Let Their Spirits Dance (9 page)

One night, I heard Tía Katia yell at my mother “Divorce him! Leave him, the lazy good-for-nothing. Que se vaya a la chingada! Look at Bernardo, he doesn't do that shit to me.”

“Bernardo's afraid of you, Katia. Besides, you know Pablo's hip is bad, pobre. He's got pain in his hip. He wasn't always like this.”

My mother's defense of my father was solid. “We married in the Church. I'll pray to Santa Rita, the patroness of women with evil husbands. I'll light another candle to El Santo Niño. If all else fails, I'll call on St. Jude for impossible cases.”

Tía Katia said Consuelo was good at one thing, and that was opening her legs. “She's opened them so many times, you'd think she was riding a horse.” When I thought of Consuelo's six kids, I knew there was truth to what Tía Katia said. The last two kids looked like us, except their voices didn't match ours. They spoke like they had just blown their noses and didn't get all the snot out. The girl's name was April, because she was born in April. April looked a whole lot like me except her hair was dark like Consuelo's and mine was light like my mom's. I don't know why they didn't name her brother January, because he was born in January. Instead, they named him Federico, but everybody called him Fufu.

April sometimes pushed her doll carriage down the dirt sidewalk in front of their house. The brat sometimes waved to me and wanted me to play dolls with her. I imagined one day turning into Tarzan and whipping from one telephone pole to another, snatching her doll carriage and stomping it to bits. I'd gouge out her stupid dolls' eyes, too.

Every time I saw April and Fufu, I wanted to do crazy things like set fire to my father's tool shed or grab his electric saw and cut off the posts holding up the roof of the garage so the whole thing would fall on his car and crush it. All I really did was walk backwards in the yard sometimes
and make myself fall in holes in the yard so my mother would worry and show my dad all my bruises. I wanted her to say, “See what you're doing to mijita, she doesn't care if she lives or dies!” Then I'd say, “Kick his ass out, Ma! Let him go live with Consuelo and her stupid kids. You don't need him! Why don't you stand up for yourself!”

After I said all that, he'd look at me and maybe slap me across the face, then my mom would have to stick up for me. Then he'd leave Consuelo for good and stop humiliating my mom, and she'd stop roaming all over the house, cleaning and re-cleaning things that were already clean. But I couldn't stand up to him either, and there were times I didn't want to, times when he hugged me and told me I was his one and only. His neck smelled like sweat mixed with sawdust from the wood he hauled around at the construction sites. I wanted to set the table for him and rub his shoulders and make him feel good so he'd never go back to Consuelo.

The night we went to Brother Jakes's revival, I washed up and got into my oxfords, white blouse, and dark skirt and let my mom brush my hair and make a clean part down the middle that nobody would laugh at with two smooth-as-silk ponytails hanging on either side. Jesse had to wear his clean Levi's and tennis shoes and the checkered shirt my mom liked but he hated. He was on a baseball team and wanted to wear his cap. Blanche said that was disrespect to the Lord's house.

Jesse was agile, lean, his muscles taut. Energy in his body surged to the surface, surprising everyone around him. I saw him release it, like a bottle cap popping when he hit a home run that nobody expected from the “poor little guy.” He defied the odds against him, winning at King of the Hill when everybody thought he'd never make it halfway up. He'd smile when he was at the top, showing two rows of perfectly formed teeth that I envied because I had a crooked one toward the top back, but it didn't show much unless I wanted someone to see it. People underestimated Jesse's skinny body and didn't suspect that behind the shy smile there was an intense power that could bring down the most formidable opponent.

“Hope nobody mistakes him for one of los negritos at Two Doors,” my dad said. Jesse looked right through my dad like he hadn't said anything at all. It was no use fighting with him. Nobody ever won a battle with my dad. When he told me I was gonna quit school and marry the first man who told me he loved me, I said “Yep, you're right, dad,” then he shut up. All he wanted to know was that he was right.

“Don't be sceered of them ol' holy rollers,” Blanche told my mother.
“They all be's in the Lord and are harmless as flies.” She assured mom that the “ol' Devil of headaches is gonna meet his match tonight!” All this happened before Paul was born so he doesn't even remember. Priscilla was only four years old, and we left her with Tía Katia.

Blanche came by for us that evening with her four kids. They were all spruced up and shined up. Jesse didn't feel so bad when he saw that his friend Gus, Blanche's son, was going too, along with his two older sisters and brother, Cindy, Betty, and Franklin. They all stood on our front porch, and it was all I could do not to laugh, because they all smelled like hair grease. Gus and Franklin had on ties that made them look like miniature preachers. Gus was called Gates because people said he was as big as a gate and twice as strong. He was almost as tall as Franklin, even though Franklin was five years older. I asked Mom if Gates looked like his father, but she said Blanche's husband was a skinny negrito who had arthritis all over his body and showed every rib through his shirts. Gates was big and had a light complexion. Blanche said it was nobody's business who his father was, because she had turned her life over to Jesus Christ and repented after she kicked her husband out and got rid of all his heating pads and pills. Gates wasn't afraid of anybody or anything. When Jesse took off for the Army, Gates had already done training in Special Forces and got as close to wearing a green beret as he could, except he kept getting into trouble and bringing his rank down.

We walked three blocks to the church, and all the while I kept comparing Mom to Blanche, watching their flowered dresses sway around their hips one step ahead of us. They dug their white high-heeled shoes into the soft dirt and balanced their walk with purses they dangled on their left arms. Blanche was tall and slim and dark, but not exactly black. She wore a small hat with a shiny red pin stuck in the middle. On days Blanche wasn't wearing her Sunday best, she wore an apron over her dress tied around her waist. Blanche always smelled like clean clothes hanging in the sun even when she was out back feeding the chickens and her proud rooster, Fireball.

Mom was shorter than Blanche, and her creamy skin gleamed smooth and silky in the darkening shadows. Every now and then, I saw the soft, red tone of rouge on her cheekbone as she turned to look at Blanche. She had left her lace veil at home. I couldn't imagine what a Catholic priest would have done if he had seen us walking to the Two Doors Gospel Church. Maybe he would have sprinkled holy water on us to bring us to our senses.

Everyone in the neighborhood watched us as we walked by, but
nobody came out from anywhere, because they didn't know what to say to us. “Hello” wouldn't have been enough. They would have had to go into details, and nobody wanted to do that. The Ruizes' old dog stood out on the front yard and barked at us. He was the same dog who chased cars and was later killed by one of them.

I noticed gallons of ice cream out on tables as we walked up to the big tent and wondered how they would hold up in the warm night. The sisters of Two Doors were making Kool-Aid in huge plastic containers. They cut up lemons and threw them in. The lemon slices collided with ladles that bopped up and down on the surface of the water. All through the service, I worried about the ice cream and wondered if the Kool-Aid would be cold. The tent was different from the church. Fold-up chairs were set up on bare dirt and Brother Jakes stood on a wooden platform with other members of the church sitting in a row behind him. The three front rows of chairs were taken up by the choir, who burst into song every now and then, whether it was time for them to sing or not. The choir sounded so good you'd think you were listening to a long-playing record set at full volume. Hanny was a member of the choir. She came by and gave us a hug and the ostrich feathers on her hat tickled my face. “'Bout time yo' all came by!”

Brother Jakes spoke into a microphone, but I didn't think he needed one. His voice carried all the way down to the end of the block. There were rough-looking people there that night, people Jesse and I didn't see at the Sunday services. I later found out that the brothers had gone down to skid row and visited places under the bridges looking for lost souls in need of conversion. These were brought in and made welcome. I think most of them were waiting for the ice cream and Kool-Aid.

After two hours of singing, preaching, and touching each other's chairs for electricity, we were told that everyone who was sick should go up to the front for prayer. By this time, Blanche was in tears, and her hat was on backwards with the shiny pin on the back instead of the front. Lots of other people were crying, and I thought maybe they were sorry for all their sins and wanted to go in through the right door. I spotted the ostrich feathers on Hanny's hat as we shuffled up to the front. By this time, Mom was crying too, and I was holding on to her purse trying not to lose her in the rush to get prayed over by Brother Jakes. I glanced at Jesse next to me looking serious like he was gonna get Mom's headaches settled once and for all. We were probably the only people in the whole place who weren't Black and that caught Brother Jakes's attention. He put the microphone down and started mopping his forehead with a big
white handkerchief. Every time he wiped his sweat away, new drops showed up, and he had to do it all over again. I was hoping he'd roll up his sleeves so he would cool off. He put his handkerchief in his shirt pocket and walked right up to Mom.

“Speak, sister! What do you ask of the Lord?” My mom answered, “My head hurts, I have migraine headaches.”

“Not anymore!” he shouted. “In the name of Jesus Christ, sister, I deliver you from migraine headaches!” Voices from the congregation answered “Amen!” “Jesus is the Healer! Turn your faith loose, sister!”

Brother Jakes barely touched Mom's head with one of his huge, shaky hands, and Mom fell back like she had been hit by a bolt of lightning. She landed in the arms of Blanche, who was standing behind her. My heart jumped to my throat. Jesse and I were over Mom in a flash. “She be all right,” Blanche said. “It's the power of the Lord what knocked her down.” All around us people were getting knocked down by the same power. I grabbed Jesse's hand tight. I figured if I went down I'd bring him with me.

Mom got up and was still crying, holding on to Jesse as she made her way out. I became a believer of the Two Doors Gospel Church that night, because Mom never had another migraine in all her life, except after Jesse's funeral. Then I think it was more than that. It was all her heartache bursting inside that made her hurt so bad she stayed in bed for two weeks.

When guys in El Cielito were being drafted to Vietnam, Brother Mel Jakes took a position as a conscientious objector and refused to allow his son Rufus to go to war. Rufus eventually went into the ministry and was just as successful as his father in rounding up souls for the congregation. Besides his skills at convincing people to choose the right door, Rufus played guitar like Jimi Hendrix and that made it easy to attract a crowd.

The Two Doors Gospel people had the right idea about the ice cream. By the time the service ended, it had melted down and was ready to spread over peach cobbler that the sisters had baked in huge pans. It was the sweetest dessert Jesse and I ever had. We were so happy, kicking up loose dirt in front of the revival tent with Cindy, Gates, Franklin, and Betty and watching Mom standing out in the warm summer evening with her headache gone, eating a dish of peach cobbler with the Black sisters of Two Doors Gospel.

 

• T
HE BALLERINA LEFT BEHIND
by the descendant of Carlos Peña Arminderez hasn't slept a wink in thirty years. Her beady eyes are locked into the distance. She doesn't know anything about medals or war. She is the lithe figure on the top shelf of the cabinet with the little glass doors that my mother bought at the secondhand store. One of the doors has a missing knob. You have to put your hand in through the door above it, then push out from the inside to get it to open. There aren't any more medals to put in the cabinet, so life there is very quiet.

If the medals talked to the ballerina, they would frighten her away. She doesn't understand that for them to be there, somebody had to bleed or die. If it weren't for them she wouldn't be there either, because the cabinet was bought to display them many years after my mother decided she was the mother of a veteran like all the other American Legion Gold Star Mothers. For years, my mother wouldn't even look at the medals. The medals have names too, Silver Star, Bronze Medal, Purple Heart, Good Conduct Medal, Air Medal, and two from the South Vietnamese government that have no names. The ballerina also has no name. We didn't care enough about her to give her one.

The medals don't tell the story of why my brother had to die. They are the evidence, the passion flower opening, its stamen sticking out from the center and the white-lobed petals blurry through my tears. It surprises me that the medals and the ballerina are dusty. Crevices, I suppose, between the little doors. Everywhere there are crevices, life is like that.

L
ast night I dreamed the roof was leaking, leaking right through the vent over the stove. First it was slow, then fast, faster, until it was a shower. There were other people in the room. I asked someone, “Is the Río Salado flooding?” and the person answered, “No, we don't know where this water's coming from.” A man came in who was going to repair the leak, but he said he couldn't because he had to go make love in a hurry, then he'd go up and do it. I watched the leak go from a drip to a small shower and I kept thinking, isn't that dangerous, with the electricity from the stove and all. Maybe the man was more dangerous, his need to make love was urgent. He was more dangerous than electricity, than fire, explosions, and death.

 

• “I
S IT
OK
IF
I take Jesse's medals to my classroom, Mom?”

Mom's leaning on her cane in the doorway of the living room. She's looking at the glass cabinet fitted stiffly in its corner of the living room.

“Now?”

“No, tomorrow. We're learning about the country of Vietnam. I have Li Ann in class, una chinita. She's from Vietnam.” I think of Li Ann's face, a small valentine someone forgot to color red. Her face is the
color of ivory. Beads of sweat on Li Ann's forehead appear clear, colorless. When she smiles her lips loop over her small chin, making its triangle tip go flat. When Li Ann smiles she is like any other second-grader. When she is solemn, she is not like any of them. A serious look from her starts a chain reaction in her body that ends in quiet, fluid movements. You might expect her to float up over the heads of the other children and land on your lap. They're like that, the women of Vietnam, phantomlike. I've seen them in pictures wearing graceful ao yais, delicate silk clothes that free up their midriffs, hang loose around their legs and tight around their tiny breasts. Jesse mentioned how they dressed in one of his letters and told me about a village girl who was teaching him Vietnamese. In pictures I've seen of Vietnamese women, their hair always seems to match the sheen of the silky clothes they wear, long or short it's kept neat, never wild.

Did Jesse fall in love with one of them? So different from our warm, round bodies. Their faces tell you nothing, our faces tell you everything. Some of them became whores. War always plays havoc in women's lives. Hard to imagine the delicate bodies raped and bruised. I know Jesse saw whores. They're the product of war, man's violence erupting from his sex splitting a woman in two, any woman, anywhere in the world. He gets even with the enemy by pinning his woman under him. He enters her, tempting fate with the hard rod of his body thrust between her legs. He is coming to the end of himself in her and doesn't even know it. The white flag of surrender is his. Jesse's too? I've never thought about it.

“Mom, do you remember that call you got from Saigon, three years after Jesse was killed?”

“What about it? I never knew who it was.”

“Suppose it was a woman. Somebody Jesse knew in Vietnam.”

“Why would she call me and never say a word?”

“Maybe she didn't speak English.”

“Ay, mija, that's not possible.”

“Why? The Vietnamese women are beautiful.”

Mom sighs loudly. “I can't think about that now, mija. I have to get them ready.”

“Get what ready?”

“The medals. Didn't you ask me for the medals?” She's standing in the middle of the living room, smoothing down her apron with one hand, leaning on her cane with the other. Her apron is clean, unsoiled by grease spots and food stains, not like when Jesse and I were kids. The safety pins are still stuck around the edge. My mother's always on the
hunt for new aprons at secondhand stores, Goodwill, and St. Vincent de Paul's, where she still buys old furniture and clothes, dishes, and knickknacks. She now uses some of the safety pins on her apron to hold up her clothes. I can't get her to understand that she's not a size 16 anymore. She's an 8. She tells me she doesn't like men staring at her in tight clothes, and I wonder if she means the toothless nomad who hangs around the Goodwill store with a shopping cart, staring at everybody who walks in.

“I hate those medals!” she says suddenly, with such anger that I close the book of poetry I'm reading.

“They never brought him back! Those men, what did they know? Pendejos! They said, here, take these medals in place of your son. What were they thinking? I never wanted the medals. I wanted my son!” Her legs are shaking. There are no tears, only anger.

“They're just medals, Mom.” But I feel it, too. We were taken, cheated, lied to. What Jesse did in Vietnam doesn't matter to us. We weren't there. All we know is that he never came home, only the medals came, the colored ribbons stiff and new. No one asked us, “Do you women want to release your loved one to us?” They just took him away, and what we wanted didn't matter. Then again, they never asked us, “Do you want the medals?” They just sent them. The war ended for us when Jesse was killed. For others, it went on and on. On TV—we looked away. On the radio—we turned it off. In magazines and newspapers—we flipped them upside down. Every time it was shoved in our faces we closed our eyes. The war was Jesse's coffin, it had nothing to do with winning or losing.

“Yes, yes, mija. Take them if you want.” She walks over to the cabinet and opens the door that has the working knob. Putting in her hand she opens the door under the ballerina. She takes out the medals one by one, brushing them off with her apron. There are tears now. “My poor mijito! Look at all he won! And he wasn't even there a year.” She gives them to me one by one. I trace over the letters of his name on the Good Conduct Medal with my finger,
Jesse A. Ramirez
. I'm looking into La Cueva del Diablo, disturbing the bats that hung upside down. If he knew, why did he go? Did he have his own death planned? How could he do this to me, to my mother? My hair, caught in the button of his uniform before he left, tangled me up in his death before he even boarded the plane.

“Remember, Teresa? Remember el cochito and how you ran to give it to Jesse at the airport? It was the last time he got to eat un cochito.” The scene is alive in me, as I run up to the man at the gate, the stewardess
takes the cookie telling me how cute it is, everyone is staring. I want to tell my mother that Jesse isn't coming back. I hide his words in my breastbone, the same place my mother hides all her pain. The words are a fiery ember, burning. If I tell her now, what will she say? Why did he go, then? How could he do this to me when he knew I loved him so much? I won't be able to answer her. Maybe it's too late. Maybe it's not important anymore. Don Florencío knew, Nana knew. She saw it in the way I lived, hiding like a bandit from conversations about Jesse's death, not wanting to know more than I had to.

The ember inside my breastbone is fanning itself to life the longer I hold on to Jesse's medals. I've carried a secret, more a wound that pools with guilt. It's like the time Paul fell out of the tree and I wasn't there to stop him. Jesse's words are like the picture before the fall. I was waiting to hear the words come true, and when they did, all I could do was point to myself and say, “I knew.”

“Here, mija, take the medals before I get them all wet with my tears. Show them to the children, tell them what a good person your brother was. Tell them that when a son dies, his mother's heart goes with him.”

I lay Jesse's medals down on the coffee table. My mother walks slowly down the hallway to her room, leaning heavily on her cane. I'm right behind her, shadowing her shuffling steps.

 

• M
Y CONVERSATION WITH
Mr. H. does nothing to make me change my plans. I figure he's on his way out anyway. I walk the thin line between truth and consequences that all teachers walk. You dance to the principal's tune during evaluation time, then shut the door after he's gone, give the kids the pizza you promised for good behavior, and go back to teaching your way.

I bring in pictures of Jesse, of me, Priscilla, Paul, Mom and Dad. What does it mean to say good-bye? To see a person you love one day, then never again? The children don't know. There's a child in fifth grade whose mother died in a traffic accident last year. He knows. The child's name is Gabriel, some kids say, like the angel at Christmas. Gabriel is sad now, not like the child he used to be who played soccer and got in trouble once in a while. Now he's nervous and thin. At times his eyes open wide in alarm, then suddenly shut down, as if the pupils have been rubbed raw and there's nothing left to reflect. I wonder if that's the way I looked when Jesse died. Everybody walked around me on tiptoes like
I had the flu. My friends wanted to carry my books for me at school. A girl I hated let me keep one of her sweaters, because she said she didn't need it anymore. I never said a word, I just put it on and walked away. I listened, I passed my classes, graduating like the rest of the kids, but I don't remember what I heard or what I learned or if I went to the prom that year or not. Maybe I did, but I don't remember. Gabriel won't remember either. His brain is spinning thoughts that get trapped behind his eyes, then fade away.

 

• M
Y MOTHER PACKED
Jesse's medals in white tissue paper and put them carefully into a plastic bag. There are teachers in the lounge who want to see them before I bring them into my class. Orlando Gomez tells me his brother Ed served during the Vietnam War. A cousin too, who later died of a drug overdose. “He came back a full-blown drug addict from Vietnam,” he says, “died in an alley where his mother found him on her way to the store in the morning.” Edna and Vicki, two sixth-grade teachers, start their own horror stories about friends who came back and others, they say, who never made it.

“I remember your brother, Teresa, he went to school with one of my cousins,” Edna says. “Smart, oh, he was smart! Wasn't he in the National Honor Society?”

“Yes, he was in all that.”

“What a shame, I mean to lose someone who could have done so much for society.”

“You still have another brother, don't you, Teresa?” Vicki asks. She's tall and pale, with dark hair hanging to her waist and dark circles under her eyes. She reminds me of a fantasma, someone who isn't real. Her question makes me mad. I think of Paul, and all the trouble he's caused.

“Don't you, Teresa?” she repeats herself. “Don't you have another brother?”

“One brother can't replace another.”

“Oh, no, sweetie, I didn't mean it that way. I only mean you still have a brother.”

“Right.” The word squeezes past my lips. My fingers twitch. A couple of other teachers come in with coffee mugs in hand. I wrap the medals up and have them packed in the plastic bag before they make their way to the table. The morning is like any other for everyone but me. Coffee is brewing and cool air drifts into the lounge from outside every
time someone opens the door. My hands are ice cold. I've never had a part of Jesse with me at Jimenez Elementary. I've brought him into the teacher's lounge, and already his name has been said so many times I'm starting to regret I brought his medals in. Questions are being asked, so many of them. What year was he killed? How? Where? The war was a farce, wasn't it? America's biggest mistake. Weren't the baby killers of My Lai court-martialed? The U.S. are the real terrorists all over the world, look at what we did in Vietnam.

People go quiet as I walk out. I hear the bathroom flush. They're waiting for me to close the door.
She looks like she's gonna cry. Hard for her, she probably shouldn't be doing this, but you know Teresa, she'll do anything to teach a meaningful lesson
.

I know, but I can't stop myself. I'm the man in my dream. The leaks in my life have caught up to me.

Lorena helps me clear the work table of glue, scissors, and construction paper before the children come in. We set up Jesse's medals on a white linen cloth I have stored in my classroom for special occasions. Lorena watches me closely. Working together for five years, she knows all the ups and downs of my face, like I know Mom's.

“They're beautiful, Teresa. I've never seen medals up close like this.”

“Good experience for you.”

“Are you OK? You look sad.”

“What do you expect, Lorena? You know how close we were.”

“Maybe you shouldn't do this. Mr. H. might…”

“Never mind about that asshole! What does he know about anything?” My voice rises several pitches. Lorena stands up and looks out the window.

“Look, there's Andy, waving at us.” I look out and wave back. Andy's dressed in his Phoenix Suns sweatshirt. He wears variations of the Phoenix Suns most every day. He lives with his dad and gets to go to all the Suns games, ASU games, and everything that has to do with sports. It's amazing the kid can keep his eyes open at school after being out so late most nights.

“Cute kid, I wish I had five others like him.” Without knowing it, Andy has relaxed me, for the moment.

The room looks like America in the '60s. I've cut out pictures of President Johnson, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Nixon, the demonstrators, the Vietnam Wall. A few war scenes dot the room. Under the picture of the Vietnam Wall is informa
tion the children copied from a book. There's only one misspelling. The “y” is missing on the word “unity.”