‘Why are the houses gray here?’ she asks.
‘They’re stained by the smog,’ answers her dad.
‘Is this where the scum lives?’
Beto says, ‘Yes.’ Then straight away, ‘No.’
Pina explains that she already knows what the smog is. Her school closed one time because of it and she was allowed to stay in her pajamas all day long for days on end.
‘You’re not going to make it to school today,’ her dad says.
‘That’s alright,’ Pina says, and she passes Beto his tie.
‘Thanks,’ he says, but doesn’t put it on.
The metal door her mom has just knocked on opens, and a fat man appears in the doorway. He’s not wearing a T-shirt, and he only lays his eyes on Chela for a second before closing the door again. Chela shrugs and Beto raises his eyebrows, which is the sign for, ‘I told you.’ But then the man comes out again, now wearing a T-shirt. A little girl peeps out from behind him, staring at Chela.
‘Maybe she has no mom,’ Pina thinks. ‘Maybe she wants mine.’
Chela talks to the man, points to the rooftop, puts her hands together, and eventually it looks like the man says something back to her. She walks back to the camper. Beto leans in toward the driver’s door and winds down the window.
‘How much have you got on you?’ she asks.
Beto opens his wallet.
‘Five hundred pesos.’
She takes all the cash, leans half her body through the window, rifles through her bottomless handbag, takes another couple of bills and, as a parting gesture, grabs the coins sitting in the camper ashtray. Beto is still holding his empty wallet, which is now gaping at the middle like a black fish freshly gutted by the monger. Chela is radiant with all that money in her hands and her hair sticking to her face in the rain. She blows Beto a kiss. Pina takes her money from her backpack and offers it to her: it’s a ten-peso coin, but Chela doesn’t accept it.
‘Save it for the bubbles,’ she says, and she blows another kiss, this time to Pina.
‘What bubbles?’ asks Pina, but Chela has already turned around. It’s her dad who answers.
‘She means bubble bath. To put in that thing.’
They watch as Chela hands the man the money, and he hands it back to her. She gives it to him again. He gives it back to her. This happens three or four times until at last the man pockets the money and lets Pina’s mom into the house. She closes the door behind her. This is when Beto, who up until then had been sitting with his head leaned back against his chair, sits up. He moves his nose in toward the windshield. Not long after, they see Chela appear on the rooftop accompanied by a lanky boy. Pina’s chest is beating so hard and fast that her admiration feels like fear.
‘That’s my mom!’ she wants to say.
Her mom is shouting something to her dad. They can’t hear her, but get the gist of what she’s saying from how she’s moving her hands. Beto lets out a sigh.
‘Don’t get out of the car,’ he tells Pina as he opens his door. Before he’s even closed it again he’s landed his feet in a puddle, soaking his socks. He slams the door, damning this and fucking that, and runs to the house, trying but failing to protect himself from the rain with his hands. His white shirt goes see-through. Before he’s even knocked, the same girl opens the door. She looks at Pina for a second, then closes the door behind Beto. ‘That’s it,’ thinks Pina. ‘The little girl has won: she’s going to keep my parents and I’ll end with the fat, shirtless man for a father.’ She shakes the thought from her head by turning her attention to her mom on the roof. Chela has broken into dance.
The lanky boy watches her, laughing nervously until Beto emerges onto the rooftop. The lanky boy leaves them to it. Pina tenses up, then climbs onto the front seat to watch her parents argue in the rain. Her mom’s happy and her dad’s furious, that much she can tell from the camper. Between them, they manage to pick up the bathtub. It’s heavy. They put it down. He shouts. She gesticulates. They pick it up again and inch their way towards the edge of the rooftop. In one single motion, they tip the tub over. Brown water pours out. And that is the last image Pina has of her parents together: they’re standing on the roof of a house in the middle of the scum, tipping filthy water onto an already flooded street.
IV
2004
I planted the corn. The rest is just watering, tending, and jotting down any observations in the margins of my books. One of them is The Urban Milpa Manual, published by our very own Alf in 1974. On the front there’s a photo of the mews before it was the mews. In the background you can see the huge house that was here originally and the rest of the plot, which is fully planted, with a group of hippies working ‘the field’. Among them I can pick out Alf, just as skinny but with lots more hair: dark, frizzy and long. And on the house’s facade I spot the bell, which would fall eleven years later and bury itself in the passageway forevermore, like the sword in the stone.
The plan is to plant the beans once the corn stalks reach a half-meter. The beans will give back all the nitrogen the corn has taken from the soil. Apparently this is important. I have to plant two or three bean shoots for every corn stalk and guide them so they climb. The nitrogen trick will make the new soil last for lots of cycles. This is what they call crop rotation and it will ensure we made a sound investment: my dad with his money, and me with my summer.
Once the bean shoots reach the third of the height of the corn stalks, I’ll have to plant the squash seeds. We’ll see how the whole thing pans out if I have to survive high school at the same time. For now, the yard looks breathtaking, if I do say so myself. Apart from the milpa area at the back, the rest is now a lawn and the planters are full. I just have one empty planter, for the tomatoes I’ll plant when my brothers are back. We put the old picnic table back where it was, but now it sits on grass. The turf cost the most out of everything, but Dad’s happy; he comes out barefoot in the afternoons after the rains. We dry the benches with a flannel and sit out there. I read and he plays his new toy: these exotic Indian drums called tabla. The name tabla makes it sound like it’s just one drum, but in fact there are two of them: a big one and a little one. Before you can play it you have to learn how to talk tabla. Dad goes to class once a week and each night he rehearses little sounds which he then tries to reproduce with his hands. I’ve got the basics down already: Right hand: Taa, Tin, Tete, Tu. Left hand: Ga, Ka. Just don’t ask me to reproduce them on the drums. Dad plays until his tendons start to ache.
‘You don’t last very long,’ I tell him.
‘Oh yeah? Well, your buddies’ parents get wrist-ache just pushing a mouse around. How sad is that?’
Dad thinks he’s so special because he doesn’t own a laptop or have an email address. When he turned forty he promised himself he’d learn a new instrument every two years. But since Luz died he hadn’t taken up anything. Then, a few weeks ago he came home with the tabla. Mom hasn’t commented on it, which means she approves.
Yesterday a letter arrived from my brothers. It doesn’t matter how many email chains she forwards us, Emma also keeps her faith in snail mail alive. The letter is written in English, as custom dictates, but it’s a shop-bought card instead of the artsy handmade ones she used to sit us down to make once a week at camp. I was crazy about writing letters, but my favorite part was sealing the envelopes with colored wax, which you had to melt and press with the copper stamp Emma had with her initials on. We keep one of the letters framed in the living room. Our four hands are printed onto it, each a different color, and even though it’s started to fade, Luz’s tiny print there means no one dares touch it. Maybe it’ll disappear entirely. Acrylic, I think it is. Or maybe gouache. I’m going to ask Marina how to restore it.