Umami (7 page)

‘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.

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.

‘On purpose?' I asked her.

‘By accident,' she said, ‘but can't you see? It was his fate.'

I shove the note under the door, then kneel down to see if it went through OK. There's a pair of feet standing still in front of me. My heart starts pounding. I scramble up and sprint back to the mews, the red trolley making a racket against the cobbles. Once safely inside the mews, I pounce on the first door I come to. How creepy, those feet standing there right next to the door but not opening. It must be Daniel, I tell myself. He must have another woman.

*

Bitter happens to be the first house. Marina lives there. My brothers call her Miss Mendoza, which is what she wrote on her mailbox, but she's told me before that ‘this whole Miss thing' makes her feel ‘old and saggy', and that she's ‘only' twenty-one, which in my eyes practically makes her the local spinster. She's definitely the token single tenant. Pina and I are also technically single, but Pi has no intentions of staying that way beyond fourteen. She swore she's going to find a summer fling (those were her words) in Matute, or whatever her mom's beach is called.

Sometimes Marina lives alone and sometimes she lives with a boyfriend. There's always some new guy hanging around, and they're usually so good-looking that if I bump into them in the passageway I have to recite poetry in my head just to stop myself from blushing (
Brown and furry caterpillar in a hurry, take your walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each
). It never really works though: I always turn bright red. And maybe good-looking isn't the right word either. Let's say: tall. And when I say Marina is the ‘local' spinster I mean inside Belldrop Mews, which is where everything that happens in my life takes place, apart from the way too many hours I spend at the school around the corner and in La Michoacana on the next block. What measly perimeters us city-kids are dealt.

A few months ago, the Neighborhood Association got hold of several liters of a horrible rosy red paint that the hardware store on the nearby avenue was selling off cheap. It was Marina's fault: she's obsessed with colors, particularly their names, so she chose it because the tins said Coral. I guess she thought coral would bring her closer to her marine-a habitat or something. We all had to take turns painting. Even my mom came out of her little bubble to paint for a while. Now, if you happen to be walking along the street when someone opens the door to the mews, it looks like you're peering down a larynx: like the long passageway is made of a living tissue, and the dew-like sunlight dappled across the textured walls is saliva.

Marina opens the door to me in jeans and a white blouse. I reckon I've spent more time observing her style than any other fashion trend. I don't really get it, but I love it. When she first came to the mews, Marina babysat us while Mom grieved for Luz. She would make us sit down with the instruments in Sweet House, where my parents have their music school, and we would spend whole afternoons drawing and painting. It was boring as hell, but from the window we could spy on the cortège of women processing through the mews to visit Mom. Slowly and deliberately, they'd file along the corridor, which was purplish back then, a shade Marina used to call ‘asylilac'. And that's what they looked like, the women; a line of loony asylum runaways, always on edge, in a rush, fresh out of a traffic jam or just stopping by between errands. Some would spot us through the window and pop into the school to deliver death-grip hugs. Then they made their way over to our house, and if they were lucky Mom would drink wine and tea with them, in which case they'd leave all serene, my sister's death like a pill that put their own mini-dramas into perspective. Other days, she wouldn't even open the door to them, so the deeply distressed cortège would come back to Sweet House, and we'd have to make excuses for Mom.

‘She's at a rehearsal,' we'd say. And sometimes she really was.

‘What about your dad?' the women would insist.

And I'd tell them the truth, which amounted to the same thing: ‘Rehearsal. He has a concert coming up.'

Sometimes it feels like they spent that entire first year locked away in a permanent rehearsal while we sat among the untouched instruments in their silent music school, the hallway piling up with gift baskets. Something I understood then is that the Mexican gift industry may be well and truly gringofied at Christmas, but when it comes to death, our own comfort foods trump everything. I've never received so many bags of Mexican sweet treats –
pepitorias
,
palanquetas
,
jamoncillos
– as I did when my sister died. I found it dumb and pretty insulting, them bringing us candies. Not that that stopped me eating them. My mom and Marina also used to meet up for wine or tea, until last year when they stopped talking to each other. I never found out why. When I ask Mom she says Marina's a traitor, or that she sided with the enemy or something along those lines. But the last time I tried to get her to dish the dirt she stood there thinking for a while and then said, ‘Because I'm like Corleone, you better don't mess with my people, or…'

‘Or…?' I asked, but she just stuck out her tongue at me.

I don't dare ask Marina what went on, but once she let it slip that she thinks Mom is ‘rancorous'. She also said it's ‘pathological' that she's still mourning, and that she lives ‘shut out from the world'. But she doesn't, really. Mom still rehearses and she's gone back to teaching in Sweet, and if we put on a play or show at school she always comes. She doesn't play in concerts anymore, though.

‘So why rehearse?' people ask her.

‘Because it keeps my head above water,' she answers, as if the lifeline music throws her were material and evident: a big, fat buoy at the base of the cello, keeping her from slipping under. As if we weren't all wading in the river of shit that Luz's death left in our home. Except that it's not even quite a river, our sadness: it's stagnant water. Since Luz drowned, there's always something drowning at home. Not everyday. Some days you think that we're all alive again, the five remaining members of the family: I get a zit; some girl calls Theo; Olmo plays his first concert; Dad comes back from tour; Mom decides to bake a pie. But later you go into the kitchen, and there's the pie, still raw on the wooden countertop, half of it pricked and the other half untouched, with Mom hovering over it, clutching the fork in midair. And then you know that we too, as a family, will always be ‘almost six'.