¡Suéltame!
BY ELISA LUNA ADY
That summer, the summer was a sheet and our home was a nothing. At home, me and my little brother watched our mom get ready for work, then leave. We sat on our hands waiting to be picked up. We taped a sign to the living room window that said $15/CUP OF AIR, until our mom told us to stop doing that or we would get killed. My little brother asked by who and our mom said, You don’t want to know, so maybe we didn’t want to know. We raced the length of the white apartment, rattled coupon drawers and raided our own misshapen forts, frolicking slo-mo in throw pillows. We invented ghosts to spice things up, gifting them their murders, murders we stole from 1000 Ways to Die. We looked out the vertical living room window slats wanting a peek of Adult Videos & Books, but Adult Videos & Books had no windows. It had a sign that rivaled the telephone poles and it had stucco walls. Walls were our worst enemy. We kept checking the window until at last we saw our auntie descending into the courtyard in her wedge sandals, never wobbling once, and then my little brother shouted jubilant, and I hurried to unlock the door.
Our auntie opened her arms like a bathing swan and she sang, “Mira los chiquitos bonitos pechochos,” in a little girl voice. When you did a little girl voice, words like precioso became pechocho. That’s just how it was.
Our mom allowed my little brother and me to go four places that summer. We went home, we went to the public library, we went to our auntie’s, we went to church. Not counting the in-betweens, like Hometown Buffet or Roberto’s. Our school had lately shuttered itself against the season, intent on locking up the jungle gyms where we visited with the spider eggs or reenacted fight sequences from Xiaolin Showdown. There were two jungle gyms at our school—green and blue—and this was how we told the twins apart. We named them the Green Bars and the Blue Bars. Our church owned a name my little brother and me didn’t understand: Our Lady of the Supine.
Churches all around us owned serious or stupid names. Awaken, Flood, Carmel, St. Bernard. St. Bernard was a dog, we thought, but that week at the tiny library near SAIGON Sandwiches, we searched him up. We searched st bernard. When only pictures of dogs appeared, we added saint at the end. St bernard saint. We clicked around.
“That’s him!” my little brother said, pointing at the monitor.
St. Bernard was one of two: he was either the bald man in loose robes or he was the man without a shirt clutching the first man’s robes. The robes wanted to rise like dough. You could just tell. It seemed those two were about to do something together and we’d caught them at the wrong moment. In the picture of the painting, the colors were candle-like—low and hacking long shadows. I didn’t know who was who. The man without a shirt looked like Jesus looked like the models who rubbed their throats together in our auntie’s magazine cabinet. All the models in those magazines were men with shiny chests and corkscrewed hips and our auntie flipped through their open-mouthed wrestling while saying nothing. I tried to mind my business when she toured her naked Jesuses. I never showed my little brother that section of the cabinet. I didn’t want to soil his eyes. I showed him St. Bernard at the library, the oily painting-picture and the line about Bernard presiding over bees and chandlers. I looked up what was a chandler. A chandler was a person who made and sold candles, or something else. On the website where we’d found St. Bernard and Naked Jesus, we could buy calendars and books and candles covered in small writing. For $1.99, we could submit a prayer request to I-don’t-know-who, but we had no dead mothers or ailing babies, so we closed the window.
We went on with our morning hogging the library computer to play dress-up games, dragging sparkly outlines over other outlines. An old man stood over us and watched. He breathed like a box fan. The front desk lady rose without warning to kindly ask him to leave us alone. Down the block, our auntie was getting her nails done or fondling hair extensions in unreal colors. We weren’t supposed to tell our mom that our auntie let us walk to the library alone.
Our auntie wasn’t our auntie, but we said so to make it easier. She was our mom’s best friend and they’d been like that since they looked into the Rite Aid camera from the top of the Georgia Street Bridge, their elbows seated, their eyebrows competing to be the skinniest of all. They wrote over their eyebrows with little pencils in those days. They looked like the holographic cholas you could get in a vending machine for four quarters, pinching the silver turnstile and twisting until everything clicked and shuddered nicely. It was their favorite photo together.
Our mom kept her copy in the glove compartment of her Toyota, beside her taser and CD book. It was still in its original yellow envelope. Auntie Paola stuck hers to the fridge with a cow magnet. Once I asked who it was who took that picture from way down below if it wasn’t either of them. Our mom smiled in the rearview mirror. Paola told me it was a boy they’d fought over who had since then joined the Marines, being that he was broke. Now he got allowances like a kid in my grade. Paola said he had more than one baby mama, gracias a Dios que no fue ni yo ni tu máma, and I saw in my mind’s eye a mother shrunken down to a dust mote. A mama wearing a bib. Our mom looked at Paola across the center console to cut the story off. She didn’t use words. Their best conversations needed no language at all.
Paola was watching us that summer while our mom was at work and the blue heat hung as still as a billboard. Me and my little brother went with Paola during the days and our mom during the nights. Our mom worked six days a week. On the seventh, we all piled into the Toyota and Paola flipped through the little CD book to find the blank-faced discs written over with marker—slojamz, loverguuurl94, old skool funk, ¿pa q lloras?—putting on the mix that fit best that morning. Paola said this was the only museum that mattered, our mom eye-rolling in the rearview mirror to give the joke its shape, and we arrived to Our Lady of the Supine Church twenty minutes late and without any good parking spots. We listened from the last row of pews until our mom deemed our day sufficiently godly. Then we snuck back out, rushing to make happy hour down the street.
Homily was the chatter of the priest in loose robes and hominy was the bob of the little corn babies in my pozole at breakfast-lunch afterwards. Sundays were our favorite because we were finally whole. We sat together under an outdoor umbrella, cars trundling past, Paola trying to convince our mom to go dancing with her again. Our mom saying, “With what time?” or, “C’mon, we’re not rail-thin fifteen-year-olds anymore,” and they went on that way bickering about birthdays, money, our grandma in Temecula who our mom had decided to stop speaking to because she refused to take us for the summer.
Paola said, “That’s your blood. Of all the women in the world, why would you ever turn your back on her?”
Our mom said, “Pao, you don’t get shit like this, I’ve told you how many times? You’re too Mexican to see my perspective,” because our mom had been born in San Diego and Paola hadn’t.
Paola sat up straighter. “¿Cómo que no te entiendo?”
Arguments in Spanish always began with ¿Cómo que ______? like the time Paola dropped us off and my little brother told our mom we hadn’t been fed breakfast, since we’d only gotten toast with sugar sprinkled on top, and then, later, Paola’s voice on speaker phone cried, ¿Cómo que no comieron? I was never afraid of Paola until she pulled out one of her ¿Cómo que ______?s.
Our mom worked at a bank, for whom she yanked her hair back til it clung to her skull. It seemed painted on. Paola worked we-don’t-know-where and wore anything she wanted, her hair freed to the wind. Our mom said Paola had been born in a cornfield with arms out, like Christ.
Our mom said Christ! when something nipped or squeezed her. She said Christ! when her mail spoke to her in a way she didn’t like. The time I dropped her phone in my ramen while playing Marble Madness, she said Christ! and poured my dinner out in the sink, combing the noodles with her French tips. I said to our mom but how did baby Paola fit with arms out and our mom said not to ask such questions about a woman’s chucha.
Paola said our mom was thinking of a cempasúchil field, not corn, and she hadn’t been born there. As a girl, it was her favorite place to stop and pee in a pinch. That was how she said it. In a pinch! Paola used to wake up at five in the morning to straighten her hair, write out her essays, and walk to Roosevelt Middle School. She walked from one city to another, or she took the bus, or she trolley-hopped. Or all three. It just depended. She grew up in a turquoise house with ten concrete steps leading up to the metal screen and there was no railing, only potted flowers balanced on the edge of every successive stair. The front of the house had been reinforced with a fieldstone wall, but every stone looked the same. Put together, the stones formed a giraffe’s spotted hide. People called it casa jirafa and Paola charged tourists passing through $15/mangonada. She taped a sign to the fence so tourists would know. Our mom said that counted as child labor and Paola said, Well, if I’d lived under the US dollar like you maybe I wouldn’t have labored as a child.
“It was a very tragic house, though,” she said, and we asked what tragic was, and she said it was the kind of story that makes you cry.
Me and my little brother asked why the turquoise house was tragic. Paola said a baby in a walker once paddled through the unlocked screen and over the concrete steps. It was why they’d replaced the old flimsy door with steel. We asked who the baby was and she said nothing.
If Paola told us stories like that, our mom made her stop, but still me and my little brother found out. Paola’s mom was dead and her dad was rich. He was in CDMX, with a new woman whose face was stuck like that since the doctor who did her face didn’t know enough to do better. CDMX was way past our city’s longest wall. Our longest wall was a short trip down through the desert. The wall belonged to our city and also to someone else. The two of them shared it, arguing over its power and influence, strengthening it and weakening it by turns. As a girl, Paola lived beyond the wall, in TJ. Now she lived on the other side, in San Diego. Every once in a blue moon, she went over to tell the wall what was what, then came back happier than before. She said there were places where the wall was low enough to straddle and others where we would need to grow wings to get over.
When we asked our mom if Paola could take us to TJ someday, she said, “Absolutely not. No way in hell.”
“Then what about in heaven?”
“No way in heaven or hell.”
On the phone once, I heard our mom say Paola only effed cowboys, them and their slanting ankles. Our mom was saying so to her boyfriend-at-the-time. I could hear everything through the keyhole of black in me and my little brother’s bedroom door. Our mom said Paola strung along all the others, making them think she wanted it. I didn’t know what ‘it’ was. Our mom said that was how Paola liked her men—sturdy. Over the wall, the men became real because they knew how to dip and gallop their women and because when they pulled on those leather boots with the pointed toes, they meant it. They weren’t pretending. They were really like that. They were the originals, not Clint Eastwood squinting in a serape. Clint Eastwood was the copycat.
After we were put to bed was when our mom sat in her suede armchair with her cell phone and her wine, arguing over whether Paola was a good friend or a bad one. It was her favorite fight to have when Paola wasn’t around. If our mom’s boyfriend chose good, our mom argued bad. She said Paola never had to outgrow her worst habits, or Paola was addicted to nostalgia, or Paola only danced and effed and begged for one more photo, funneled money to her dirt-broke sisters in Mexico, Paola didn’t know how to put her foot down, and on and on.
“It’s like she doesn’t want a life here,” our mom said into the phone.
If her boyfriend said Paola was a bad friend, our mom rose a defense against this, wading backwards through time to find her favorite memories, when they were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, when they would hitch rides across the wall to dance and drink and eat, getting up to no good, selling homemade rock CDs to stupid boys and learning how to pickpocket on Avenida Revolución. She said it was thanks to TJ that San Diego had any personality at all, that Chicanos owed an aesthetic inheritance to border cities. She said Paola loved us like we were her own, Paola dropped everything to take care of us, she accompanied me to the doctor the time I had strep throat, to make me gargle salt water even when I screamed no, it hurt too much, I didn’t want to, but if it was Paola doing the cajoling, I eventually settled down and I listened. These arguments made me the happiest, because I knew they were true, and because they featured me and my little brother.
“It’s funny. Jasmine is just like her—a mini Pao,” our mom said. Her voice was sad and sweet at the same time. “Like a parrot, running around repeating whatever she says…with the exact same intonation, the same accent, and Matthew is even worse. Every time Paola drops them off, they remind me less and less of myself…”
Those were the calls where you could hear our mom’s voice shake. It was the only time her voice shook, when she was telling her disagreeing boyfriend, “Paola hasn’t…she’s never once looked away,” and I wondered what it was Paola didn’t look away from.
Now Paola lived in the remodeled toolshed behind our mom’s coworker’s North Park house. The toolshed had a kitchenette. Paola added -ette at the end, saying that meant it was miniature. It had one window, above the kitchenette sink. The window was a square cut out of the wall and the way it was shut was with a slab of wood on hinges. There was no lock or screen. It let in the essence of the season and the singing too. Every evening our limbs wore welts from the mosquitoes who drifted in. It had a bathroom, too, with a shower where you could turn in a circle and nothing else. It had nowhere to go, which we loved about it, me and my little brother.
That summer, we congregated in the kitchenette like cockroaches, rifling through Paola’s cupboards and drawers. They were all wrong. In the cupboards and drawers were dead batteries, burned CDs, hair equipment, board games missing two or ten pieces, discounted school supplies she saved for us, Raid and matches, deformed Beanie Babies and sugar packets in light pink, photo albums with little clear windows that sounded wet when they slid together, a tin of magnets and chola stickers and winning lotto tickets she told us she was compiling to surprise herself, a box for red hair dye full of old phones and MP3 players, a binder packed with letters and mall photo booth strips where all the girls’ faces became white planets, candles, chonies and neon bras and bikinis undone, and a wooden jewelry box we weren’t allowed inside because it would soil our eyes. We were allowed inside Paola’s magazine cabinet, but only when she was busy with her hair or her phone calls.
Paola didn’t have much space in that itty-bitty toolshed, so everything was all wrong. She had a hot plate to make Maruchan and a couch that became a bed and the bed shrieked if you leaned on it just right and when she wanted to nap, we woke her with its shrieks til she laughed and landed a pillow on our faces. She had two outlets that her snaking plugs took turns using.
She had a TV she kept in the kitchenette, but it was a pipsqueak with an extendable antenna. On it, she watched shows laced with static where all the ladies shouted, “¡Suéltame!” or, “¡Lárgate de aquí! No quiero verte nunca más.”
The TV ladies loved suéltame and we loved the TV ladies. I pretended to translate them, using their eyebrows to understand the hue of the scene. Paola told me the best thing to learn in Spanish as a girl was suéltame and if you were getting ready to use it, best to fill your lungs with all the available air and direct it up and away, loud as can be. In one scene, the suéltame scared my little brother so bad it had to be shut off. The TV lady was an heiress with smeared eyes and a torn dress and her husband threw vases at the wall, his teeth shining as he backed her into the canopy bed. Paola stood up and the screen went dark.
“No more of that today,” she said.
Our mom’s coworker finished remodeling the garage and in moved a couple from Cuba. The wife was pregnant all the way and the husband was racist, though he was darker than Paola. He called Paola derogatory words under his breath when they ran into each other at the laundry machine in the side yard. We repeated them to our mom.
She looked at us with a mouth unmoving and then she said, “That is a very derogatory word. Only ugly people use it. Don’t ever say it again, do you hear me? Come here. Do. You. Hear. Me?” and we heard her, yowling at her talon grip.
Our mom’s coworker owned and rented places all over San Diego. His name was Frank. He was a Financial Analyst at the bank where she worked. For us, this was too boring to put into a search engine. Paola said Frank-from-the-bank let her live behind his house for cheap because he wanted to eff our mom. She said not to repeat that to our mom, so we didn’t. We wanted too badly to have more of her secrets.
Every once in a blue moon, Frank knocked on Paola’s door with his upturned wrist. He liked asking about our mom. There was no peephole for spying and Frank brought over Paola’s bills and pizza coupons since everyone there used the same address, so Paola couldn’t deny him. She slit the door to give him one searching eye. He stood in the rectangle of waiting light in his stiffly ironed clothes.
First he liked to try us, saying, “How’s your mom doing?” or, “Did your mom get you that, buddy?” but Paola blocked his view with her waving hips.
She said, “What do you need, Phil?”
He said, “It’s Frank, remember.”
She said, “Oh, yeah,” and nothing else.
Frank turned pink. He laughed, then asked if she would be able to make rent that month. Paola paid him on the 1st with rolls of cash held together by thick rubber bands. It forced him to fan the dollars out and count. Sometimes he messed up his math and had to begin again, her acrylic nail timing him with its colorful ticking. Sometimes this ticking messed him up a second time and when he asked her to please stop for a second, she added three more long nails to the song she was making, drumming them against the doorway and watching him with her slowest blinks. Frank never showed his annoyance. He smiled at everyone and everything. He said did we like Terry’s Chocolate Oranges and yeesh, it’s hot in here and to tell our mom how much we looked like her and could Paola refrain from inviting people over at night, the neighbors were complaining again? The neighbors were the Cuban couple and their unborn baby. Paola said maybe he should remodel his driveway next and rent it out to all the squirrels in our zip code.
Frank grinned, pointing a finger at Paola’s face. “Genius.”
He talked with his hands before he talked with his mouth. When Paola handed that month’s money over, he held his palms out Jesus-style and said, “Hey, don’t look at me! I’m not here to ask questions,” and he strained to catch our eye, wanting to throw the joke open, inviting us inside of it, but me and my little brother hated its shape, so we said nothing.
Paola told us stories. She told us CDMX was short for Mexico City. We asked her if we had an America City.
She laughed and said, “Not ours because it’s too Mexican.”
She told us she’d been born a Catholic, so she would die a Catholic. She told us sometimes she missed her old church, Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, where you could take the rear exit and stumble upon a wreath of tarp clothing stalls, but Our Lady of the Supine was nice too, with its horizon of dark red steps, its grand oak doors and its brass-hammered Jesus.
Paola told us of the patroness of cabinet-makers and housewives and horseback riders, a lady who shared a name with the winds that brought us yearly wildfires. In English, the lady was Saint Anne, mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus, but in Spanish she became something else: Santa Ana. Santa Ana’s emblem was a door, which was the opposite of a wall, I thought, but Paola told me the opposite of a wall was no wall. Just air all the way. In Spanish, Mary became Guadalupe and in Nahuatl, Guadalupe became Coatlicue. Everyone was someone else, depending on who you asked, what language they coveted. Jesus was Palestinian or he was Paola’s Mexican cousin who lived in San Ysidro and sold fake Nikes off the freeway exit, but if he was her cousin, you had to add an accent mark just to be sure.
Paola told us to be a saint you had to be canonized and to be canonized you had to be dead and to do miracles. She corrected herself: to have done miracles. She told us you could use an egg to check if anyone wanted you to die. She told us you could drink a tecito and then read what the heavens wanted to tell you about yourself in the canyon of the cup. She told us she had a horse and two boyfriends waiting for her over the wall and the horse was white like snow, neither of which we’d ever seen—horses or snow. We asked Paola what she had here and she said she had our mom and she had us, the most beautiful babies in the world.
Paola showed us the cover of an old English-Spanish magazine. The cover was her, Paola Ortiz Romo, surrounded by a border of baby pink.
“I was fifteen here,” she said. “Someone my mother knew asked her permission to reprint it for a magazine he’d started with some friends. Can you imagine? He said the photo stopped him in his tracks.”
Paola was sitting sideways on the concrete steps of the turquoise house where the baby had died. Her brown shins were soaring and her cork wedge sandals were barely hanging onto her toes. She was gazing up into the blue-sheeted sky, her hair held together with chopsticks. Below her, a boy was playing at a basketball hoop. The magazine was called Guau! It only lasted four issues. Paola said it wasn’t an ordinary magazine, but one where people put their stories and poems.
She said, “This is as close as your auntie will ever get to ‘literary.’”
It was her second dream to win an award like the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, but she didn’t have the patience to write anything longer than a page. We said what about the first dream and she zipped her lips, then tossed the key.
Paola taught us some words: augment, shortcake, schizophrenia, foolhardy, jackass, ni modo, chingar. Some others. Paola used the word eff around us because she knew our mom liked it better than the regular version. Me and my little brother weren’t allowed to hear it said the way adults did. Eff was a word that might mean bully, or do things alone together. Chingar was a word that might mean bully, or do things alone together. Me and my little brother set them side-by-side, wondering which was better—I’m gonna eff you up! or, ¡Te voy a chingar! Both of those were about bullying. Paola said a word’s meaning was context-based and when my little brother asked what a context was, she told him to imagine her eyelashes.
She said, “It’s not just the soul. It’s also the things that frame the soul.”
Paola told us of our mom while our mom was working and Frank’s sliding glass doors were dark with no one home. By telling of our mom, Paola told of herself. There was our mom’s tattoo (a baby angel resting on her thigh) and the abortion our mom got at fifteen and how in high school, our mom liked to sneak out at night to tag walls. Our mom’s tag was La Swanky and Paola’s was La Perrita. The point of tagging was to tell the wall that you were alive, that it was an object and objects could be changed, undone, brought low. An abortion was what you did when you didn’t want to push the baby from your chucha. Above her top lip, Paola had a dot and we later learned it was made of India ink. Our mom gave it to Paola in the ninth grade and in return Paola gave our mom the baby angel made up of one hundred-and-something dots. You couldn’t tattoo with that kind of needle unless you did dots. We asked Paola to show us and she redrew the tattoo from memory. The angel baby came before the abortion; from then on our mom teased Paola by calling her brujita.
Paola called our mom nothing but her name. Paola called her boyfriends everything under the sun and then some. It was true Paola’s favorite boyfriends were over the wall—the ones with good ankles—but she had some here, too. They wore baseball caps and snapbacks and arrived to the toolshed with hands in pockets, like shy boys. Paola said the way men did their makeup was with facial hair and no light. Paola didn’t let her boyfriends come inside while we were over, but she accepted gifts from them. They brought her bright flowers dressed in plastic, letters, Beanie Babies, avocados, tangerines caught in a net, 7-Eleven pastries.
Once, a boyfriend in construction boots brought a Slurpee, half cherry and half Coke, but after he left, Paola said we couldn’t drink it since it wasn’t sealed. Me and my little brother didn’t know what that meant. We watched her pour it out in the toilet, then flush. Another time, a boyfriend in a Raiders jersey came over while Paola was ironing her dresses and she set the steam upright to greet him. When he tried to come inside, she said he couldn’t because her kids were home—this made us love her more—and still he didn’t listen. He grabbed her by the arm like you see a dad do to a howling child at Albertsons. Paola didn’t use her suéltame on him. She reached for the waiting iron with her other hand and there was a lot of heavy movement and dark voices at the door that brought the sound of my heart up. I covered my little brother’s eyes as I’d been taught to do when two TV characters wanted to be alone together. I thought about alone together, how those words were opposites but when you set them close, they became something else. When I looked up again, the boyfriend was holding his arm like a baseball bat, but his face was a baby’s. He flew out of the doorway, his blue jeans lunging backwards, and he yelled that Paola was effing crazy, eff her and eff that, and on and on.
Paola shut and locked the door on his tantrum, calmly retrieving her phone to order us a pizza. She knew all the nicest delivery boys and their shift times. The delivery boys were in love with her for the extra fives and tens she slid them, and for her face and freed hair. This time, it was Erick with the lightning bolt shaved into the side of his head. Paola acted shaken until he offered to scout the block for her burn victim, setting our small pepperoni on top of a milk crate containing ballet flats. He said burn victim with a dimpled smile. Paola laugh-laughed and followed after him, her in her socks and Bugs Bunny t-shirt and him in his polo and pizza visor, their shoulders kissing as the door shut. Me and my little brother watched the door shut.
If Paola’s boyfriends didn’t come over, they called. Paola picked up the phone for them in a sing-song voice and held her conversations while she was on the toilet, painted toes dancing.
She looked at us while she talked, knowing we couldn’t understand what she was saying but allowing us to interpret her eyelashes anyway. When she took a shit, she left the rolling plywood door cracked and we didn’t mind since she had to watch us for our mom. Paola said time to shit! when it was her time to shit. Our mom said shit! when one night her right eye swallowed her contact lens and we had to help her hunt for it, holding the hand mirror while she pulled up on the pink, her iris darting north and south. She said shit! the time she had her period in her pencil skirt and had to drive all the way back home to change, shedding her bloody stockings on the bathroom floor.
Paola took us to the wig store so we could guess which hair was a woman’s or a horse’s or a nothing’s—she always knew the answer. She walked us to the Party City next door, where me and my little brother learned how to steal. Paola said Ross was the easiest to steal from because the clearance section was a mess and the store attendants didn’t care to pick everything back up or replace the ripped tags. Paola stole hair ties and tampons, candy at checkout, whatever you could grab at a mall kiosk during her brisk stride to Charlotte Russe. She stole coasters and cutlery and ranch dishes, tucking them away in her takeout boxes at restaurants. If she did it while we were out to eat with our mom, they could fight about it for the whole freeway, going back and forth with the radio’s volume—up for our mom who wanted to drown out their tense voices and down for Paola who wanted to be heard better. Paola stole magazines, stuffing them down her purse, and the convex security mirrors cherished her face, refusing to tattle on her to the shop owners. The magazines she stole from the nail salon were torn or dripped on, semi-luminescent gossip. The magazines she stole from Adult Videos & Books were where Jesus lookalikes posed in no clothes.
Me and my little brother started out with balloons and streamers and then we went to Bed Bath & Beyond to take anything we could fit, smothered lovingly down Paola’s dog-sized bag.
The day we wanted to bring home a plastic bowling set, Paola made us tell our mom it was a gift from her boyfriend and our mom frowned at us during the next red light.
She said, “Is Paola bringing people over while she watches you?”
I said, “Only Frank is allowed to come in,” and my little brother concurred to make it more believable, saying, “Yeah, only Frank and he’s weird.”
“Why does Frank need to be inside?”
“One time I clogged the toilet with paper towels and the floor flooded.”
“How many times have I told you—? You cannot flush paper towels.”
“Only because the toilet paper Paola gets rips when I wipe!”
Our mom said, “Christ,” either to me or to the car behind us honking at the green light and me and my little brother jerked forward as she accelerated past Our Lady of the Supine’s stucco walls and red staircase. My little brother did the sign of the cross the way Paola taught us.
If the cops came knocking, Paola made us hide, me and my little brother and her sardined under the couch-bed. We breathed the leaping dust bunnies back and forth. They came knocking twice that summer, skirting the laundry machine and dryer to get to us. The time Frank was home, he pounded his wrist on the door to ask what the hell was going on and Paola blamed it on the Cuban couple in the garage, saying the husband had been hitting the pregnant wife. Frank went pale and sweaty to hear this said. Me and my little brother shared a look, wondering why the wife hadn’t used her suéltame or her iron, wondering if Paola meant it or if she’d made it up.
That night, my little brother couldn’t help himself. He recounted everything we’d heard that afternoon. Our mom puckered her mouth as she rubbed her makeup off with cotton swabs. I could tell she was holding a private conversation with herself in the mirror, her and her hellfire eyes.
The Cuban couple moved out a week later. Frank made them, helping them lug their bags down the driveway. The wife was silent but her face was molting its dark makeup. She stroked her belly and stared out at the clouds. Frank was saying you know I really can’t tolerate this kind of thing and, understand this is why people sign leases and he knotted his hands together to make himself seem sorry. Frank had none of his usual smiles. The husband had a face like he wanted to kill Paola dead and Paola stood on the burning concrete in pajamas and her bare toes, her face a nothing. Paola’s strongest expressions were a nothing. Her eyelashes were little mosquitoes and her painted toes didn’t react to the heat. She watched them go with her chin tipped up, wading into the fake grass to gloat. The husband and wife from El Cerro didn’t argue with Frank because they spoke only Spanish. They disappeared around the corner, their bags dragging heavily behind them.
Paola and our mom had long conversations on the phone after that. They went on for the whole of our mom’s lunch break. When our mom called, Paola answered in her speaking voice and shut the rolling plywood door with her foot. She turned the shower on to hide the high volume behind water and steam, but some words leapt out at us anyway.
The most I heard was Paola saying, “You know, there was a time in our life when I thought more than just money and—and image mattered to you. That to live was to stand for something, to be someone. But what, Isabel, do you teach your children? Who are you? What are you leaving them with—? Yes…language, memory—things that they—yes! It’s what they need! You don’t, no, you don’t…mira, no te metas en eso…”
After that, there were only snippets. Chicano—chilango—unlawful—my effin’ kids—cómo que—eviction—pues, vete entonces—and that makes you a what? What do you expect—? That I’ll fall to my knees and—?
Every night, our mom sat us down hoping we would give Paola up. She wanted to know what Paola had been teaching us and if Paola had ever brought up our dad, who we hadn’t seen in years. When we knew him, we knew he was drunk because he danced wherever he wanted to walk, his falls broken by his elbows, his chin, the edge of the tiled counter. I told our mom when Paola drank, her gums stayed the same color and she folded laundry like a lady doing origami, sipping from her brown paper bag. Paola wasn’t like our dad and she didn’t have a license the city could take away. Our mom looked at us hard, investigating our lashes for lies. She asked in a somber voice if we ever thought about our dad, if we wanted to see him again, and me and my little brother panicked, saying no, we wanted to see Paola.
Paola and our mom began to argue about nothing as an excuse to argue about anything. They made cases to us hoping we would love the other a little less—that Paola couldn’t keep a job, she’d never finished high school and couldn’t stand to hear our mom talk about her work for those reasons, that our mom was sanctimonious and yet she barely believed in God, she was a brat who threw a fit when she didn’t get her way.
Paola said did our mom even know us, her own children? Well—did she? She opened the plywood door one afternoon with a wild animal in her eyes and she told me and my little brother that we had different dads. We’d never even met the first because he was our mom’s homeroom teacher. He was forced to move schools and then states. Paola saw our faces change and she said, “My God!” through her hands. The door shut again and the shower resumed.
My little brother wasn’t saying anything, so I went looking for something to distract him.
It was my duty as the older sister. That was what Paola always said. I called him over and we went through her cupboards and when he unlatched her jewelry box, I didn’t do anything to stop him.
Inside we found endless papers held together with clips. Bills, addresses, unsent letters. A pretty glass spiral where you could press your thumb into the depression to enjoy the cold. A bracelet made of paper. Colorful bills from the Banco De México and a little cut-out from the newspaper announcing a man who had won the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia a long time ago.
Nothing piqued our interest. Then, behind it all, we found a stack of photos Paola had kept from her albums and on the back she’d written in blue ink. She wrote muñequita and bite me! and luvvvergirl. The photos were of Paola and our mom from their skinny eyebrow days and when we came to the last one, we saw something we shouldn’t have. In it, Paola was on her back, but she had no shirt on, and she was enshrined under the legs of the person taking the photo, and that person was our mom, which we knew because Paola had drawn the angel’s face for us and there was the angel, and Paola held our mom’s wrist like a nursing baby, but the nipple was the first two fingers on our mom’s hand. It seemed Paola wanted to chew them up and her face said they tasted good. Her eyelashes looked like they were in love. The two of them wanted to be alone together in that photo—you could just tell. They wanted to be seen by no one. Now me and my little brother were seeing them.
I heard the water shut off and my arms trembled trying to get everything back in the box again. Me and my little brother ran for the couch-bed. By the time Paola emerged, we were sitting on our hands and waiting. She sat with us. The air was warm and close and our faces were warm and close. Paola said she was sorry, she shouldn’t have said something so foul, she was a liar and she would never do it again. She’d only done it to get back at our mom.
She said, “You should never use another person to hurt someone. People aren’t things,” and her voice shook while saying it.
It was decided we would never see Paola again. My little brother cried, but he was too little to know when to stop talking and he’d said too much to our mom about our week. The photos in the jewelry box were enough. I wanted to defend our auntie, who knew us even when we didn’t know ourselves, and who we couldn’t blame for this because we were the ones who’d gone looking. I wanted to tell our mom when Paola took down the fold-out ironing board, she hummed behind the steam and the steam remade her face until she was new and strangely lit. She was like a saint. Me and my little brother canonized her with our love.
Our mom didn’t care. She was too angry to hear us that night or the week that followed. Her anger only grew. She said don’t let that woman fool you, she’s not from CDMX, which is artsy and academic, she’s a tijuanense trying to hide it, her mom lived and died a whore in that dirty city, just because her dad’s a writer from down south, she thinks she’s above it all, that she can transcend her origins. Me and my little brother didn’t know what to say to stop her from going on.
Our mom said, “Yes, even men of the intellectual class buy sex—yes, even Paola’s daddy. Run back and tell her that, why don’t you? That man hasn’t spoken to her in almost a decade and she has the nerve to call herself his daughter. She’s not. She’s a nobody. She runs home to fuck a way of speaking and then she comes back here to fuck for pay—to turn her nose up at women like me, because we don’t agree with her behavior.”
I said, “Mom, don’t you mean eff?” and she looked at me for the first time and she said, “Yes—I, yes, that’s what I meant. Eff.”
Our last Friday with Paola, she took us to IHOP and we all shared a milkshake. At home, she turned on the TV to make our day less tragic. Still we cried behind the guitar ballad that introduced all those ladies who said suéltame. We understood that there were limits to our understanding, but it didn’t help—to be aware of the wall and without any means of scaling it. She made us take the school supplies and lotto tickets, too, organizing them neatly in our backpack. My little brother cried harder, saying he didn’t want her to leave us and Paola pinched his cheek and asked if he was excited for school to start back up again. She lit four prayer candles and clipped our nails for us. The silver teeth flashed like a falling star and then a new moon being born right there on the ice-cold concrete. All those moons our fingers shed. Paola kept her eyes down when she said to tell our mom she didn’t regret anything, she meant that even if we had to be apart, even if we only ever ran into each other at church, wending through the pews of Our Lady of the Supine every Sunday to blink all we wanted to say to each other. She showed us how to give a kiss with eyelashes and my little brother forgot to keep crying, he was laughing so hard.
I asked Paola what supine meant and she went right away to one of her dictionaries, paging slowly through all the S-letter words. I imagined she’d stolen it from somewhere. I imagined a boyfriend with beautiful ankles gave it to her. It seemed the afternoon died a first and second death in all that page-turning time, and the air was too precious to be inhabited by our favored TV ladies, who on that Friday were anticipating divorce and financial ruin because they’d embraced their husband’s bitter enemy. Every day was a new episode. Every episode alternated between ranch-style mansions filled with still hair and suéltames. This last suéltame was soft like Paola predicted. You could tell the TV lady didn’t mean it, she was whispering it as a warning to herself, she wanted her husband’s enemy to lean in so they could be alone together with the wash of piano. A tear glittered on her cheekbone. Her husband’s enemy brushed it away with his mouth. She smiled, shut her eyes.
Paola said, “Supine: lying flat on your back with your face looking upward.” Me and my little brother knew without speaking that it was true—Paola was the Lady who did miracles and our mom was the Supine, no matter what that photo said. Paola was the first and only saint who would never die. “‘We walked past the rows of supine bodies, unable to tell who had fallen unconscious and who was coming very slowly awake.’”
