‘I’ve tried a thousand times at home and never found it,’ she says.
‘How can you really try if you don’t even know what a penis looks like?’ Ana asks.
‘Do so.’
‘How?’
‘OK, I don’t,’ Pina admits. ‘My dad wouldn’t show me his even though my mom yelled “It’s natural! It’s natural!” at him. But he didn’t want to so that was the end of that.’
‘I see my brother’s all the time. It’s just like a pinky. How about we try on Luz?’
‘What if she tells on us?’
‘We’ll tell my mom she wet herself and that we had to change her knickers,’ Ana says, lifting her sister off the swing.
‘Alright,’ Pina says, and she proceeds to take the lead refills out of the BIC. She counts them, then puts all eight in her pocket. She doesn’t want to risk them breaking inside Luz. Then she has another idea. On the ground near the swings there’s a drink with a straw in it. Pina puts the pencil in her pocket, grabs the straw from the can and wipes it on her shorts.
Between them they manage to lie Luz down on the wall on top of Ana’s trousers. Pina tries to take off her swimsuit but she gets in a twist. It’s not the same as undressing a doll. But even so Ana knows how to do it. Watching her maneuver the straps, it occurs to Pina that the secret is not to be afraid; it occurs to her that people with brothers and sisters are the least afraid of all. Luz is still giggling and singing, ‘on the swing, a-wing, a-wing there’s a little swinging lady’.
‘What’s she talking about?’ Ana asks.
‘That is so creepy,’ Pina says.
But Luz carries on singing her song, making it up as she goes along. Ana holds down her knees and joins in the chorus to distract her.
‘On the swing, a-wing, a-wing…’
‘Stop it,’ Luz says. ‘My song.’
This vagina hatch turns out to be even harder to open than the last one, and Pina’s job is made more difficult still by Luz, who squirms the second the straw goes near her. Luz laughs at first, but then starts to cry. Ana pins her down by the wrists. But Pina gives up almost immediately. Nobody has ever really punished her, but she has a hunch that what she’s doing is worthy of serious punishment. They let go of Luz and tickle her until she rolls and almost falls off the wall.
‘Maybe Luz and I don’t have holes,’ Ana says, ‘and that’s why we’re sisters.’
‘You don’t get it,’ Pina says, now not so sure about anything. She jumps down from the wall.
‘If you don’t have holes, you’re never going to have children,’ she says, then stands up on one of the swings and thrusts her pelvis forwards and backwards, rocking herself furiously. She’s thinking that neither the hole, the penis, nor the tadpoles exist, that it’s all a story for dumb kids; another one of those stories her mom tells her, like when she says she’s going to pick Pina up from school and instead her dad shows up. Like when she told Pina she could go along to her dance class and then just went without her and without saying anything and Pina was left standing in the kitchen in her leotard.
They hear a whistle. Luz recognizes it and starts to clap. A few seconds later Linda turns up at the swings. Pina is on edge. She’s scared Aunt Linda will tell her off. She stops rocking herself but remains frozen on the swing. She clutches hard onto the chains and her eyes bore into her feet, into her shadow on the grass, into Ana’s panties lying there like a dead butterfly. Linda announces that they have to go back to Mexico City. It’s an emergency: Grandma Emma turned up to surprise them and nobody’s there to open the door.
‘Get dressed, all of you!’ she orders. She means all of them bar Pina. Pina is the only one who’s fully dressed. Pina will have to stay there all weekend.
II
2004
It’s midday when I set off for the tools. Mostly I go so I don’t have to be around my emotionally disturbed mother. She’s completely loca. This morning she burst into my room screaming, ‘Go back!’
‘Eh?’
‘Go back to that song,’ she said, sitting down on what used to be Luz’s bed but is now my chaise longue. ‘Pass the remote.’
I passed her the remote. The stereo was playing a CD I barely know. Mom went nuts with the rewind button and hashed the song as if she were slicing an onion. Look at this big-eyed fish swimming… You see beneath the sea is where a fish should be… You see this crazy man decided not to breathe…
‘What is wrong with you?’ I asked when she finally threw the remote on the bed and let the song play on.
‘Did you ever play this to Luz?’ she asks me.
‘No siree, Marina just burnt it for me.’
Mom went on staring at me, I laughed, and then she got up and took the CD from the stereo.
‘I forbid you to listen to this song,’ she said, already by the door. And then, looking at the CD cover, ‘I forbid you to listen to Dave Matthews! Or his band!’
‘Yeah, right,’ I told her. Mom has never forbidden me to do anything.
‘And don’t say no siree,’ she said before disappearing down the hall.
‘You’re messing with my mental health, you are!’ I screamed, but she had gone. When I went down for breakfast, I found the CD broken into pieces in the kitchen.
*
I go out into the mews’ passageway and the salmony light hurts my eyes. Last night I stayed up reading. I got through an entire novel, but an easy one, not like the ones Emma sends me. The charactress was fifteen and had a brain tumor. Her titties, according to her, look like bananas. Now it’s my favorite book, because usually in metaphors they look like apples or melons or oranges. Or rather similes. But when I bend over, my titties hang down as if I was forty not thirteen, and that’s why I never have a bath at Pina’s anymore, even though she has a big bathtub. Pi likes to chat while I’m washing and I don’t like her seeing me naked. She’s got pointy, pert titties. If it were a simile I’d say: like Grandma’s hat. On the end of each one sits a dark nipple like a hazelnut. But me, I have flat nipples and my skin’s so pale that my sad blue veins show through like a bad omen. Anyway, I don’t want to think about this anymore. The Girls are sunbathing in a corner of the passageway. Sometimes Alf leaves them outside for hours. I go up to their double stroller.
‘Charactress isn’t a word,’ I tell them, ‘but it should be.’
I have the red trolley with me so that I can bring back whatever I manage to wangle off the neighbors. I start with the house across the street: Daniel and Daniela live just out in front with two Pugs, a baby and another on the way. They’re not so bad, but they’re not especially nice either. Their house has white tiled floors in every room that make the whole place feel like a giant bathroom or a spaceship. All the furniture is made of dark, fake leather, except for the baby’s stuff, which is yellow because they refuse to buy anything blue or pink. Some afternoons, Pi and I look after the baby and root through their half-empty bookshelves. It’s mostly manga and then this one book about how men and women come from different planets. One thing they do have going for them is their giant TV — bigger than anyone’s in the mews — and while the baby sleeps we watch the random shows Daniel downloads and warns us not to touch.
As I might’ve guessed, they’re not at home. I take out one of the pre-prepared notes I brought with me and write their names at the top (Daniel, Daniela, Baby). The baby is called Baby because they haven’t given her a name. They think you should get to know your kid before naming it, because if you do it the other way around you force it to take on the personality of that name, not its natural one. My dad says, though not to their faces, that everyone will just keep on calling her Baby forever. But D and D don’t want that, they just refuse to give her a name without taking her feelings into consideration. They’re waiting till Baby is old enough to have an opinion on the matter. Pina’s dad reminded them that what they’re doing is in fact illegal in Mexico. But Daniela won’t listen to him. The way she sees it, a name can make or break you. She says that in her high school there was a guy called Abel who was run over by his brother.