Читать книгу Give It To Me - Ana Castillo - Страница 11

5

The letters and postcards that Palma Piedras sent to Abuela over the years from her adventures were spread out on the bed. Without thinking about it she had brought them out. She told herself she couldn’t sleep because she’d drunk coffee too late in the day. The fact was that it was going to take time to get used to Ursula’s absence. Getting unused to someone around, Palma thought, was not the same as missing them. She noticed there were a few envelopes held together with a rubber band. They weren’t in her handwriting but addressed to Abuela. She picked the bundle up and turned it around a few times. The return address was in LA. Who did her grandmother know in LA? Well, the answer could be anybody. Most likely a relocated pastor from her church or former church member.

Out of curiosity as to why the old woman would keep those letters, eight with her own correspondence, Palma pulled off the rubber band. It was so brittle it snapped. They dated back to when Palma was a mere Tater Tot. Included were two business envelopes with government return addresses: The Department of Human Services. The others were in letter-size envelopes. Large, loopy handwriting. She opened one randomly. Mami. It was addressed to someone’s mother. Palma skimmed to the end and the signature, in round letters was, your dauhter, Angela. (Daughter was spelled “dauhter.”) Her abuela’s daughter, a.k.a, Palma’s biological mother. Dear Mami, How are you? I hope well. How is our baby Palma? We miss her! Her gaze ran frantically over the page. Her tiny toes with teeny toenails. I love her so much, she read . . . about her. She’s such a good baby (i.e., said baby never cried). She put the letters in order chronologically and began reading about Angela and her boyfriend, Mariano, Jr.

Apparently, they had Palma when they were both around fifteen. Kids. (So he was Palma’s biological father—not a rogue as Abuela insinuated.) Mariano, Jr.’s family were migrant workers, the letters revealed. Abuela was opposed to the pregnancy, the couple getting married, and most def did not want her daughter to go on the migrant trail picking onions, tomatoes, and fleas off their necks and ankles at bedtime. But Angela went anyway. (It explained why Palma’s birth certificate read that she was born in Indiana.) Angela and Mariano, Jr. left her with her abuela over summer when they were working the fields with his family in that nearby state. When they came back Abuela had begun the process of taking full custody. Those kids had little wherewithal to understand what was going on. They appealed to Abuela’s compassion, which only existed for Christ on the Cross, Jim-Bo, and the Holy Spirit—nothing left for bad girl Angela, who’d gone against her mother’s wishes.

If only my father were still alive, Angela wrote in her last letter, he would never have taken my dauhter away from me. As far as Palma could tell, her parents married, stayed together, and eventually settled down in Los Angeles. You are heartless, Angela had written to her mother from there. Not exactly a news flash. What Palma didn’t know was how had Mariano, Jr. felt about it all that time. Leaving his baby behind, and with Angela’s “heartless” mother?

Everything Palma had taken for truth was rearranged.

If she’d felt sorry for herself her whole life because she believed she had parents who hadn’t loved her, Palma now felt worse discovering that they had. Knowing she was possibly wanted, every corpuscle, capillary, and nerve ending started to quake. She gulped down a glass of ice water and then put the glass against her forehead. Palma’s brain went rat-a-tat-tat with one doubt after the next. Had they tried hard enough to get her back? A Rubik’s Cube of scenes from her entire upbringing shifted around in her head. The day-by-day blows of her upbringing. The kids in grammar school who mocked her for not having a mom and dad. Arrimada, the Mexican kids called her. It meant an orphan freeloader. What would have getting her menses been like had her mother been there, and not an old woman from a village who believed it was one more shameful aspect of femaleness? Silly things came to mind too: the mother-and-daughter tea as a senior in high school with their pretty hats and dainty gloves, going to the salon together beforehand for manicures. Palma never knew if her grandmother would have come, but as a teenager she was ashamed of the old woman—the scant English, the wrinkles, and the tote bag she used as a purse. The fact that around her own—other poor Mexicans—she was a tyrant, but with Alta Mulch or even regular Mulch, Abuela shrank until she became an India watermark on the wall. Totonaca de pata rajada she called herself.

Would someone have asked the girl to the prom if she’d had a dad willing to lend him the car and made sure the boy got her home at a decent hour instead of the word around the school being that she could be had for a song? When Palma got called dirty Mexican in the neighborhood, what if her hard-working father came out and pounded them with his farm-worker fists? Would she have worked evenings waiting tables at the diner if she had parents to insist that homework came first? Did Palma have her mother’s eyebrows that at fourteen she started plucking, then shaving, and then had to draw back in as slim flapper’s lines? Was her humor that people called sardonic her mother’s—a distilled version passed on from Abuela’s acidity or from the Y-chromosome? Or instead, just an urban Darwinianesque trait adapted for survival in the South Side of Chicago?

Most of all, what Palma Piedras wondered that night was, would those anonymous parents have loved her for the girl she was, had they come back when she was eight? Sixteen? At forty-plus it was too late for a mommy and daddy, but could she ever set her heart straight?