Knowledge pisses you off.
*
A list off the top of my head of the things Noelia would buy in the supermarket without stopping to think:
Flip-flops, especially the kind with patterns on them. I must have given away a thousand pairs, but every time I clean out a closet, there’s another one.
Tin foil.
Canned tuna. This was an old tic of hers: before she met me, since she practically lived at the hospital, she ate the same salad, over and over, which she’d picked up when she did her junior residence. It consisted of one can of tuna, another of corn, and a few tablespoons of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. (Noelia made a point of stressing the mayonnaise brand whenever she passed on the recipe to some malnourished resident: in her day, only the nurses used McCormick; residents ate Hellmann’s.)
Sugar-free gum (at the cash register). She only ever chewed gum when she drove alone, because she was paranoid she’d fall asleep at the wheel.
Paracetamol.
PAM: 1-cal cooking spray.
*
Noelia once said to me, ‘Being only a daughter is so Umami No.’
*
PAM cooking spray — that piteous substitute for oil which I refuse point-blank to use — came into our lives kicking and screaming. Lulú brought it for us. Lulú is Noelia’s cousin from Boston, and was the undisputed chief promoter of my wife’s esoteric side. Every time she came to stay she’d bring a new tarot-card game, or a year’s worth of Chinese horoscopes, or a book on her latest diet. The pair of them were hooked on Weight Watchers for about a hundred years, during which time Lulú sent boxes and boxes of points-based, readymade food without ever giving a thought to how deeply it offended me.
In exchange, whenever Noelia went to the States for a conference, she would take Lulú a box full of handmade tortillas and Mexican bits, because her cousin was one of those émigrés who spends their life idolizing their homeland. When it got easier to get hold of Mexican products over there, Lulú became more and more picky. She only wanted Noelia to bring her things from the market; nothing prepackaged. One time they stopped us at customs and we had to hand over all seven kilos of the Oaxaca cheese we’d attempted to sneak through. Try as Noelia might to play up her credentials for the customs officers, nobody would believe her that that stringy, by then ever-so-slightly-tangy cheese was pasteurized.
Lulú lived outside of the country and, to some extent, outside of time. As far as I recall, she was the only one of our friends and family who never stopped making hypothetical comments about our hypothetical children. She never gave up telling us about how gringas were having babies later and later, about fertility clinics, about how she was going to take our kids to see God knows what team over there, because she was a baseball nut. She probably still is. I mean, in all likelihood she’s still alive, it’s just I haven’t seen her since Noelia’s funeral. I remember she took care of the flowers.
Lulú didn’t have children either, or a partner. In her own words, she didn’t even have ‘a dog to whine at her’. The day she turned up with a tub of Cool Whip, she presented it to us with the words, ‘Not even God, who invented the penis, could have come up with something this good and this low in calories.’ But that was the only reference to a man I ever heard her make. I know she had several, because she was a fine-looking woman and because, once Lulú had taken herself off to the guest room, Noelia would fill me in, jumping into bed possessed by a kind of gossip hyper-frenzy, which only sleep, generally mine, could snap her out of. It was during one of these sessions that Noelia let on how the idea of the reborn dolls had come from Lulú.
‘What are they?’ I asked. ‘It sounds esoteric.’
‘They’re dolls that have been reborn,’ Noelia explained.
‘Reborn how?’
‘Like, they’re not dolls anymore. When they’re reborn, they become babies. Sort of to console those people who don’t have children, you know the type?’
2001
My job is to take all the dirt off the death trumpets with a toothbrush. It’s really hard because the dirt is the same color as the trumpet so you can’t tell when to stop. When I think I can’t get any more off I put the trumpet in a salad bowl full of warm water and Grandma rubs it with her fingers to make sure. Her hands look like mine when I’ve spent ages in the lake. Now I have clothes on again and it feels all toasty. When the trumpets are as clean as clean can be, we give them to my mom and she puts them in with the garlic and tomatoes that are sizzling in the pan. Sizzling is what you call the sound of loads and loads of snakes talking at once.
‘What do you paint your hands with?’ I ask Grandma.
‘My nails?’
‘Yup.’
‘With varnish.’
‘Would you like Emma to paint your nails?’ my mom asks me.
I shake my head from side to side. Of course I don’t. I know what varnish is and how much it pongs.
*
We eat at a table on the terrace, which Grandma calls the porch. I’m hungry. Everything smells of oil and garlic. Pina doesn’t like garlic because she’s dumb. Ana likes garlic as much as I do, especially the burnt bits. My mom takes two pieces from the pan, gives us one each, and we chew on them happily. Pina pulls a face at us like she’s disgusted. She says to me, ‘Jeez, Luchi Luchi, who would have known?’
‘Known what?’
‘That you’re not a vampire.’
Emma gives us cotton serviettes instead of paper ones and I sit all elegant, like the elegant ladies on the planes who wear neckties and little hats and give out peanuts.
‘I can’t be a vampire because I’m a peanut, right?’ I ask, and everyone says, ‘Right,’ apart from Ana, who rolls her eyes and stays looking at the sky like when she wishes we weren’t sisters at all.
Emma serves the pasta from the pan and some wine that her friends on the other coast make. She serves us girls a little bit too, but it tastes gross. Only Pina likes it, but then she says that her mom also likes wine and her chin trembles like she’s going to cry, but then she asks Grandma for some Coca-Cola. Ana and I laugh, because we know Grandma hates Coca-Cola. But then Emma explains to Pina something she’s never explained to us.
‘Coca-Cola is the sewage of the empire,’ she says.
Ew, no wonder my mom never let us touch the stuff.
‘Is Michigan an empire?’ I ask, while trying to wrap my spaghetti around my fork like my mom wants us to.
Pina says it is and that the emperor is called Michelin.
‘That’s not true,’ Ana says. ‘The emperor is called Umami.’
‘And is he a baddie?’
‘A really bad baddie,’ Pina says. ‘He eats little girls for breakfast.’
‘Nuh-uh, no he isn’t,’ interrupts Ana. And then she says to Pina, ‘Don’t tell tales to my sister!’ And to me she says, ‘Umami is the best emperor in the world; if a little girl goes visit him in his castle, Umami will grant her a wish.’
I want to ask more but Mama and Grandma put us to work in the kitchen. They give me a special spoon, like the teeny-weeny baby of the one you use to scoop ice cream, and I have to use it to make melon balls. First you dig it in the fruit, then you turn. I’m the queen of the melon balls. I have to put them then in glass dishes where Ana then serves a scoop of ice cream and Pina adds a spoon.