My grandmother putters around the house, Quiet, dazed, often confused— her eyes watery and clouded over.
She’s a shrunken version of her former self, with a Q-tip shaped head and mussed gray-white perm, low hanging breasts like dried apricots, her bony frame, half dressed in jeans and a pajama top.
I remember laying my head in her lap as a child where she sat on the rough, woolish sofa, exchanging chisme with my visiting mother— she would scratch my head, weaving her nails in and out of my hair, loosening the long braid that hung down my back. Then she was round, with large, soft breasts and a shameless bulge around her middle. She smelled like my favorite flower: gardenia, and a pink powder puff, and sometimes like the soaked canela and plump raisins she stirred into the oatmeal drink she made for me every morning. She was home for me, always,
and she was as full of life as she was fat, maybe more so.
She was funny, and silly, and god forbid you didn’t do what she told you, out came the chancla and a chase!
But I never feared my grandmother: between my younger brother and I, I was the obedient one, the one who followed all the rules, and who would do anything she asked: “Mija, let’s dance,” she would say in her sing-song voice, and we would swing and spin wildly across the kitchen linoleum as dinner simmered nearby.
She prayed with me, she sang to me, she turned to the night music to help me fall asleep: “Can you hear the crickets, Mija?” and I would strain my whole body to listen for their silent symphony until I became tired enough to finally shut my eyes and drift away.
She cleaned and dressed me, she bandaged my scrapes, she took me to church— she protected me and collected my tears for years and years, she left the door cracked at night, and the light on in the hallway.
She was somehow all-knowing, even before I could open my mouth to tell her how the kids teased me at school because I cried for her;
even when I ran away to Los Angeles, and we didn’t speak or see each other for years. She sent love letters to me anyway in writing as delicate as lace, and I secretly tucked them behind my dresser after poring over every detail, alone in my studio apartment.
When I returned, she taught me how to care for my baby; She cooked hundreds of thousands of meals, She ran the dishwasher, she was ordinary, she was stubborn, she was disciplined, she loved and was loved deeply.
One day she didn’t wake up, and I was the first to find her on my way to the shower, to shake her shriveled body: once, twice, a third time before my heart could register what my mind was shouting—
and then— silence, all but for a loud ringing in my ears.
Then there was the sweaty panic that washed over me as I called and called for my nearly deaf grandfather to come fix it, to breathe life back into her body, to comfort me though he couldn’t comfort himself—
now he shook uncontrollably, his face contorted— almost 50 years his bride and suddenly a shell of the woman we knew and cherished.
Where there once was softness, now all had turned to stone.
My little brother wriggled in his seat: “I gotta go,” he said, pulling on my dad’s tattooed arm.
My father escorted him to the bathroom stall at the back of the bus.
I was alone for a few blissful moments where I read my book and periodically stared out the window at the passing scenery.
The Greyhound droned on and on, eating up the road like a sea snake drawing water as it slithers through the reeds.
Whoosh: a line of naked trees goes by— Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh— plotted in vast fields of brown and gray against an indifferent sky.
I imagined what it would be like and when we would get there: I sunk into my winter jacket and pictured myself leaping from one mound of snow to the next, leaving deep imprints, clearing a crooked path.
Another fifteen hours until we reached our destination— left me wringing my hands, adjusting and readjusting my seatbelt, running my fingers through my long, tangled hair. Where were we… how far had we come?
Finally we pulled into a barren station, with just a bench and an overhang covered in snow. This was our stop, but it couldn’t be, I thought— there was no one around; it was storming outside and cold to the core; no amount of warm clothes could have taken off the edge: red, chapped face barely visible beneath my scarf—
I had never been caught in a snowstorm, never made a snowman, never seen the exact intricacies of a snowflake: “There are no two alike,” my dad said, catching me as I marveled at the expanse, slowly rising higher with every bit of snowfall.
It was the first time I thought god must be real; this showy blizzard swept up and away almost as quickly as it had started.
My father retrieved our bags, I thought I was an Eskimo, a snow princess, an ice fairy. I held my hands up to the white:
Colorado.
Ocean waves lap up first her feet, then sinking slowly, the hips, the head—
Long, slick strands of seaweed wrapping their tendrils around her ankles as she twists, struggles a little until there’s no fight left in her.
The pearls around her neck, breakaway, bob, dipping in and out from each crest, float briefly before they return to the place they came from. . . . Submerged.
