B0061QB04W EBOK (13 page)

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UGUST 1982,
two months after my mother had returned from El Otro Lado, the peso was devalued for the second time that year due to the national debt crisis. What little money my mother had brought with her was quickly spent. She found herself the head of the household and with very few options of how to make a living. After two years of earning dollars, it was difficult for her to readjust to the hardships brought on by Mexico’s unstable economy. But what was harder for her was to have to explain to everyone who knew her why she had come back. As the taxi driver had said, everyone was leaving, not returning. I didn’t realize back then how difficult it must have been for my mother to look at her friends and admit that her husband had indeed left her for another woman, just as they had once teased her that he would.

I often found her talking with my grandmother in whispers. But when Mago, Carlos, and I asked her for details of those two and a half years that she was gone, she would say little. So all we knew at that point was that my father had left her for another woman, but back then we still didn’t know how he’d gone about it. We wanted to know what it meant that he was now with someone else? Did it mean he would not be coming back? Did it mean he had given up on the dream house? Did it mean that he would start a family of his own with that other woman and forget about us? Did it mean we would never see him again?

“It means he’s washing his hands of us,” my mother said. “It means we will starve here in this miserable place, and he will be too busy tending to his new woman to give a damn!”

“Papi wouldn’t do that,” Mago said. “He’ll come back.”

Out of all of us, Mago was the only one who harbored any hope that Papi would not forsake us. My mother’s broken promise—that she’d be gone only a year—had caused a rift between them, so Mago’s loyalty to my father remained strong. He had been gone for so long that in his absence he had become bigger than life in Mago’s eyes. But regardless of how much she had changed, I was too happy to have my mother back to cling to the hope of seeing my father again. And I was angry at him. I didn’t have a single memory of him and Mami together—of all of us together—and I felt cheated out of the family I yearned to have. Why did he have to go and fall in love with someone else? I wanted to know. Hadn’t Mami always done what he had asked of her? Hadn’t it been enough that she had followed him to El Otro Lado and left us behind?

And now he had returned to us a different version of my mother, one who was bitter, heartbroken, and weighed down by the knowledge that she had four children to support and was on her own.

Not too far from the train station is La Quinta Castrejón. Although it has now deteriorated and is no longer the fancy place it once was, back in its day it was frequented by wealthy people. It was on the outskirts of my grandmother’s colonia, La Ejidal, which was as poor as could be. But La Quinta Castrejón sat there amidst the poverty, teasing us, reminding us of what we couldn’t have. It was surrounded
by a block wall lined with broken pieces of soda bottles that glinted in the sunlight like the jagged teeth of a beautiful but deadly beast. There was a long driveway that led to the reception hall and pools. The driveway was lined with palm trees, the only palm trees in the neighborhood, like soldiers standing guard. Inside there was a large swimming pool with a high diving board and smaller pools for little kids. There was a playground with swings and slides and a seesaw. Weddings and quinceañeras were held in the reception hall every weekend. Later, when the middle class was almost entirely wiped out as a result of the debt crisis, those parties became less frequent, causing La Quinta Castrejón to lose its glamour and be mostly forgotten.

But at the time, that hadn’t happened yet, and Mami decided to try her luck there.

“That place is immune to the recession,” Mami had said. “People still have to get married. And inflation can’t stop young girls from turning fifteen.”

Mami had been unable to find a job, and she did not want to sell Avon anymore because she wanted to avoid her old clients and their mocking glances as much as possible. So we started to sell things at La Quinta Castrejón on the weekends.

On Saturday, after a lunch of alphabet soup and tortillas, Mami prepared the merchandise to be sold that night. I wondered what kind of party would be taking place. Mago said it would be a wedding. I thought it would be a quinceañera. We placed a bet and the loser had to clean the outhouse the next day.

Around five o’clock Mago, Carlos, and I left the house with Mami. Betty stayed home and cried. She wasn’t allowed to come. Mami wanted her to come along. She wanted all of us to come so the guests at La Quinta Castrejón could see she had four mouths to feed and take pity on her and buy from her. But the first night we came to sell, Betty cried and cried because the loud music and the laughter and chatter of the people inside kept her from falling asleep. The night was cold and we were shivering because our sweaters were too thin to keep out the chill. But Mami refused to leave even though everyone was inside the hall dancing and having a good time. She said that soon the party would be over and they would come back out and buy more cigarettes or gum, maybe even a bag of potato chips if they felt like a midnight snack.

Then the next day Betty had a fever and a cough. Abuelita Chinta scolded Mami as if she were a little girl, saying that it was the night’s dampness that had made Betty sick, and what would we do if she came down with pneumonia?

Mami said, “She’s an American, that’s why she’s so fragile.” Because Mago, Carlos, and I have thick Mexican blood running through our veins and neither the dampness nor the chill of the night would make us ill, we had to come along. I didn’t mind it so much. It meant we would get to spend time with Mami and see the beautiful dresses the quinceañeras and brides would be wearing.

We got to La Quinta Castrejón and were disappointed to see there were already other mothers setting up their stands. They had all their kids with them, too. The winner was the mother who brought along five kids, the youngest tied to her back with a rebozo. Mami cursed under her breath and began to set up her stand. She put out the mint and caramel candy, little bags of peanuts and roasted pumpkin seeds, cigarettes and matches. Mago and I helped her with the stand while Carlos walked around the parking lot offering to watch people’s cars in exchange for tips.

Mago and I watched a limousine approach. I held my breath and prayed that it was a quinceañera, first because I loved quinceañeras and second because I didn’t want to clean the outhouse the next day if I lost the bet I’d made with Mago. I prayed to the saints and held my breath until the driver opened the door of the limo, then I saw the young girl in her puffy pink dress and glittery tiara emerge, her escorts at her side. Mago was too mesmerized by the girl who seemed to be floating in a pink cloud to get mad that she lost the bet. We watched this young girl and her escorts walk into the reception hall while everyone clapped for her and congratulated her for becoming a mujercita, a little woman.

Soon all the guests were inside, and we were out in the cold night shivering and blowing puffs of warm air into our hands. It was the middle of the rainy season, and the sky was thick with rain clouds. Once in a while we would see lightning flashing over the Mountain That Has a Headache. Mami paid no heed to the weather. She kept glancing at the other vendors. She rearranged her goodies as if trying to find just the right way to display them. A man came outside to buy
a pack of cigarettes, and he looked at Mami and at Mago and me. I put on my sad face, just like Mami had told me to do. But I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I was almost seven years old, too old to compete with the baby nursing at his mother’s pitiful small breast. The man looked like a prince with his suit and tie. He bought his cigarettes from the woman and even gave her an extra tip, for her children, he said, and then went back to the party.

I didn’t look at Mami because I knew she was angry, at me, at the man, at the mother with her five children, at Papi for putting her in that situation, at herself for leaving El Otro Lado in a moment of desperation. “I should have stayed,” she would say to Abuelita Chinta sometimes. “He left me there on my own, and I knew no one, but I should have stayed. There were jobs. Maybe not great jobs, but at least we weren’t starving. And here in Mexico, with the cost of everything going higher and higher, how are we to survive?”

I leaned against the wall and tried not to think about that beautiful place she yearned for. Mami picked up her tray of cigarettes and gum and decided to go inside the reception hall to offer them to the guests. Sometimes she got kicked out; sometimes, if the hosts were kind, they would let her stay for a bit.

Mago and I got up and walked over to look at the pool. There was a chain-link fence from the reception hall to the ticket office to keep people out, but we didn’t need to go inside. From out there, we could see the pool clearly, shining like a blue jewel. By the ticket office was a white poster listing the admission prices. Mago helped me add up the numbers because I hadn’t yet learned to add big numbers in my second-grade class. The cost of swimming here, for my siblings and me, plus Mami, was two days’ worth of meals.

“Your father worked on that pool,” Mami said from behind us, startling me. I turned to look at her, expecting her to be angry at Mago and me for leaving the stand unattended. I was waiting for her to yell at us, but instead, she said, “Your father tiled that pool.”

We turned back to the pool and admired the navy blue tiles going all around the edge and covering the inside. “Papi did that?” I asked with awe. I had known Papi worked in construction, but I’d never really known, until that moment, which projects he had worked on around the city.

“I remember that he came home after work and told me that as soon as the pool opened, he would bring me here to swim.” Mami put her hand up on the chain-link fence and curled her fingers around the metal wire. She put her forehead right up against the fence and looked at the pool. “Your father said that as a thank-you gift, the owner had allowed the workers to come for a day to enjoy the pool, free of charge. So he brought me here. Imagine that? I don’t know how to swim, but your father does. He held on to me the whole time. I was so afraid, but not once did he let me go …”

I turned to Mami and saw the blue water reflected in her teary eyes. I wanted to tell her what Mago had told me once before. Memories are yours to keep forever. I wanted to tell her that as long as she held on to those special moments with her and Papi, they would always be hers—that other woman, whoever she was, couldn’t take them from her.

But Mami had already wiped her tears. She had already looked at the stand and noticed we hadn’t sold anything that night. She was walking away with brisk steps, her hands clenched into fists, yelling for us to come and tend the stand or there would be no money for food tomorrow. “I can’t do everything by myself,” she said angrily. “You kids are old enough to help.”

I didn’t move away from the chain-link fence. I heard the music drifting out into the cold night. It was finally time for the waltz. I looked at the pool Papi had tiled with his own hands and imagined myself dancing to El Vals de las Mariposas with him. In my mind’s eye, he was holding me tight, whispering in my ear how proud he was of me for becoming a little woman.

“Get away from there,” Mami said as she pulled on my ear. She dragged me away from the pool and the pretty tiles, and I went back to tend the stand with Mago. Soon it was midnight and the rain was starting. The guests came out and rushed to their cars without another glance at our goodies. Carlos and the other boys ran from one car to another, trying to collect their tips from the guests for watching the cars. Some guests ignored the boys’ outstretched hands and hit the gas pedal too hard. I worried for Carlos as I saw him jump out of the way to avoid being hit.

“This is the last time we come here,” Mami said as she started to throw all the goodies into a bag.

“It’ll be better next weekend, Mami,” I said. “Maybe next week the guests will be different.”

But Mami wasn’t listening. She threw the bags onto our shoulders and folded the metal table. Just as the rain began to pour, we rushed down the long driveway. We slid on the mud, our legs getting splattered by the procession of cars. The guests turned right onto the paved street to go back to their fancy homes, and we turned left and stumbled on the dark dirt road toward Abuelita Chinta’s shack. Mami wouldn’t slow her pace even though we were gasping for breath and our legs were burning and our sides were hurting. She stared straight ahead and didn’t look back.

I know now that she wasn’t fleeing the rain. She was running away from the glittering pool and its blue tiles, from the memory of my father and her wading in the water, arms intertwined, from the pain of knowing that even though he had held onto her in the pool of La Quinta Castrejón, he eventually had let go of her, in a place just as beautiful and frightening. El Otro Lado.