Leo Ríos
Dirty Dishes
My parents have finished picking grapes. In August they’ll hoe weeds in dirt rows of little green seedlings—the babies of almond trees and endless bushes of corn, beans and carrots. It’s the first month of summer before fourth grade. Everyone’s at the house all the time, and I’ve been watching my mom in the kitchen every day.
Our kitchen walls are light green. Cabinets are blue. The grey floor tiles are marked up with hundreds of dots and in some spots the flimsy tile peels away in patches, leaving shallow black pockmarks. Except for my mom and now me, nobody ever comes in here for more than a minute.
I stand next to the fridge, a gross banana-yellow thing stashed with goodies: tomatoes, cilantro, chiles, Del Monte brand ketchup, a small jar of strawberry jam, a plastic container of jalapeños en vinagre, chicken eggs, two gallons of mango-orange Tampico and a big box of grapes.
From here, I see my mom pick up foods and cooking tools in flurries. She’s a hurricane. She has power over every ounce and particle. Powder spices sprinkle from the tips of her fingers like magic dust. Rainbow-colored batches of vegetables land on cutting boards, only to be disemboweled by the cold blade of her knife. Bloody pieces of meat stand no chance, whether boiled inside pots or fried on puddles of oil. Sometimes smoke sizzles into the air and when it does, I know something is toast.
When the food’s ready, my dad, my brothers and I sit at the dining room table like wolves. Horacio, Luis Ángel and I grab food with our hands, push it into our mouths with all the fingers that fit and lick any trace of the stuff off our wrists and the sides of our lips.
‘What? You’ve already forgotten how to act like educated people?’ my mom yells. ‘You look like animals!’
We eat more and make dog sounds.
‘Auff! Auff! Auff! Ahahahahahaha!’
Our older brother Meño doesn’t say anything. He’s in puberty.
‘Enough,’ our dad says. ‘The rules.’
He stares us all down, holding an index finger in front of him, as if it’s a gun he might point at someone if that person deserves to be shot.
We stop barking and use spoons to finish eating. The rules mean no talking.
After the comida cooking storms are over. My dad and brothers have scattered. I’m leaning against the fridge again, and my mom stands at the sink, washing dishes. In front of her, there’s a window. It’s hot today, burning.
Water flows from the faucet nonstop, the dishes like wet babies turning slowly in her hands. Their backs are scrubbed, then rinsed and laid down to rest in a giant dish cradle. The smell of soap floats in the air, mixing with the fumes of Pine-Sol and cockroach spray.
‘You want to help me?’ my mother asks.
It’s the seventh day I’ve watched her cook and wash dishes. Because the fridge and I are diagonally across from the sink and stove, I see everything. And I’m also able to step into the fridge’s shadow when she turns towards me. This time she doesn’t turn.
‘Alex,’ she says. ‘I already saw you. Do you want to help me?’
I step one foot closer. This is what I’ve wanted, to learn. It seems easier than cooking, and I like water a lot.
‘How do I do it?’ I say.
She turns towards me, holds her palms up in front of her.
‘Easy,’ she says. ‘With your hands.’
I don’t say anything. Once, I counted: there were a combined total of twenty-seven cups and plates, in addition to a jumbled mess of spoons, forks, knives, spatulas and cucumber peelers. There were also special assignments: giant pots and heavy skillets that bled black grease for what seemed like minutes.
It’s too late anyway. My mother sticks the last fork into the side cradle where the utensils huddle together.
‘You can help me cook if you want,’ she says.
‘Sí, sí!’ I say, clapping my hands and hopping up and down. ‘What do I do?’
‘You’re going to help me make flan.’
I stop jumping, hold my arms at my sides. Flan is mine, my brothers’ and my dad’s favorite postre. Such an undertaking seems inútil, futile, doomed.
I’m about to walk away when my mother says, ‘Alex. Bring me the sugar.’
The plastic bin of sugar is inside one of the cupboards close to the ground.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Here it is.’
‘First,’ my mother says, peeling the lid off the container. ‘We burn the sugar. Do you want to see?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘How do we do that?’
‘Bring the bucket that’s outside by the door,’ she says. ‘Quickly.’
Two seconds later, I’m standing on the upside-down bucket. My mom places a circular tin pan on one of the burners and turns a knob. I hear a clik-clik-clik-clik-clik coming from somewhere inside the stovetop. She places the tin pan on the blue circle of flame and dumps four spoonfuls of sugar into it. Using moist rags for protection, she holds opposite ends of the pan, gently rocking it side to side.
After a few minutes the small mound of sugar, white and grainy, melts into a tar-like substance, brown and gloopy.
‘Is it still sugar?’ I ask.
My younger brothers interrupt.
‘Amá!’ I hear Luis Ángel scream. ‘Horacio hit me!’
I then hear Luis Ángel sobbing. In the background of his awoos, I can hear Horacio saying, ‘Shut up, foo. Don’t tell. Please. I’ll give you a dollar. Shut up. Come on, foo. Please. Be quiet. Shh. Shh. Cállate!’ followed by a sharp wataz and even louder wailing.
My mom cranks the knob to the right and the flame goes out.
I follow her towards the living room, smacking the fridge’s chest with my palm as I pass it. My hand kind of hurts but I keep going, avoiding the far end of the dining room table by spinning quickly. I then have to leap over the meshed iron cover of the old heater sleeping two feet underground like a caged dragon. I reach the living room just in time to watch my mom grab Horacio by the arm and shout, ‘Horacio! How many times have I told you?’
* * *
A week before, my mom had called me into her bedroom. She looked sad and desperate, like she does during Christmas, when she desires to be with her parents and siblings more than usual. Her mouth was closed tightly, and I know this took effort, because all of my mom’s face is big—plump and long like my own.
‘Sit down,’ she said, closing the door behind me.
My parents’ bed has a bright red velvet comforter, made from old curtains my dad bought at a yard sale. I climbed on and felt the comforter’s fuzzy skin with my fingers, scratching my nails against the patches where the velvet has rubbed away.
My mom stood in front of me and asked, ‘Do you also call Luis Ángel stupid?’
The question seemed unimportant. Stupid isn’t the worst thing that we call him, though it is the most frequent. He’s only a year younger than Horacio and two years than me, but he’s shorter, skinnier than we were at his age. This really bothers us.
I said, ‘Sometimes. Why?’
She leaned over and clenched my fidgeting hand with hers, squeezing harder than I had imagined her capable of.
‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to call him that anymore. Do you understand?’
My mom had never gotten like this with me. Why was she doing it? I wanted to cry but kept my face scrunched up.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Her grip hurt me all the way from my nails to my neck. My finger bones were on the verge of fusing together, and I had to shrug my shoulders to prevent the pain from shattering me into two. I thought she was going to let go but instead she kept talking.
‘Today, I heard Horacio calling him that. And do you know what?’
She squeezed harder.
‘Yesterday, Luis Ángel was sitting at the dining room table. He had his head lowered on his arms and was staring at the wall. He does this all the time, you already know. I thought he was asleep, but then I heard him say, Stupid, stupid, yes, stupid. So I asked him, Why do you say that? and he told me, Because I’m stupid. I told him, That’s not true. Who told you that? He didn’t want to tell me. He just stayed with his head down and said, I just know that I am, Mami.’
I looked down and sobbed quietly. It had been a few years since I’d cried in front of someone.
‘I don’t know what to do anymore,’ she said.
She finally let go of my hand and let out a deep breath. ‘What am I going to do with you all?’
She seemed sad again and even wrapped an arm around me, leaned the side of her face on top of my head.
‘Don’t call him stupid anymore.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Not anymore.’
‘I’m telling you this in seriousness. He’s starting to believe it.’
The mocos inside her nose made slurping sounds. I could feel her tears spilling onto my scalp.
‘Amá, forgive me.’
The skin on my chest felt hot and itchy.
‘Stupid,’ she said, and then added, ‘I don’t like that word. Out of all the ugly words in English, that one seems the most ugly.’
She escorted me out of her bedroom, and I locked myself in the bathroom. I tried to read my Goosebumps book, but all I could think about was what had happened the day before…
Luis Ángel had been outside, standing on top of a bench pushed up against the house. His back was turned to me, and he was tapping his forehead against the metal cover of the breaker box. It was part of a game he liked to play, pretending to be a goat.
I saw him and said, ‘You want me to help you with that?’
He said, ‘No. Don’t.’
I hopped up onto the bench and said, ‘Relax, foo. I’m not gonna do anything.’
I put my hand on the back of his little neck. Before pushing forward I told him, ‘This is what you get for being so stupid.’
* * *
In the kitchen, my mom and I have blended together: chicken egg yolks, vanilla, Lechera and cow milk. The stuff looks like rompope, lo que viene siendo eggnog.
‘Are we gonna put tequila in this?’ I ask.
‘Tequila? You’re crazy.’
What’s crazy is that the sugar has hardened and crystallized inside the tin pan. The brown layer of sweetness is shiny and transparent. It looks like copper-colored ice—cracking here, breaking apart there, and holding itself together somehow.
My mom pours the rompope-looking goo into the pan. She covers it with aluminum paper and presses tightly around the edges so that no air can enter or escape.
‘Now,’ she says. ‘We cook it.’
She fills a big pot with a shallow pool of water, then places the pan inside. When the water boils, she turns the fire down and covers the pot.
‘How long will it take?’
‘One or two hours,’ she says. ‘In the meantime, go outside. I will call you when it’s done.’
I want to stay in the kitchen because if I go outside Luis Ángel might be there, and I don’t like seeing him because it makes me sad. I haven’t hit him since last week, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to. Why is that? He doesn’t do anything to me.
‘What if it burns?’ I ask.
My mom’s rinsing the blender cup in the sink.
‘It isn’t going to burn,’ she says.
‘How do you know?’
‘Because my mother showed me how to do this. If it burns, the sun will fall from the sky.’
‘That’s not true,’ I say. ‘The sun is too big.’
She finishes rinsing the cup and leaves it in the sink.
‘Even the sun depends on what happens on Earth,’ my mom says. ‘If the flan burns, it’s because something bad bewitched it.’
The right side of my abdomen shudders. I then feel tightness in my throat, like when we go to México and breathe the cool mountain air.
‘Something bad like what?’ I say.
I’m thinking of the things I’ve done to Luis Ángel and Horacio. One time I cranked the old heater on. Its meshed iron cover turned hot. I made them stand on it. Their little feet burned. I had pushed them off quickly because I knew they couldn’t take it for more than a second. The bottoms of their feet were seared with red squares, making the skin look like waffles.
‘It could be many things,’ my mom says.
She walks away in the direction of her bedroom. I stay standing on the bucket, listening to the water inside the pot make gurgling sounds. I touch the side with my index finger then quickly pull away. The metal is hot. If the pot blows up in my face, the explosion’ll destroy my neck first then disintegrate my jawbones. My brain might survive, but I’ll be in bad shape.
* * *
‘What are you doing?’ Horacio asks.
‘Making sure the flan doesn’t burn,’ I say. ‘Get out of here.’
I’ve been standing here for a long time.
‘Foo, you need to see something.’
‘What is it?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ he says. ‘Come outside and I’ll show you.’
Horacio looks like he’s done something drastic. He stares at me with his big green eyes, looking scared. He wants me to help him somehow.
‘What did you do?’ I say.
‘It wasn’t me,’ he says. ‘It was Luis Ángel.’
We run out the house and into the backyard. Between the wooden shed and the peach tree that borders the alley, there’s a dark bloody pile on the grass.
Four small birds are dead. Two of them have their wings spread out sloppily, absolutely devoid of grace. They look like they crashed into the ground and crumpled upon impact. The other two have their wings curled up close to them, as if they had tried to hug themselves before dying.
‘What did you do?’ I say, grabbing Luis Ángel’s shirt with both hands. I’m about to beat his ass but he somehow wriggles free.
‘It wasn’t me, foo! I swear!’
Horacio explains. He found an old BB rifle and a box of BBs in the shed. He and our Luis Ángel shot at the grass for a while before putting it away. Horacio then went down the alley to play Kick Ass with our neighbor Tony. When he came back the dead birds were littered all over the yard. You could see the bullet wounds splattered on their wings and across their breasts. One of them had a deep bloody hole where its eye should’ve been, and another one’s beak was punctured with a perfect little circle. Horacio used a stick to push the birds into a pile then went to go look for me.
‘How do you know Luis Ángel did this?’
‘Because he tried to shoot one when we were playing with the BB gun. That’s why I took it away and put it back in the shed.’
‘This is bad,’ I say. ‘If our dad sees this, he’s gonna be pissed.’
‘That’s what I’m saying!’ Horacio says.
‘What are we waiting for?’
‘That’s what I’m saying! Help me put them in the trash can!’
‘You’re stupid,’ I say. ‘He’ll look right there.’
‘What are we gonna do then?’
‘Bury them,’ I say. ‘Rápido!’
The dirt around the peach tree is soft because my mom waters it every day. This is where we use our hands to dig a grave. The hole is about a foot deep when we’re done scooping and scraping like maniacs. We drag the bodies into the ground and cover them with soil. The tips of our fingernails are black, and a layer of dirt reaches our forearms.
We kneel under the shade of the peach tree, relieved our dad hadn’t come outside during the burial. How could we have explained?
I stand up and sprinkle dirt on the grass where the dead birds had laid, using the soles of my shoes to rub dirt into the blood. The stink of death is gone.
‘Should we say something?’ Horacio says.
‘Like what?’ I ask, kneeling next to him once again.
‘I donno. A few words?’
I slice a leaf stem with my thumbnail then stick another stem through the slit, making a tiny green cross. I prop the cross on top of the burial spot.
‘Foo, this isn’t a movie,’ I say.
‘Doesn’t matter, foo. What if these birds had family?’
‘Who cares if they had family!’
‘If you don’t say something, I will. Yeah, I’m definitely gonna say something.’
‘Do it,’ I say. ‘I don’t care.’
‘Don’t leave yet.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Dear God—’
‘Are you for serious?’
‘Shut up foo,’ Horacio says. ‘Yes, I’m serious!’
‘Alright,’ I say. ‘Keep going.’
‘Dear God. These birds are dead. So sorry that it was kind of my fault. I taught Luis Ángel how to shoot! I turned him into a cold-blood killer! Take these birds to heaven and rest in peace. Okay? Whistle. Call them, like, woorooroo woorooroo, caw caw. They’ll fly straight to you, man!’
He throws a palmful of dirt on the mound.
‘Amén,’ he says.
‘Amén,’ I reply. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’
* * *
The house smells of sugar. Did the flan smell like this before I went outside? I don’t know. It smells freaking good.
I climb back onto the bucket and feel vapor oozing from the sides of the lid. It’s not that hot, so I inch my face closer. The tip of my nose touches the metal. I pull away quickly because my nose skin is sensitive. I burned myself. It hurts, but I rub it, and the feeling goes away.
From somewhere behind me my mom says, ‘Is it done?’
I jump and say, ‘Uh! Oh! You scared me!’
My mom uncovers the pot. A cloud of smoke rises then disappears into the air. The smell of cockroach spray’s extinguished now.
‘It’s done,’ she says.
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I can smell it.’
She grabs my face with both hands and pivots my head, as if checking me for bruises.
‘What happened to your nose?’
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Why?’
‘It’s red, as if you burned yourself with something. Did you burn yourself with something?’
I hop down and walk to the bathroom, climb up on the sink so I can see my face in the mirror. It’s true. The skin on my nose has a tiny red blotch.
‘Damnit,’ I say. ‘Crap.’
The red stain makes my nose look sick. I have my Mamá Sylvia’s nose. No one on my mom’s side of the family has this nose except me and my cousin Nestor. Our nostrils are wider than everyone else’s and shaped like circles. My uncles from my dad’s side call it a fat nose. I never noticed its fatness until my uncles started talking about it.
I think my nose makes me be closer to my Mamá Sylvia, even though she lives all the way far in México. We also have black hair and dark skin. The only thing I didn’t get from her is green eyes. The demon Horacio got those.
This is how some people distinguish my brothers and me. Because Meño and Horacio are light-skinned, and especially because Horacio has green eyes and golden brown hair, people say that they’re cute and light-skinned. To Luis Ángel and me people say dark as if they’re disappointed, as if it’s sad we’re not living up to our potential. Who knows?
One of my uncles calls me dark, hairy and horrible. When he does, I start acting like an animal, grabbing onto his legs and pretending to chew his bones. My dad has to calm me down, saying, ‘Alejandro! Calm yourself! Or do you want me to calm you?’
I always have to stop after that.
I open the sink’s faucet and rub cold water on my nose. I splash more all over my face just for fun. When I look in the mirror again it looks as if I’ve been crying. I go along with it.
‘Amá,’ I say, walking back into the kitchen. ‘My hair hurts.’
‘What? How is that your hair hurts?’
‘It’s true,’ I say, running my hands through my hair.
‘Don’t make yourself,’ she says. ‘Hair doesn’t hurt.’
Hers is brown and straight, hangs down to just above her pompis. Like her dad (my grandfather) and unlike my Mamá Sylvia, my mom’s blood is pure and Spanish.
She pulls the tin pan out of the pot and rips off the foil.
‘I told you,’ she says. ‘It’s done.’
‘Can we eat it now?’
‘It has to cool.’
‘How long?’
‘A good while,’ she says, leaving again in the direction of her bedroom.
I stay in the kitchen with my new idea: maybe I act like a monster with my younger brothers because I am one. I have monster skin, hair and nose.
But then what’s our older brother Meño’s excuse? He’s the biggest monster of us all.
* * *
My family and I are sitting at the dining room table. In front of us, the flan is sliced up into eight moist pieces. For everyone, this is a big deal, a rare treat.
‘Why does it look like that?’ my dad says.
‘Like what?’ my mom says.
‘Look at it,’ he says. ‘The sides look like cheese.’
When my mom has made flan in the past, the top and sides of the flan always come out perfect. They’re usually smooth and flat. Today, the sides of the flan look like crumbled cheese, as my dad said, or, perhaps, a sponge. Pockets of air bubbles have sunk themselves into the flan’s texture. I think of a word we learned in Science: igneous.
My mom uses a fork and samples the first mouthful.
‘It’s good,’ she says and dishes out plates to everyone.
‘Besides,’ she continues. ‘Alex helped me. That’s why it tastes distinctly.’
I feel embarrassed. To protect myself, I slide a hand under the table and flip my brothers off. They don’t say anything. I hold my middle finger stiff until everyone has a piece of flan.
‘You have a good hand,’ my mother tells me from across the table. ‘You’re going to help me do many things.’
After a few moments, I ask Luis Ángel in Spanish, ‘Do you like the flan?’
The haircut he has is bowl-shaped, a big black bowl like a helmet.
‘You want a piece of mine?’ I say.
One of his front teeth is missing. There’s a scar above his eye from when one of us split his skin with a shovel. It was an accident.
‘Luis Ángel,’ I say, more forcefully.
The truth is the kid’s smart, like smarter than everyone in this stupid family. Last month his teacher told us she wanted him to skip the second grade. After a few hours, he was begging our mom to not let it happen.
‘Hey man, are you okay?’
He doesn’t look up from his plate.
I put a forkful of flan in my mouth. The spongy texture has little to do with the taste. The taste is good—sweet, moist and only slightly burnt.
* * *
A week later, I walk from the kitchen into the living room. My wet hands hang out in front of me, and my eyelids droop like a drunk’s.
‘We need a dishwasher,’ I say. Since I learned how to, I’ve washed dishes every day.
My family is sitting on the living room couches, watching The Wizard of Oz on television. My mom, my dad, Horacio and Luis Ángel seem to have not heard me. My brother Meño did.
‘We have one,’ he says. He points an index finger at me and grimaces, baring teeth covered with braces, the metal wires and fixings always shiny because he cleans them after every meal.
Meño and I almost have the same birthday. I was born a day before he turned four. He’s exactly three years and three-hundred-sixty-four days older than I am.
‘Just look at yourself,’ he says. ‘You’re the damn dishwasher.’
Leo Ríos is a fiction writer from Wasco California. A recent graduate of Cornell University’s MFA Program, he started writing stories in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.