Page 83 of And Still Her Voice
“Teddie, I’m really sorry about Freddy.”
“And I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Can I have one?” I asked, motioning toward her cigarette.
“It’s been years,” she said, slapping one out of the pack.
“I know.” I lit up.
“Girl, you were always a strange kid. Always with your head in a book or talking to your Grandma. Scared the shit out of me.”
“Wait. You knew about Grandma?”
CHAPTER 29
Brown People in Berets
I’m ten sitting on a tree stump in my cousins’ backyard where Abuela also has a garden, coffee cans and lard cans full of red geraniums and sweet-smelling carnations. Colorful puffs sprout from the prickly nopales. In a pink eyelet dress, I purse my lips, so Grandma Phoebe can’t say anything about getting dirty as I watch the kids at my cousin Sal’s birthday party take turns swinging a bat at the piñata filled with candy.
Grandma Phoebe had warned me to act like a lady, reminding me how much better I had it in the house built for her. But I didn’t think so. I couldn’t recall any kids hanging around our house, except my siblings. I had no memory of playing kick the can, or having a piñata filled with dulce. “You have a piano you can play with at home,” Grandma had whispered.
“Yeah, I remember you talking to your Grandma Phoebe,” Teddie said. “We’re Mexican. We talk to our ancestors. Nothing new. I talk to Freddy all the time and Abuela Antonia. Now that your dad’s gone, you can talk to him, too.”
I didn’t think Teddie understood. “Oh, hell no.” I took a deep drag wondering why Phoebe hadn’t popped in lately.
“Anyway, back then I sensed your pain, so I’d try to talk to you, but you’d go all quiet and run off.”
“You’re the one who scared me,” I said, exhaling.
“Why?” Voice booming, she sat straighter, twisted toward me, and then laughed. “Afraid of my brownness?”
“Not at all.” I always envied the color of her skin, wishing I could be her color, that way I thought I might fit in better, not stand out like a strawberry milkshake. It was more her voice and her size that she used to intimidate others, but never me. “You knew how to be seen. You knew how to be heard.”
“Even though you were little, you sat there like you were the Queen of Sheba. Just staring, like you were looking down at us. Like you were all high and mighty living in that big castle. Like your caca didn’t smell.”
That wasn’t even close to the truth. “My caca does smell. I remember sitting in this very spot staring out at a bunch of kids having a good time. I really wanted to join in so badly and just act like one of the kids running around and not caring about getting all dirty, but—”
“But what? Afraid of getting down in the dirt?”
“No.”
“Too bad your family can’t hang on to the castle your grandpa built,” Teddie said.
“On stolen land.”
Teddie looked at me curiously. “What do you mean?”
I blinked, wondering if she knew anything at all about the family home over in Glendale. “What doyoumean?”
“Your mother’s been talking to my dad. Apparently, your father borrowed against your casa to pay off some gambling deuda or something,” she said, emphasizing the Spanish words.
A gambling debt? This was new to me, but not unbelievable. But then I wondered if maybe Teddie might have gotten something lost in the translation. “Are you sure they were talking about my father?”
“Even though I don’t speak Spanish, I can understand, especially when it’s put in context or, cuss words. Funny, Dad and I used to argue. He’d say to me. ‘You’re a Chicana.’ I’d say ‘No, I’m American’ and yet we never spoke Spanish in the house.”
It surprised me that except for a few words, she never learned Spanish. Her father spoke it fluently, but my aunt, born in the US never pushed it on my cousins and, as a matter of fact, forbade any talk of their Mexicanness.
“What about your family?” I asked. “Will you be able to stay?”
