The Smell of Old Lady Perfume Read online

  “You’re not going anywhere. Don’t close your eyes. We’re right here with you. You’re going to be fine. You’re going to be fine!” she told Apá. She held his head and rocked fast and light like a cicada’s wing. She ground her teeth, and I could tell she was trying hard not to cry, trying to hold herself. Only her body fluttered. She hummed that sound she did when we were sick or hurting. She refused to let him sink into the darkness.

  “We’re taking you to get help,” Amá said.

  Apá tried to smile, but only one corner of his mouth cooperated.

  Amá continued to hold Apá and rock.

  Angel Jr. went into the living room and dialed 911.

  Silvia sat on the bed and whispered to Clark who was just waking up.

  I didn’t listen to anything else. It was like walking far into a tunnel or a thought. I lay down on the floor, at the end of the rug, and held my wet face against the bottom of Apá’s bare feet. I was sure that he could feel me hugging him, even if his body couldn’t feel anything else. I held very still and heard only the sirens of the ambulance coming to get Apá.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Sick Days

  Amá said she wanted us at home so the house wouldn’t be empty and sad to return to. I was sure the house would be sad whether we went to school or stayed home. The truth was she didn’t want to have to pull us out of class if things got worse, so she called us in sick.

  “I’m going with you,” Angel Jr. said. But the ambulance driver wouldn’t let him get in. We couldn’t go to the hospital. No kids under the age of fifteen were allowed to visit. It had something to do with younger kids always getting sick. We shared colds, flus and other germs at school. They didn’t want us sharing these with people who were already sick. Since we hadn’t been to school, I wasn’t sure this had anything to do with us. We hadn’t even had the chance to meet any dangerous germs.

  “What do we do then?” Silvia asked.

  “Wait,” Amá said. She told us to stay off the phone in case she called and make like summer had never ended. But how could we do that with Apá sick?

  All summer long we’d waited outside for Apá to come home from work because his return was the best part of the day.

  Once after he came home, when a few warm drops from a few black clouds fell, we didn’t run inside. We held hands in a circle instead and skipped around, singing: Que llueva, que llueva, la Virgen de la cueva, los pajarillos cantan, la luna se levanta. “Let it rain, let it rain, the Virgin in the cave, the birds do sing, the moon rising.” Apá called it a rain dance for people who also went to Mass and believed in saints. When the water finally came drumming down and our backyard flooded, we followed the puddles. Apá grabbed giant pieces of flat wood from his wood pile and we pretended they were rafts—even after they sank when they hit the water. We giggled until our lips and toes turned blue.

  Another time we waited, it was so hot outside that the pavement felt like a frying pan on our bare feet, so we made like it was Día de San Juan. St. John was the one who baptized Jesus Christ. On that fake Día de San Juan, Apá got out of his truck, untangled the hose, turned it on, put his thumb over the hose’s opening, and baptized us all over with cold water. Then he sprayed water up into the air and made a rainbow.

  We ran under Apá’s rainbow until the backyard was like a soup bowl of mud. When I saw Angel Jr.’s hands dig into the soggy brown, I jumped out of the way. I ran behind Apá, hoping for protection. Sblat! There wasn’t any protection and a ball of mud hit me right in the face. Apá didn’t let it go any farther because I was complaining, and it made Amá furious when we dirtied up clothes anyway.

  Most days, Apá let us drink the leftover coffee he brought home in his thermos. He sat with us out on the back porch on his old log bench and watched as we mixed in three parts milk and as much sugar as could melt in room temperature coffee. We added ice. Café con leche me quiero casar…it started a song about a girl who wanted a husband. All we wanted was the coffee. We shook, shook, shook it, while we danced around the yard. We poured it into tiny porcelain cups that Silvia carefully washed, dried and put away in the dining room cabinet. We drank up. My dad’s leftovers made a sweet delicious coffee-flavored milk that went down smooth. Silvia allowed herself to be a kid, but made herself feel better by giving it a fancy name like “afternoon tea.” It was an idea she got from a ladies magazine.

  But when the ambulance came and took my dad away and we sat there waiting for him to come home, there was no dancing for the rain, no mud, and no tea party. Angel Jr. played video games. Clark made a cardboard welcome-home poster with the art set Silvia got for Christmas. Silvia read a book. I watched television.

  By the afternoon, I really started to wish we’d gone to school or at least to the hospital. Angel Jr. disappeared and later told us that he’d tried to sneak in to see Apá. He was tall enough to pass for a grown-up, but the front desk clerk had told him no just like the ambulance driver had.

  We lounged around the house all day as we pleased, and with each passing hour, the ceiling dropped closer and closer. Eventually it was a house with a ceiling only two feet high so that even if we were free to do anything, there was no room or desire to move.

  Finally I got off the couch and stood over Silvia. I looked over her shoulder until she turned around. She was annoyed, but I asked anyway. “Do you think Apá is coming back?”

  “Don’t even think that he’s not!” she snapped and threw the book at me as she stomped away.

  When Amá came home she told us they were keeping Apá at the hospital, and she didn’t know when he’d be back. She told us he had stopped talking but was thinking of us every minute he was there. Then she started calling people and letting them know about Apá.

  The hours became days, and my grandma, on my mom’s side, showed up and set up camp at our house. Abuelita lived a nine-hour bus ride away in El Florido and was the only grandma we knew. A handful of smiling pictures in our photo album hinted that we liked her once. She was an older version of my mom, one built like a washing machine, one more strict and religious than a nun, one who sometimes seemed to love church even more than she loved God. She wasn’t all bad though—she told my mom that she should let us go back to school. But Amá had already made up her mind that we wouldn’t return to school until my dad came home.

  So the days passed and nothing much changed, except that the air became thick with the smell of old lady perfume, of dying flowers and alcohol. It was the same smell from when my mom was sick with my little brother. It was the smell of bad things.

  CHAPTER

  5

  La Fe

  Amá let Silvia and me tag along with her to La Fe. La Fe was our neighborhood clinic. We went there when we weren’t feeling good or when we needed our teeth cleaned or for a checkup or shots.

  My mom wanted to talk to Dr. Gutierrez, our family’s regular doctor. He spoke Spanish, and she was sure he’d be able to help her better than the hospital doctors who seemed to be talking to her down their noses like she’d just crossed the river.

  La Fe wasn’t far enough from our house to get a ride. It was far enough to make me wish it were though. We couldn’t drive there either because Amá had never learned how to. She’d only ever seen two cars growing up, and those two cars had crashed one day in front of the plaza and in front of almost all the four hundred people who lived in El Florido. It’d left a big impression. She walked as much as possible, except for taking the bus once in a while or letting my dad drive her places.

  Amá was the fastest-walking grown-up in the world. Her calves were strong and curved. There was no medal or anything, but she acted like she was running a race. She got us everywhere faster than a bus. When we complained, she told us we “weren’t born in a car.”

  It was afternoon when we started walking to La Fe. The school bus with the kids who were too little to walk home by themselves drove up beside us. I’d been on that bus just a couple of few years before. The blur of yello
w made me wish I were still riding with the little kids. Being on that bus would’ve meant Apá was all right.

  I ground my heels into the pavement as if it hurt to go anywhere. It was hot outside. My shirt already clung to the underside of my arms and my socks were wet inside my shoes. “Pick up your feet,” Amá said to me. She hated when I dragged my feet. I dragged my feet even more.

  “Hurry—and stop dragging. Those are your new shoes,” Amá repeated as we got closer and closer to the clinic.

  When we got to La Fe, Silvia and I waited outside the door while Amá went into Dr. Gutierrez’s office. We eavesdropped through the open door. We overhead him say something went wrong inside Apá. A clot in his head cut the oxygen going to his brain. That’s why he couldn’t move. It was called a stroke. Dr. Gutierrez had talked to the doctors at the hospital and heard that Apá was holding on.

  Amá started to tell the doctor Apá’s life story. “Surviving is in his blood,” my mom told him. She told him how much Apá had gone through when he was young. “His own mother died of cancer when he was only a baby.” Apá never talked about her, but we’d heard the story anyway from my other grandmother who’d known his family growing up.

  My dad’s mom hadn’t wanted to die. She was a smart girl from the capital and knew what cancer was. She knew it wasn’t like a cold or a stomachache. My grandfather would tell her not to cry, and then cry himself. She died maybe dreaming of that young son who she wasn’t meant to love.

  My grandpa Francisco died several years later from what people believed was a broken heart. Completely orphaned at the age of thirteen, Apá lost everything. Their farm went to the bank. His sister Tina had grown up and left long before. Apá went from neighbor to neighbor helping out in exchange for a place to sleep and eventually saved up enough money to ride the rail lines up the Mexican desert to California. He was flung into a world of Levi jeans, brilliantine, English, and confusion. People whispered that they didn’t believe any good could come of a boy alone, set loose in the world. They told him he’d never grow up to be a man. But he did grow up.

  He followed my aunt to Los Angeles. They had never been close, but that quickly changed. Aunt Tina’s husband worked construction and from him Apá learned a skill. Apá eventually moved to El Paso and started a family of his own. He worked odd jobs until he started a construction business himself.

  My father survived.

  My mom told the doctor that my father hadn’t stepped into a doctor’s office since the days of his boyhood. Maybe it was on account of his parent’s death that he didn’t trust doctors much. He’d stayed away from them for years.

  Even when we were born, he’d kept his distance. “Angel just waited in the waiting room. He sat there and declared that’s what waiting rooms were for,” Amá told the doctor. She told him instead of visiting clinics, Apá read all about plants and their healing powers. If he coughed, he sipped lime juice and honey. If his stomach turned sour, he ate mint.

  He even swallowed a clove of garlic every night, believing it kept him healthy. He’d fallen off a roof on a job without breaking a bone. He’d been okay after being bitten by a black widow that had crawled out of the kitchen sink after spending months getting fat in the pipes. Every time he came out standing, he thanked the garlic.

  It didn’t mean he was a health nut. He still ate bad food for lunch at work, the kind you buy from the window of a truck and eat in a car. And—he smoked too many cigarettes.

  “But he’s a good man!”

  That’s what Amá wanted the doctor to know most of all. “I’m telling you all of this because he’s always taken care of us, and now we’re going to take care of him. We’re going to get him better,” she said.

  Amá wanted to know what to expect. Dr. Gutierrez told her it was different for every patient. “Those are particulars you have to discuss with the hospital, if he gets better. I’m sorry. We just have to wait and see.” But that’s what we’d been doing all along. Amá shook his hand and thanked him anyway.

  “I just wanted to scream at that guy! My dad is going to get better. He just has to,” Silvia whispered to me as we walked back home.

  My father held on.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Prayer

  Sunday morning rolled around.

  A Sunday could be like a regular day. You could maybe even have fun on a Sunday. But I was feeling sadder than ever because at the end of the day, Sunday meant another week. It meant starting all over again and more of the same.

  My dad hadn’t gotten any worse, but he also hadn’t gotten any better.

  Wishing for Apá to get better was like standing at the bottom of a crater and calling out but only our own voices called back. It was pointless. Because we couldn’t just wish, we prayed. So, though we didn’t go to Mass, we went to the church.

  It was a lot for us to even be doing that much. My mom usually had to spoon-force church on us. She nagged and nagged and that mostly made us want to go less, like when she would bug us to do the dishes. She kept telling us until it made us not want to do it even more.

  May was the only time we went to service willingly. Every day in May, every girl under the age of fifteen put on a dress and veil and went to church after school. Amá called it “Mary Service.” We walked up the church’s center aisle with handfuls of white daisies and carnations.

  The flowers were for the Virgencita’s altar. I even kind of liked it. I just had to make sure to be far back enough in line to avoid being pinched by Miss Mickey. She was the lady who lit the candles, passed out the flowers, and got friendly with the priest. She was a dried up cascarita, a shell of a woman. She wanted us to walk lightly, stand up straight, and hold our flowers as if we were offering a prayer to God. If we didn’t, she pinched us with the bite of a vicious tiny ant grabbing enough skin to make a painful point without leaving a bruise.

  I wasn’t surprised to see Miss Mickey at the back of the church when we walked in to pray for Apá. I sat in one of the front aisles with my brothers and sister. My super-religious grandma had stayed home. She had actually been to Mass already, and someone needed to be there in case Amá called. The phone had been ringing all day—my mom’s sisters from Juarez, my aunt Tina from California, the guys from Apá’s work. Besides, Abuelita didn’t mind that we went to church alone as long as we went. “Just get closer to God,” she said.

  I crossed myself. I knelt. I searched my mind for words. I couldn’t think of what to say. My mind wandered.

  Our church, St. Ignatius, wasn’t a square church with white walls. St. Ignatius was a fortress built long before Miss Mickey was born, long before Texas was part of the United States. It smelled old—old wood, old incense, and the awful smell of old women.

  There was plenty to look at. There were regular church-type things like wall murals, statues of saints and colored glass. If I squinted, I could even see the nuns praying behind the screens on both sides of the altar. The church was part of a convent, and the nuns prayed there several times a day and sang for special services. If I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated, I could hear them singing. They were songbirds whose language I didn’t understand, but I liked the echoes of their voices. Church wasn’t so bad when they were around. Still, on most days, sitting at St. Ignatius was a test no matter how many birds sang.

  I bent the tip of my left foot to the back of my right knee and switched feet. I watched Silvia with her hands clasped tightly. I knew that I should be praying too, but I wasn’t sure how to start.

  “I hope you study harder than you pray,” Miss Mickey said. She’d come up right behind me. She wrapped her white shawl tight around her thin shoulders.

  I unloaded the first thing that popped into my head. “Miss Mickey, if people are married in the eyes of God forever, how can a widow like you ever hope to get married again?”

  I don’t know why I talked back to her. Maybe I was angry that she’d reminded me about school.

  “God is going to turn your tongue to p
ork rinds for talking like that!” Miss Mickey chastised. I knew God wouldn’t turn my tongue to chicharrones. She said that to kids all the time, and everyone still had tongues made of flesh. What I said was rude, and I was sorry anyway.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Mickey,” I told her. “It’s just that my dad is sick, and…”

  “Don’t say anything else. The best way to get good things to happen is to be a good person. Stop thinking up nonsense and think of good things, Chela,” she said. She pushed the glasses with the half-frames and hanging chain up the bridge of her long nose.

  I whispered a thank-you to her. I turned back to the front of the church. I crossed myself. I crossed myself one more time. I tried to think about my dad without the scary parts that were half-true and half-imagination. I shut my eyes so tight I saw flashing colors. I saw his face. I slipped in my request—

  “Dear God, I want to be a good person. My dad is a good person. He really is. He’s always looking out for everybody. Please look out for him. Please help him to get better. Please, Please, PLEASE. Amen.”

  I repeated it in the way a person might do with a Hail Mary after confession. I wasn’t sure how else to go about it.

  When we got home, nothing had happened. I wanted so badly for it to be different, but…the smell of my grandmother’s perfume reminded me that she was still there and my dad was still sick.

  It was sad like Sundays. It didn’t matter if you were sick of Sundays. When they came at you, there wasn’t much you could do. They just were.

  CHAPTER

  7

  The Seventh Day

  The evening of the seventh day, something finally changed. A pair of doctors wearing mint-colored pajamas came out of my dad’s room at the hospital and told my mom that the difficult part was over. They were letting Apá out on Tuesday.