Umami (6 page)

The boys are my dad, Pina's dad Beto, and my two brothers. They took the canoe and they're going to sleep on an island in the middle of the lake. I wanted to go with them, but then I saw Theo putting a bunch of straws in his backpack and I thought best to go with the girls. Yesterday, Pina made us breathe through straws with our heads camuflashed under the water in the lake and it felt horrible. Only Theo lasted a long time, and now he thinks he's king of the straws and he wants to play at straws all day long.

The grown-up girls are my mom and Emma. The little girls are me, my sister Ana, and her friend Pina who has a woolly dead pilot sweater that doesn't belong to her tied around her waist. She doesn't have her own one because she's not part of the family. We call her Pi, and when she annoys us we call her Pee-Pee and Ana gets real mad. Pi is sad because her mom left her a letter. If my mom left me a letter I'd be happy, but when I said as much to Ana she said, ‘That's because you're dumb.'

Ana is ten and she thinks she's the queen of the forest.

When my mom lent Pina the sweater I instantly wanted mine. Mama said that I could only put it on if I took everything else off. That's why under my sweater I'm only wearing my swimsuit, and that's why the mud feels scratchy against my knees as I crawl along. And that's why I try to stick to the mushy parts, where I can slide along and nothing hurts.

I find a river of mud and follow it, even though it leads me off the track, even though there isn't really a track because the trees in the grove are planted in rows, and if you look at them from the right spot they hide behind each other, and between the rows everything that's not a chestnut tree is empty space, and everything that's empty space is track.

My woolly dead pilot sweater is yellow and tickly, but the sleeves are too long for me and I have to fold them up to my shoulders like an accordion. This morning Theo said that there's such a thing as a giant slug, and they're yellow and black and called banana slugs. He said I look like one in my sweater. I liked that. But Olmo said if anything I look like a rotten banana. I told him he has the face of a porcupine and Theo said, ‘Luz
está
right.'

They all start talking weird when we come to the lake. And that's why I'm not going to speak English. I'm never ever going to speak English. English makes you weird.

I sit down at the end of the sort of river and rub mud in my face, because everybody knows mud-masks make you pretty. Mud-masks and also drinking tomato juice, but tomato juice is trick juice because it isn't sweet at all. Then, just next to my foot, I spot something, and that something is a black trumpet. I don't move. Apart from my eyes. I spot another one, three, four, seven, all together. I take out my guide specimen to check and yep, they're like twins. According to Grandma, when you find one you've found a ton. I turn around, get on all fours again and start singing to them even faster so that more appear.

‘Flashy flashy flashy flash.'

And it works.

Where before there were none, suddenly I can see millions of them. It's like the Magic Eye pictures in Olmo's book where if you just stare at the page you don't see anything, but if you make yourself go cross-eyed you see a dinosaur.

‘Trumpets! Truuumpettts!'

I shout until my mom appears, springing out from between the trees.

‘Where?' she says.

‘Kneel down,' I say. But she only crouches down. I point and it doesn't take long before she spots them too. They're all over the place, the same color as the dirt. Black trumpets are the real queens of camuflash.

Pina and Ana turn up to pick my trumpets, and I want them to go away but I don't say anything because they are saying how good I am at this and how excellent my mask looks on me. Emma picks a few and smells them. She says we're going to do spaghetti with black trumpets, garlic and white wine and, ‘didn't I tell you five was a lucky number?'

‘I'm a lucky peanut,' I say.

‘You're my little truffle hog, that's what you are,' says Mama, and she rolls my sleeves back up.

I don't know what a truffle hog is, but I guess it's a pig made out of fancy chocolate. I get up and my legs are totally brown, just like my hands and my face, and I guess that's why she said it. I'm a chocolate-covered peanut.

‘Wanna go shower?' Grandma asks.

‘Not now,' I tell her.

‘Okey dokey,' she says.

Ana and Pi take the trumpets to the house because in the end we've collected a ginormous paper bag of them. The rest of us go on walking because now Grandma wants us to find another mushroom, a chanterelle, which is yellow, but it's not like any of the yellows that Mama has in her basket, or like my sweater, or even like the yellow of the banana slugs which she says only exist on the other coast.

‘Of the lake?' I ask.

‘Of the country,' Grandma says.

I want to find the chanterelle. I'm going to find it. We walk. I've got so much mud on my knees it's like there are two cow patties sitting on them. I like them. I like walking with the adults because they talk without whispering secrets to each other and don't make you do anything with straws. One time, Pina and Ana tried to put a straw up my front bottom because they said that all of us women have a little hole there to make children. But they couldn't find it, so they told me I don't have one and that I'm never going to have children, which is fine by me because children can be so dumb and nasty with their little sisters, even when the little sisters are really nice and pretty.

My mom picks a mushroom for her already very full basket.

‘That's a magic mushroom,' Emma tells her.

‘Really?' I ask.

‘She just means it makes you sleepy,' says Mama.

‘And giggly,' Grandma says.

‘And it makes you see things,' says Mama.

I say it doesn't sound so bad, but it doesn't sound that magic either.

‘Which one is it?' I ask, and they point to one in Emma's hand, but they won't let me touch it. Emma collects chestnuts and I see her putting them in her sweater pockets which are now all big and bulgy like the stockings she hangs by the chimney at Christmas when we come to see her, and which she fills with trick presents for us, like fruit and pencil sharpeners.

‘Are you going to eat them?' I ask her.

‘I'm going to paint them,' she says.

‘What color?' I ask.

‘I'm not going to paint on top of them. I'm going to paint them in a still life.'

‘Emma's
Pickings: A Still Life
,' my mom says.

‘A minimalist still life, this year,' Grandma says, and they both laugh, and I laugh too so they think I get what they're talking about, but also because it's like a choir and if you don't laugh it's like you aren't singing, and it you don't sing it's like there's a lake in front of you and you've got your swimsuit on but you won't dive in. Like Ana, who never wants to swim. She says the mud is gross. But really she's embarrassed to be seen in her swimsuit, and I miss before, when she wasn't embarrassed by every little thing and she wasn't so mean.

Emma makes us hold her chestnuts while she looks for a lighter in her giant pockets. I drop a few, but she doesn't mind. She's got a long neck like a giraffe and she always seems sad until something makes her laugh out loud and she throws her neck back. She's got yellow teeth and red hair, apart from the hair that's closest to her scalp, which is white. She has an old truck filled with so many blankets you could live in there, and she keeps hot things in colorful flasks: milk, tea, soup, coffee. She always has a cigarette in her right hand, with her left hand holding the right elbow, which reminds me of the music stand where my mom and dad rest their music when they practice. When I grow up I want to be like Grandma but in Mexican. But my mom says that's genetically impossible: Emma is only my grandma because she got married to my mom's daddy. Genetically is when you generally look like someone else. Mama doesn't look like Emma, but she calls her Mom anyway. Emma is only ten years older than her but she calls Mama Kiddo. She calls us all Kiddo. My dad, too. But she calls Beto Beddo.

‘I wasn't ever married to your father,' says Emma. ‘Not technically.'

‘
Arrejuntada
,' my mom says in Spanish. ‘Shacked up with him, whatever.'

Emma tries to say the word
arrejuntada
but the r comes out all floppy.

‘When I grow up I want to shack up with a pilot, too,' I tell them, and then I get back on all fours and leave. I'm a banana slug on stilts.

Pina's mom told her how babies are made. Now Pina is trying to explain it to her friend, but she keeps getting muddled. Ana assures her that she doesn't have any hole for any penis. Pina is going to show her that she does; that her mom isn't a liar. Ana pulls down her pants and knickers. It's Ana who says knickers, because that's what they call them in England where Agatha Christie comes from. Pina calls them panties.

They lay Ana's clothes out on the stone wall that surrounds the hotel's mini playground and Ana lies on top of them. She lets her feet dangle on either side. Pina inspects her, fully concentrated. It occurs to her that since she doesn't have a penis she'll need some kind of tool to find Ana's hole. She hops off the wall, opens her backpack, and finds a BIC pencil. She clicks the end and pushes the lead nib down: she doesn't want to draw all over the inside of her friend's vagina. Her mom told her that's what you have to call it, ‘Not your peepee, not your girly bits, and definitely not your flower.'

Pina has second thoughts about the BIC. What if a bit of nib somehow broke off inside Ana and stayed there for ever, and then when she had children they came out all shiny and gray? Perhaps she should use the rubber end? Pina doesn't say any of this to Ana; it was hard enough trying to convince her to take her clothes off. Ana thinks she knows it all. She says babies are made when mommies and daddies make love, because that's what
her
mom told her. This theory really bugs Pina. Firstly because it's plain dumb, and secondly because that would mean that Ana's parents, who had four children, love each other more than her parents, who only had her. As if they ran out of love to make. Pina wants to show Ana once and for all that she's wrong. Having children doesn't have anything to do with love. It's a physical, mechanical thing: the man slots his penis inside the woman. Her mom explained the whole thing with the proper words for it all: the man's penis shoots out some tadpole thingies, which are actually baby seeds.

Ana and Pina are looking after Luz while the other kids swim and the grown-ups drink beer by the pool on the other side of the hotel. There are some swings between the stone wall and Pina's backpack. Luz is sitting under one of them and Pina pats her on the head: her ringlets bounce at the slightest touch. Then Pina climbs back onto the wall where Ana is now standing on tiptoes pretending to walk across a balance beam like a gymnast. Pina pushes her gently and Ana loses her balance but regains it straight away.

‘Quit it, Pina. I could have fallen like Humpty Dumpty and they would have put you in jail.'

Pina doesn't ask who Humpty Dumpty is. She never asks Ana to explain her gringoisms.

‘Lie down,' she says.

Ana lies on top of the clothes.

‘Open your legs wide.'

Ana opens them but she won't stop jiggling about, and Pina can't find any way in.

‘Stay still!'

This, or something, amuses Luz, who starts chuckling. Pina glances over at her. She's pushing an empty swing. Ana and Pina had also been pushing each other on the swings before they'd got onto the baby-making hole. Now, if she puts her hand up to her face, Pina can smell the rust of the chain.

With her BIC, Pina carefully combs Ana for an entry point. She imagines the baby-making hole has a secret hatch: you have to press the exact point with a penis or the pencil rubber to open it up. A bit like the barely visible hole on the back of the alarm clock which you have to poke with a pin to set the time.

Ana gives up hope.

‘I don't have a hole,' she says, her lip quivering.

Pina carries on her search. It's not that uncommon for her to make Ana cry, and she always gets over it in the end. This time, though, Ana shuts her legs.

‘Maybe if you're chubby you don't have a hole.'

‘Don't be a ninny,' Pina says. ‘All girls have a hole. How else would the pee come out?'

This is what she says, even though she knows that what Ana wants to hear is that she's not chubby. But she is. A little bit. In fact, Pina's mom told her that the pee hole isn't the same as the baby-making hole, but she imagines they're similar: they're neighbors, after all. It's like they live in the same mews.

‘Maybe if I pee you'll be able to see where it comes out,' Ana suggests.

‘That is gross,' Pina says, wielding her pencil threateningly. ‘You will not pee on me or I'll tell on you for leaving Luz by herself on the swings.'

Luz is singing a lullaby to the empty swing. Maybe she can see a ghost there. Pina and Ana have discussed this possibility before because Luz is always talking to an invisible someone or another. That thought barely finished, Pina hears the dull thump of the swing hitting Luz on the forehead. The little girl screams, drops to the floor and starts to cry.

‘Hey, Luchi, Luchi,' Pina cries. ‘Hey, come over and help me out.'

But Luz doesn't even seem to hear her. Ana jumps off the wall, goes to her sister, lifts her onto the swing and pushes her gently.

‘We haven't finished,' Pina says.

‘Why don't we try on you?' Ana says.

‘I'm embarrassed to take off my panties.'

‘I took off mine!'

Pina throws her panties at Ana from the wall. Luz laughs. She's got a lovely laugh. When Luz laughs Pina thinks how she'd like to have brothers and sisters. Luz puts the panties on her head like a hat, but Ana snatches them off and throws them back in the direction of the wall; they land on the grass. Ana can be pretty snappish with her sister sometimes. All four of them can be pretty snappish with each other, and when they're snappish Pina thinks how she doesn't want brothers or sisters, especially not four.