Alicia D. Ortega
How Soon is Now?
Good mornings Grandma sings and dances in the living room barefoot, box-stepping with her hands at her hips. She sounds like the lady on the record, voice wavy sad: Nadie comprende lo que sufro yo. Grandma danced and sang for dimes as a girl, she says, in Colorado and Arizona and New Mexico; sometimes it paid more than the mines did her daddy. She holds her chin high, her shoulders shimmy to the beat. We try to imitate her she is so beautiful but we are just bouncing with our sister Luz, our messy braid and her neat one thumping on our backs.
Grandma sings mujer, a word we know from Grandpa’s mouth, but it sounds prettier in hers. We can’t sing with her; we don’t have these slippery words, these secret tongue rhythms. She sways eyes closed on through the next song.
You hear it, don’t you Nina? she asks.
We do. We wrap our summer arms around the high waist of her khaki slacks, our bare feet on hers, letting her body guide us through the trumpeted chorus. Grandpa is never here when this happens: he is in the garage he is working on the lawn he is at the hardware store he is not here.
Y tú Grandma sings quien sabe por dónde andarás quien sabe qué aventura tendrás qué lejos estás de mí.
We have Madonna contests with the neighborhood kids on the gazebo in San Pedro Park. Winner gets to wear the sparkly purple necklace from McDonald’s. Luz tugs the bottom of her white shirt up and through the collar and dances with her tummy showing. Madonna has brown hair like ours in the video but we’re not allowed to watch it because the Pope. Did you know Madonna doesn’t believe in Jesus? Did you know she does sex?
Ricky’s turn. He lies down on his side on the white wood floor with his ankles together, flops his legs. We laugh. Ricky what are you doing!
I’m a mermaid, he says. Haven’t you seen Truth or Dare?
None of us have.
It’s what the boy dancers do, he says, nodding eyes wide like he’s ready to fight.
You still have to sing!
Ricky wins because he knows all the words; it’s only fair. He wraps the necklace around his hand like a sparkly glove and threatens to hit all the girls with his brilliant fist but we can tell he doesn’t mean it.
The guitar hangs over the sofa where family portraits hang in our friends’ homes. Dad plays it sometimes when his brothers and the cousins are over. First it’s Elvis and doo-wop and the stuff he liked when he wasn’t Dad. When he had a mustache and tight jeans and feathered hair. When he was in a band called Los Ramóns. The second hour he slips into the Spanish songs, Tejano standards his dad taught him as a kid.
When we go to sleep with our sister the adults are still gathered in the kitchen, these nights. We press our ear to the cool bedroom wall and listen for our mother’s laughter.
Grandpa squeezes our shoulder as we walk into Luby’s after Sunday mass at Our Lady of Grace. Luz and our cousins are a few steps ahead of us, fighting over who opens the door for Grandma.
You know you’re my favorite, right mija? He leans over as he says this. You know you’re the special one, right?
We heard him say this to our sister a couple times but still it feels like our birthday.
Lining up for the cafeteria Edgar calls us mamacita and wags his tongue at us and we don’t know why we’re so mad. A few weeks later he corners us during private reading time, sits too close to us on the floor and says Nina did you know your parents had sex?
No they didn’t, we say, tilting Family Pictures so he can’t read over our shoulder. The words are in English and Spanish but mostly we just like the paintings, the bright flowers in the grandma’s dress, the deep black of the little girl’s hair.
Yuh huh they did. They had to or else they wouldn’t have you.
Maybe I’m adopted, we whisper. We know this is not true.
I’m not your mother, Mama groans, but she’s smiling as she tugs a pillow over her head. She wants to sleep in because Saturday, but we act like we don’t know. It’s morning! we insist. We wake too early most weekends; we like being the first face Mama sees.
I’m not your mother, she groans again, but when we climb onto the bed she lifts the covers for us to scoot in next to her. Her breath slows and we try to match her rhythm. We wonder if we are inside her dream.
We play Captives at recess. The boys call us Wild Thing because we wriggle loose from their hands when they try to trap us on the jungle gym. Inside our notebooks we write WT in loopy cursive, faint and tiny beneath our name.
When we get glasses, one of the girls starts calling us abuelita; the name sticks. Even Ricky uses it, at least when other people are around to hear. Our sister shoves anyone who says it but she’s not always there when it happens, and besides she’s younger than us so it’s embarrassing. At recess we struggle so hard to escape from the boys our new glasses go flying off our face. When we put them back on they slant dumb to the side. Everyone laughs. We stop scribbling Wild Thing on our homework, we stop playing Captives. We stop going outside for recess.
If you’re Mexican why don’t you speak Spanish?
We don’t know.
Do your parents speak Spanish?
They sing it?
Miguel Melendez hates us. We’re scared to ask why.
Fea, he growls as he walks past our desk. Fea con lentes.
When we tell Mrs. Powell he’s been whispering mean things at us pitching gravel down the back of our shirt licking our pencils smearing gobs of jelly on our drawings she says do you know what it means when a boy does that to a girl?
It means he likes you.
She says this with a smile, like it’s something we’ve been wanting to hear. So we don’t tell her when Miguel spits on our chair when we’re in the bathroom. We don’t tell her when he points at the wet smear on the back of our skirt and says mira fea you’re leaking.
Mrs. Powell plans to call our mother. She found a secret page deep in our journal where we wrote all the things we’d call Miguel Melendez if we weren’t so scared of him: MEANIE ASSFACE PUTO CABRÓN. It’s illustrated.
Every time the phone rings a tumble in our stomach. When Mrs. Powell finally calls, our mother doesn’t punish us. She places a bowl of sliced cucumbers on the enamel kitchen table and sits across from us.
She asked if I spoke English, she says, watching us chew. She asks why we did it and we tell her about the spit. Our voice gets warbly when we tell it. She twists her mouth.
Miguel Melendez is a cabrón, but do you even know what that word means?
We shrug.
And puto? Where’d you hear that?
We consider telling her that Jessica Valenzuela calls herself and all her friends putas but it doesn’t seem like a good time.
If your father heard you using that word—
She sits a minute, nails clacking the table. You wonder why puto is worse than all the others. You remember how Ricky flinches when he hears it. How he always looks around making sure no one said it about him.
He’d be pissed, Mama says, but not at you, mija. It’s just not worth the trouble.
Grandpa won’t dance with Grandma but she doesn’t care, she says he never was a good dancer anyway. She adjusts our hand on her waist, presses her other hand firm against our left palm. She teaches us to lead without looking aggressive, to show where we want to go through our fingertips. When we slouch, or stare blank in her eyes, she reminds us to smile.
Melissa Etheridge tosses her head and snarls like she doesn’t even care if it’s pretty. She makes us want to do something with our hands. Dad sees us watching her on VH1 and smirks: Wouldn’t be a Melissa without a Janis. We don’t know what this means but we’re used to him rolling his eyes at our angry white girl music. Everyone does. At school we pretend Selena is our favorite too and it’s easy because she’s perfect and sweet and bidi bidi bom bom. Ricky says she sews all her own costumes. Did you know she’s married to her guitarist? You can hardly hear the guitar, we want to say, but we still like her, we do, we just wish she screamed sometimes.
When we unhook the guitar from the wall we’re stunned by the feel of it, this box of vibration humming full and smooth, but we can’t make it sound the way it should. When Dad plays the sound comes in surges, strong and steady, and in Grandpa’s hands it’s more like a staircase that dips and slides, a staircase that trickles up and down and only he knows where it stops.
We’re startled by our ugly first strums, the crash of notes. We hold it before the long mirror in our parents’ bedroom a while. We look small behind it, unsure, a mess of dark curls a pair of too-round glasses tilted a white shirt and khaki skirt per the San Antonio Independent School District rules. We leave the guitar on our parents’ bedspread and run to our bedroom. We change.
We don’t have rock star stuff: no leather, no spandex. We clamp Luz’s sparkly black headband around our neck like a stiff collar. The tulle bow tickles our chin. We make do: a pair of jeans shredded at the knees, a crisp white button-down shirt of our father’s tied into a bulky knot at our waist, Selena-style. We pick up the guitar, we pose. We look more like we do in our heads, now.
The sound is still off. We press our fingers to the frets like we’ve seen Dad do, but no chords come. Eventually we settle for single notes, thumbing slow through octaves, letting each tone swell into the room and fade out.
Selena dies on a Friday and by Monday all the girls have shirts. They can’t wear them to school because the dress code so they wear them beneath white button-downs. We can see the outline of Selena’s dark hair and red lips half-hidden on their chests.
The girls cry into bowls of macaroni and cheese. We don’t cry. We know this is wrong, somehow. Someone asks hey abuelita where’s your heart?
Grandma has been watching Univision for what seems like days. When we visit with our sister she’s distracted; there’s no dancing or singing, not even when Grandpa leaves for the store, when it’s just us ladies. She shakes her head saying the whole world’s going to care about this Mexican girl it’s about damned time. Shame she had to die for anyone to pay attention.
Ricky wears eyeliner to school but his lashes are so long the teachers can’t quite tell. His hair is too long for school rules but he slicks it back with Moco de Gorila Punk Squizz, maximum strength; he says he’s gonna dye it blonde for summer soon. He passes us a tape between classes: Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. She’s Canadian, he tells us, and all the songs are about Uncle Joey from Full House. We think it’ll be shiny pink disco pop, drum machines, studio laughter, but then we hear how she lets her voice break on the high notes.
What would we sound like at that volume? And who would hear us?
With birthday money, we buy a bright yellow Walkman. Each night, we lie in our bed and listen to Alanis, imagining elaborate music videos with us as the star. We set the last song on Side A at the San Fernando Cathedral, the big church downtown with the glimmery gold altar. When she hits and holds the big note near the end, we see purple doves burst from our chest.
We’re drifting off one night when Luz places a warm hand on our forearm. Through the headphones, we hear her.
I wish you’d let me listen too, Nina.
The next day we buy a cheap headphone splitter from H.E.B. and after prayers our sister crawls into our bed. She stays awake the whole album, even after the hidden song at the very end that’s just Alanis singing echoes into an empty room.
In Spanish I Señora Turner tells the class to pick Spanish names.
It’s like a confirmation name for the language, she says, winking at us like we’re in on some joke. She asks us to explain our chosen label in a short essay. We want to be Marisol because it sounds like the sun. In the margins, Señora writes you can’t forget where Marisol comes from. It’s short for Maria de la Soledad. Our Lady of Solitude. It doesn’t matter: she calls us Niñita anyway.
Because your voice is so little, she says, because you talk so little, so slow.
We know a few chords now. We’ve been teaching ourselves with instructions we found on the Internet and printed out in the school library. Luz discovers the whiteplastic binder we keep under the bed. It’s filled with tabs for Hole, the Breeders. She asks why we keep it a secret.
We don’t want to be laughed at, we say. We’re no good, it’s embarrassing. She considers this. She shrugs. You’ll get better. I think it’s cool.
Ricky is baffled we don’t share his love of Shakira.
It’s just Britney en Español, we insist.
No. A little bit Britney, but mostly Alanis.
Never. There’s no rage in it.
Ricky snorts.
And just what do you have to be mad about, Niñita Abuelita?
We’re watching MTV in the living room with our sister when Alanis comes on, the one of her singing and smiling into the camera, face so soft and close we know what her skin must smell like. Grandpa walks in near the end, when she’s playing the harmonica.
Puedes ver sus granos, he chuckles.
We didn’t notice the tiny bump on her cheek before, but now the pimple is all we see. We’re annoyed at him but glad we see it now, how she lets everyone know she’s not perfect.
She’s not singing for you, Luz tells him, and for a second we’re worried he’ll be
mad but he just shakes his head, smiling, you girls, you’re funny.
How come Grandma never sings around Grandpa? Luz wonders in the dark.
We can hear her sucking on the cord of her headphones.
Don’t know, we tell her. We know better than to ask. It’s not just singing: now that we’re getting older, Grandma cusses when he’s away, her laugh a hard choked gut sound.
A mile walk to the store with Luz and it’s hot as hell but with no school there’s not much else to do. We’ve been thinking about it for weeks, the dull brown building, front windows plastered with band posters and concert flyers. It’s on Main, a few blocks north of San Antonio Community College, where all the kids with dyed black hair and bags stuck with pins hang out.
We wear shorts cut from jeans and baggy black shirts and enough smoky eyeliner that maybe we don’t look so fourteen. Men shout at us from cars as we pass San Pedro Springs but we’re careful not to hear in that way Mama taught us, chins down, eyes on the pavement. When we press through the front door the air conditioning hits us so fast it’s almost hard to breathe. We are suddenly aware of our slick skins, the sweat between our thighs.
We thumb through the used CD section, nodding to ourselves like experts. The boy behind the counter looks about 19, old enough to make us nervous, but he’s air-drumming to whatever’s surging through the speakers, something that sounds like a dizzying math problem.
We select Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me by The Cure because the cover is a pulpy red mouth and Luz just learned the bassline to “Just Like Heaven.” The boy at the counter approves our choice with a quick nod.
This your first Cure album? he asks.
Yeah. We get a strange pang when we meet his eyes.
They’re too whiny for me, he smiles. And I dig the Smiths. I guess I’m selective about the whininess or something.
We want to love The World Won’t Listen but at first it doesn’t feel like it belongs to us, the man’s voice pretty but meant for men like him, like he’s singing at himself in a mirror, but then he’s wanting to die happy in a car and we know that want. We’ve only ever been in our dad’s truck late at night but you can still long for a feeling you haven’t felt yet, you can.
By the time high school starts we have short black bangs and an Oscar Wilde quote inscribed on the inside cover of our journal: We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. We know almost no one at Lanier HS but there are a handful of kids who hang out in the parking lot at lunchtime who nod at us as we eat our sandwich on the front steps, headphones on. Near the end of our second week a girl who calls herself Coma invites us to eat with them.
You like Moz?
Who?
She grins.
Morrissey.
We nod.
We’ve been writing here and there, sometimes with a guitar in our hands, sometimes in front of a mirror. We sing, too, but only when we’re alone. Somehow Luz knows this. She asks when we’re going to let her hear our voice.
When Ricky shows up at the ¡Viva Morrissey! all-ages club night with his long black hair gelled into a pompadour, we call him a poser.
Why can’t he be mine too? he asks. You know he’s gay right?
It’s something we come back to all the time with our new Lanier friends: who’son the end of all that burning love? Tomás, a boy who has MOZ tattooed in a thick black band across his ring finger, insists the rumors aren’t true. Just because he hugs men doesn’t mean he sleeps with them, he says, and he’s right, but we wonder why we want so badly to answer the question, why the question is a question in the first place. Moz sings of a love just beyond reach, we all know it, and Ricky’s dancing with us to “This Charming Man” and the bassline thumps like love in the movies and how could this be anything but real? All of us in this dingy club on South St. Mary’s all of us brown and singing and hugging, even the boys.
Why do you love him so much? Mama asks. She’s tired but she tries to sound cheerful. Grandpa has been forgetting things. He set an entire package of bacon on fire in the oven, plastic and all. He’s sick; everyone’s scared to say it.
His voice is beautiful, we say. There’s something about it that kind of reminds me of Grandma’s. As soon as we say it we’re embarrassed, but Dad agrees. He’s very ranchera, he says. All that melodrama, you know?
We’re shocked. We didn’t know Dad knew anything about Moz. It’s like we thought Morrissey was our secret.
He sings about the invisible lines, Luz adds, and the broken hearts. Mama nods.
When we were younger we felt sure we and Luz and Dad were the lone stars of Mama’s dreams but now we know we must have been wrong. We watch her lips when the radio plays conjunto in the kitchen, pleased when her mouth shapes the words even if she makes no sound.
Tomás tries to impress us with his cover of “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side.” We’re embarrassed at his cracking voice, his messy transitions. He never thinks to pass us the guitar.
In Spanish II Señora asks us to construct altars to a deceased celebrity of our choice in celebration of Día de los Muertos. She prefers celebrities over family members; she doesn’t want the exercise to get too personal for anyone. We’re to present our altars before the class with a brief speech explaining the significance of each item featured. We construct an altar to Moz, a shoebox covered in sparkles and song lyrics and dried vegetables. Señora isn’t impressed: He’s still alive, Nina. You didn’t follow the rules of the assignment.
But Morrissey has been in mourning his whole life, we say. No one sings straight to death like he does.
Grandma will sing at Grandpa’s funeral. She insists on a Mario Lanza song none of us have ever heard, despite Dad’s protests that it’s too dark.
You sound like you’re going to crawl into his grave, he says.
So what if I do? Grandma retorts. This is what I feel. This is what I want. She slaps the counter top. She’s been making bizcocho, Grandpa’s favorite, for the memorial barbecue; flour and sugar speckle her black dress.
She sucks in cinnamon air. Heaven forbid I make you all uncomfortable.
The choir doesn’t know the song or have time to learn it, so Grandma sings a cappella. Her voice trembles and dips into low pools of hurt but she hits every note. Grandpa smiles over a guitar in the portrait by the altar. We can’t look at it. We’re ashamed we didn’t offer a song of our own. We’re shaking with tears when Luz squeezes our right hand.
There is a light that never goes out, she whispers. After the burial Dad pulls the guitar down from the wall. He and his brothers dive into Grandpa’s songs, the standards everyone knows, but it’s not like always. Grandma’s not there in the corner, watching. She’s on the front porch greeting mourners with handshakes and thank-you-for-comings. Luz nudges us. Do we have a song?
Dad blinks when we ask for the guitar. Just one song, we assure him, though he doesn’t protest. He nods, clears his throat. As we arrange ourselves on the arm of the sofa, fitting the guitar over the curve of a crossed leg, we spot our sister nodding to our mother, whose eyes shine even in the dim light.
Something breaks open.
We cannot describe our own voice. We don’t know what it sounds like to anyone else; we’re always surprised when we hear ourselves on answering machines, or the tinny recordings we’ve made in our bedroom those afternoons no one was home. We don’t know what we look like, dark curls tumbling over a blonde guitar, filling the room with a sound that exists outside words. But we know this voice takes a different shape when someone hears it. That it’s ours and not ours, all we’ve heard and none of it too, trembling in our lungs and out and up into spaces we’ll never see. When we sing it’s our throat and the air and Grandma’s wavy sad, it is boys with thorns in their sides and beautiful dead girls we don’t mourn right, it’s San Antonio and the park gazebo and the mirror in our parents’ bedroom. It’s when we can’t speak and when we speak too loud it’s our skirts too short it’s our faces too long it’s flash floods and clumsy skies and listen it is loving and how soon is now it is whatever it needs to be it is whatever it needs to be.
Alicia D. Ortega hails from San Antonio, Texas, but now splits her time between Baton Rouge, where she is an MFA student at Louisiana State University, and Dallas, where she forces her husband to sing karaoke with her. This is her first publication.