Thirteen Senses (3 page)

“Oh,
grandmama,
” Gorjenna was now saying, with her big blue eyes so excited that they just looked like they were going to pop off her lovely, smooth-skin face, “I was so scared that you weren't going to say ‘I do' that I almost wet my pants. I mean, my dress,” she added, laughing, realizing that today she wasn't wearing her Levi's.

“Me, too!” said RoseAna, laughing equally nervously.

Both of these young women, Gorjenna and RoseAna—Tencha's children—looked totally Ail-American, without a bit of Mexican Indian blood in them, but, also, they'd been taken down to Guadalajara, Mexico, and
los Altos de Jalisco
enough times as youngsters by their grandparents, so that they were both proud of their Mexican ancestry.

“Tell us,
grandmama,
” continued Gorjenna, “if you had it all over to do, would you still marry
grandpapa?
”

Hearing this, Linda, Salvador and Lupe's second daughter, almost spilled her champagne.

And Lupe, feeling wonderful with all the Mumm's champagne she'd drunk, looked at Gorjenna and all these young women standing before her. “Yes, of course,
mi hijitas,
” she said.

“But
grandmama,
” said RoseAna, “you have to admit that there was a moment when it looked like you weren't going to say your vows.”

“Yeah,” said Gorjenna, smiling happily, “my sis is right. You weren't going to say ‘obey,'
grandmama!
”

“And she didn't,” said Teresita, Salvador and Lupe's third daughter, “so let bygones be bygones.”

“Of course, I didn't,” said Lupe, “I'm not a child.”

“Then
grandmama,
” Gorjenna said, “you don't think that wives should obey their husbands?”

“Of course not,
mi hijita,
” said Lupe. “How did you ever get that in your head?”

“Well, because, men—I mean, we, women, are taught,
grandmama,
that men are—”

“Are what?” said Lupe, cutting off her granddaughter, “weaker than we women when life really gets tough? Oh, I've told all of you girls since you were babies,” continued Lupe, “that I saw my mother in the middle of the Revolution keep our family alive and together with her power! Not my father. No, he ran away. Then I saw my sisters do the same thing. It was never the men,
mi hijita,
who kept our families together. God as my witness, men fall apart when children are crying with hunger. Ask your
grandpapa,
Salvador; he will tell you the very same thing. It was his mother who got them through the Revolution, not his father. Please, do not ever believe all these lying, romantic movies of the men being so big and strong and the women being weak and scared and not knowing what to do.

“Do you think for one minute that Salvador and I would have ever gotten this far and built this fine home here if I'd left things up to him? Why, it's taken me these fifty years to civilize him, I tell you, and make him into the man he thinks he is today—a fine, great man with his airs of fine cigars and all his show-off ways.”

“You tell them, Lupe, you tell them!” shouted Carlota. “These girls need to know! All men are cowards and liars and no good! But what can we women do? A dog can't give us what we want, so we're stuck needing to do what we can with men!”

The screeching that now erupted from the young women in the living room was so loud, it even startled the men in the next room.

“Carlota!” said Lupe. “That kind of talk helps no one! What these girls need to know is that life was never meant to be easy, and especially not easy for us women, ever since God chose for us to be the carriers of life here inside of our bodies, and not the men. Oh, no man knows the joys of pregnancy or the pains of birthing,” added Lupe, “and so they can't possibly have the respect and understanding of life that women have!”

“Exactly,” said Carlota. “This is why I chose to never have children, and I don't care what any priest tells me—because priests are men, too, and they don't know—I wasn't going through all that suffering that I saw my mother and sisters go through just because they had a few moments of pleasure with a man, but the man—the no-good—can just run off abandoning what he created, and continue his own pleasure!”

“On this, I entirely disagree with my sister Carlota,” said Lupe. “But, I will say that I wish I could've spoken up fifty years ago as I spoke up to this priest today. Because life will continue to be—not just difficult for us women—but completely unfair if we allow people like this young priest to get away with getting us to use words like ‘obey' and not the men!”

“Tell them, Lupe, tell them!” shouted Carlota, waving her cane in the air. “This is good! Really good! Now you're talking! And girls, any time your husband says to you, ‘Oh, no, honey, you just don't understand, because you're a woman,' the truth is that he is hiding something and trying to make a fool of you! Mark my words, I know. I had to steal money from Archie, just so I wouldn't always be penniless, and I swear that I worked at our businesses as many hours as he did, or more!”

“I'm sorry to say,” said Lupe sadly, “Carlota is right. But I never needed to steal from Salvador, because in our marriage, I handled all the banking and bookkeeping, but—oh, was I in for questioning when any monies were missing! Then, so help me God, every time it turned out that Salvador, himself, had spent that money, but it never stopped him from trying to blame me the next time.

“I swear,” said Lupe, “I now realize that every marriage is like returning to the Garden of Eden, and there is Adam again, trying to blame Eve for his own shortcomings. So what you girls need to know is that it is absolutely not for any wife to obey her husband, and it has never been! It is for a wife to understand that above all else, she is a mother, and as a mother, ours is to attend to the survival of our children and of the home. And a home,
mi hijitas,
is not a fine house with great walls and roof, but a piece of the Mother Earth where a woman has squatted down to give birth, and in doing this sacred act, she makes that piece of Earth Holy before God,” added Lupe with power.

“Lupe is right,” said Carlota, tears coming to her eyes, “we had nothing but sticks with mud for walls for our home in Mexico, and our floor was dirt that we swept and watered down every morning and afternoon and polished smooth with the sweat and oil of our bare feet. But oh, what a home we had. The finest home in all the world, because our mother—God bless her soul—showed us love and the way to God every day! And our laughter, and our fights; oh, we were poor, but so happy with our love of
la familia!
”

Carlota couldn't go on—she was crying so much. There was not one dry eye among all the women in the room.

IN THE NEXT ROOM
Salvador was leisurely smoking his long, fat cigar. The husbands of Linda, Gorjenna, and RoseAna were also smoking cigars. But they were puffing on their cigars like a person does with a cigarette, causing their fine cigars to burn too hot and fast. The whole room was filling up with smoke. Victor, Salvador and Lupe's only son, got up to open the side door. Victor hardly ever smoked, and the smoke was bothering him. Glancing into the next room, he saw that their Aunt Carlota's face was full of mischief as she talked to the younger women.

“I'm not joking,” she was saying. “We women have to know how to get our way with men or we don't got a chance. Everything is organized to their side. Not ours. So the best way for us to get our way is by rolling our eyes and hips like this and pretending to be obedient, but we are not! No, we're thinking and planning all the time. It's hell, I tell you, living with men!”

And as she said this, Carlota rolled her big, painted-up eyes to the heavens and gave such a smile with her powdered-white face as she moved her hips suggestively that the young women were all busting with laughter.

“
Tia Tota!
” screeched Gorjenna, blushing. “I didn't know you could still move like that!”

“You're just terrible!” said RoseAna, wiping her eyes—she was laughing so hard.

“Oh, no, she's not terrible! She's good!” yelped Teresita, shuffling her feet and doing a little dance. “And roll those hips again,
Tia Tota
! Roll 'em and roll 'em! And keep those joints loose and young!”

Carlota did as her niece Teresita said, holding on to her cane with her right hand and raising her left hand to dance and roll her hips, like a real ballroom sex machine.

“Well,” said Lupe, “I was always very different from my sister Carlota, as all you girls know, so I never rolled my eyes and did those other things to get my way in my marriage. What I did was speak up very frankly, saying what I was thinking, as I'd seen our mother do with our father. But I'll tell you, it wasn't always easy, especially when we first got married and I was so young and I knew nothing. And Salvador, like a typical man, just thought that he knew everything.

“And why do men think this, God only knows,” continued Lupe. “When it's so obvious, as my mother-in-law, Doña Margarita, explained to me, that it was us, the women, that God entrusted with the carrying of life here in our womb, so He obviously thought a great deal of us.

“I loved that old woman so much,” added Lupe. “I tell you, a mother-in-law can be a great asset to a young wife, if the wife is wise and open-minded, and that mother-in-law knows how to give advice from a distance.”

“But Lupe,” said Carlota, smiling, “you have to admit that this is the very reason God gave men such big heads, the truth is that the poor fools are really good for nothing. You kept this family together, not Salvador!”

“Well, then,
grandmama,
” said Gorjenna, sipping her champagne, “are you saying that maybe you wouldn't have even married
grandpapa,
if you had it all over to do today?”

RoseAna slugged Gorjenna on the shoulder so hard that she almost knocked her younger, smaller sister off her feet.

“Gorjenna,” said Linda, hitting her niece on her other shoulder, equally hard. “When are you going to learn to watch your mouth!”

“Stop hitting me, you two!” yelled Gorjenna back at them. “Or I'm not joking, I'll hit back and hard, too! Who are you guys kidding? This is what we all really want to know!”

“She's right,” said Teresita, making a face at her sister Linda, “so you two guys stop hitting her, or I'll join Gorjenna and we'll knock you old fogies for a loop! She is only asking the juicy question that we all really want to know, but don't have the guts to ask. So come on,
mama,
tell us,” added Teresita, turning to her mother, “if you had it all over to do, would you marry
papa
?”

The room went silent and Linda's eyes filled with tears, but she never made a sound.

“You want to know the truth?” said Lupe, taking a big sip of her champagne. Her eyes suddenly lighting up with
gusto.
“Eh, you girls really want to know?”

“Yes!” said Teresita, Gorjenna, and RoseAna excitedly.

Tencha and Barbara—Victor's wife—only nodded, saying nothing.

Linda shook her head, saying, “No, please, dear God, no,” but she said it all so softly that no one heard.

And across the room Victor, who'd been smiling, quit smiling and took a big breath.

“No, of course not,” said Lupe to her daughters and granddaughters. “If I'd known Salvador back then, like I know him now—I would never have married him. He lied to me! He tricked me!”

“And I warned you!” shouted Carlota, shaking her cane up at the ceiling. “I told you that he was a liar and a bootlegger before you married him! But no, you wouldn't listen to me! You believed him instead!”

Linda had to grip the piano to steady herself. She was getting physically ill.

“Quiet, Carlota!” said Lupe. “This is for me to say! Not you!” Lupe was high on champagne and she wasn't going to be stopped. “Salvador swore to me days before our wedding,” she continued, “that he was an honest, hardworking fertilizer mover, and that he didn't drink or gamble. And Carlota is right, I did believe him, and we got married. Then it wasn't until after I was pregnant that he had the guts to tell me the truth that he was a bootlegger, a gambler, and he drank and carried a gun! Everything that we were brought up to detest in our home!”

Linda now quit holding on to the piano for support, stood up straight, and screamed: “Lies! Nothing but lies! Oh, I detest how you two are going on with this one-sided complaining about
papa,
without owning up to your own damn responsibilities!

“Papa loves you,
mama
! He has always loved you! If my husband ever showed me half the love
papa
always shows you,
mama,
I'd drag my ass across burning fire just to be with him! And yes, we all know that
papa
isn't perfect, but damn it—oh, you should be ashamed, both of you!”

And saying this, Linda threw her champagne glass across the room, shattering it against the fireplace; then she turned and walked out the front door, slamming it so hard that the whole house shook.

In the playroom, the kids had stopped watching TV, and they came racing through the house to see what was going on.

In the living room, Teresita was howling with laughter, and then she, too, threw her crystal glass of champagne across the room against the fireplace.

“Welcome to our
familia
,” said Teresita, laughing
con carcajadas.
“Welcome to our
crazy-loca familia
!”

Gorjenna was the next one to drink off her champagne and throw her glass with a scream. Then everyone got into the act, even Carlota.

In the next room, Salvador calmly continued smoking his big, fat cigar, burning red-hot like a hardwood log that took a long time to turn into ashes.