Umami by Laia Jufresa Page B

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.
    â€˜I wasn’t ever married to your father,’ says Emma. ‘Not technically.’
    â€˜ 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.
    â€˜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.
    â€Œ
‌ 2000
    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