The Smell of Old Lady Perfume Read online

  My mom came home that night and told us he’d started talking again. He missed us and couldn’t wait to be back.

  The wait was unbearable, but this time it was without the question mark that had sent all the angry blood rushing to Silvia’s face. There was no more, “Do you think Apá is coming back?”

  On Tuesday afternoon, Amá rolled my apá into our living room in a blue vinyl wheel chair on loan from the hospital. He wore the warm-ups that he always wore around the house when he wasn’t working. The baseball cap that usually covered his bald head sat on his lap. His hair had turned ash-colored. He looked tired. His smile pulled downward, but there was something in his eyes. To me he still looked like he could do anything and everything.

  I looked at my brothers and then at Amá. When no one opened their mouth, I ran to Apá’s side. I hugged him tight, tight, tight, to give him everything I’d held onto. With his one strong arm he hugged me back and whispered that he just wanted things to go back to what they used to be.

  What Dr. Gutierrez and the green guys at the hospital told my mom was that some people who went through what Apá did lost movement in parts of their bodies, sometimes a whole side. They couldn’t talk or sometimes think the same.

  Maybe it was because Apá loved us so much or because he was so stubborn, but he insisted everything was fine. He said it to all the people who called on the phone too—until the phone stopped ringing. He told us the wheel chair was just for show. He got out of the chair and made a big deal of walking into the living room. He said he felt only a little like he was walking in a bowl of Jello. He said he felt a little slow and sometimes numb, but all he needed was a good stretch. He was almost the same.

  Except: the doctors wanted him to take medication. He refused, took up a stretching regimen, doubled up on the garlic and started drinking Chinese herbal tea.

  With his second chance also came an avalanche of “no’s”: no work, no red meat, no salt, no sugar, no cheese, no grease, no smoking, no, no, no. Those “no’s” were the hardest part for him. My Amá called them his temptations.

  Amá was going to get a job so Apá could stay home and get better. He was passing his business on to his buddy Tomás, at least for a while. Tomás had worked with him for a long time.

  Other “no’s” were not so easy to control. “Take care of your apá,” Amá said. She wanted us to watch out for Apá smoking in the bathroom. She said that we’d know when he did because the one time he’d tried to quit, she’d smelled the smoke on the hand towels. Amá told me to find Apá’s cigarettes and hide them.

  I found them underneath the bathtub and flushed them down the toilet. Apá didn’t say anything about it because that would’ve been admitting that he was planning on smoking to begin with.

  When Apá insisted on driving the few blocks to the grocery store, Amá insisted on a nice walk there instead. She and Clark each grabbed him by one hand so that he had no choice. At the store, they reminded him that he wasn’t supposed to eat red meat. He came home with a bag of vegetables and raw dissatisfaction on his face.

  Amá grabbed lettuce, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers and limes from the bags. She cut up the vegetables and put them together in an extra-large plastic mixing bowl. She cut a couple of limes in half and squeezed the juice onto the raw veggies. I helped. I opened the refrigerator and put everything away after she was done.

  Then she told me to tell Apá that dinner was ready. “Apá!” I yelled out. “Do you want me to get you some salad?”

  “I rather have tacos,” he answered.

  After the salad, we watched a movie. When Silvia forgot to leave the salt off the popcorn, I yelled at her. She yelled back. I never won those shouting matches, but she crumpled when I reminded her it was for my dad.

  At bedtime, I looked around. I saw my brothers sucked into the television next to Apá. My dad sat on the couch rubbing his right leg. Silvia stood there with a scowl still on her face. My mom helped my abuelita pack for her return to El Florido. After Abuelita went to sleep, Amá sat on the couch with her head on Apá’s shoulder. I saw them like that, and I thought it might be okay.

  When I kissed my dad goodnight, he told me how upset he was that we’d been staying home from school, waiting for him. “School is important, mija. I’m taking you back myself tomorrow,” he said. “Now, go to bed.” I kissed him goodnight again and again.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Breath

  Apá nudged me on the shoulder to get ready for school the next morning. I opened my eyes. He stood there fully dressed in brown pants and the shirt Amá got him the year before when he’d joked it was his 153rd birthday.

  I was so relieved to see Apá standing there, I said the first thing that popped into my head—I told him I’d been holding my breath. Apá said it was okay. “I’ve been catching mine,” he said.

  Amá kissed us good-bye and wished us luck at school. She was leaving early to drop off job applications so Apá was going to finish getting us ready. Our first day of school outfits had returned to the living room couch. We dressed ourselves once my mom was gone. My special skirt sat on the couch, but I told my dad I didn’t want to wear it. He let me wear whatever I wanted. I pulled on a pair of pants that would help me fit into the middle of the week.

  Apá let us have sugar cereal for breakfast. We were usually only allowed to eat sugar cereal on Saturday mornings. “Why is Amá getting a job?” Clark asked Apá with his mouth full.

  “She doesn’t want to sit at home bored all day with me,” Apá told him and laughed at his own joke.

  “I’ll stay with you,” Clark said.

  “No, you have to go to school and learn.”

  Apá hardly ever let us miss school. It was because his father had made him quit young and work hard. It was intense labor, like hauling grain and cleaning pig pens. He wanted us to make the most of the opportunities he’d never had.

  Those days Apá was in the hospital were the first time in a long time that we missed school. I’d even gotten a perfect attendance ribbon the year before. Of course, it wasn’t always like that. I missed sixty-four days in the first grade. I spent a good part of that year at home with an ear infection and a bad case of “papí-tis.” Papítis was the word Amá called it when we couldn’t bear to spend a single minute away from Apá.

  The year I missed that much school, Clark was still a baby. He took up all of Amá’s time and Apá took care of the rest of us. If I felt even a little sick, I got up extra early and jumped on top of Apá’s mountain of a pansa. “Let me go to work with you, Apá,” I begged, jumping on his belly, watching it jiggle.

  “You know, when I was your age, I wanted to go to school. I loved school. I tramped twenty miles through the snow every day just to get there,” he said. I had no idea that it didn’t snow like that in Chihuahua.

  Still I begged and begged him to let me stay with him. Sometimes he gave in. “Ok. Let’s get ready then,” he’d say. He’d pull on his work clothes, and I’d put on comfortable clothes. He’d grab his hard hat, and we’d be on our way.

  When we got old enough that missing more than a few days of math made a difference in our grades, my dad didn’t let us stay home anymore.

  When Clark begged to stay with him that first day back in school after his stroke, the answer was a firm NO.

  After we ate, Silvia took Clark and me outside. She hissed at us not to bug my dad about staying home anymore. If we kept bugging him or cried, it was only going to make him feel bad. Did we want him to feel bad?

  At the front door, Apá checked our backpacks to make sure we had our school supplies. Since Amá had hidden the truck keys, Apá walked us to school. He didn’t make Clark ride the little kid bus, but let him walk with us instead. He held his hand the whole way there.

  Apá let Silvia and Angel Jr. walk into their school on their own. The middle school was right across the street from the elementary school, and Amá had already called them to explain everything.

  It wa
sn’t that easy for Clark and me. Apá walked us to the principal’s office. He liked going in and saying hello to everyone when he dropped us off. The ladies there knew him. They also knew about the hospital because Amá had told the principal’s secretary, and the office ladies liked to gossip. They told Apá how great it was to have him back.

  When Apá hugged Clark good-bye and left, Clark cried. They weren’t soft tears. It was full-on bawling. I wanted to cry too. What if my dad wasn’t home when we got out? What if something bad happened again? What if this time we weren’t there? I was as scared as Clark, but I remembered what Silvia said. I whispered in Clark’s ear. I asked him to stop or the office ladies were going to have to call my dad. Then he was going to make my dad feel bad. Clark calmed down, and I walked him the rest of the way to his classroom. Then the bell rang, so I ran to my first day of class.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Small

  By the time I actually started sixth grade, I felt like a burra—a donkey, which was what they called the kids who weren’t too smart. We had missed a little more than a week of school. Nothing was like it was supposed to be. I wasn’t sure how to explain it, except that I felt very small.

  I was like the new kid even though I’d been at the same school my whole life. I even got the ugly leftover chair. It had a bent-up metal tube that reached into a slab of wood which had probably been attacked by angry woodpeckers. I hung my backpack on the ugly chair and put my notebooks and binder in the rusty basket underneath. I had no choice.

  I sat there at the back of class where I couldn’t even see the chalkboard. The most I could see of my best friend Nora was the back of her head. I probably wouldn’t get to talk to her until lunch.

  I became hypnotized by the clock’s tick tock, tick tock. “Put your books away now. It’s time to go to the cafeteria,” the teacher, Ms. Hamlin, finally said. She pulled out her keys and a little plastic bag full of tiny carrots from her desk drawer.

  Ms. Hamlin wasn’t like any other teacher I’d ever had. She looked like a high school kid. Her hair was short and flipped up at the ends. She wasn’t much taller than a sixth grader. She didn’t speak Spanish either so she probably hadn’t grown up in El Paso. One hour a day, we switched teachers with another class. She taught them Social Studies. Their teacher, Mr. Guerrero, taught us Spanish language, which I already knew perfectly, of course!

  When Ms. Hamlin turned off the light, we put our books away and placed our heads on our desks. I sat quiet as a mouse with my head down. I waited for Ms. Hamlin to call out my name. “Miguel, Roy, Aaron…,” Miss Hamlin began calling out names. “Ollin, Izcalli, Arturo, Brenda, Antonia, Nora, Camila…,” she went on.

  Yes, Camila hadn’t moved to another school after all. Maybe she’d gotten scared of not knowing anyone at the private school.

  My own name drummed in my head, but not in Ms. Hamlin’s voice. The real voices grew farther and farther away and the tick tock got louder and louder. I started to think about what my dad might be doing at home. The door jiggled and locked before I knew it. I jumped up out of my chair. Everyone was gone! I tried the door. It was locked from the outside. They’d forgotten me!

  I walked to the window and pulled aside the blinds. On the other side of the window was a neat row of new portable classrooms. I returned to my desk. I took out my pencil case and chose the pencil with the biggest eraser. I traced the carvings in front of me, trying to figure out what to do. “Juan & Ceci forever. Southside Bears #1.” There were other scribbles from other kids, scratched over and erased. I put my finger in my mouth and wet it. I pressed it against the wood, smearing the marks. I rubbed at the words until they turned into tiny curls of dirt.

  My dad was probably eating cardboard for lunch, and just as miserable as me. I stared at the clock and its long arm, tick-tocking from under the light cast by the sun coming through a broken blind. Amazingly, only five minutes had passed.

  I heard the door handle turn. I quickly pushed the pencil and case back inside the desk. I stood up straight. I rushed toward the door. “Chela! What are you doing here?” Ms. Hamlin exclaimed. “How did you get here?”

  “I never left! You never called my name.” I looked at her.

  “Oh, Chela, I forgot you started class today. Come on. It’s a good thing I came back for my grade book.” She grabbed her things and we rushed to the lunchroom. “I’m not sure what happened,” she explained. She apologized five times before heading to the teachers’ lounge. I didn’t say anything. I still wanted her to like me.

  When I reached the front of the cafeteria, I saw a man in a hat standing by the door. It couldn’t be! It was Apá! I ran to him. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We’re going on a picnic,” he told me. He had already talked to the office ladies about taking us out of school for lunch. Silvia, Angel Jr. and skinny little Clark waited outside.

  We walked out the school’s front gate. There was the truck, sitting in front of the little park down the street from the school. He’d searched for the keys all morning and finally found them. He opened the double cab door and pulled out a pair of red and white Whataburger bags. “Waterburger!” Clark squealed.

  “Don’t worry, I’m only having a grilled chicken sandwich,” Apá said when Silvia started in on him about the food and the driving. Sometimes she was pushier than Amá.

  Apá winked at me. I sat down next to him on one of the park benches, and smiled a smile bigger than me. I forgot all about my absentminded teacher. I was with my dad, and only that mattered.

  CHAPTER

  10

  Clones

  I finished my class work before anyone else that afternoon, and Ms. Hamlin gave me the okay to use the only computer with the Oregon Trail game on it. It was a game where people pretended they were settlers and crossed a river, got married, wrote their name on the mountains and on just about anything.

  Nora came over when she finished her work. There was something different about her as she walked toward me, but I couldn’t figure out what. We hadn’t been face to face all day. I wanted to tell her about my dad coming home from the hospital and the lunch picnic. We hadn’t talked since before he’d gotten sick.

  Before I could say anything, Roy, who everyone thought was the cutest boy in school, walked up behind us. He watched the game quietly, waiting for a turn. The three of us were quiet until Nora looked at him and said, “Hey Roy! Chela was just saying she thinks you’re cute. She wrote your name on the trail.”

  I hadn’t even opened my mouth, much less about a boy. I didn’t understand why she had told him that. My heart fell into my shoe. I made like I hadn’t heard. I stared straight ahead, then I stood up and took the bathroom pass. I didn’t look at Roy.

  I hurried into the girls’ bathroom and locked the door. I didn’t want to think. I turned on the hand dryer and the water in the sink and left them running. I pushed the lever on the toilet paper dispenser and the paper hand towels until there was nothing left. I didn’t even hear the dryer or the water. There was only the pounding of that heart inside my shoe. My foot was pumping gallons of blood straight into my face.

  Someone knocked, then jiggled the door handle. “Chela,” Ms. Hamlin said. “I need the pass back.”

  I slid the pass under the door and heard her walk away. Miss Hamlin was young, but she was also old, and couldn’t help. When I became so transparent that I disappeared into the bathroom tiles, I opened the door. Nora sat against the wall next to the bathroom. She had on a guilty crooked smile that reminded me of when she lost her sister’s favorite sweater.

  “Don’t smile at me,” I told her, throwing a wad of paper at her.

  “Don’t be mad. The bell rang already,” she said. “I was just teasing. Maybe I was mean. Listen, I thought you should know. Camila invited me to be a part of her group at lunch. I don’t know why, but she doesn’t like you so I can’t be your friend anymore. I’m sorry.”

  She grabbed her book bag and walked away.


  I could follow her, but what would I say? I couldn’t compete. Camila could make people instantly popular. Anyone who spent time with her got noticed. Everyone knew her, even the teachers. It had always been like that. At first, it was because of her family. Her brother and sister taught at our school. Her cousin was a substitute. Her mom was president of the PTA.

  But Camila also came close to being perfect. “How polite” and “how smart” the teachers always said about her. She’d always been an A-class girl and always won the spelling bee. She was possibly the most beautiful sixth grade girl. Her long shiny black hair fell past her waist. She had clothes like only Barbie dolls wore.

  Most of the girls in school wanted to be like Camila. Suddenly, I knew what was different about Nora. From a certain angle, she looked like Camila already. Same clothes. Same shoes.

  Nora walked toward where Camilla’s group hung out after school. She didn’t look back. I followed her through the maze of kids still leaving the building until she became just another kid in the crowd. I couldn’t imagine that she was the same girl I called best friend for most of my life.

  Nora and I’d met in kindergarten. Back then, we were also close friends with Roy and his best friend Miguel. We were friends like only really little kids could be. We rode our bikes together. We went to the corner store together. If the clerk seemed even a little distracted, Miguel and Roy walked in, pretended to look, took penny candy in between their fingers, and made knuckles as they left. Outside, they undid their fists and dropped Hershey’s Kisses in our hands.

  As soon as we got too old for those trips, Nora and I started watching telenovelas after school at my house. Telenovelas were Cinderella stories. In La Fiera, our favorite, a poor girl met a boy with money, fell in love, was hated by his family, found out she was really rich all along, and—of course—they lived happily ever after.

  Nora always wanted to be in-love like in the soaps. Once she even had a crush on Miguel, freckles and all. That’s when she got it into her head that I should like Roy. Roy had big brown eyes and his last name was Gonzalez too. “If you marry him, you can keep your last name, just like my cousin Irma. For now, you can just kiss him,” Nora had told me.