The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters Read online

  Though I can’t stand wedding shit, I’m kind of looking forward to seeing my sisters again, and I do love the flowers. There’s something about balancing muted buds and lacy greens with bright blossoms that’s as soothing as firing up a joint in a bubble bath. So I’ve offered to do flowers for my brother’s wedding, even though it means hauling out of bed early this Saturday morning to make it to Grand Central Market while it’s still cool enough to deliver fresh blooms to the church.

  I throw on a cotton shift, shove on my chanclas, and I’m out the door in minutes. The wedding’s not until four in the afternoon, plenty of time to shower, and color my hair —that skunk stripe of gray roots that’s plain absurd in a thirty-year-old woman. But I have to get home before Sophie arrives with Elena. I jab the key into the ignition, and I’m off, careening down Coates, Bostwick, Eastman, and Pomeroy all the way to City Terrace, which shoots off at Herbert and onto the San Bernardino Freeway.

  My neighborhood streets are so spindly and twisted that if I meet another car winding toward me, one of us has to slam on brakes and reverse so the other can pass. There are zero sidewalks, and some people keep chickens, even a few goats. I have to watch out for these, especially backing out. The across-the-street neighbors are Santería people. They practically keep a petting zoo in their yard. When she visits me, Rita asks when I’m going to move back to the United States.

  But my little rental house is so close to the law firm (specializing in custody cases) where I work that I may never move. I’m a field social worker. This means I log serious driving miles in deep traffic. I’d hate commuting to a distant office on top of that. But this is Saturday morning, and I don’t want to think about work or even the voice-over narration for the infomercial I want to make for parents on how to prepare for a court appearance: Remember to cover all tattoos of an obscene, satanic, or violent nature; come showered and sober, and please don’t forget to wear your teeth . . .

  Basta, I tell myself, Saturday morning, remember? Now, what about that roach I stashed in the ashtray last night? Ah, here, it is. I clip that baby, spark a match —somehow my car lighter has disappeared —and pop in my Gloria Gaynor tape to sing along with “I Will Survive,” a corny old song, but it sure picks a person up in the morning. A rooster with shimmering green-black feathers struts across the street. I open the window to a blast of boom-box mariachi trumpets. “Get out of here, you fucking cock!”

  As I drive, I wonder why on earth anyone would want to get married. My car glides past a series of cheap, crumbly houses flying U.S. flags in anticipation of the Fourth of July holiday. Never mind that the brown folks living in these stucco shacks are the first to be rousted by the LAPD on any whim. These residents are patriotic suckers. In the boulevard, I cruise past graffiti-scrawled liquor stores and pawn shops before nosing the car onto the ramp. I crank Gloria way up to blot out the freeway’s roar. Marriage? I mean, come on, what with parents who can’t hold on to their kids, the Third World lurking everywhere I look, and the LAPD busting heads, isn’t there already enough trouble in this world?

  At Grand Central, I slip into the cool, dank mercado, enjoying the citric tang emanating from fruit bins until stench from the fish stalls overpowers it. Underlying this, though, is the mealy aroma of fresh corn tortillas. With my mild buzz, nothing is as seductive as a steamy tortilla de maíz, butter-glazed and drizzled with lime juice. Nothing, that is, outside of Apolinario. As my eyes adjust, I wander from the tortilla and produce vendors toward the fish stand where my make-believe novio works. There he is, my dream lover, standing legs apart, as powerful and irresistible as his namesake, except that he’s cleaving salmon steaks and wearing a blood-spattered apron. It’s kind of hard to imagine Apollo —the god of youth, manly beauty, and poetry —hacking fish for a living.

  “Hola, Apolinario,” I call over the parsley-bordered displays of tuna, shark, and snapper near hillocks of pearly gray-shelled camarones spilled over ice chips.

  He snaps off his rubber gloves as he approaches the counter. “¡Qué calor!” Because he’s from Central Mexico, I’m surprised he finds the morning more than mildly warm, though it has been smoggier than hell. Climbing down the hillside in my car, I felt like I was entering, layer by gauzy layer, a recently gassed war zone.

  He tells me he has no air-conditioning in the room he rents over Woolworth. At night, he showers and lies atop his bed, wet, with a rotating fan on. Now, as far as I’m concerned, Apolinario, the fish guy, could easily step out from behind that butcher’s block and into a major motion picture. The guy could be as old as forty or just twenty-two. With his clear brown eyes, smooth cinnamon skin, and thick black hair, he could be an Aztec nobleman, an incarnation of Tezcatlipoca, old Smoking Mirror, the tempter himself, with four women to pleasure in the days before temple priests carve out his heart with obsidian blades to offer it, hot and throbbing, to the sun. As I picture him emerging from the shower, water droplets jeweling his lean body, I swallow hard, lick my lips. I’m almost queasy with lust —or maybe it’s that I’m leaning over a tray of squid that’s a little past its prime.

  He asks when I’m going to take him away from all this, pointing at the stainless-steel buckets of bloody fish parts, blubbery innards, and silvery scales behind him. (We joke that one day I’ll make an honest man of him —a U.S. citizen, that is —when we elope to Las Vegas.) In Spanish, he reminds me that men suffer, too.

  I laugh and offer to bring him a cafecito with pan dulce from the bakery.

  But he wants to know why I won’t marry him. “¿No me quieres?”

  I’d like to say, “Te quiero plenty.” Instead, I fix my eyes on a severed trout’s head at the top of one bucket. If I tilt my head, the dull eye seems to wink. And I mention that my boyfriend, Jaime, would not be cool with this.

  “No me importa.” Apolinario says he has a wife, insists she’ll understand.

  I do a double take.

  “Yes, Girasol will be so happy,” he says in English, but switches back to Spanish to promise she’ll start packing the same day. We’ll send her bus tickets express mail. With my sponsorship, she can apply for a work visa. He assures me I will die for her asopao. Her chiles rellenos, mole, tamales dulces are stupendous, beyond belief!

  “¡Ojalá!” And I do wish I could. I don’t like to admit I can no more afford to hire his wife than I have the means to “move back to the United States,” as Rita says. And there isn’t enough time to go into my feelings about marriage, even a marriage of convenience. “¿Quieres leche con tu cafecito?” I can never remember if he takes cream.

  “Sí, un poquito de leche,” Apolinario says, rubbing at a splotch on his apron. Without looking up, he asks me to bring him a cinnamon pig cookie, if they’re fresh.

  But before I step into the Panadería Cubana, he calls out, “Bette!” Early Saturday, the market is not crowded, but the stragglers gape at us. “Los hombres sufren.” He emerges from the fish stall and stands under the fluorescent tube lighting like a character in a strange play, the kind that makes audiences uneasy. He holds his cleaver with the handle to his breastbone for drama. “Tú lo sabes.”

  I smile and point to indicate I’m headed to the bakery. If he’s done embarrassing me, that is. Yeah, yeah, men suffer. You don’t have to tell that to Jaime, my real-life boyfriend, who proposed to me a week ago at a dinner party in front of his friends and their wives. His glasses steamed and his cheeks flamed like I’d slapped him when I said, “Are you out of your mind?” That was a conversation stopper for sure —absolute silence until the waiter wheeled in champagne and Jaime told him to take it back.

  After my cafecito with Apolinario, who behaves more sensibly once he has a little caffeine and pig cookie in him, I head for the flowers, bearing a carton in which Apolinario has placed a live lobster, saying “Langosta for you, because you are too nice to me.” The thing bucks like a bronco in the carton, freaking me out, so I get a shopping cart to set it in, which I’ll need anyway for the flowers.

  Luckily
, I don’t have to do the bouquets or boutonnieres for the bridal party. Some florist will handle those, and we’ll use the bouquets as table pieces at the reception. I’m thinking calla lilies, though, for the church. I pass on the usual sprays of baby’s breath in favor of wax flowers. Carnations, cheap everywhere, cost next to nothing here, but I despise them. They look like balled-up tissue, reek like store-brand bathroom spray. My ex, who’s in prison, sends me a dozen every year on my birthday. Maybe the carnations are supposed to induce amnesia about his never paying a cent of child support and then work as an aphrodisiac, making me all hot to see him when he’s released. Really, that would take something more along the lines of a full frontal lobotomy.

  Ah, peonies, sweet peas, lisianthus, and stargazer lilies. And hydrangea — how firm and dewy it is! I load the cart. The yellow rosebuds in the refrigerated case droop a bit, except for one in back. This beauty is red-veined at the base. When I touch it to the tip of my nose, the petals emit a lemon-tea fragrance, subtle as a whisper. Maybe I will make one boutonniere, the groom’s. Then I pick some irises for my house. Finally I select a sunflower, its heavy head inclined toward a shaft of light pouring from a side door. I write out a small card: Todos nosotros sufrimos, and ask the florist’s helper, a friendly cholito, to take it to the fish stall where Apolinario works.

  “Why’d you buy lobster?” Sophie says as she takes the carton from me. She arrived as I was unloading the car. Since our kids’ fathers are MIA, so to speak, my sister and I perform “visitation” for each other. I keep Aitch and Elena one weekend, and she keeps them the next. This way, we both have free time to party or date, but mostly we just catch up on housekeeping and sleep during our child-free weekends.

  “I didn’t buy it.” I arrange the irises in a vase on the dining table, spreading them like a plumed fan. “Someone gave it to me.”

  Elena perches on tiptoes to peer into the box. “You better wash that big bug.”

  Two-year-old Aitch, busy removing plastic containers from the low cupboards, couldn’t care less. His favorite activity is taking things out of other things and then replacing them, one by one. Give him a laundry basket full of socks, and he’s happy until mealtime.

  “Ugh.” Sophie curls her upper lip. “Giveaway lobster?”

  “It’s alive, check it out.” I step back for a full view of the flowers on the tile-inlaid table. The blooms cast violet reflections in the yellow enamel, like thunderheads before the sun in an impressionist painting by a brilliant, but demented, artist. “By the way, did Cary pick up Nilda at the airport?”

  Sophie nods. “For once, he did something useful.”

  “Does Dad want me to take them to the wedding?”

  “I’ll get Dad and Nilda, since you’re watching Aitch in the church,” Sophie says. “When are you going to cook it? The lobster, I mean. There’s the wedding this afternoon and the dinner after that. Aren’t you supposed to boil it right up? It’s not going to live all that long, you know.”

  “Sure, it will.” I pull the hairpins out of my “fun bun,” a style designed to hide the fact that my hair is unwashed and the gray is growing out. “Before we leave, we can fill the tub with cold water and let him loose in it. For now, we’ll stick him in the sink.” I wonder what, if anything, the across-the-street babalawo does for his goats before brandishing the knife.

  “Him?” She stoppers the sink and twists on the cold water. “How do you know it’s not a she-lobster?”

  “Oh, it’s a him, all right. His name’s Apolinario.”

  Sophie uses salad tongs to lift the scrabbling crustacean out and plops it into the sink. Elena pulls over a step stool, climbs, and stares into the sink. “You okay?”

  Apolinario waves a rubber-banded claw.

  “You’ll have more room in the bathtub.” The way she says it, I know she won’t let me forget to transfer the thing later. The hard part will be getting my four-year-old to agree that poor Apolinario has to be boiled later, cracked open, and dipped into garlic butter. Seriously, there’s no way a live lobster is going to live out its natural life commuting between my sink and the bathtub. Like there’s not enough trouble in the world.

  Weddings bore the crap out of me, especially the church part. I settle into a front pew between Elena and little Aitch, imagining Apolinario’s dripping body, ready for some heavy-duty daydreaming. I hand Aitch a wooden puzzle I bought so he doesn’t get restless during the service. He’s trying to fit the pieces together, while Elena fans herself with the church program.

  I’m relieved as hell I’m not in the bridal party and didn’t have to buy one of those garish lavender jobs, like the one Sophie’s wearing as she trudges up the aisle. Those gowns cost a fortune and make anyone my age look like an over-the-hill prom date afflicted with color blindness. Sophie’s struggled to shed pounds, but if you ask me, she ordered her dress way too optimistically. She looks like a great purple balloon ready to burst, yet she’s smiling to beat the band, and her hair looks terrific —soft, shiny black waves tumbling down her back. Sophie’s following some kid in white taffeta tossing rose petals, and behind them looms Rita, looking hot and pissed-off, clunking along in high heels she’s clearly not used to wearing. A few other girls —stumpy as trolls in drag —tramp behind Rita. After these, lurches Rosa, the matron of honor. I wonder why she didn’t do something about that hair, but short of shaving it and buying a wig, what can be done with hair so dull it should hang from a horse’s rear, haloed by green flies?

  Finally Aracely trails Rosa. Thank God she’s outgrown her blue Mohawk days and now wears her black hair in a cute spiky cut. Her ivory dress, a miracle of silk vertical panels, actually makes her look more human than rodent.

  Over the organ music, I hear a familiar honking. Elena tugs my purse strap. “Grandpa’s crying.”

  I pluck a wad of tissue from my purse and hand it to her without taking my eyes from the side door. Where is that boy? Did he change his mind? There, now I see him in a slimming black tuxedo and —what’s that? —a carnation boutonniere. What happened to my yellow rosebud? No doubt Aracely made him wear the cheaper flower to match the groomsmen.

  “Uncle Cary looks nice,” Elena whispers.

  My mother should be here. She loved him best and never hid it, but she loved us all so well, it hardly mattered. How proud she would be, fierce with pride. My throat constricts and my eyes burn as my brother climbs the altar steps to take Aracely’s gloved hand in his.

  “See!” Aitch lifts the completed puzzle over his head, and the pieces tumble out, clattering to the floor.

  In the church social hall, Nilda gasps when my first husband, Luis, meanders in with his second wife, Nancy, on his arm. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Relax,” I tell her. “Cary invited him. They’ve been close for years.” My brother’s friendship with Luis outlasted my marriage to him by seven years.

  Nilda, who feels no compunction not to outdo the bride, is wearing a trim cream-colored suit. For a seventy-three-year-old woman, she looks damn sharp. “I don’t know about these ex-husbands showing up and bringing the new wife. Válgame, Dios.”

  “It’s fine, Tía, really.” I make my way to the door to hug old Luis, who has truly aged. Though he’s just thirty-six, he’s already bent, withered as a scarecrow. I also reach to embrace Nancy, who’s hobbling on a gilt-handled cane beside him.

  “Glad you made it.” And I mean it.

  Nancy’s mouth splits open, and she hee-haws with such force that I jump. Even Luis looks startled. Throughout the hall, heads turn, people probably wondering how the heck a donkey got in here.

  “How’s the hip?” I ask to make her less nervous, and I lean in to listen to her breathy tale of doctor’s visits, X-rays, prescriptions, and physical therapy, until Aitch interrupts, crying because he’s lost a puzzle piece. Grateful as hell to the kid, I ask Nancy to please excuse me.

  “Where’d you drop it, m’ijo?” I scan the floor until Elena spots the wooden part. Then I grab a cup
of planter’s punch and soft drinks for the kids before finding a table. I prop Aitch in a chair, his puzzle before him, and I slip into a seat beside Elena.

  “The floor is filthy,” she says, “but the flowers look pretty.”

  “Thanks.” The strategic arrangements of flowers left over after I decorated the church do look lovely. At Grand Central, I toyed with the idea of tying individual daisies to fishing line dangling from the ceiling, and, reasonably, decided, fuck that —way too much work. Who’d notice, anyway? I suck back the potent punch, feeling I earned it.

  “Guess who I saw, Mama?”

  “Who?”

  “Pam.”

  I gasp, and sweet drink burns in my nostrils and windpipe. Elena thumps my back until I catch my breath. “You saw Pam? Where?”

  “Behind us at church.” Elena points. “Look, there she is with Grandpa.”

  I squint at her from across the hall. “At least, she looks sober.”

  The old woman isn’t swaying on her feet, sputtering curses and waving her knobby fists like she was the last time I saw her, months ago, when she turned up at Dad’s birthday party, uninvited. In fact, she’s marching —arm in arm with the old man —right toward us.

  “Look who I got here,” says my father, grinning like he’s a kid who’s just caught his first catfish. “You remember la Pam?”

  Remember her? I still get night sweats when she pops up in my dreams. “Hello, Pam,” I say. “How nice to see you.”