Laia Jufresa - Umami

Lulú lived outside of the country and, to some extent, outside of time. As far as I recall, she was the only one of our friends and family who never stopped making hypothetical comments about our hypothetical children. She never gave up telling us about how gringas were having babies later and later, about fertility clinics, about how she was going to take our kids to see God knows what team over there, because she was a baseball nut. She probably still is. I mean, in all likelihood she’s still alive, it’s just I haven’t seen her since Noelia’s funeral. I remember she took care of the flowers.

Lulú didn’t have children either, or a partner. In her own words, she didn’t even have ‘a dog to whine at her’. The day she turned up with a tub of Cool Whip, she presented it to us with the words, ‘Not even God, who invented the penis, could have come up with something this good and this low in calories.’ But that was the only reference to a man I ever heard her make. I know she had several, because she was a fine-looking woman and because, once Lulú had taken herself off to the guest room, Noelia would fill me in, jumping into bed possessed by a kind of gossip hyper-frenzy, which only sleep, generally mine, could snap her out of. It was during one of these sessions that Noelia let on how the idea of the reborn dolls had come from Lulú.

‘What are they?’ I asked. ‘It sounds esoteric.’

‘They’re dolls that have been reborn,’ Noelia explained.

‘Reborn how?’

‘Like, they’re not dolls anymore. When they’re reborn, they become babies. Sort of to console those people who don’t have children, you know the type?’

My job is to take all the dirt off the death trumpets with a toothbrush. It’s really hard because the dirt is the same color as the trumpet so you can’t tell when to stop. When I think I can’t get any more off I put the trumpet in a salad bowl full of warm water and Grandma rubs it with her fingers to make sure. Her hands look like mine when I’ve spent ages in the lake. Now I have clothes on again and it feels all toasty. When the trumpets are as clean as clean can be, we give them to my mom and she puts them in with the garlic and tomatoes that are sizzling in the pan. Sizzling is what you call the sound of loads and loads of snakes talking at once.

‘What do you paint your hands with?’ I ask Grandma.

‘My nails?’

‘Yup.’

‘With varnish.’

‘Would you like Emma to paint your nails?’ my mom asks me.

I shake my head from side to side. Of course I don’t. I know what varnish is and how much it pongs.

*

We eat at a table on the terrace, which Grandma calls the porch. I’m hungry. Everything smells of oil and garlic. Pina doesn’t like garlic because she’s dumb. Ana likes garlic as much as I do, especially the burnt bits. My mom takes two pieces from the pan, gives us one each, and we chew on them happily. Pina pulls a face at us like she’s disgusted. She says to me, ‘Jeez, Luchi Luchi, who would have known?’

‘Known what?’

‘That you’re not a vampire.’

Emma gives us cotton serviettes instead of paper ones and I sit all elegant, like the elegant ladies on the planes who wear neckties and little hats and give out peanuts.

‘I can’t be a vampire because I’m a peanut, right?’ I ask, and everyone says, ‘Right,’ apart from Ana, who rolls her eyes and stays looking at the sky like when she wishes we weren’t sisters at all.

Emma serves the pasta from the pan and some wine that her friends on the other coast make. She serves us girls a little bit too, but it tastes gross. Only Pina likes it, but then she says that her mom also likes wine and her chin trembles like she’s going to cry, but then she asks Grandma for some Coca-Cola. Ana and I laugh, because we know Grandma hates Coca-Cola. But then Emma explains to Pina something she’s never explained to us.

‘Coca-Cola is the sewage of the empire,’ she says.

Ew, no wonder my mom never let us touch the stuff.

‘Is Michigan an empire?’ I ask, while trying to wrap my spaghetti around my fork like my mom wants us to.

Pina says it is and that the emperor is called Michelin.

‘That’s not true,’ Ana says. ‘The emperor is called Umami.’

‘And is he a baddie?’

‘A really bad baddie,’ Pina says. ‘He eats little girls for breakfast.’

‘Nuh-uh, no he isn’t,’ interrupts Ana. And then she says to Pina, ‘Don’t tell tales to my sister!’ And to me she says, ‘Umami is the best emperor in the world; if a little girl goes visit him in his castle, Umami will grant her a wish.’

I want to ask more but Mama and Grandma put us to work in the kitchen. They give me a special spoon, like the teeny-weeny baby of the one you use to scoop ice cream, and I have to use it to make melon balls. First you dig it in the fruit, then you turn. I’m the queen of the melon balls. I have to put them then in glass dishes where Ana then serves a scoop of ice cream and Pina adds a spoon.

Grandma makes tea. She puts a white cloth, two mugs and a jar of honey on a tray.

‘Why are there bugs in the honey?’ I ask her.

‘They’re not bugs,’ she says, ‘they’re special mushrooms for adults. But I’ve got something special for you kiddos too,’ she says, and she pulls out a tin of long cookies with a chocolate middle. She asks me how many I want and I say, ‘Lots.’ She puts one cookie in each ice-cream cup and hands me the ones left over. Ana gets all jealous. She hates it when I get presents and she doesn’t.

‘I’ll give them to you if you tell me where the emperor’s castle is,’ I say to her.

‘Done.’

I give them to her and she whispers in my ear, ‘You’ll never reach it, because it’s at the bottom of the lake.’ Then she sticks her tongue out at me and walks off with my cookie tin. Pina sticks her tongue out at me too, just because.

When we go out with the dessert, Emma gives us a round of applause and my mom sings a song she really likes about a donna, which is Spanish for doughnut. Except it’s not in Spanish.

‘What language is that?’ asks Pina.

Mom says it’s Italian and then we all teach Pina the song. Turns out it’s not about a doughnut as I always thought, but about a woman. My mom keeps on explaining all the words but I’m not paying any attention to her because I’m thinking about something else. I’m thinking of how my ziplings and I are always hiding to drink a drink that is actually made of poop.

*

Ana and Pina go watch their TV series in one of the bedrooms. They bought it yesterday in Penny Saver and it has a zillion new episodes and it’s all they ever talk about. I don’t want to watch it because, even though they say it isn’t scary, I’ve seen vampires on the cover, so it’s scary.

Grandma asks me if I like hammocks. I tell her I do and she takes me to the front terrace, where her old truck lives. Our rented car lives there too, but not today, because the boys took it with them. And the little path that connects the house to the highway is there too. Plus some muddy shoes, some chairs, umbrellas, and a giant ball of threads hanging from the roof. Emma unravels it and it turns out the ball is the hammock. She ties it between the two posts of the terrace.

‘Porch,’ Emma corrects me.

‘I thought the porch was at the back.’

‘That too. You’ve got your front porch and your back porch.’

‘And your middle porch,’ I say, but she doesn’t laugh.

I climb into the hammock and she says, ‘Lift your head,’ and when I do she slips a cushion behind it.

‘I never used a pillow on a hammock before,’ I tell her.

‘It’s the civilized version,’ she says.