Page 7 of And Still Her Voice
Suddenly, a loud crash and a thud like an earthquake shook the house and my hippie daydreams were interrupted. It boomed from my parents’ room. They were yelling at each other again, picking up where they’d left off Good Friday night after Dad had been out “en una borrachera.” He’d gone out straight after work and spent his paycheck on booze without leaving Mom anything for groceries or the bills; another Friday night when we’d had to fast whether it was Lent or not, whether we had a choice or not.
“God damn it!” I heard cussing from all the way down the hall. “You had enough to buy all that Easter shit!” Dad yelled.
Mom yelled back. “No skin off your nariz. I bought the kids things with my cleaning money.” Oh no! My stomach flipped. I brought my hands to my mouth, squeezing my lips. Why did she have to go and bring that up again? Dad had made it clear that there was enough work in our own home. “I told you I didn’t want you working outside of the house, much less cleaning the neighbor’s houses.”
“Your mother never minded when my family cleaned her house,” Mom said, and then the shouting and cursing escalated to the point I slapped my pillow over my head.
I wondered if I should call Mom’s brother Teodoro to come and get us. Last time, there’d been too many of us to stay over like before at his tiny house in Monte Vista with his wife, all of his kids and Abuela Antonia, so he’d dropped us all off at a motel over on Colorado Boulevard. I sort of missed those earlier timesat his house, even though the circumstances of us being there were embarrassing. I liked hanging out with my older cousin Teodora “Teddie,” named after my uncle. And even though she was “big, brown and beautiful” —she liked to say—she terrified me. The good kind of terror. The oldest sister of all boys, she didn’t take anyone’s shit, not even her father’s. I wished I had her power.
I thought it sort of sick how Mom equated terror with love, like power was sexy? I couldn’t muffle the sound of her crying now and I wanted it to stop. Maybe I should drive her away from here myself. I sprang out of bed and rushed down the hall, crashing through the door into their bedroom and accidentally kicking over a can of beer which rolled across the floor toward my parents where my dad, now in his white T-shirt and skivvies, had Mom pinned to the floor, holding a knife to her throat. Her one eye was still swollen from Friday night, the other bloodshot and glazy. Why couldn’t she learn to play dead like me? She screamed, “Anna, llama la policia!”
“You call them and I’ll kill her,” Dad yelled, Mom arching and kicking until her garter belt snapped.
“Hijo de puta.” Mom spit at him. Oh, no! Didn’t she know she only pushed his buttons harder by calling him a son of a whore? I noticed a run in her stockings. The helpless look on her face embarrassed me. I felt pity for her when I so needed to feel respect. “Call the police!”
But it wouldn’t have done any good to call the police. They never helped. I was too afraid, besides Mom told me it was worse if you were a woman and even worse if you were a Mexican woman. I didn’t know what else to do, inching forward like a lion tamer, as if I could reason with him. I popped open the can of beer and held it up as if I could lure him away. “Is this what you want?”
But then in her smoky pianissimo voice that Grandma sometimes used to try and calm Dad down, she spoke out, “Charley, you’re better than this. Put down the knife.” His eyes pierced through to my core and Grandma spoke a little louder, in her scarlet mezzo-forte voice, “Charley, you need help.”
“Shut up, bitch!” Dad yelled fortissimo, tears streaming down his cheeks. “The only help I need is for you to get the fuck out of my life!”
Mom yelled. “Anna, te dije que llamaras a la policia.”
“Phoebe, get out of here. Leave me alone,” he shouted, lunging at me with his knife, slashing the air beside my face. I threw the can to deflect the weapon as he raised it for another stab at me, and then with the strength of St. Joan of Arc, I grabbed his wrist with my right hand. Only because he was so drunk, was I able to snatch the knife away with my left hand before knocking him down. He grabbed my leg. “No Daddy, please. Don’t hurt me!” were the last words I heard as he pulled me down, my back slamming onto the floor, knocking the wind out of me. His weight crushed me as Grandma’s red and purple rage flared, her screeching for him to stop. I saw stars before blacking out.
My head throbbed when I came to, finding him curled up next to me on the floor. I panicked, wondering if he might have hurt me even worse than I could tell, but then I noticed him clutching his stomach as blood and other squirmy stuff squirted out between his fingers, seeping onto the old, already-stained carpet.
“Ay, no!” Mom turned, glaring at me. “Bueno para nada! Now look what you’ve done.” She crawled over to kneel by him, throwing me off to the side. I was good for nothing.
I got up and ran to my bedroom where I cried without making noise. Still holding the knife, I noticed the slash and bloodstains now on my JC Penney Easter dress.You see, Grandma.I strippedout of the dress and tossed it into the wastebasket.This is all your fault!I had no choice except to escape this hellhole.
Suddenly, I wanted to get back to that girl in the park with long red-brown hair like mine, the one who said, “Hello pretty one. Peace and love to you.” I needed to find the girl in the mirror looking back at me with the love in her heart shining through.
CHAPTER 6
Pretty Girl, Cease to Exist
I thought about calling my cousin Teddie, but I didn’t want to wake a sleeping bear. I’d wait until daylight.
“Darling, no need to air our dirty laundry once more,” Grandma said. “Go home.”
“Talk about dirty laundry. You never minded when Mom’s family washed and ironed your clothes or polished your silver or took care of the child you practically abandoned. And then you had them all deported!”
“Anna, that’s not true.”
But in my search for the truth about my grandfather’s death, after the Crash of ’29, I’d learned how my dad’s family did have something to do with my mother’s family getting deported to Mexico during the ’30s “Repatriation” of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. My mother told me the story of the morning she’d been in their Glendale kitchen having breakfast with her mother Antonia and brother Teodoro. My mom, little Teresita, only five at the time, had been in kindergarten, her brother in second grade.
The morning started the same as any other weekday beginning with Abuela Antonia hand-making tortillas for breakfast before they all headed up to the big house to fetch little Charley LeMar, and then taking them all to school. My father and mother had grown up together and were now in the same kindergarten class.My Mexican grandparents Antonia Verdugo and her husband Pedro Marquez had worked for my white grandparents, the LeMars, for many years, at first to pay back a loan for land taxes. Apparently, the property, once part of the big Verdugo land grant, had been purchased in 1921 by my Grandfather LeMar, a small attached portion still owned by the Marquez family. Even after the loan got repaid, because Grandpa Marquez loved working the land and tending the orchards, he stayed on in Grandpa LeMar’s employ, even after Grandpa LeMar’s untimely death. If you asked me, Grandma Phoebe remarried George way too soon. After that, my abuela Antonia practically raised my father.
Anyway, Grandpa Marquez had been working in the orchard the morning when some armed men in uniform approached him and told him to get in the car. At the same time, Teresita had just bitten into her tortilla, butter dripping down her chin, when men in uniform stood on the porch shouting at Antonia and her children to come out and get in the car. From the backseat, Antonia was confused. “But we’re legal,” she said. “We were born here. This is our property. We work hard. We pay taxes.”
Antonia was horrified because, at the same time, she knew her husband had not been born here. Teresita, terrified, asked what they’d done wrong. It wasn’t until a few days after they got out of a crowded jail cell with no food or toilets that my mother saw her father again. Reunited, they were all put on a train and deposited somewhere south of the border. Teresa never saw Charley again until some fifteen years later.
Not until she was older did my mother learn that it had been my father’s stepfather George who had reported the Marquez family to the authorities. He then subdivided the property where they lived, selling it to pay off his gambling debts. Allegedly, Grandma Phoebe had been dealt out of George’s shenanigans. Apparently, when she learned what had happened, she sent the family money in Mexico—only to assuage her guilt, my motherwould say later. “He was your husband,” Mom retorted, as if she’d ever been able to control her own husband, my father.
But then, in the ’40s, the Bracero Program issued temporary US work permits to millions of Mexicans to come back and work due to a labor shortage caused by the war. Except for my Uncle Teodoro, everyone returned to Salinas, “the Salad Bowl of the World.” That’s where my parents reunited one day, my dad having just been discharged from the Navy and needing work.
Of all the strawberry fields in all of the world, he ran into Teresa, in a Salinas strawberry field, but that’s another story written before this one, a story that might have ended differently, had my grandfather not been killed.
