Free Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros Page B

like Sesame Street. Kids hopscotching on the sidewalk, blessed little boogers. And hardware stores that still sold ostrich-feather dusters, and whole families marching out of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on Sundays, girls in their swirly-whirly dresses and patent-leather shoes, boys in their dress Stacys and shiny shirts.
    But nights, that was nothing like what we knew up on the north side. Pistols going off like the wild, wild West, and me and Ximena and the kids huddled in one bed with the lights off listening to it all, saying, Go to sleep, babies, it’s just firecrackers. But we knew better. Ximena would say, Clemencia, maybe we should go home.And I’d say, Shit! Because she knew as well as I did there was no home to go home to. Not with our mother. Not with that man she married. After Daddy died, it was like we didn’t matter. Like Ma was so busy feeling sorry for herself, I don’t know. I’m not like Ximena. I still haven’t worked it out after all this time, even though our mother’s dead now. My half brothers living in that house that should’ve been ours, me and Ximena’s. But that’s—how do you say it?—water under the damn? I can’t ever get the sayings right even though I was born in this country. We didn’t say shit like that in our house.
    Once Daddy was gone, it was like my ma didn’t exist, like if she died, too. I used to have a little finch, twisted one of its tiny red legs between the bars of the cage once, who knows how. The leg just dried up and fell off. My bird lived a long time without it, just a little red stump of a leg. He was fine, really. My mother’s memory is like that, like if something already dead dried up and fell off, and I stopped missing where she used to be. Like if I never had a mother. And I’m not ashamed to say it either. When she married that white man, and he and his boys moved into my father’s house, it was as if she stopped being my mother. Like I never even had one.
    Ma always sick and too busy worrying about her own life, she would’ve sold us to the Devil if she could. “Because I married so young,
mi’ja
,” she’d say. “Because your father, he was so much older than me, and I never had a chance to be young. Honey, try to understand …” Then I’d stop listening.
    That man she met at work, Owen Lambert, the foreman at the photo-finishing plant, who she was seeing even while my father was sick. Even then. That’s what I can’t forgive.
    When my father was coughing up blood and phlegm in the hospital, half his face frozen, and his tongue so fat he couldn’t talk, he looked so small with all those tubes and plastic sacks danglingaround him. But what I remember most is the smell, like death was already sitting on his chest. And I remember the doctor scraping the phlegm out of my father’s mouth with a white washcloth, and my daddy gagging and I wanted to yell, Stop, you stop that, he’s my daddy. Goddamn you. Make him live. Daddy, don’t. Not yet, not yet, not yet. And how I couldn’t hold myself up, I couldn’t hold myself up. Like if they’d beaten me, or pulled my insides out through my nostrils, like if they’d stuffed me with cinnamon and cloves, and I just stood there dry-eyed next to Ximena and my mother, Ximena between us because I wouldn’t let her stand next to me. Everyone repeating over and over the Ave Marías and Padre Nuestros. The priest sprinkling holy water,
mundo sin fin, amén
.

    Drew, remember when you used to call me your Malinalli? It was a joke, a private game between us, because you looked like a Cortez with that beard of yours. My skin dark against yours. Beautiful, you said. You said I was beautiful, and when you said it, Drew, I was.
    My Malinalli, Malinche, my courtesan, you said, and yanked my head back by the braid. Calling me that name in between little gulps of breath and the raw kisses you gave, laughing from that black beard of yours.
    Before daybreak, you’d be gone, same as always, before I even knew