Anything the Grandmother said always made Amor and Paz feel miserable. They wondered if their father had been telling stories about how they often forgot to make their beds, because they woke up too late and had to rush off to school, and then came home after dark when it seemed pointless to make a bed for just a few hours.
—An unmade bed is the sign of una mujer cochina, the kind who catches lice, do you hear me? No man wants to marry a woman who can’t make a decent bed.
Oh, brother! the girls thought, but they were only allowed to nod and say, —Sí, Abuela.
Her sons had too many children and too many things. It made their apartments crowded. And they rented, but didn’t own. None had the foresight nor the resources to buy their own home. Stupid children! Why didn’t they think?
Baby and Ninfa were too busy spending on home furnishings, furnishing their daughters like princesses. Fat-Face and Licha spent all the money on their flea market weekends, the way others play the slot machines, and then transporting all this junk to Mexico, spending the profits on their vacation, and coming back to buy all over again. And Inocencio, though he was a very good upholsterer, was never as excellent with figures as he was with tufted cushions. With seven children and with Zoila at home as homemaker, there was never enough for a house, though Zoila argued that if only Inocencio would let her work they could save for a down payment. —Real estate! That’s the ticket, she said. But Inocencio countered with his own argument, —What! A wife of mine work? Don’t offend me!
The Grandmother’s sons were busy. All week long they worked, and on weekends they took turns escorting her to look at houses, a horrible business of looking into other people’s bathroom cabinets. The new houses were too far away and beyond her resources. And houses within her budget were in neighborhoods with all kinds of riff and raff.
—Here you’ll feel at home, they said, but she couldn’t say she did not feel at home in the crowded squalor called the Mexican barrio. —This isn’t home. This is a slum, that’s what this is.
Something happened when they crossed the border. Instead of being treated like the royalty they were, they were after all Mexicans, they were treated like Mexicans, which was something that altogether startled the Grandmother. In the neighborhoods she could afford, she couldn’t stand being associated with these low-class Mexicans, but in the neighborhoods she couldn’t, her neighbors couldn’t stand being associated with her. Everyone in Chicago lived with an idea of being superior to someone else, and they did not, if they could help it, live on the same block without a lot of readjustments, of exceptions made for the people they knew by name instead of as “those so-and-so’s.”
To visit Chicago is one thing, to live there another. This was not the Chicago of her vacations, where one is always escorted to the lake shore, to the gold coast, driven along the winding lanes of traffic of Lake Shore Drive in the shadow of beautiful apartment buildings, along State Street and Michigan Avenue to window-shop at least. And perhaps taken on an excursion on the lake. How is it she hadn’t noticed the expression of the citizens, not the ones fluttering in and out of taxis, but the ones at bus stops, hopping like sparrows, shivering and peering anxiously for the next bus, and those descending wearily into the filthy bowels of the subway like the souls condemned to purgatory.
At first the Grandmother was thrilled by the restaurants and the big discount chains—but then the routine got to be too familiar. Saturdays in search of houses that were not to her liking. Dark brick houses with small, squinty windows, gloomy apartments, or damp little bungalows, everything somber and sad and not letting in enough light, and no courtyards, a dank, mean gangway, a small patch of thin grass called a garden, and maybe a bald tree in front. This wasn’t what she had in mind.
And as the weeks and months passed, and she was still without a house, the rainy, cold autumn weather began and only made her feel worse. There was the Chicago winter coming that everyone had warned her about, and she was already so cold and miserable she didn’t feel much like leaving her room, let alone the building. She blamed Ninfa, who kept lowering the heat in order to save money. The Grandmother confined herself to bed, satisfied only when she was under several layers of blankets.
The city was such a nuisance. Everything was so far away and hard to get to. She couldn’t take the bus—no, no, even though she had wandered about alone in Mexico.
Now it was her sons’ turn to say, —Alone? How? No, wait till the weekend. But when the weekend came, they were exhausted, and Amor and Paz for some reason were so rude to her. They grunted, they scurried off without greeting her when she entered a room. They mumbled in their atrocious pocho Spanish with English words minced in. She suspected they were hiding from her. —¿Y la Amor? —Amor se fue a la … library. Like that.
Her sons fought like cats and dogs. Where did they get such cruelty? Only weeks had passed since Inocencio had traveled to Mexico to fetch her, but in that short amount of time Inocencio was astonished to find the neat order and fastidious habits of the Tapicería Tres Reyes shop dissolve as easily as polished chintz ripped off an old love seat.
—Since when does Tres Reyes do chrome kitchen chairs? Inocencio begins.
—Don’t be such a snob, Fat-Face shrugs. —Money’s money.
—I told you, Baby says to Fat-Face. —I told you he wouldn’t like it, but who listens to me?
—He’ll like it all right when the dough starts rolling in.
—Idiots! Inocencio shouts, a vein on his forehead throbbing. —Don’t you two stupids understand anything? Tres Reyes has always stood for custom work, for quality. The day we trade in our hammers for staple guns we’re ruined. We’ve made a name for ourselves restoring fine antiques, by hand! Not pumping out cheap kitchen chairs. I turn around and now look what you’ve done! Next thing you know we’ll be making plastic slipcovers.
—As a matter of fact, Baby says proudly, —we’ve practically landed the Casa de la Raza Furniture Store on Cermak. If they agree to our proposal we’ll be doing all their slipcover work!
—Please, Inocencio says, —kill me already!
—Don’t create a drama, Tarzán. You know as well as I do we’re running a business here.
—Well, for you it may be a business, but for me it’s like a religion. I don’t put my name on work that looks like … dirt.
—Spare me your stories. We can’t rely on little old ladies from Winnetka. It may be all well and fine to make a beautiful chair, but it’s not enough volume to make us rich.
—Not now, but soon, soon.
—Soon? When? I’m sick and tired of waiting for soon. Tarzán, listen to me. If you would only let go a little and let me manage things for a while. You live in the clouds. You don’t have a head for business, you never have …
—Let you manage! I leave for a few weeks and look what you’ve done! You’re crazy!
—You’re the one who’s crazy! You never let me do anything. You can’t boss me around like when we were kids. You live in the past, do you hear me? You think it’s easy to work with someone like you? Ha! You want the truth? Tarzán, you drive me nuts! You get on my nerves! You make me sick! Do you realize you call out Zoila’s name at least twenty times an hour? I’m not lying. Like the hiccups. And that’s not all. I didn’t want to tell you, but we’ve lost more upholsterers from you making them rip up something they just did and having them do it over just because it doesn’t meet your standards. And let me tell you another thing: I can’t even put a hammer down without you picking it up and putting it away. You’re worse than una vieja! I’ve had it with you …
Inocencio tells all his troubles to his mother. —You know what Fat-Face says, Mamá. He says he and Baby are already thinking of opening up their own business.
—Is that so? says the Grandmother. —And let them. You don’t need them, mijo. You’re better off working for yourself.
—I’d like to see them try. I give them one month, and then they’d be begging to come back. Mamá, you don’t know th
em. They’re my brothers, but they’re terrible upholsterers. It’s that I can’t make a go of it with them. Fat-Face is always cutting corners, and Baby’s sloppiness is making us lose our best customers.
—You don’t need these mortifications. Listen to your mother, start your own business. The customers will follow. They know good work when they see it.
—It’s that I don’t have the centavos just now. Maybe one day. Ojalá.
But nothing, nothing in the Grandmother’s imagination prepared her for the horrors of a Chicago winter. It was not the picturesque season of Christmas, but the endless tundra of January, February, and March. Daylight dimmed to a dull pewter. The sun a thick piece of ice behind a dirty woolen sky. It was a cold like you can’t imagine, a barbarous thing, a knife in the bone, a cold so cold it burned the lungs if one could even believe such a cold. And the mountains of filthy snow shoveled in huge heaps, the chunks of ice on the sidewalk that could kill an aged citizen. —Oh, this is nothing, you should’ve been here for the Big Snow, the grandchildren bragged, speaking of the recent storm of ’68.
Big snow or little snow, it was all the same after the novelty of snow had worn off. A nuisance, a deadly thing, an exaggerated, long, drawn-out ordeal that made one feel like dying, that killed one slowly, a torture. Let me die in February, let me die rather than have to step out the door again, please, the Grandmother thought to herself, dreading having to dress like a monster to go outside. —Ay, ya no puedo. I can’t anymore, I can’t. And just when she could no longer, when she could no longer find the strength, the drive, the will to keep on living, when she was ready to fold into herself and let her spirit die, just then, and only then, did April arrive with sky the color of hope and branches filled with possibilities.
59.
Dirt
On Sunday mornings other families go to church. We go to Maxwell Street. —Vamos al Más-güel, Father announces, and starts to sing “Farolito” in a happy voice. He sings while he’s shaving. He sings so loud we can’t stand it. Father flicks the light on in the rooms where we’re sleeping. —Wake up. Vamos al Más-güel. He tears open curtains and raises venetian blinds, dust spinning in his wake, the summer sunlight killing us.
The Grandmother has already had her toast and coffee by the time we pick her up at Uncle Baby’s. She climbs in the van with a hairy ixtle shopping bag and her old maroon umbrella with an amber handle. —To protect me from the sun. Thanks to you sleepyheads it’s already so hot. No doubt we’ve missed the best buys by now, she adds, settling in. She’s wearing her market dress, a shapeless, faded shift. —The better to haggle with, the Grandmother insists. —This way they feel sorry for me.
But Father wears his good clothes even though Maxwell Street is filthy. Flies on crates of rotten cantaloupe. Rusty coffee cans filled with rusty nails. A plastic Timex box filled with gold molars. Boxed lemon meringue pies with the meringue a little squashed. Beyond the trash are real and not-so-real treasures. A man playing an accordion with a live chicken on his head. Strings of plastic pearls the colors of Easter eggs. A china shepherdess statue with a crack like a strand of blond hair, —From Paris, gimme ten dollars. The finest homemade tamales in the world from that Michoacán widow the police keep hassling because she doesn’t have a food permit.
Father hates used things. When we bring home toys from the Goodwill and the Salvation Army, we have to lie when he asks where we got them. —This? You bought it for us, remember? But Maxwell Street is different. It reminds Father of the open-air markets in Mexico.
Mother and the Grandmother are just glad to get out of the house. They wander the streets like prisoners escaped from Joliet. Everything amuses them. The blues musicians twanging away on steel guitars. The smoky scent of grilled barbecue. The medicine man wearing live snakes. They don’t care if they don’t buy a thing. They’re happy just to eat, to stop at 18th Street for carnitas and chicharrón, or at Taylor Street for Italian lemonade on the way home.
But Father is shopping with a purpose. He’s looking for his British wing tips, the Cadillac of zapatos, with pinhole designs along the toe and ankle, along the lace-ups, shoes so heavy if you dropped them on someone’s head, you’d kill him. But these are the shoes Father prefers, classic wing tips of oiled and waxed calfskin, a rich tobacco color.
It’s over to Harold’s we’re headed, corner of Halsted and Maxwell, across the street from Jim’s Original Hot Dogs.* Harold has been there since … —Since before you were born, girlie. Up a narrow, dark flight of wooden stairs. On each sagging step, a strip of aluminum so that your footsteps coming up or down announce you. Tap, tap, tap. The stairs creak. The walls are stained. The banister, dark from the oil of hands, is sagging. Everything is sagging like a pile of shoe boxes—building, shelves, steps, Harold.
Two hundred and forty pounds of Harold is standing with a shoe box in one hand, tissue paper gaping over, one shoe in the other hand. —Those costs you double in the Loop, Harold is saying to a black mother who is buying a pair of red high-tops for her lanky baby-faced boy.
Harold’s best shoes come in strange sizes, display shoes from the windows, tiny as a Cinderella. “Good lucky” for Father he has small feet.
It smells sweet in Harold’s, dusty and sweet as leather. The box window fan revolving slowly. All of Harold’s salesmen are young boys in ties, the place too hot for ties, especially today. Everyone sweating. Harold, tie-less, standing among a pile of messy boxes, talking too loud. How does he find anything here? He does. It’s not a fancy shop. The grime, the dirt, the sweet leather smell. Harold wiping his face with a handkerchief. He knows shoes like Father knows sofas.
There are only a few chairs, the ones with seats that lift up like in the movies. Mother and the Grandmother have already claimed the last two, Mother fanning herself with a shoe box lid, the Grandmother flicking a limp handkerchief.
Harold demands you step on a box lid when you try on a shoe. It’s a bit dim and dark, and there’s a real disorder that nobody minds, which makes finding a pair more exciting. At any second another Chicago fire could start, a spontaneous combustion of shoe polish and paper and shoehorns and dirty shelves. At any moment the place could collapse in a sea of flames. A speckled light enters from the windows that have been painted over in green paint. The windows yawning open. Noise of street hucksters and hawkers. The sticky scent of pork chop sandwiches rising from Jim’s Original Hot Dogs.
But at Harold’s Father forgets that British wing tips mean excellence. —Dirt, dirt, he says in Spanish, when examining the slippery leather soles, the fine stitching, the sweet scent of real Italian calfskin. —Trash, he keeps muttering in Spanish. —Mugre. Porquería. ¡Fuchi! Father feels it’s his duty to insult the merchandise. He’s furious whenever we pay the first price quoted for anything. —Fools! Store owners expect you to haggle.
—How much, my friend? Father asks.
—Them cost you fifty, Harold says, already talking to another customer.
—How much? as if he hadn’t heard.
Harold, sweating, looks at him, disgusted. —Amigo, I already told you, fifty bucks. Cincuenta. Cinco and oh.
Father: —Fifty? Then that look he is famous for, that eye of the rooster, head tilted a little as if he has razors tied to his talons and is about to attack in a gleam of green-black feathers and bloody foam.
—Fifty dollars? For this dirt …
Harold brings his 240-pound body of businessman over and plucks the shoe box from Father’s hands. —For you, not for sale.
—Get outta …
—You get out of here, Reyes. Don’t bother me, I’m busy selling shoes.
—Twenty-five. I give you twenty-five.
—I already told you, forget it. They’re the best, those shoes.
—Sheet on you. Get outta … Son of a mother … Muttering as we all step down the rickety aluminum-tipped steps that tap-tap with our defeat.
Father is a man possessed. We talk to him, but his eyes are spirals. We tug his sleeve and point
at items we’d like to buy—popsicles, bandanas, felt-tip pens. It’s useless.
After we’ve walked around the block and touched bunches of socks, six pairs for one dollar, after we’ve reached for a cold bottle of strawberry cream soda bobbing in an ice cooler with chunks of ice floating like icebergs, your hand numb when you finally fish it out, after we’ve heard the preacher man shouting for us to receive the Lord, He is coming, but he’s not here today at Maxwell Street, after we’ve walked past the doorways with big, busty women in halter tops and purple satin hot pants, after we’ve eyed sacks of Ruby Red grapefruit, a plaster Venus di Milo, a geranium plant growing in a coffee can, we do go back, we will go back, we must go back. Must we? We must! It’s terrible to have to climb the aluminum-tipped crooked stairs the second time.
Mother asks for the car keys.
Humiliating the third.
When we get to Harold’s, the Grandmother camps on the first step and says, —I’ll wait here.
—How much? Father asks Harold once more, as if this was the first time.
—Forty-five, Harold snorts. —And you’re getting them dirt cheap, too!
—Thirty! Father says.
—Forty! That’s what I paid for them.
—Thirty-five!
—I said forty and get outta here, you heard me!
Father pays his money, muttering, —Dirt, dirt, for this dirt. All the while Harold is stuffing the bills in his shirt pocket and waving him off, waving his arms as if saying, —You’re nuts, get lost, forget it. Both of them terribly angry, ruined even, all day. Enraged. Disgusted.
Triumphant!
* Taquitos de Pine-Sol.
Father’s favorite taquería is a place on Halsted Street called La Milagrosa, a few blocks south from Jim’s Original Hot Dogs on Maxwell. Father likes to tell the story about the first time he took Mother there. They were still newlyweds. Mother was not impressed.