learned to cry without making a splash.
“I’m not a sissy. I’m a boy,” he shouted, ducking to take cover in the backseat. I might have defended him, but I was still sort of sitting in the afterglow of church and besides, it was too early to start any trouble.
Dad burst out laughing, slapping the steering wheel. “We’ll see about that, sissy.”
Maggie laughed and Michael punched her arm. “Leave gordito alone,” Mom said (as if “fatty” was a better name), throwing a shoe that sailed past my head all the way to the backseat, landing smack in the middle of Patty’s giggling face, but Josie, on Mom’s lap was the one who wailed. Dad, in rare form that morning, blasted the radio. Mom must have given him some special candy or slipped him an extra teaspoon of sugar in his coffee like she did some mornings when she sensed he’d woken up feeling down again. She’d visited curanderas to prescribe special cures made of herbs and prayers. But it was Grandma who shared the trick with her about the candy. How’d that work out for you, Phoebe?
