Red Glass (12 page)

Next we stopped at the phone booth, where Dika and I took turns talking to Mom and Juan. Neither of us mentioned the police encounter or the fireworks scare or the fact that Ángel’s mom might still be alive. Dika seemed to have forgotten about all that anyway. Drunk on her burgeoning friendship with Abuelita, she gushed about how wonderful life was here, how we might stay an extra week.

When I talked to Mom, she tried to sound casual, but I heard the caution between her words. “So, how have you been feeling, Sophie?”

She was really asking if I’d freaked out yet. “Good, Mom.”

“Really?” she asked, trying to hide her surprise. “But have you—have you been worrying or—”

“No,” I said, my voice strong. “I’m good.”

And then she asked a few questions about food and the weather and put Juan on the phone and he asked about the food and weather, and we all took turns talking about the food and weather.

Later, at home, Abuelita and the aunts ground the corn dough on the stone metate, then patted out little balls and patted them out into flat circles. The tortillas cooked on a clay plate over the fire, and everyone but me turned them with their fingers. The aunts didn’t want me to flip the tortillas because of my
manos tiernas
. But finally I burst out, “How will my hands get tough if I never try?” So they let me, and sure enough, my fingertips got burned, but I bit my tongue and blinked back the tears and told myself that pain was a step to strength.

Meanwhile, that first day, Pablo played with his cousins near the river while Ángel and Mr. Lorenzo worked with Pablo’s uncles in the cornfields. In the afternoon, they came back from the fields smelling of sunshine and sweat and soil. After a late lunch, the men played basketball while Pablo and I watched. It wasn’t until nighttime, after chamomile tea and sugary pastries, that I got a chance to be alone with Ángel, in the hour before bed.

We followed the same routine every day, for nearly a week. The days blended together; some afternoons it rained—quick thunderstorms—but mostly it was clear-skied and gentle. I liked losing track, feeling that we were in a timeless place.

Sometimes, during the day, music blared from speakers in the village center.
Cumbia
and merengue and salsa, the same three albums, played over and over again. Some songs I liked and found myself singing along with.
Me pongo a trabajar, me pongo a trabajar
, I put myself to work. And everyone in the village
was
hard at work. All the women were making tortillas; you could tell by the woodsmoke rising from chimneys throughout the valley. I liked knowing that the men in the fields were hearing the same songs, Ángel especially.

My favorite song was “Siguiendo la Luna,” “Following the Moon,” which we’d heard in the van. That song transported me back in time, into the van, inside that cozy space, with the song playing and Ángel mouthing the words, watching the moon through the window. Strange how you can get nostalgic about something that happened only a week earlier.

Abuelita didn’t like the music blaring. She liked peace and quiet and nature sounds. That way she could protect her animals better. When the music wasn’t playing, she could somehow hear when a hawk was about to dive to capture a chicken, and then she’d run outside whooping to scare the hawk:
“Wooooosh! Wooooosh!”

She was protective of Pablo, too. She warned him not to play in the stream and to watch out for snakes. She gave him garlic to protect him from poisonous spiders and scorpions and tied a string around his wrist with a big seed called
ojo de venado
—deer’s eye—to ward off evil eye in case anyone in town was envious of his fancy tennis shoes with red lights that lit up when he walked. And once in a while she asked me to check on him, because he’d been a city boy for a year and he wasn’t accustomed yet to country life. I would find Pablo and his cousins chasing lizards and playing hide-and-seek, yelling and laughing and breathless from running. When I called them back for meals, they were always rosy-cheeked, covered in dirt, loaded down with treasures they’d found in the
monte
and spouting off stories of animal encounters. Since we’d arrived, he hadn’t asked me once to read to him.

Meanwhile, Ñola moved along the edges of life like a ghost. I would look up from working, and there she would be, hovering in the shadow of a tree, or emerging from a tangle of squash vines. She spent most of her day lying in a comfortable place and then, for an unknown reason—maybe a change in the breeze or the angle of the sun—she moved, so slowly, until she found another spot that made her smile, and then she settled down, sometimes with her eyes closed, sometimes open. Sometimes the spot that made her smile was in the middle of the path to the outhouse.

“Oh!
¡Perdón!
” I said the first time I nearly stepped on her.

Her eyelids fluttered open and she laughed.
“Heeheeheehee…”

She didn’t use the outhouse herself. On her way from one lying-down-place to another, she’d just crouch down and bunch her skirt around her knees for half a minute and then get up and keep walking. The first few times, I thought she was looking at a special flower or a little animal, and I strained to see, until I realized that she was peeing under her skirt. How would it feel to have such an utter lack of self-consciousness, such a complete at-home-ness in the world?

Whenever I saw Ángel, I wanted to talk to him, but the men seemed to have their own territory, and the women had theirs. Men hardly ever entered the kitchen—as though a force field might zap them. They even ate separately. My job was to bring them their food after they came in from the fields. At first this made me indignant—why did the women have to serve? But then I played it up, and acted like an eager waitress putting down their food.

“Anything else I can get you,
señor
?” My voice was sweet and sticky with sarcasm. “¿
Más agua
? Tortillas?” The husbands took it seriously, but Ángel smiled. He had a small dimple in his left cheek that only showed up when he was trying to hold in a laugh.

In the evenings, I watched him play basketball with the guys. They were all either little boys or older men, no other teenagers, no one even in their twenties. It felt weird, like
The Twilight Zone
, to live in a place with no one between ages twelve and thirty. The other teenage guys—and girls, I discovered—had either left to study in the nearest town or gone to the U.S. or Mexico City to work.

Ángel was an amazing player. He whizzed effortlessly around the court. As long as someone passed him the ball, he could pop it into the basket from anywhere on the court. The other team had three players guard him, but even so, he jumped above their heads to catch the ball, then stayed suspended in the air as though gravity didn’t exist, and shot.

Mr. Lorenzo stopped to rest often. He sat next to me, breathing hard, wiping sweat with his handkerchief.

“Why don’t you take off that flannel shirt, Mr. Lorenzo?” I asked in Spanish. “No wonder you’re hot.”

“I have to keep it on. My organism has been through a lot. You know, if an
aire
hit me, it could make me sick.”

“An
aire
?”

“Like a cold wind. A cold, evil wind.”

“Oh.”

“Before the
violencia
in my country, I could wear T-shirts. But now, you see, I always have to protect myself against the
aires
.”

This didn’t make much sense to me, but then again, neither did Dika’s glass.

“
M’hijo es muy bueno.
My son is good, no?”

“Incredible,” I said. “How come he’s not on the basketball team at school?”

Mr. Lorenzo shook his head. “He can’t go to the practices. Says he needs to work after school to save money.”

“Money for what?” I asked.

“My son has many dreams.” He sighed. “All secret.”

He paused to watch Ángel weave the ball around his opponents, leap into the air, and with one hand, toss it expertly through the hoop.

Mr. Lorenzo smiled. “You know, he is smart, too, my son.
Muy inteligente.
His teachers say he will get a scholarship, no problem.”

“I didn’t know he was a good student.”

“Good student?
¡Sí!
He works hard. Math, A. Science, A. History, A. English, B. Always!”

Mr. Lorenzo was beaming. His hands were folded in his lap, thick, short fingers interlaced in a way that seemed modest, delicate even. This close to him, I noticed a small tear at the hem of his flannel shirt, a tear that had been mended with perfect, tiny stitches.

I wanted to put my hand over his, but instead I just said, “You must be really proud of him.”

What would Mr. Lorenzo do when Ángel refused to come back? Would he stay there in Guatemala? And what about his wife? What if she was alive after all? Dika hadn’t mentioned a word about this possibility. Had Mr. Lorenzo later assured her it wasn’t true? Or was she in denial?

I thought about the glass, the flannel shirt, the sunglasses, my limes…. Was all this enough to keep us safe? Suddenly, I felt protective of Dika. True, I had my whole sack of imagined fears, but she had real fears, real traumas. I was used to being depressed. I’d accepted it as part of being Sophie. But Dika…what would happen if Dika lost that crazy spark?

Nights were when Ángel could sneak into the kitchen with us and drink coffee and eat pink sugarcoated rolls and talk. Still, we were usually surrounded by people, so he secretly let his arms brush mine as he walked by or let his leg rest against mine at the table. Small, almost imperceptible things. Things I might have been imagining.

Just before bed, we brushed our teeth by the cistern—a huge concrete basin of water—and washed our faces. Ángel and I lingered and talked for an hour, alone, standing close enough for me to make out his dimple in the faint light. We talked, easily, about anything that came to mind. I told him about a showdown between a puppy and a turkey over a tortilla scrap; he told me about how he’d learned to talk to a burro. He showed me how you make a burro trot by pursing your lips and making rapid-fire kisses.

While our words were gently bobbing along on the surface, underneath, my feelings were darting like fish. Feelings of wanting to reach out my finger and touch his dimple. And more. When there were pauses in the conversation, I thought, Now, now we will kiss. In those moments, he looked as though he was going to say something important. A few times he took a breath and opened his mouth and then closed it again.

But just when the space between our bodies was shrinking, I felt awkward and nervous and my hands shook and I grew conscious of a zit on my cheek and wondered if my hair looked frizzy. And I heard myself saying, “Well, good night,” and walked inside to the mattress that I shared with Ñola, and as she made strange little noises in her sleep, I lay awake, furious with myself.

I didn’t mind sleeping with Ñola. She smelled like farm animals and musty chicken pens and tree bark and sweet urine. She smelled like oldness, but an outdoor oldness, not an oldness that came from sitting in front of a TV all day or playing bingo in a nursing home, but an oldness as natural as ancient trees and drying riverbeds and layers of sediment eroding on mountains. Ñola whispered things in her sleep that only I could hear. Not Spanish—was it the language of sleep or Mixteco? Did her murmurs offer wisdom gathered over the course of a century?

Dika and Abuelita shared a mattress, where they ate fruitcake and talked and giggled like two girls at summer camp who hadn’t seen each other for ages. You’d think they were the oldest and best of friends.
Comadre
, they started calling each other, co-mother, the closest two women can be without being related by blood or marriage.

One night, I overheard Abuelita say to Dika, “Oh, how you and Sophie remind me of the
gitanos
!”

“
Gitanos
?” I asked. That was a word I’d never heard before.

“Gypsies!” Dika said.

I propped up on my elbow and looked over at Abuelita. “Why?”

“Your skin, and your accents,” Abuelita said. “Like the
gitanos
! They were
buenas personas
, like you. Good people. They came in painted wagons. In the very old days, they performed dances and songs for us, and later, they started setting up a big screen outside and showing movies.
María Santísima Purísima
, how I loved those movies! And the ladies went from house to house telling fortunes. We gave them tomatoes or eggs in exchange for a card reading. Oh, how I miss them. They no longer come.”

“Why not?” Dika asked.

Abuelita shrugged.
“Quién sabe.”
Then she whispered, “You know, I have some
gitana
blood.”

“Really?” I said.

Abuelita gestured to Ñola, asleep beside me. Abuelita smiled and began her story.

Long ago, when Ñola was seventeen, she fell in love with a young
gitano
man who traveled with his companions from town to town, staying for several weeks in each place. He met Ñola on his first day in town and over the next weeks, they spent every minute together. The man asked her to marry him and travel with his
gitano
family. She adored him, but her parents and neighbors disapproved. It was one thing to be entertained by
gitanos
, they said, but quite another to marry one. So her family advised her to find a man from her own village to marry.