Loteria (2 page)

LA CHALUPA

T
here’s a flea market on Alexander Street that we used to go to when I was little. It’s where we went to buy things like
comales
and
molcajetes
. They sold sheets and sheets of
Lotería
paper and I didn’t know it came rolled up like that. I didn’t know you could make your own
tabla
.

There was a round woman who sat in a canoe with flowerpots around her like if they were her children. Red flowers, pink, yellow, and purple. She wore a nightgown with thin stripes and had braids falling down her chest. Her name was Alondra. Estrella called her
una pendeja
because she was a grown woman dressed up like a
Lotería
card
.
But she wasn’t dumb. She made bracelets with all these different colors and would stitch your name on one if you asked. Two dollars apiece. She’d sit under the sun, even when it was ninety-five degrees outside, and braid her bracelets. We’d pass her on the way to the food stands, buy some
barbacoa
and
tamarindo
, then pass her again, and she’d be in the same place.

“Want something, Alondra?
¿Un Jarrito? ¿Algo? Ándale
,” Papi would say.

She’d close her eyes and tighten them, shake her head like if she were remembering someone who’d died. When she’d open her eyes we’d notice she wasn’t crying.
“No, no gracias,”
she’d say.
“No necesito nada.”
She’d open her arms and sweat would be glistening over her forehead.

I asked her to write a word on each bracelet I bought because I wanted them to read like a sentence.
Ven. Que. Te. Quiero. Ahora
. It’s the riddle to
La Rosa
, which is a strange
dicho
. I don’t know how a rose has anything to do with wanting or loving. But every time I thought of it I heard Mom’s voice and the way she’d say it in Spanish, all smooth and sexy like Sara Montiel: Come, I want you now.

And because
quiero
can mean either want or love, I asked if it meant “I want you” or “I love you.” Come here, because I
love
you, or, come here, because I
want
you? If you were saying to someone,
come
to me, then the person you loved wasn’t there, and if you had to tell someone to
come
to you then maybe he didn’t love you. And to
want
someone to come to you is like an order. If you have to order someone to
come
to you, how much love is in that anyway?

After Alondra made my last bracelet, I put it on my arm and she read them out loud from my wrist to my elbow.
Ven. Que. Te. Quiero. Ahora
. She opened her arms and hugged me the way Tencha does, with her body soft like pillows, and I understood why even though she was smiling sometimes she looked like she was in pain. She was confused of whether or not she was wanting or loving. Or both.

EL CANTARITO

W
hen Estrella ran away I thought she was going to Angélica’s house because she wanted to scare Papi into thinking she was leaving for good. We thought she was being dramatic and wanting attention. I never thought she’d go to the cops. I never thought they’d come to the house the way they did.

Julia asks the same thing over and over when she sits down next to me in the activity room. She wants to know what it was like living at home. “And on weekends?” she asks. “What did you do all together? What did you do with your Papi?” But she wouldn’t get it. She wouldn’t know what it was like.

We all fought. We all hit each other.

Papi punched because he was a man, but we hit him too. There was one time when Mom grabbed the Don Pedro bottle from the coffee table and smashed it over his head. Blood ran down his face like the statue of Jesus Christ and Estrella and I had to grab toilet paper to soak up the blood.

Now, here comes Julia thinking
Fama
magazine is going to open me up like some stupid jack-in-the-box. Like if I’m some extension cord tangled up in a garage she can take a few minutes to untangle. Then what? She’ll leave me alone? Or maybe Papi will stay in jail because of something I say, something she writes down and tangles up later.

It’s like in
Lotería,
instead of playing the four corners we play the center squares. But midway through the game you find you have the corners but you’re missing the center. And if you would’ve played the corners you would’ve won already. But that’s how it is, isn’t it?

I keep my mouth shut because I don’t know the rules of the game.

Three days ago Tencha came to visit me and sat in the chair next to the door. I’d been laying out the cards on my desk.
La Rana.
El Paraguas. El Melón.
Thinking about the stories the cards helped me remember. Usually she sits with me on the bed and rocks me back and forth and tells me everything’s going to be okay. But this time she sat in the chair, all hunched over with her feet together, and whispered, “Mama.” Then nothing. Like if she couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out. I knew what she was trying to tell me, that her rosaries for the last week were for nothing. Her prayers to
la Virgen
were for nothing. And if I waited for her to tell me it would’ve taken too long. So I walked over to her and put my hand on her shoulder, and she started sobbing in that way that’s scary, like if her lungs are falling out and she has to suck them back in before they fall to the floor.

Estrella was in the ICU ever since that night they came to get Papi. I was looking out the window next to my desk when Tencha asked if I wanted to see her. She whispered, like if I’d get mad at her for mentioning her name. But she knew it wasn’t going to be the way I imagined. I wouldn’t sit at the end of Estrella’s bed and hold her hand. And I wouldn’t be able to go inside the room she was in. When Tencha said her name I put on my sneakers and stood up, keeping my head down so I wouldn’t have to see her eyes.

She had to get permission, she said. Larry, the social services director, didn’t think it was a good idea. He lowered his voice as he talked to her in the hall, but I could hear him. He said I was too fragile, it might make me worse. But she told him good, said if I didn’t get to see my sister I’d sue him when I turned eighteen. My own flesh and blood. They should be ashamed of themselves. “Shame on you!” she said. And then he agreed, but only for one night. She told him everything would be fine. She was responsible and this was a family matter.

Before we walked out of the building he told us an officer would take us to the hospital and sign us in. We drove to the Medical Center near the zoo off of highway 59, to a huge building that looked like a good place, not some clinic with bums crowding the emergency room. It looked like a place that could fix things. It had forty-four floors and there were doctors with clipboards walking up and down the hallway. When we asked the receptionist for Estrella María Castillo the woman told us she was on the thirty-eighth floor. I remember because I pushed the button in the elevator but it wouldn’t light up, and when the doors opened the hallway was quiet. It seemed like no one was there. But finally a nurse passed. She said I couldn’t go inside the room where Estrella was. All I could do was see her from behind a pane of glass. But all I could see was her chin and the shape of her body past two other beds. I couldn’t see her eyes. There was a curtain blocking half of her face. For all I knew it could’ve been someone else.

When the nurse looked at me she did that tilt of the head like people do, like if I were abandoned. Other nurses started to show up and they looked at me in the same way. Maybe they thought I’d attack them or knock them over or run inside the room no matter what I was told, because they’d heard what had happened. But I didn’t. I stood there and looked at my sister while Tencha walked with them down the hall and asked them questions.

The machines that were next to her beeped louder the longer I stayed, and no matter how much I tried to block them out, I couldn’t. I pressed my palms against the glass and told her how much I love her. How sorry I was. My sister. Just there, sleeping. Not moving. She got blurry from the fog of my breath covering the glass, and I whispered,
¿Y por qué tenías que ser tan tonta?
I wrote her name in my mind and imagined the star as I drew it over the glass.

Mom used to say to us,
Estrella y Luz, cuánto las quiero
.

I pressed my hands harder against the glass and told her it was going to be okay, not because You were going to make it okay but because I was there and You were there and I was really trying to tell You something. Like how much I love You. And if I loved You, wouldn’t that make things better? It didn’t matter if I fell on my knees or threw up my hands and prayed I don’t know how many Hail Marys.
Lo siento, Madre María.
But it was a matter of Your will. Learn to live with what you lose and that’s what’s meant to be.
¿Verdad?
Mom used to say, “Forgive and forget.” I say it to myself over and over when I’m trying to fall asleep at night but it feels like a lie. It turns into a song and then I don’t even know what I’m singing anymore.

Standing there, all of a sudden, I was like a jug of water trying to be taken from one place to another, and little by little, I was spilling. The nurses didn’t even look at me anymore.

EL VALIENTE

P
ancho Silva was fat and never showered. He had gray hair on the sides of his head and a little on top that he combed forward. He told Papi when he first met him that he was going to be a movie star. He was in that Pedro Infante movie
Los tres huastecos
as a double and was working his way up. He and Pedro Infante were tight, like brothers. But after Pedro’s death in a plane crash Pancho’s future as a film star was over. He told Papi the job at the industrial plant was just temporary, and he was planning on getting back into the movies someday.
Puro
bullshit Papi said. And it’s true. When I met Pancho Silva he didn’t look a thing like Pedro Infante. He
is
full of shit, I said, and Papi agreed because he winked at me.

Papi met him at the bakery down the block from our house on TC Jester one morning when some black guy walked in with spandex on his head. Pancho was standing in front of Papi, and he turned around and said something under his breath about the spandex. Papi smiled, because he’s polite. Then Pancho started talking to him in Spanish, asking him where he was from, if he had a job. He said he could get him something at the plant he worked at because he was retiring soon and they’d need someone to replace him.

That day, Papi brought home
tres leches
. Mom said it was too sweet and runny and it didn’t have enough eggs. She said the one her Tía Sofi makes is the best in the world and no other
tres leches
comes close. You could only have a slice of this one with a cup of coffee or a glass of water to wash it down. Estrella didn’t say anything, but I could tell she liked hers because she kept licking her fork. But none of that mattered. Papi smiled and said to us,
“Ya tengo trabajo.”

After his first day at work he said the plant stunk. It was hard to breathe because of the lack of air. He had to punch in at five-thirty in the morning and work until six in the evening, carrying sheets of metal and putting them where they belonged. Then push a button. Sometimes they’d ask him to help in other departments, like welding. They’d show him what to do, and he’d do it.
Como un pinche perro
, he’d say. He came home with his arms covered in black. Sweaty. Tired. Worn-out. And that’s when I’d get him a beer from the kitchen. I’d cut a lime and squeeze juice over it, because beer is better that way. Then I’d take a sip to make sure it tasted good. Like that, I’d get a little
peda también
. One beer turned into two, then three, then a six-pack. Then I started seeing a glass half-filled with Don Pedro by the couch. Sometimes at night I’d be going to sleep and hear him singing
rancheras
in the backyard. If I was still awake, I’d go out there and sing. I’d tell Estrella to come with me, but she’d roll her eyes and say she wasn’t a drunk Mexican like Papi.

“Mija linda,”
he’d sing, his arms reaching toward the sky and his hips swaying. He’d hum some
ranchera
and I’d try to figure out which one it was. Mom would open the back door wearing nothing but an oversized T-shirt and tell us to be quiet before she even asked what we were doing. Papi would hit his chest with both fists, like Tarzan, like if that would make him louder, and say,
“¡Aaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy, pero qué chorrito de voz tengo!”
I’d laugh, and she would too. We’d laugh so hard it’d take me awhile before I could sing. Then finally, we’d sing. The same song, always, all together, all three of us.

“Paloma negra, paloma negra.”

Until I fell asleep and Papi would carry me to bed.