The Tequila Worm (13 page)

“I should’ve enjoyed my furniture. I should’ve let Sofia put
buñuelo
crumbs all over my bare sofa. Let her spill her red hibiscus water all over my table
and
floor . . .”
Boy, I
hope this lesson isn’t that I’m a messy mule too!
I thought.

She continued. “Yes, by death, we know life. And so it’s best to embrace it. How’s that for Martian talk?” Berta and I kissed her. “Now—we eat!”

Our Thanksgiving dinner of turkey
mole,
rice, beans, hot corn tortillas, and
tres leches
cake was to die for.

At
sobremesa,
we were drinking
café de olla,
Papa’s sweet spiced coffee treat. Abuelita went first. “Sofia, as the
comadre
in charge of the family’s Christmas
nacimiento,
I have the honor of appointing you the Christmas
madrina
this year.” Everyone started clapping.

“Eh . . . thank you, Abuelita, but what do I have to do?”

“You’ll put baby Jesus in the manger on Christmas and then make him a new dress to wear on the sixth of January.”

I looked over at Berta and Lucy.

“Thank you, Abuelita. But can Berta and Lucy help me make the dress?”

“Yes, yes, of course, for this is good training for
comadres
.”

I went next at
sobremesa
. “Tía Petra, as I wrote in my letters, Berta and I are getting good at connecting from far away. When are you going to teach us how to connect with the dead?” Berta’s eyes widened.

“Ay,” Tía Petra said, “just wait until you experience being the Christmas
madrina.
This is about learning to kick with your soul, mi’ja. Something that the mind—however educated—and even the heart can’t do or even begin to understand.”

The ChRisTMaS. NaCiMienTO

Winter term classes began the day after Thanksgiving break, and field hockey ended. At last I was playing
soccer
on those emerald fields.

The days before Christmas break rushed by. It was a magical time too, for one morning as I headed up the hill to clean room twenty-four, I found the entire campus, trees, grass, and all, encased in ice, sparkling with the first rays of sun. It was like being inside a glass dome full of snow.

The last day before Christmas break the chapel was aglow with flickering
luminarios
and the altar was surrounded by rows and rows of red poinsettias. It was just like the picture I’d seen in the school brochure. We all sat down to a formal Christmas dinner with china, silver, and crystal, where we ate roast meats and mashed potatoes and ginger cake and were entertained by the school’s madrigal group. Then the headmaster stomped in dressed as Santa Claus, saying “Ho! Ho! Ho! ”and wishing everyone a merry Christmas and giving out bags of cookies and chocolates.

The next morning Brooke and I exchanged presents: I gave her the novel
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
saying it would give her a taste of the magical; she gave me a book of poems by Emily Dickinson, saying it would give me a taste of the Northeast, home of the Big Three.

Her family dropped me off at the bus station. Marcos and the other valley students were flying home.

I sat in the first row again. How wonderful to be going home, and for Christmas, the most magical time of the year. Then I remembered that I had to be the Christmas
madrina
. Would this teach me to connect with the dead, as Tía Petra had said?

Before dozing off, I smiled, so happy that I’d received honors in all my fall term classes, and that we were now playing soccer. Brooke was hogging the soccer ball; even so, she was nice and fun. I’d been over to her house a couple of times, and her family was warm and friendly.

Marcos and I were good friends now, kicking the soccer ball almost every Saturday while practicing our Spanish. Sometimes Brooke played too. She laughed when we told her about Johnson’s
Ropa Usada
and about my “gorgeous green dress” that she kept borrowing.

I slept most of the trip. Papa, Mama, Lucy, Berta, and Noe were waiting at the station. After we kissed, Mama said, “We have to hurry over to the
abuelitos
to help with the
nacimiento
.”

Abuelita was wearing yellow rubber boots and gloves, and standing beside an enormous pile of mud right in the middle of her living room. Her face, glasses, and braided hair were splattered with mud, and the floor was littered with twigs and leaves.

“
Ay,
the Christmas
madrina
has finally arrived!” Abuelita took her gloves off, stomped her boots on the tarp, and gave me a big hug. She started wiping off the mud. “I’m making a Mexican town, mi’ja, with a big plaza
.
It’s a replica of the town where my grandmother, who gave you the gift for mule-kicking, met and fell in love with your great-great-grandfather, who gave Berta the gift of those big choppers of hers. First, we will make a four-foot mountain with sprouting tiny trees.”

We put pots of cacti, rosemary, and red poinsettias on a plank-and-cinder-block structure, and then filled the spaces with buckets of mud. As we worked, Abuelita told the story of how our great-great-grandparents met:

“My grandfather lived in a tiny town in Mexico, up on a hill, in a two-room house. When I first visited, I was stunned at how small the house was and couldn’t believe that six people lived there.

“But what struck me most was how everyone was always so calm and got along. It was because of the town plaza.”

Once we finished the mountain, we helped Abuelita create the town, using blocks of Styrofoam and wood painted to look like adobe homes, a church, shops, even a cantina. There were miniature benches, a fountain, and a pink gazebo for the plaza.

Abuelita continued, “The townspeople gathered at the plaza every evening. They sat on the wooden benches, strolled, gossiped, told stories.” I remembered Clara, explaining how tales were first told in plazas. “Some sold flowers or fruits from their gardens, or small toys they’d carved, or squares of flan they’d made fresh that day. Others came with guitars and sang songs about love and broken hearts. And this was where recipes and remedies were exchanged, where pictures of babies,
quinceañeras,
and brides, as well as the dead, were passed around.

“And that’s where you—Sofia, Berta, Lucy, and Noe—were conjured up too, for that’s where my grandfather and grandmother first met and fell in love.

“She was fifteen and had gone to visit her Tía Paula. As was the custom, all the girls in town started walking around the plaza in one direction, while all the boys walked in the opposite direction. He was eighteen, quite handsome, and was carrying a big blue balloon attached to a long stick.

“On the first turn around the plaza, she came face to face with him and his balloon. They smiled at each other. On the next turn, there he was again, now holding only the long stick because his balloon had popped. And on the third turn, he bowed to her and handed her the long stick with a piece of balloon still attached to it.”

Once the town was finished, Abuelita reached into her pocket and pulled out a blue balloon. “Here, Lucy, please blow this up, mi’ja. It’s to honor the love of your great-great-grandparents.” Abuelita tied the balloon to a long stick and stuck it inside the plaza.

“Now it’s time for a
merienda
of coffee and churros.” As we sat at the kitchen table, Mama said, “What this barrio needs is not another fancy TV channel or a new 7-Eleven or even Wal-Mart. No! What it needs is a plaza. Just an open space where the
comadres
can gather in the evenings to talk, look, gossip. And where the young people can meet, just like in Abuelita’s story.

“I once heard that if you put too many cats in a house big enough for only one or two cats, the cats eventually go crazy and turn violent. That’s exactly what’s happening to our barrio.

“Before there was no plaza, but it was nice then, with just our one-family houses all around. The kids played games in each other’s yards, kickball in the alley, soccer in the street.”

Abuelita said, “It was one big family, with everyone knowing each other and everyone pitching in and looking after each other’s kids. The old ones were always telling tales and stories. And when they died, the family would lay them out on a table in the
sala
and retell their tales, until it was finally time to plant them in the ground. Now apartments are taking over.”

I said, “Oh, but it still feels so good to be home.”

On December 21, we all gathered at the
abuelitos’
house. Abuelita had added a wooden jacal to the plaza. It was made from pieces of mesquite and had a ceramic Mary and Joseph—each about a foot high and badly chipped and faded—kneeling before an empty cradle.

Ten cardboard boxes marked
EL NACIMIENTO
stood where the tarp and mound of mud had been.

After a cup of frothy Mexican chocolate and a handful of
pan de polvo
cookies—each star, bell, and angel sprinkled with crystals of sugar and freshly ground cinnamon— Abuelita carefully opened the first box. It was filled with balls of old newspaper.

I wondered what pieces I would find. Year after year, each of us selected a ball, unwrapped it to discover the piece inside, and went to Abuelita, who stood in front of the
nacimiento
like a conductor before a symphony. She would take the piece, examine it through her thick eyeglasses, and then tell us where to put it.

Each piece had its own story about who had given it to her and when. A piece might make the
nacimiento
one year but not the next. It depended on how Abuelita was inspired to decorate the
nacimiento
that year.

The only pieces she put out herself were those of Mary and Joseph. They were the oldest.

Abuelita took Mary in her hands. She traced her face, her veil, her entire outline with her long fingers. “This piece makes me feel as if my mother and grandmother are right in the room with me. It makes me feel like a little girl again, when I was helping them create the Christmas
nacimiento
. I’ve since discovered that creating the
nacimiento
isn’t work, really, even when it takes weeks, for it’s a gift of sacredness— to the baby, to the whole family.”

I unwrapped one ball and laughed. The gray ceramic elephant with the pink saddle! I’d chosen it in other years. “Now, that,” Abuelita said, “belongs to one of the three magi. Put it at the very bottom of the hill, for the three magi aren’t coming for a while.”

The next piece I unwrapped was a lime green plastic dinosaur with a long goofy neck. This used to be my favorite, but now it seemed only gaudy and silly: did it really belong in the
nacimiento
? But it was also one of Abuelita’s favorites, a gift from Mama when she was a little girl. Abuelita said, “Put it right next to Mary, just outside the jacal, with its long neck peeking in.”

And that’s how it went for hours, box after box. There must have been more than seventy angels—some flying, others kneeling or sleeping; and many with chipped wings and cracked faces; and three with no heads at all. There were hundreds of animals: pigs and ponies, storks and camels, even a pink flamingo and a big ceramic whale that went in a pool of wadded-up blue plastic.

There were the usual shepherds, about thirty of them, and the three magi—one a foot high; the second, five inches; and the third, only the size of a thimble. There were twelve plastic mariachis, each equipped with a tiny violin, horn, or guitar; a huge ceramic Cantinflas, with his pants falling down, chomping on an onion, as well as a bobbing head of JFK and a hula-dancing Hawaiian girl in a bright grass skirt. There were cut-out pictures of Maria Felix, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and the Virgin of Guadalupe.

And then there were the inexplicable: two big stuffed green frogs, one playing an accordion, the other, a trumpet; as well as bottle caps, glass marbles, maracas, Mexican jumping beans, tiny piñatas, plastic whistles, cardboard dolls in acrobat outfits, a dried-up pomegranate, an enormous lollipop with a tequila worm inside, and another tequila worm in a tiny bottle of mescal. There were rocks and shells and paper flowers and bows and all kinds of Mama’s wacky handmade things too.

Abuelita added a big yellow pineapple, five red apples, three oranges, half a dozen green chilies, and a handful of cinnamon sticks and walnuts.

Then we put wisps of angel hair here, there, and everywhere.

Abuelita disappeared behind the mountain, and hundreds of tiny lights, red, yellow, green, and blue, winked on to sparkle throughout the mountain, town, and plaza. Every piece came to life.

Over another cup of hot chocolate, but this time with a crispy cinnamon-covered
buñuelo
each, we all sat around the
nacimiento
and Abuelita told stories of how her grandmother and then her mother had created the
nacimiento
each year. Sometimes it was Bethlehem, or a Mexican village, once, a lush African jungle, with wild animals and exotic plants. Often it took weeks to finish. I shook my head. How tired I was from just putting the pieces out!

Before we left that night, Abuelita took me aside and handed me a small bag made of white satin. “Here, mi’ja, love him like he’s your own baby.”

When I unwrapped it at home, I found a mended, glued, and badly chipped ceramic baby Jesus. Mama said, “Your great-grandmother gave him to your grandmother when she was appointed the Christmas
madrina
the very first time.”

The next morning I called Berta. “
Comadre,
I need your help. The doll is falling apart. Do you think we can find a tiny dress at Johnson’s
Ropa Usada
. . .”

Mama walked in. “Sofia, hang up. I need to talk to you—
now
!”

Berta said, “Oh, Sofia, you’re in
trouble
.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Sit down.”
Oh, no!

“I heard you talking to Berta. This is no joke, being the Christmas
madrina
. If you can’t take this seriously, tell your
abuelita
right now. You are representing the whole family, Sofia.”

“But Mama, I wasn’t—”

“Remember how your papa makes his beans sacred by how he cleans and cooks them?”

“Yes.”

“Well, start there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Make this so-called doll your baby by cleaning and gluing him back together, carefully and thoughtfully. This is not the panty-hose baby, Sofia.”

“But what about the diaper, the dress?”

“Here.” Mama pulled a square of white satin and another of purple from a bag. “Use this.” She left as Lucy and Berta walked in.

“Are you in the doghouse?” asked Lucy.

“Sort of.”

Berta said, “Oh, you should’ve heard her on the phone, Lucy, saying she wanted to buy a tiny dress for Jesus at Johnson’s and—”

“Well, I wasn’t joking, but I now get how this experience is going to teach me to connect with the dead: I’m going to join them!”