The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez

  “Go back to your mother,” Amalia said to him, “I’m sure she misses you.”

  “He doesn’t have anyone!” Juan shouted at her. “He’s from El Salvador.”

  Then the boy wasn’t from school. Amalia was startled by Juan’s angered tone, his words.

  The young man left the blanket on the ground. He touched Juan briefly on both shoulders. He left, glancing back once more.

  “He reminded me of Manny, when he ran away, that time, remember?” Juan turned away from her quickly. He picked up the blanket from the ground.

  Remember? How could she forget? She remembered everything about her dead son—and, yes, the Salvadoran boy had resembled him; he had the same look of bewildered innocence her son had never lost.

  That night Amalia thought she had screamed, but it must have been a nightmare because nobody heard her.

  A few days after—when Raynaldo was away for the night—she came home late from work and threw herself in bed, exhausted. She fell asleep immediately for the first time since Manny’s death.

  Teresa’s coughing wakened her. Amalia screamed: “Stop it! I have to work tomorrow. Stop it!” The coughing weakened, stopped.

  Amalia heard her children stirring. She walked barefoot on the cold floor, telling Gloria and Juan to go back to sleep. In the converted porch, she saw her mother propped on her pillow, the way she slept to secure her breathing, control the gasping cough. Teresa’s gauzy eyes were open. Amalia went back to bed.

  In the morning she found her mother in the same position, eyes still open. Teresa was dead. Now Amalia would have to make arrangements to deal with this new death. So she was glad she had managed to fall asleep again last night, to get a full night’s peaceful rest at last.

  5

  IN THE KTICHEN of her stucco bungalow in Hollywood on the morning that had begun when she saw the silver cross in the sky—imagined it—Amalia prepared her morning coffee, automatically setting another cup for Raynaldo on the table covered with red-and-white checkered linoleum. She always tried to avoid looking at the tiny mounds and streaks of gray borax that lined the edges of the room to ward off cockroaches, indomitable in summer. But her eyes could not keep from lingering over the chair Manny had claimed as his—it had one leg shorter than the others. She had removed the chair from the kitchen after his death, but its absence became more painful. It was kept, unused, against the wall.

  This remained out of her sight: Teresa’s La Dolorosa. Amalia had put it in the closet even before taking off the black dress she had borrowed from a neighbor for her mother’s flowery funeral. “A woman should have as many flowers when she leaves the world as when she married in church—if God granted her the blessing of a white wedding,” the old woman had told Amalia. Even surrounded by decorated chrysanthemums, and lying in the coppery coffin with her hands crossed over her rosary on her chest, Teresa had managed to look sternly at her daughter.

  After the funeral, one day—it seemed that it had occurred in one day—the deep trance within which Amalia had existed for months, in which only Manny’s death was real, lifted. She awakened one morning and felt reassured by Raynaldo’s protective arms about her; they had never been withdrawn, she had merely not felt their warmth. That weekend, she agreed to go dancing with him. At dinner she laughed at some nonsense or other of his. She knew that all her life she would be haunted by memories of her dead son and that the hurt and missing would always be there; but she also realized that the course of her life—which had included death instead of the peace she had thought might occur—must now continue. The Holy Mother would be with her—was with her—as she always was. Amalia had felt a saddened peace after that.

  But it was soon broken by the tension that developed—or did she just begin to notice it when she came out of the long trance?—among Raynaldo, Gloria, and Juan, the tension Raynaldo must have carried with them to El Bar & Grill last night when he stalked out angrily because that young man named Angel—she would not think of him; never again!—was admiring her. And how was that her fault?

  Was she missing Raynaldo so soon, and even though she knew he would come back? Amalia wondered in her kitchen now. This period with him had been one of the best. Not once had a utility been disconnected…. Well, she would miss his arm about her later this morning—but he’d be back by then—when she would watch her semanal, her weekly television drama, “Camino al Sueño.” On Saturdays, when he wasn’t working and after they had their coffee, he would follow her into the living room—the beds would have been folded away—and he would share a highlight of her week, that week’s installment of “The Road to a Dream.”

  On the kitchen table were stitched pieces of lavender material for a dress Amalia was making. She was an excellent seamstress and cut her own patterns out of newspapers. She had not decided whether this dress would be for her or for Gloria.

  When they entered the kitchen, Juan was wearing his pants, no shirt, Gloria was in a thin lemony dress she often put on before she made herself up. Both were barefooted.

  Amalia wanted to tell them—

  How beautiful they were!

  Juan kissed Amalia lightly on the cheek, as he always did in greeting. “I got something for you,” he said to her.

  Gloria walked to the refrigerator.

  To avoid kissing me? Amalia wondered, and wanted to order her to kiss her.

  Juan sat at the table. He held out some earrings to Amalia. They were large, with lots of glittering things, the kind she loved.

  Why this gift now? Amalia was immediately suspicious. Juan had never given her anything. “Where did you get the money for them?”

  Juan withdrew the earrings. “I’m working after school, man.” He bounced the earrings from hand to hand.

  It infuriated her when he called her “man,” although she knew it was just an expression. She had begun to notice that he used the word when he was trying to disguise something, hide something, by sounding tough.

  “Where are you working, Juan?” Amalia felt tense just to ask that question.

  “At a video rental store.”

  Juan resented menial jobs. When he had worked during other times, and even before his recent moodiness, he would come home and say, “That Mickey Mouse job is shit, just shit.” He had not sounded like that now. “Where is the store?” Amalia forced another question. She spoke to her children in a combination of English and Spanish, sliding from one to the other in the same sentence. They would answer her like that, except that they had no accent in English, that she could detect, except perhaps now and then. She had begun to notice that, in anger, her son and daughter would shift to English when they spoke to her. With each other they almost always talked in English, with slang words that annoyed her.

  Juan looked at her in exasperation. “In Hollywood, man, where else? I told you.”

  “He’s in the movies, Mom. A big star. He’s sure good-looking enough,” Gloria said, still not looking at her.

  And he was good-looking enough, Amalia knew. But you never saw young Mexicans in American movies. “You didn’t tell me you were working, Juan.” She would have remembered.

  “Yeah, Mom.” Gloria faced her finally. “He did tell you, I heard him.”

  Mom! Again that despised word that made her feel fat and ugly. “Maybe he told you,” Amalia could not keep accusation out of her voice, “you talk late every night.”

  “We hear you and Raynaldo, too,” Gloria said. She scratched one bare foot with the other. “Talking, I mean.”

  Amalia insisted Raynaldo keep his sex sounds low, sometimes quieting them herself by kissing him only for that purpose. She wanted to confront her daughter’s insolence. What are you holding against me? What could Teresa have told them? Amalia remembered Teresa’s whispers, prayers—out of that time of blackness, they had become like muffled curses.

  Juan placed the earrings carefully on the table. He touched his forehead, brushing his hair over the recent bruise there.

  “It’s almost healed, m’ijo
,” Amalia soothed him. He had explained it only vaguely—a fight at school, he’d fallen.

  “Fuckin’ bastards,” Gloria cursed.

  Juan looked at her quickly.

  A cautioning look. Amalia did not know what to react to immediately: Gloria’s apparent knowledge of what had caused the bruise, Juan’s signal to stop her, or to the filthy word. “Don’t use that word around me, Gloria, not here or anywhere else!” she demanded.

  “Fuck? That word? You never heard it before … Mom?”

  Yes, last night! “Never!” Amalia looked down because she thought her face might be flushed with shame.

  “Most people have,” Gloria said. “I bet Raynaldo has.”

  “He’s never used it in my presence,” Amalia was certain.

  Gloria shrugged. “You love him, Mom?”

  The easy words were like shots at Amalia. “Of course I love him. He’s my husband!” And even if he isn’t, how do you think we manage even this well? How do you think I can keep you in school? She wanted to ask them both that, remind them of her insistence that they must finish school, make something of themselves. Instead, and to halt these moments, she explained his absence, “He’s on one of his overnight hauls,” and she almost believed it herself.

  “He must’ve left late,” Gloria said. “Because he came back last night. When you were still out.”

  Returned here? To wait for her? After she stayed in the bar and—Amalia looked at Juan for verification.

  “I wasn’t here,” he said.

  “But he left right away because I told him to get the hell out of our house,” Gloria said. She touched her lips as if only now discovering she had not applied lipstick.

  “Gloria—” Juan seemed about to rebuke.

  “How dare you!” Amalia answered her daughter. Was it possible that she—and Juan—had pretended, all these years, to accept, yes, to like, Raynaldo? “You’re lying,” Amalia said, and wondered, Why? “And you remember that he’s been more of a father to you than—” She stopped. She tried never to mention Gabriel; only that he “had left.” Juan didn’t remember him, Gloria had never seen him—and it saddened Amalia to realize that.

  “Yeah, Mom?” Gloria goaded. Then she laughed. “I was just joking. What did the letter you got yesterday say?”

  Amalia had come in with it when she returned from work. She had placed it on the table—and they had both been there—before she put it into her purse. “I haven’t read it.” Despite the abrupt question, she could answer that quickly. There was nothing more the letter from the public attorney could say to her about her son, nothing.

  “Cops lie all the time,” Juan said.

  “Man, do they,” Gloria said. “Like at school—”

  “Yeah, they busted a lot of the vatos and said they were selling drugs,” Juan finished.

  Vatos! Cholo talk, gang talk. Amalia knew cops lied.

  “They’re real shit, Mom,” Gloria extended her contempt. “Know what they did? Enrolled in school, for months, pretended they’re students, right? Then they bust the guys they made friends with, say they bought drugs, sold drugs—lie, lie, lie.”

  “But they didn’t get everyone,” Juan seemed to enjoy that.

  Had he been arrested in that raid? Or had he been one of the ones they didn’t get? Was that how he was bruised? Had that happened around the time he had sheltered that Salvadoran boy in the garage? Was he Salvadoran? Had Juan told her that only to disorient her? Or were her son and daughter only concerned for her, about the sadness the letter from the public attorney might arouse again? Amalia welcomed a sudden tenderness toward her son, her daughter. “Give me your present, m’ijo,” she said.

  Juan held the earrings to her.

  “Put them on me.”

  Juan tried.

  Amalia finished for him. Manny would have known how, so tenderly, the way he had placed the flower in her hair, that distant day. Softly, she thanked her suddenly shy Juan.

  “They look beautiful on you,” Gloria’s voice softened. She touched the delicate coppery fringe on the earrings. “They glitter, just the way you like.”

  My little girl again! And my son! Amalia thought exultantly. Suddenly the mood of separation and closeness collided, overwhelmed her. She wished she had enough money to give her daughter a quinceañera’s coming-out. Girls her age dressed in white, vaunting their purity, carried flowers into a dance they presided over, escorted by a handsome young man—like Juan!—wearing a suit and tie. When as a girl she had worked for a wealthy Mexican-American family in El Paso, she had watched in fascination as the fifteen-year-old daughter fluttered like a bird in her frilly white dress, and—Now Amalia frowned, the memory blurring, leaving only a terrible, cold desolation…. “I’m sewing this dress for you,” she responded to Gloria’s softened tone; she had decided, that very moment, that the dress would be for her.

  Gloria held the stitched portion up to her chest. “Too big. I think you’re making it for yourself, Mom.”

  How frail closeness could be! Amalia felt. “What was that!” Had the house trembled?

  “It’s not an earthquake, ‘Amá,” Juan laughed. “Just a truck idling.”

  “Well, this is earthquake weather, so hot and still.” Amalia wanted to hear their usual denials.

  “Superstitions, ‘Amá,” Juan reassured. “There’s no such thing.”

  Amalia had what she had wanted: reassurance that there would be no earthquake, and being called “‘Amá” by Juan.

  The vibrating sound had turned into the growl of a motorcycle.

  “It’s Mick.” Gloria had peered out the barred window. She ran out of the room.

  To make herself up, Amalia knew. She was relieved that there was no earthquake, but it didn’t please her that Mick was here. Why did there have to be either?

  Mick walked in, swaggered in.

  With shiny black pants! In this heat? He was about Juan’s age. He might have been good-looking, Amalia allowed herself to think—if it weren’t for that… costume. What else to call it? All that black, and the shirt without sleeves and slit open at the sides, and the silvery belt and that wristband with studs. And those boots!—the kind gringo cowboys wore in Texas when she was growing up. If that’s what he was attempting, he had succeeded in looking ominous, rough, although—who could miss this?—he was somewhat scrawny. And that single earring!… Was he a Stoner?—Amalia didn’t want even to wonder about that, about his being one of the new breed of Mexican-American gangs who adopt Anglo ways, their drugs, their music.

  “Ésele” Juan greeted him.

  Ésele!—gang slang for “guy”; but, Amalia constantly reminded herself, many young Mexicans speak like that and aren’t in the cholo gangs.

  Mick nodded at Juan.

  Amalia was glad to detect a tension between the two.

  “Hi, Am-al-lee-ah,” Mick drawled.

  Amalia winced at the familiarity, and his pronunciation of her name. “Hello—” She stopped deliberately, frowning deeply, as if attempting to remember his name. “Hello—”

  “Mick,” he reminded her.

  “Pero cual es tu nombre verdadero?” Amalia asked.

  “Huh? Oh, I don’t speak Mexican, never learned it.” Mick emphasized his drawl.

  Amalia said in English: “I said, What’s your real name? Mick’s no Mexican-American name.”

  “Huh?”

  He muttered that sound constantly, as if everything baffled him—and it annoyed Amalia. “I said, Mick’s no—”

  “Oh, yeah, well, my dad’s name was Miguel.” He pronounced it Mi-goo-ell. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes,” Amalia said. “Are you ashamed of being Mexican?”

  Mick glanced at Juan, as if gauging whether to contain his anger. He smiled, a crooked, rehearsed smile. “Naw, but—” Then he shrugged Amalia’s question away. He said, as if repeating an explanation to himself: “All you gotta do is look around to see who’s on top, and if you wanna get there—”

  “You
wanna get… where?—ésele?” Juan asked him.

  Amalia laughed aloud, welcoming Juan’s sarcasm, even his calling Mick “ésele.”

  “Sure is hot,” Mick shifted away. “Earthquake weather.”

  “That’s a stupid superstition,” Amalia was glad to say. “And those pants make you hotter.”

  “Huh?” Then Mick laughed suggestively. “I’ll say they do!”

  “You real hot shit—huh?—ésele?” Juan taunted. “What if—?” He stopped when he saw his sister.

  Dressed now in a short, tight skirt and a blouse that left a strip of her flat stomach exposed, Gloria stood at the door, as if undecided where she belonged within the room.

  Incredible to believe that both skirt and “blouse” had once been one of Amalia’s ruffled dresses, converted—how?—into this by her daughter. Well, she wouldn’t be surprised if Gloria used only the ruffle for a skirt!… Amalia stared at her pretty daughter, in admiration and astonishment. How could she have put on so much makeup so quickly, and how could she make her hair do all that in such a short time?—piled and teased about her face.

  After moments, Gloria walked over to Mick. He kissed her, lazily nuzzling her face, glancing triumphantly at Juan and Amalia.

  Amalia looked away. Juan stared at them.

  Suddenly there was a crashing metallic sound outside.

  “Fuckin’ shits were following me!” Mick stood up, tense. “Probably knocked my bike over.” He did not go out to see.

  He looks like a terrified boy, Amalia thought. There were boys like him killing and being killed now all over the city, and so she, too, felt afraid.

  Juan had run out of the kitchen, into the front room.

  Gloria answered Amalia’s look: “Mick thinks some dudes are following him ‘cause he’s going out with me.”

  “Just crazies.” Juan was back. “They’re gone.”

  “Motherfuckers,” Mick muttered.

  “Hey, man—” Juan warned him, indicating Amalia.

  There was no word Amalia detested more than the one Mick had just said. Juan had used it in a rage when he was fired from an after-school job clearing tables at Denny’s Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. “Motherfucker thought I was after his girl,” he’d said, “and who the hell wants her, man?” Amalia had expressed her outrage at the word; it made her cringe when she heard it tossed on the street, on buses. Juan had apologized. Imagine!—that there could be such a word. She could not even think it. Her anger allowed warm blood to return to her body, easing the abrupt fear the shouts had created, the tension of violence—eased, too, by the fact that Juan had “protected” her; she loved that.