Where We Come From Page 10
“Was he really that dark?” Orly asks and then remembers his mom telling him not to talk about people’s skin color, but he figures it’s okay in this case because he’s named after the man and because the question makes Nina smile like she knows something he doesn’t.
“It was from working outside all his life, from the time he was younger than you. Then he had to leave home to look for work when he was fifteen. But when he took off his shirt he was as light as you, maybe lighter.”
Orly has a hard time imagining his great-grandfather’s skin being anything like his, that they could be related by anything more than a last name, but he doesn’t have time to turn this over in his head before Nina goes to the next set of photos. Each comes with its own story she has to tell before she lets him turn the page again, so many that they flood his mind with who was married to who, whose grandfather’s land was stolen, which were the brothers who were hired guns, whose father was lynched by the Texas Rangers, who died in Korea, who died in a bar in Reynosa, who was shot in Vietnam and got a Purple Heart, who worked in a beauty parlor, who was a policeman and also played the harmonica and accordion in his own conjunto, who did time in prison, who left her boyfriend to marry the Jehovah, who raised six little ones on her own, who left to work the fields and stayed up north, who was the first to finish high school, who was homecoming queen that one year, who was the first girl in the family to finish college, who went away to school in Washington, in Boston, in California, who was the first to go to dentist school, who was the first to go to law school, who lived for years and years allá solita in New York City, who was the first to own her own business, who was the first to move away and not come back. Most of them dead and the rest living far from here. She turns one page and there’s the sepia photo of Mamá Meche when she was three or four, standing on a large wicker chair with a huge bow in her hair. As different as her hair and skin are today, the shape of her little eyes and nose looks the same. The next page has one of his dad when he was Orly’s age and riding a horse. Toward the end of the album they find his mom and dad’s wedding photo. Nina waits a little longer here because he’s moving his finger along the edges of the picture.
“Are there any more of them?”
“Only this last one,” she says.
It’s from his baptism, with his mom and dad and Nina, the same one he has stored away in his closet at home. The priest has just blessed him, and his godmother is cradling him in her arms, smiling, beaming actually, lifting up the child she will help guide through life by her words and deeds.
9
Orly sleeps in a small room next to the kitchen and the bathroom, which makes it easy if in the middle of the night he needs to pee or wants to go serve himself a glass of water. The bed is pushed up alongside the paneled wall and at night before falling asleep he likes to feel the grooves on it. Between some of the grooves he can stretch out his hand and barely reach the next groove; between others the space is only large enough for his fingers to stay scrunched up together. The actual grooves also come in different sizes, some of them as wide as a full inch, others more like three-quarters of an inch. He likes to know when there’s a pattern. A pattern makes him feel there is some logic to the ways things are, someone has thought this through, whether he knows the reason for this or not. In the morning he’ll ask Nina for a ruler and measure them. There’s a mystery of some kind to be solved in the grooves and the distances between them and he has a sense that figuring out the pattern might lead to something bigger and this might lead to solving other mysteries. When he asks her for the ruler she’ll say, Pero why, Orly? But he’s learned that some questions, especially the more important ones, don’t have answers.
Nighttime is the hardest part of the day for him, especially when he can’t sleep and he’s trying not to think about how he was bored most of the day. How Carson keeps posting pics on Instagram with the hashtag #AllTheShitOrlysMissing, today hanging out at his family’s beach house with his older half sister and her boyfriend, who go to Tulane, yesterday at the Marble Slab in River Oaks taking a selfie with two unidentified girls, both blond, holding waffle cones with enormous scoops of ice cream, one of them dotted with gummy bears, the other with Skittles. It makes him miss home. Even the musty smell of Nina’s sheets and quilt remind him of the old sleeping bag they keep in the tree house and how squirrels chewed through the lining and so no one had used it until Alex started sneaking out at night.
* * *
—
If Orly turns his pillow the other way, so his head is at the foot of the bed, or what he assumes is the foot of the bed—there’s no headboard—and if he squints hard enough, he can make out the shelf with a Virgen de Guadalupe statuette and then behind it a few bowling trophies and a plaque Nina received in 1999, when she was Teacher of the Year. There’s also a framed photo of her with a group of girls from the kickball team she used to coach. Like all the other rooms in the house, his bedroom door has a wide gap at the very bottom, as if the doorframe is too tall or the door was too long and they sawed off the last inch or so. When the light is still on in the hallway, the gap is almost like the night-lights he has in his room and bathroom at home.
He hasn’t inspected the entire room, but at least near his bed the pattern is two narrow spaces, a wider space, and then another two narrow ones; it’s the opposite with the grooves, one narrow groove between the narrow spaces, but all the rest are wide. He’s guessing the spaces and grooves continue in the same pattern down to the floor, beyond where he can wedge his fingers between the wall and bed. During the day he hardly notices the paneling; it’s only at night when he has nothing to do or look at that he reaches out to feel the grooves.
Though he can’t see it at night, he knows the room has a popcorn ceiling, the kind his mom said she was going to have in the townhouse and was so ’70s, whatever that means. She was still living at home with the family because the townhouse wouldn’t be ready for a couple more weeks. Orly never got to see where she was moving to or even drive by it, but one night when she was cuddling with him in bed she told him about the popcorn ceiling and how it was the one part she wished she could change about her new place. She said it like the tiny bumps on the ceiling were the only thing that might keep her from being happy when she moved out.
“You know when there’s something that really bugs you and every time you look at it, it bugs you a little more, but there’s nothing you can do to change it right away, you just have to live with it that way.”
“Sort of,” he said, though nothing was coming to mind. He just liked the sound of her voice, the wisp of her breath on the back of his ear.
“You probably won’t remember any of this, you were too young, but when you were a baby you used to ride in the backseat of the car facing backward. It’s safer this way, for little babies, and then when you got a little older, it was okay to turn your car seat the other way, so you were facing forward and seeing what we were seeing, and we could look back and make sure you were doing okay or know if you fell asleep. But you hated looking this way, to the front. You’d cry and cry anytime we had to put you in the car and wouldn’t stop until we pulled you out. At first we thought it was making you carsick to look out this way, the way we were, facing forward, and you kept twisting your little body in the seat to see what was behind you. We asked you what was wrong, but you were just learning to talk and we couldn’t understand what you were saying and that upset you even more. Then we remembered you hated when things changed. You used to put up such a fuss at the day care if they tried to feed you in a different spot with all the other little kids. This was happening around Christmas and we almost didn’t want to leave the house, especially not for any long trips. Your dad finally had the idea to turn you back around, since you still could ride this way and it was safer. But even this didn’t make you stop crying when we put you in the car. Then one day I picked you up from day care and on the way home it started raining and
this made you clap. Clapping was always good because this was how you told us you liked something, and this time what you liked was watching the windshield wiper go back and forth, the one that’s for the back window, which was what you didn’t like about facing the other way, because the front wipers were kind of blocked by the seat in front of you. Then I finally remembered your favorite song at the day care was ‘Wheels on the Bus,’ and your favorite part was when they sang about the wipers going ‘swish, swish, swish’ and you’d do the motion with your little hands.” She grabbed his hand to show him how he used to do it side to side. “Swish, swish, swish…”
(He actually remembered hearing this story from his dad, but he didn’t want her to leave yet and so he’d pretended this was the first time he’d heard it. The only difference in the two stories was that they each claimed to be the one who’d picked him up from day care that rainy afternoon.)
“But until this happened and we figured out what you needed, you were like me with the ceiling. So frustrated, you know?”
He nodded like it all made sense to him. Then he listened to her explain the difference between the smooth texture they had throughout their house and the popcorn texture at the townhouse, but the whole time he was wishing that instead of her being worried about the ceiling, she was worried about how she wouldn’t be here every night to say good night to him. He couldn’t bring himself to say these words because it seemed like his wish would mean she couldn’t have her wish and this would make her sad again, which was the reason she was leaving them in the first place. So maybe it was better to say nothing and pretend the popcorn ceiling was the only thing on his mind right then.
* * *
—
Sometimes he’ll feel the grooves on the paneling for ten or fifteen minutes before rolling over and falling asleep. If he wakes up in the middle of the night he might reach out for the wall as if he were a blind man steadying himself.
When he’s fading is when one thought slips to another that leads to another that doesn’t always make sense, at least at first. The popcorn ceiling, for instance, reminds him of real popcorn and how Nina said she would buy some for him next time she went to the store. And the popcorn reminds him of going to the movies, even if their dad never let them buy popcorn.
Before their parents ever mentioned the separation, they used to all go as a family to the movies on Saturday mornings. It was his dad’s idea to save a few dollars by going to the matinee. He had worked as a movie usher growing up and didn’t think paying the full admission price was worth it and never let them buy anything from the concession stand, especially not the popcorn, which he claimed was recycled popcorn, from the previous night, stuffed into large plastic bags and then the next morning tossed in with whatever new popcorn they made, so by looking at it you never knew if it was just made or had been sitting around from the night before or longer. He said it as if the ushers had collected the popcorn people left behind, under their seats on the sticky floor, and stuffed this into the plastic bag too.
Their dad also didn’t think they should have to stay in a theater if it turned out they didn’t like the movie they’d bought a ticket for.
“If you go to the store and try on a pair of jeans and they don’t fit, they’re too short, like high-waters, what do you do?”
“What’s high-waters?” Orly asked from the backseat. They were on the tollway headed to their family time, as their dad liked to call these trips to the movies.
“You know, pants that are too short.”
“We don’t buy our clothes at the store,” Alex said. “Mom buys them online and we try them on at home and she sends them back if they don’t fit or whatever, or if they’re the wrong color. She doesn’t like going to stores.”
This seemed like new information to their father and it was another exit before he spoke again. “But you don’t keep them, that’s the point. If they don’t fit, they get sent back to the store. So if the movie you’re watching isn’t something you like, what you thought you were ordering, then why should you sit through two hours of it?”
“Sure,” their mom said, glancing up from her cell phone, “but if the other movie is sold out, then you might be taking somebody else’s seat.”
“But only when the theater is busy, and it’s almost never busy on a Saturday morning.”
“You’re teaching them to steal, Eddie. If you buy one ticket you can’t just decide to slip into another theater. People don’t do that here.”
“So nobody likes to save money?”
“Not that way.”
“All I’m saying is to get their money’s worth, to see the movie they really want to see. Is that such a bad thing, to watch the movie you really want to see?”
It was quiet for a moment in the Suburban; they were about to exit and could already see the movie theater. She checked her cell phone one last time before sticking it into her bag. “Don’t listen to your father.”
But they did, except Alex made Orly promise not to tell about those times when they snuck into another movie. This meant they could see practically any PG or PG-13 movie they wanted, maybe even R-rated, unless Alex thought there might be something super scary that would give Orly nightmares and then the whole thing would blow up in his face because he was three years older and was supposed to be watching out for his little brother.
Later their dad changed jobs and was traveling more, mainly during the week to Dallas, where the ad agency had opened another office, but sometimes also to L.A., if they were shooting a commercial and he’d have to be back the next week for editing. So then it was just their mom, Alex, and Orly. That their mom was watching her own movie during their Saturday morning outings made it easier for the boys to sneak into the one they really wanted to see. The last time the three of them went to the movies was the weekend before their mom was supposed to move out. Their father was out of town, as usual, editing in L.A., and was due back on Sunday or Monday, depending how it went with the client.
All that week at school Alex had been hearing from Kyle about Blair Witch, which was supposed to be way scarier than the original Blair Witch Project, made back in the late ’90s and which he’d seen one night in his room. Kyle’s dad was still an undergrad when the first one came out and, because he wasn’t always checking parenting websites or traveling for business, he had taken Kyle and his little brother to see it last Friday night, because who goes to see a slasher movie on a Saturday morning? What time of day he saw it mattered less to Alex than just seeing it already and not having to hear which character gets it first in the movie, when you’re totally not expecting it. Which was all he had to hear to know he couldn’t take Orly.
He let Orly know this only after their mom had given them their tickets and rushed off to catch a movie at the other end of the multiplex. Theirs was rated PG, and based on the reviews it was an inspiring movie about an underdog baseball team that wins a state title against all odds.
“But I don’t want to see it by myself.”
“You’re acting like that’s the scary one.” His brother was already walking backward toward his own movie.
“You’re going to make her mad, Alex.”
“Not if you go to your movie and I go to mine and you stop being stupid about the whole thing.”
“You’re the stupid one.”
“I’m not the one who thinks not making her mad might make her change her mind about leaving.”
Orly flinched as if his brother had punched him in the arm.
“Seriously, stop acting like a baby,” Alex said and then hurried off to his movie. Orly waited a few minutes before following him into the same theater.
The previews had just ended and they were announcing that the audience had to turn off or silence their cell phones. The theater was pitch-black now, and he held on to the railing until he was almost at the place where the corridor ended and he would�
�ve turned to walk up the steps to the stadium seating. There were only twenty or thirty people in the whole theater, and he thought he could make out Alex in the middle, instead of in the very back row, where he normally wanted to slouch down when it was a movie their mom had picked out for them. Orly was squatting against the wall—low enough to where no one could spot him—when he heard the first scream, but more like multiple screams, one layered on top of another and coming from different directions. Only there weren’t any people on the screen, just disembodied shrieks moving, running from whatever it was they saw. The person holding the camera was scrambling through an old house, up stairs and around corners, away from the screams and thunder in the distance, away from the pounding on the doors and windows, and later, still in the house but now in more like an underground tunnel or secret passage, searching for a light, some escape from what was coming for them. Then the person holding the camera stopped suddenly, locked a door, looked at the other locked door in the dim room, looked back at the first lock, and that’s when the door busted open and the screams started again. All before Orly could rush out of the theater.
And then he was beyond the door, in the glow of incandescent lights, the paisley carpeting in the hallway. He felt unsteady, like he had been the one running to get away. The floor was calling him to sit for a while. But he was afraid to draw the attention of the usher coming this way, so he walked in the opposite direction and slipped into the restroom. He splashed cold water across his cheeks and into his eyes, like this might dilute some of what he had just seen.