Night at the Fiestas: Stories Read online

  Instead, of course, our recitations took place in Sunday school before Mass. One by one we stood before our classmates as our teacher, Mrs. Reyes, followed our words from her Bible. Antonia recited the same psalm she had recited the year before. When it was my turn, I stumbled over the phrase, “For my iniquities are gone over my head: and as a heavy burden are become heavy upon me.” When I sat down with the other children, tears gathered behind my eyes and I told myself that none of it mattered.

  A week before the procession, my mother met me outside school. During the day she rarely left the store or my little brothers, so I knew it was important.

  “Mrs. Reyes came by the store today,” my mother said. I couldn’t tell from her face if the news had been good or bad, or about me at all. She put her hand on my shoulder and led me home.

  I walked stiffly under her hand, waiting, eyes on the dusty toes of my shoes.

  Finally my mother turned and hugged me. “You did it, Maria.”

  That night we celebrated. My mother brought bottles of ginger ale from the store, and we shared them, passing them around the table. My father raised his and drank to me. Nemecia grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

  Before we had finished dinner, my mother stood and beckoned me to follow her down the hall. In her bedroom she took down the box from her wardrobe and lifted out the wings. “Here,” she said, “let’s try them on.” She tied the ribbons around my arms over my checked dress and led me back to where my family sat waiting.

  The wings were light, and they scraped against the doorway. They moved ever so slightly as I walked, the way I imagined real angel wings might.

  “Turn around,” my father said. My brothers slid off their chairs and came at me. My mother caught them by the wrists. “Don’t go get your greasy hands on those wings.” I twirled and spun for my family, and my brothers clapped. Nemecia smiled and served herself seconds.

  That night Nemecia went up to bed when I did. As we pulled on our nightgowns, she said, “They had to pick you, you know.”

  I turned to her, surprised. “That’s not true.”

  “It is,” she said simply. “Think about it. Antonia was last year, Christina Moya the year before. It’s always the daughters of the Altar Society.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me before, but of course she was right. I would have liked to argue, but instead I began to cry. I hated myself for crying in front of her, and I hated Nemecia. I got into bed, turned away, and fell asleep.

  Sometime later I woke to darkness. Nemecia was beside me in bed, her breath hot on my face. She patted my head and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Her strokes became harder. Her breath was hot and hissing. “I am the miracle child. They never knew. I am the miracle because I lived.”

  I lay still. Her arms were tight around my head, my face pressed against her hard sternum. I couldn’t hear some of the things she said to me, and the air I breathed tasted like Nemecia. It was only from the shudders that passed through her thin chest into my skull that I finally realized she was crying. After a while she released me and set me back on my pillow like a doll. “There now,” she said, arranging my arms over the covers. “Go to sleep.” I shut my eyes and tried to obey.

  I spent the afternoon before Corpus Christi watching my brothers play in the garden while my mother worked on her altar. They were digging a hole. Any other time I would have helped them, but tomorrow was Corpus Christi. It was hot and windy and my eyes were dry. I hoped the wind would settle overnight. I didn’t want dust on my wings.

  I saw Nemecia step out onto the porch. She shaded her eyes and stood still for a moment. When she caught sight of us crouched in the corner of the garden, she came over, her strides long and adult.

  “Maria. I’m going to walk with you tomorrow in the procession. I’m going to help you.”

  “I don’t need any help,” I said.

  Nemecia smiled as though it was out of her hands. “Well.” She shrugged.

  “But I’m leading it,” I said. “Mrs. Reyes chose me.”

  “Your mother told me I had to help you, and that maybe I would get to wear the wings.”

  I stood. Even standing, I came only to her shoulder. I heard the screen door slam, and my mother was on the porch. She came over to us, steps quick, face worried.

  “Mama, I don’t need help. Tell her Mrs. Reyes chose me.”

  “I only thought that there will be other years for you.” My mother’s tone was imploring. “Nemecia will be too old next year.”

  “But I may never memorize anything so well ever!” My voice rose. “This may be my only chance.”

  My mother brightened. “Maria, of course you’ll memorize something. It’s only a year. You’ll get picked again, I promise.”

  I couldn’t say anything. I saw what had happened: Nemecia had decided she would wear the wings, and my mother had decided to let her. Nemecia would lead the town, tall in her white dress, the wings framing her. And following would be me, small and angry and ugly. I wouldn’t want it next year, after Nemecia. I wouldn’t want it ever again.

  Nemecia put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s about the blessed sacrament, Maria. It’s not about you.” She spoke gently. “Besides, you’ll still be leading it. I’ll just be there with you. To help.”

  “Hijita, listen—”

  “I don’t want your help,” I said. I was as dark and savage as an animal.

  “Maria—”

  Nemecia shook her head and smiled sadly. “That’s why I am here,” she said. “I lived so I could help you.” Her face was calm, and a kind of holiness settled into it.

  Hate flooded me. “I wish you hadn’t,” I said. “I wish you hadn’t lived. This isn’t your home. You’re a killer.” I turned to my mother. My words were choked and furious. “She’s trying to kill us all. Don’t you know? Everyone around her ends up dead. Why don’t you ever punish her?”

  My mother paled, and suddenly I was afraid. Nemecia was still for a moment, and then her face clenched and she ran into the house.

  AFTER THAT, EVERYTHING HAPPENED very quickly. My mother didn’t shout, didn’t say a word. She came into my room carrying the carpetbag she used when she had to stay at the home of a sick relative. I made my face more sullen than I felt. Her silence was frightening. She opened my bureau and began to pack things into the bag: three dresses, all my drawers and undershirts. She put my Sunday shoes in too, my hairbrush, the book that lay beside my bed, enough things for a very long absence.

  My father came in and sat beside me on the bed. He was in his work clothes, pants dusty from the field.

  “You’re just going to stay with Paulita for a while,” he said.

  I knew what I’d said was terrible, but I never guessed that they would get rid of me. I didn’t cry, though, not even when my mother folded up the small quilt that had been mine since I was born and set it into the top of the carpetbag. She buckled it all shut.

  My mother’s head was bent over the bag, and for a moment I thought I’d made her cry, but when I ventured to look at her face, I couldn’t tell.

  “It won’t be long,” my father said. “It’s just to Paulita’s. So close it’s almost the same house.” He examined his hands for a long time, and I too looked at the crescents of soil under his nails. “Your cousin has had a hard life,” he said finally. “You have to understand.”

  “Come on, Maria,” my mother said gently.

  Nemecia was sitting in the parlor, her hands folded and still on her lap. I wished she would stick out her tongue or glare, but she only watched me pass. My mother held open the door and then closed it behind us. She took my hand, and we walked together down the street to Paulita’s house with its garden of dusty hollyhocks.

  My mother knocked on the door and then went in, telling me to run along to the kitchen. I heard her whispering. Paulita came in for a moment to pour me milk and set out some cookies, and then she left again.

  I didn’t eat. I tried to listen, but couldn’t make out any wor
ds. I heard Paulita click her tongue, the way she clicked it when someone had behaved shamefully, like when it was discovered that Charlie Padilla had been stealing from his grandmother.

  My mother came into the kitchen. She patted my wrist. “It’s not for long, Maria.” She kissed the top of my head.

  I heard Paulita’s front door shut, heard her slow steps come toward the kitchen. She sat opposite me and took a cookie.

  “It’s good you came for a visit. I never see enough of you.”

  The next day I didn’t go to Mass. I said I was sick, and Paulita touched my forehead but didn’t contradict me. I stayed in bed, my eyes closed and dry. I could hear the bells and the intonations as the town passed outside the house. Antonia led the procession, and Nemecia walked with the adults; I know this because I asked Paulita days later. I wondered if Nemecia had chosen not to lead or if she had not been allowed, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

  I stayed with Paulita for three months. She spoiled me, fed me sweets, kept me up late with her. Each night she put her feet on the arm of the couch to stop the swelling, balanced her jigger of whiskey on her stomach, and stroked the stiff gray hair on her chin while she told stories: about Cuipas when she was a girl, about the time she snuck out to the fiestas after she was supposed to be asleep. I loved Paulita and enjoyed her attention, but my anger at my parents simmered even when I was laughing.

  My mother stopped by, tried to talk to me, but in her presence the easy atmosphere of Paulita’s house became stale. Over and over she urged me to visit her in the store, and I did once, but I was silent, wanting so much to be drawn out, disdaining her attempts.

  “Hijita,” she said, pushing candy at me across the counter.

  I stood stiff in her embrace and left the candy. My mother had sent me away, and my father had done nothing to stop her. They’d picked Nemecia, picked Nemecia over their real daughter.

  Nemecia and I saw each other at school, but we didn’t speak. The teachers seemed aware of the changes in our household and kept us apart. People were kind to me during this time, a strange, pitying kindness. I thought they knew how angry I was, knew there was no hope left for me. I too would be kind, I thought, if I met myself on the road.

  The family gathered on Sundays, as always, at my mother’s house for dinner. That was how I had begun to think of it during those months: my mother’s house. My mother hugged me, and my father kissed me, and I sat in my old place, but at the end of dinner, I always left with Paulita. Nemecia seemed more at home than ever. She laughed and told stories and swallowed bite after neat bite. She seemed to have grown older, more graceful. She neither spoke to nor looked at me. Everyone talked and laughed, and it seemed only I remembered that we were eating with a murderer.

  “Nemecia looks well,” Paulita said one night as we walked home.

  I didn’t answer, and she didn’t speak again until she had shut the door behind us.

  “One day you’ll be friends again, Maria. You two are sisters.” Her hand trembled as she lit the lamp.

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. “No,” I said. “We won’t. We’ll never be friends. We aren’t sisters. She’s the killer, and I’m the one who was sent away. Do you even know who killed your brother?” I demanded. “Nemecia. And she tried to kill her own mother too. Why doesn’t anyone know this?”

  “Sit down,” Paulita said to me sternly. She’d never spoken to me in this tone. “First of all, you were not sent away. You could shout to your mother from this house. And, my God, Nemecia is not a killer. I don’t know where you picked up such lies.”

  Paulita lowered herself into a chair. When she spoke again, her voice was even, her old eyes pale brown and watery. “Your grandfather decided he would give your mother and Benigna each fifty acres.” Paulita put her hand to her forehead and exhaled slowly. “My God. So your grandfather stopped by one morning to see Benigna about the deed. He was still on the road, he hadn’t even made it to the door, when he heard the shouting. Benigna’s cries were that loud. Her husband was beating her.” Paulita paused. She pressed the pads of her fingers against the table.

  I thought of the sound of fist on flesh. I could almost hear it. The flame of the lamp wavered and the light wobbled along the wide planks of Paulita’s kitchen floor.

  “This wasn’t the first time it had happened, just the first time your grandfather walked in on it. So he pushed open the door, angry, ready to kill the man. There was a fight, but Benigna’s husband was drunk and your grandfather wasn’t young anymore. Benigna’s husband must have been closer to the stove and to the iron poker. When they were discovered—” Paulita’s voice remained flat. “When they were discovered, your grandfather was already dead. Benigna was unconscious on the floor. And they found Nemecia behind the wood box. She’d seen the whole thing. She was five.”

  I wondered who had walked in first on that brutality? Surely someone I knew, someone I passed at church or outside the post office. Maybe someone in my family. Maybe Paulita. “What about Nemecia’s father?”

  “He was there on his knees, crying over Benigna. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ he kept saying.”

  How had it never occurred to me that, at five years old, Nemecia would have been too small to attack a grown man and woman all at once? How could I have been so stupid?

  “It was terrible for your mother, you know. That day she lost her father, and she lost her sister, too. Oh, how those girls loved each other.” Paulita laughed without mirth. “But Benigna won’t be back. She barely even writes.”

  If my mother didn’t fear Nemecia, then the love she showed my cousin was just that: love. Love for her sister, love for her father, love for a child terrified and abandoned, love for an entire life lost to my mother forever. It was even possible that amid all that loss, caring for Nemecia was what had saved my mother. And there was absolutely nothing—no recitation, no feat of strength—I could do to shift that.

  At school I watched from across the yard for signs of what Paulita had told me, but Nemecia was the same: graceful, laughing, distant. I felt humiliated for believing her, and I resented the demands she made on my sympathy. Pity and hatred and guilt nearly choked me. If anything, I hated my cousin more, she who had once been a terrified child, she who could call that tragedy her own. Nemecia would always have the best of everything.

  NEMECIA LEFT FOR CALIFORNIA three months after Corpus Christi. In Los Angeles, Aunt Benigna bought secondhand furniture and turned the small sewing room into a bedroom. She introduced Nemecia to her husband and to the miracle child. There was a palm tree in the front yard and a pink-painted gravel walkway. I know this from a letter my cousin sent my mother, signed with a flourish, Norma.

  I moved back to my mother’s house and to the room that was all mine. My mother stood in the middle of the floor as I unpacked my things into the now-empty bureau. She looked lost.

  “We missed you,” she said, looking out the window. And then, “It’s not right for a child to be away from her parents. It’s not right that you left us.”

  I wanted to tell her that I had not left, that I had been left, led away and dropped at Paulita’s door.

  “Listen.” Then she stopped and shook her head. “Ah, well,” she said, with an intake of breath.

  I placed my camisoles in the drawer, one on top of the other. I didn’t look at my mother. The reconciliation and tears and embraces that I’d dreamt about didn’t come, so I hardened myself against her.

  OUR FAMILY QUICKLY GREW over the space Nemecia left, so quickly that I often wondered if she’d meant anything to us at all.

  Nemecia’s life became glamorous in my mind—beautiful, tragic, the story of an orphan. I imagined that I could take that life for myself. Night after night I told myself the story: a prettier me, swept away to California, and the boy who would find me and save me from my unhappiness. Cuipas slept among the vast, whispering grasses, coyotes called in the distance, and Nemecia’s story set my body alight.

  We attended Nemecia�
��s wedding, my family and I. We took the long trip across New Mexico and Arizona to Los Angeles, me in the backseat between my brothers. For years I’d pictured Nemecia living a magazine shoot, running on the beach, stretched on a chaise longue beside a flat, blue pool. As we crossed the Mojave Desert, though, I began to get nervous—that I wouldn’t recognize her, that she’d have forgotten me. I found myself hoping that her life wasn’t as beautiful as I’d imagined it, that she’d finally been punished.

  When we drove up to the little house, Nemecia ran outside in bare feet and hugged each of us as we unfolded ourselves from the car.

  “Maria!” she cried, smiling, and kissed both my cheeks, and I fell into a shyness I couldn’t shake all that week.

  “Nemecia, hijita,” my mother said. She stepped back and looked at my cousin happily.

  “Norma,” my cousin said. “My name is Norma.”

  It was remarkable how completely she’d changed. Her hair was blond now, her skin tanned dark and even.

  My mother nodded slowly and repeated, “Norma.”

  The wedding was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I was wrung with jealousy. I must have understood then that I wouldn’t have a wedding of my own. Like everything else in Los Angeles, the church was large and modern. The pews were pale and sleek, and the empty crucifix shone. Nemecia confessed to me that she didn’t know the priest here, that she rarely even went to church anymore. In a few years, I too would stop going, but it shocked me then to hear my cousin say it.

  They didn’t speak Spanish in my aunt’s house. When my mother or father said something in Spanish, my aunt or cousin answered resolutely in English. I was embarrassed by my parents that week, the way their awkward English made them seem confused and childish.