scrambling, coins dancing on the tiles, shouting under the rain of copper and silver, yelling, —Me! Me! Me!
* Mexican pillows embroidered with Mexican piropos, sugary as any chuchuluco. Siempre Te Amaré, I’ll Always Love You . Qué Bonito Amor, What a Pretty Love . Suspiro Por Ti, I Sigh For You . Mi Vida Eres Tú, My Life Is You. Or the ever popular Mi Vida, My Life .
12.
The Little Mornings
— D on’t laugh so hard, the Grandmother scolds.
—You’ll swallow your tongue. Watch, see if I’m wrong. Don’t you know whenever you laugh this hard, you’ll also cry as hard later the same day?
—Does that mean if we cry hard first thing in the morning, we’ll laugh just as hard before we go to sleep?
I ask and ask, but the Grandmother won’t answer.
The Grandmother is too busy supervising the tables and chairs being carried out to the courtyard. She’s ordered the hi-fi placed on the other side of the living room and turned around to face the courtyard windows. The entire dining room has been replastered and repainted for the occasion. For weeks workmen have trooped in and out, leaving a trail of white footprints from the dining room, across the covered balcony, down the stairs, and over the courtyard tiles to the green iron gates. The Grandmother has scolded them daily; first for being such cochinos , and finally for being lazy and slow. Only yesterday, wearing newspaper hats and speckled work clothes, did they finish their work, just in time for tonight’s party.
But now that they’re gone, it’s the grandchildren she shouts at for being everywhere they’re not supposed to be; playing army hospital in her larder, spitting at passersby from the rooftop, running outside the gates and into the street.
—Barbarians! Never, never-never-never step outside the courtyard gates! You could be stolen and have your ear cut off by kidnappers. How would you like that? Don’t laugh, it happens every day. You could be hitby a car and worn on the bumper like a necktie! Someone could put out your eye, and then what, eh? Answer!
—Sí .
—Yes, what?
—¿Gracias?
—How many times do I have to tell you? You’re to say, “ Sí , Abuela.”
It’s Father’s birthday. All week the Grandmother has been marketing for everything herself because she can’t trust the servant girl Oralia to buy the freshest ingredients for Father’s favorite meal—turkey in the Grandmother’s mole sauce.
When the Grandmother goes to the market, she samples from each vendor, pinching, and poking, and pocketing their wares. She makes believe she doesn’t hear them cursing when she walks away without buying anything. The Grandmother couldn’t care less. It’s mijo’s birthday.
This year, because there are already so many people in the house, only a few guests have been invited, some of Father’s boyhood friends—his compadre from Juchitán they call Juchiteco, or Hoo-chi, only I hear it as Coo-chi, like the word in Spanish for “knife” almost.
Throughout the house, the Grandmother shouts her orders from the balcony overlooking the courtyard, above the laundry fluttering on the rooftop, from the apartment upstairs rear where she and the Little Grandfather sleep, from Aunty Light-Skin and Antonieta Araceli’s rooms below, to the two front apartments facing the street where both tenants have been let go this summer so that her three sons and their families can visit all at once. Imagine the sacrifice. The Grandparents aren’t rich after all. —There’s just the rents, and Narciso’s pension, and the little earnings from his tlapalería , which is hardly anything, to tell the truth. But what’s money compared to family? the Grandmother insists. —Renters come and go, but my sons are my sons.
Every year Father’s birthday is celebrated in Mexico City and never in Chicago, because Father’s birthday falls in the summer. That’s why on the mornings of Father’s birth we wake to “The Little
* Mexican pillows embroidered with Mexican piropos, sugary as any chuchuluco. Siempre Te Amaré, I’ll Always Love You . Qué Bonito Amor, What a Pretty Love . Suspiro Por Ti, I Sigh For You . Mi Vida Eres Tú, My Life Is You. Or the ever popular Mi Vida, My Life .
12.
The Little Mornings
— D on’t laugh so hard, the Grandmother scolds.
—You’ll swallow your tongue. Watch, see if I’m wrong. Don’t you know whenever you laugh this hard, you’ll also cry as hard later the same day?
—Does that mean if we cry hard first thing in the morning, we’ll laugh just as hard before we go to sleep?
I ask and ask, but the Grandmother won’t answer.
The Grandmother is too busy supervising the tables and chairs being carried out to the courtyard. She’s ordered the hi-fi placed on the other side of the living room and turned around to face the courtyard windows. The entire dining room has been replastered and repainted for the occasion. For weeks workmen have trooped in and out, leaving a trail of white footprints from the dining room, across the covered balcony, down the stairs, and over the courtyard tiles to the green iron gates. The Grandmother has scolded them daily; first for being such cochinos , and finally for being lazy and slow. Only yesterday, wearing newspaper hats and speckled work clothes, did they finish their work, just in time for tonight’s party.
But now that they’re gone, it’s the grandchildren she shouts at for being everywhere they’re not supposed to be; playing army hospital in her larder, spitting at passersby from the rooftop, running outside the gates and into the street.
—Barbarians! Never, never-never-never step outside the courtyard gates! You could be stolen and have your ear cut off by kidnappers. How would you like that? Don’t laugh, it happens every day. You could be hitby a car and worn on the bumper like a necktie! Someone could put out your eye, and then what, eh? Answer!
—Sí .
—Yes, what?
—¿Gracias?
—How many times do I have to tell you? You’re to say, “ Sí , Abuela.”
It’s Father’s birthday. All week the Grandmother has been marketing for everything herself because she can’t trust the servant girl Oralia to buy the freshest ingredients for Father’s favorite meal—turkey in the Grandmother’s mole sauce.
When the Grandmother goes to the market, she samples from each vendor, pinching, and poking, and pocketing their wares. She makes believe she doesn’t hear them cursing when she walks away without buying anything. The Grandmother couldn’t care less. It’s mijo’s birthday.
This year, because there are already so many people in the house, only a few guests have been invited, some of Father’s boyhood friends—his compadre from Juchitán they call Juchiteco, or Hoo-chi, only I hear it as Coo-chi, like the word in Spanish for “knife” almost.
Throughout the house, the Grandmother shouts her orders from the balcony overlooking the courtyard, above the laundry fluttering on the rooftop, from the apartment upstairs rear where she and the Little Grandfather sleep, from Aunty Light-Skin and Antonieta Araceli’s rooms below, to the two front apartments facing the street where both tenants have been let go this summer so that her three sons and their families can visit all at once. Imagine the sacrifice. The Grandparents aren’t rich after all. —There’s just the rents, and Narciso’s pension, and the little earnings from his tlapalería , which is hardly anything, to tell the truth. But what’s money compared to family? the Grandmother insists. —Renters come and go, but my sons are my sons.
Every year Father’s birthday is celebrated in Mexico City and never in Chicago, because Father’s birthday falls in the summer. That’s why on the mornings of Father’s birth we wake to “The Little
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