At any moment bliss might be interrupted by the last word sent through the window in a ball of fire. The flick of a light switch could trigger an electrical-short explosion, a reminder never to hire the cousin studying to be an electrician. How much truth exists in a drunk man’s gossip; during Franco’s last fiesta, an artist claimed he’d seen real fur, alive, four-footed, footloose among the faux. And what of the handsome gardeners circling about—hyenas waiting for the lion to falter? Santa María Virgen Purísima, soy la más miedosa de toditos los pobres infelices del mundo de la misericordia. Cover me with your faux-fur mantle, Virgencita, keep me in the dark. Pray for me, keep me safe. Bless this humble home.
Akumal
When I wrote the previous story, “Chocolate and Donuts,” that memory jogged another memory—a moment I told few people about. It was a visit to a place in the Yucatán Peninsula I’d been to for only a few minutes, but what happened there stayed with me a lifetime. I realized after writing the other selection, it was time to visit Akumal again, if only in print.
I have yet to return to Akumal in the forty years since that first visit, though I borrowed from the experience for a chapter in Caramelo (but nobody would know that but me). My friend the designer Verónica Prida passed through Akumal and was surprised to see my photo in a Texas newspaper clipping taped under the gift shop counter. “But why is this news story here?” she asked. “Well, I don’t know,” the cashier said. “Someone put it there.” What is the connection between Akumal and me? Sólo Dios, as the Mexicans like to say, only God knows.
It was the last time I’d travel with them, or so I thought. I was twenty-one, the end of my childhood. Too old to be traveling with my mother and father, I told myself. Yet, out of love for Mexico and my father who’d invited me, I said yes.
It was the summer between undergraduate and graduate school. Am I remembering or inventing here? In my memory it’s just before I go to study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In my mind I’ve settled this summer like a jade bead before the dull two years to come working in that foreign place Iowa City.
The trip is Father’s idea; so is the idea that I’d be coming along with them. Most probably he didn’t ask Mother before he invited me; he doesn’t think about that. Or she doesn’t care yet, but will later when she has one of her famous tantrums. Then it’s him and me against her, always against her.
Every trip has low points, just as it has its highs. I want to talk about the highs, a few only, the ones I remember now, today, thirty-seven summers later, as brightly as the day they waltzed away with me.
The trip was to take us to the Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and finally Oaxaca. Father’s choices. We were traveling to states where his father, a military man, had been posted. Because of his father’s meandering career, Father was born in Oaxaca instead of at home in Mexico City. Maybe the ancestors were calling Father back, but if so, he wasn’t listening. He talked about new beaches and good food, and that was enough to convince us.
We flew from Chicago to Mexico City, then Mérida. After the lulling drone of the plane, I glanced out the window and was amazed to see, standing alongside us, an enormous mountain with snow on top and a little cloud snagged on its peak like a beret. It took my breath away. I could only nudge and point.
“Popo,” Father said. Popocatépetl, that was it. Our Mexican Mount Fuji. One of the twin volcanoes seen from the rooftops of Mexico City when I was a child. I’d never seen it from this altitude. Our plane’s shadow swept across like a mosquito, the great mountain as solid and still as a Buddha.
In Mérida we rented a sky-blue VW Bug, Father at the wheel as always, and drove into the jungle headed for Chichén Itzá, a Mayan pyramid we’d only seen on television. The blue Bug was zipping along the two-lane highway, all of us jabbering like macaws when we came around a curve and there it was. We were left with words dangling from our mouths. Chichén Itzá rising from the jungle. Brilliant, white, enormous, as impressive as Popo.
How had we not known Chichén Itzá would be…stupendous? Chichén Itzá was as magnificent as the Parthenon, or the Egyptian pyramids, or the Eiffel Tower, or any other world wonder. Here again was a “How come nobody told me?” moment.
Chichén Itzá might have been enough for the whole trip, but we had to drive on before nightfall to a new resort called Cancún, the place where Mayan kings had supposedly wintered, or so the ads wanted us to believe. It was just a few hotels then, with sacks of cement and piles of sand and loose boards lying about, a town so new it had no charm. But the waters, ah! They were the most beautiful beaches I’d ever seen: fine white sand like talc and water more shades of turquoise than I’d ever dreamt.
We stayed only a night and then aimed the Bug toward the Mayan ruins of Tulum, down the coast of Quintana Roo, syllables so lovely to the mouth and ear Joan Didion stole them for her daughter’s name.
Tarantulas skittered across the highway, making their trembly way from one part of the jungle to the other. Father stopped at a place called Akumal so we could rest. It was nothing more than a few thatch-roofed palapas with hammocks strung up and a quiet lagoon rimmed by palm trees.
I was lucky enough to be wearing my swimsuit, or I might not have ventured in. The water was calm and still. I lay down at the shallow lip of water and land where the sand, ridged and soft and firm at the same time, settled into the contours of my back and neck. The water, warm as a body, lapped at my earlobes, and the trees set a dappled light waving the sunlight gently over me as if giving me a cleansing. The waves, slow and calming, murmured things I didn’t need to understand for now. I shut my eyes.
And I felt something that has come and gone in my life at odd times without my asking. A sense of detaching from myself, of sliding out of myself and connecting with everything in the universe. Of being empty so I could fill up with everything.
And I wondered if dying was like this, and if so, why was everyone so afraid of it? All the while the water lap-lapped at my earlobes, saying and saying things softly.
This was only for a moment, maybe a few seconds, a few minutes at most. I was living in dreamtime, like when you’re in love. There’s no such thing as time, just being, unhitched from a body, that tractor trailer. I was fearless finally. Infinite happiness.
“¡SANDRA, YA VÁMONOS!” my father shouted, reeling me back to the world of the living with its minutiae of petty obligations.
“Let’s go,” Father shouted, impatient to get us to the next destination on his list, not knowing how far away I’d just traveled. How could I explain?
It was gone as suddenly as it had come. But it belonged to me, it had been given to me.
I kept it a secret inside the car and inside my heart, as if I’d unearthed an exquisite artifact that might be confiscated at the border. Something ancient yet new, something of great value, like a coin I would have to hide under my tongue.
A Borrowed House
I once gave a lecture called “Quiet as Snow” at a librarians’ conference where I told the story of my many childhood libraries and mentioned a much-borrowed book. Why did that little book from so long ago stay with me all these years? Writing is the tug of a question, but you don’t know the question until after you’ve written the answer.
This essay was one of two written for the Thomas Wolfe Lecture, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and delivered on October 21, 2014.
My first crush was over a book, and not just any book, but a book about a house. Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House. My brother Kiki and I were wild about this picture book as kids and checked it out of the Chicago Public Library seventeen times. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, but what I remember for sure is that we memorized its pages, we fell asleep with the book, we wanted to keep it, and we even planned to steal it. Can you blame us? Like many inner-city children, we had no idea you could buy a book. For a long time I thought books were so valuable they were issued only to institutions and not individuals. We’d never seen a bookstore or books that didn’t have
a stamp in them that said “Property of Saint Mel’s” or “Chicago Public Library.”
One exception. My cousins had a collection of books behind a glass cabinet in their apartment thanks to Aunty Lily, who worked at a book-binding company. I read bits and pieces of Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, fascinated by the illustrations, but was never able to read more than a page or two at a time, because I was told it was rude to prefer books over cousins.
The only books we owned as children were the glossy cardboard ones you could get at Woolworth’s or the supermarket, but these didn’t count as real books to me. As a kid, I’d never seen a store that specialized only in books. In our neighborhood anything that mentioned books was prefaced with the word “exotic,” and that meant for adults only. Nowadays with bookstores disappearing the way of the dodo bird, I bet there are plenty of kids who haven’t seen a bookstore either.
We may not have known where to buy a book, but we did know the price of The Little House by checking the cards tucked inside the front cover pocket. Back then library books came with two cards tucked into a manila pocket glued onto the front page. This card had the name of the book and price on it, and it also had a rubber-stamped date that told you when the book had to be returned. It stated in clear letters along the border there would be a twenty-five-cent fine if you lost the cards. I touched these cards over and over to make sure I wouldn’t lose them, and blame the Chicago Public Library for the beginning of my obsessive-compulsive anxieties.
Kiki and I got a fifty-cent allowance each Sunday. If we pooled our money and saved for a few months, we could own our favorite book. We meant to tell the librarian we’d lost it and pay for it, so it wasn’t technically a theft. But the idea of lying to a librarian was infinitely more difficult than stealing a book, and we gave up on the plan before carrying it out.
The Little House is the story of a house set on a pretty country hill. The landscape changes as the years pass, but the house is solid and constant. All the while, lurking beyond the horizon is the faint glow of the city, growing steadily closer with the decades. We see the horse-drawn carriages giving way to automobiles, the country roads paved over with steam shovels, the clothes of the homeowners changing with the times. Only the house remains the same as everything around it is altered, the city gobbling up the countryside, replacing it with tall buildings and elevated trains, so that in the end, the house finds itself no longer in the country but in the middle of a busy downtown street, neglected and shabby, but still as good as new deep down inside. Finally, at the climax of the book, the house is rescued by the original owner’s great-grand-descendants, who haul the house away on wheels and drive it out into the countryside and place it on a beautiful hill spangled with daisies just as when the story began.
The Little House arrived at a time when my life wobbled. My brother Kiki had been my best buddy while our older brother, Al, was away in military school, but I found myself alone on Al’s return. It was hard for me to make friends. I was not pretty. I had asymmetrical bangs thanks to my mother, who invented the Vidal Sassoon look years before Vidal Sassoon. My school uniform, a plaid skirt, was patched in the front because Mother had scorched it accidentally while ironing. At school I was convinced everyone who saw me was staring at the patch on my skirt. I knew what it was like to feel like the Little House when it was sad, afraid, and run-down. I needed to know that, though the world around me was often frightening, I would be all right in the end, especially in my family, where things happened nobody told you were coming, or they told you and you weren’t listening.
I remember climbing into the backseat of our Chevy once and asking, “Where we going?” “Mexico,” my mother said. I looked out the rear window and caught a last glimpse of our apartment, 1451 West 63rd Street, second-floor rear. It was just another graceless Chicago building whose best feature was its fifty-dollar-a-month rent. Four rooms with linoleum floors. Nothing to love, but it was home. My heart sank.
Fifth grade
The story of The Little House gave me courage. It opens with the man who built the house declaring, “The Little House shall never be sold for gold or silver and she will live to see our great-great-grandchildren’s great-great-grandchildren living in her.” No wonder this book was a favorite! Why couldn’t my own grandfathers make such a promise? Why couldn’t Father? He traveled back and forth to his hometown, Mexico City, almost every year the first six years of my existence, or at least that’s the way it felt to me. Could it be Father was homesick even when he was home with us?
My Mexico City grandparents lived at Fortuna, number 12, in the neighborhood officially named la Colonia Industrial, but more commonly known as la Villa or Tepeyac for its most famous visitor—la Virgen de Guadalupe, in 1531. If only Abuelito Cisneros had declared that the house on Fortuna would never be sold, not for Mexican pesos or U.S. dollars, so that I wouldn’t have had to live long enough to witness its mint-candy facade painted a fecal brown. Even if it hadn’t been sold, how could Abuelito have bequeathed the Fortuna house to eighteen grandchildren scattered across two countries.
My mother’s father, Grandpa Cordero, was a widower before I even began grade school. In Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood, Grandpa shared his dark and dreary two-flat at 3847 West Grenshaw with four of his grown children. Uncle Maño, who didn’t work for reasons we never thought to ask; Aunty Lily, thrice married (and twice divorced from the same man!); Aunty Margaret, raising two daughters alone; and upstairs, Aunty Lupe, her husband, Pete, and their three kids. No room for any more guests there, that was for sure.
We whirled about Chicago from apartment to apartment in neighborhoods where we were able to find a flat on the cheap. Father’s forays back to Mexico kept us constantly broke, until finally Mother, born the year of the stock market crash, figured out we needed a house for stability. Like so many working-class women, Mother knew a house meant safety from the wolf at the door.
Maybe Father never would’ve followed Mother’s advice if Divine Providence hadn’t stepped in and given him a good kick in the pants. In January of 1966 the pipes in our old brownstone froze, burst, and forced us to haul water up four flights of stairs in glass milk gallons. When Father saw our icy coat sleeves, shoes, and mittens, he realized it was time. He sold his beloved new Chevy station wagon for three thousand dollars, borrowed money from any relative who would trust him, and placed the down payment on our first home, a two-story bungalow in Humboldt Park on Chicago’s Near North Side.
At our old address we lived on the top floor of what was once an elegant one-family brownstone at 2152 West Roosevelt Road. It was already divided into three-flats when we moved in. We told everyone we lived on the third floor, but technically it was the fourth, because of a raised basement. Behind a hidden door on the second-floor hall, you climbed up a narrow flight of stairs to what were once the servants’ quarters. That was our flat. You entered by way of a middle room, but this room outfitted with two beds served as a bedroom for my four younger brothers and me.
Imagine how overjoyed we were at our new address to turn the faucets and have water gush out. We could walk easily to the nearest public library only five blocks away instead of the five-mile hike to the library on Madison off Western Avenue. And best of all, I no longer had to sleep with my little brothers. I had a real bedroom—the size of a closet, but I wasn’t complaining. That closet was mine.
The Little House sparked a lifelong hunger for a house of my own, a place to restore yourself from the world that might rough you up a bit now and then. A house meant a lot for a girl who lived with too many people, in run-down neighborhoods, who talked to trees, whose family thought she cried too much because she did. A house, even borrowed for a little, but all your own, would mean a place to imagine and be safe. All my life I’ve dreamt and dream about a house the way some women dream of husbands.
When my father was sick and knew he had only a few months to live, he confessed to me in private, “I wanted to leave each of you children a house. But
I’ve failed.” And then he started to cry.
It astonishes me even now to think Father’s idea of success was leaving each of his seven kids a house! Father had given us so much by not giving us much.
Necessity. That’s what he gave us. Necessity taught us to value what we worked for, to recognize others who, like us, didn’t have much, to be generous to others because we hadn’t had much. When you haven’t had much, you never forget what that feels like. Compassion. That’s what Father gave us.
In my life because of my poor choices, men came and went, but mainly went. I couldn’t rely on them to buy me a pumpkin shell. I bought my house with my pen. All by myself. Without having to borrow from my father and mother for the down payment. I bought my first house in San Antonio with tremendous fear, in a neighborhood so beautiful I didn’t think I belonged. Could I meet the mortgage on a freelance-writer’s income? Two women in my life convinced me I could. My literary agent and my then accountant, Pam Hayes.
When the Brooklyn writer Betty Smith finally earned some money with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she went out and bought herself a house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For her, for her mother before her, for my mother, for so many working-class women, a house is a life raft to keep you afloat when the storms sweep everything else away. Maybe things have changed, but back then, that’s what a house meant to women. For Betty Smith it meant something she could give her kids to make up for the hard times her writing had caused all of them to suffer.
Smith once wrote, “Serene is a lovely word. It means to me, a walled garden with a gate in it and end-of-the-day sunshine and peace and sanctuary.”
One of the first things Smith did with her new house was pull down the front porch and build that wall about the garden. The neighbors were aghast. I understand. A front porch is supposed to be for waving at neighbors and chatting. But for a writer it’s when you look like you’re not doing anything that you’re actually writing; people who don’t write don’t understand this.