Laia Jufresa - Umami

‘I’m not sleepy.’

‘I know. It’s to make you more comfy.’

‘Will you rock me a little?’

Grandma rocks me for way too little before she stops and says it’s going to rain.

‘How do you know?’

‘Because the dragonflies are out.’

She goes into the house and comes out with some paper and a can of pencils. Then she kisses me, and when she’s gone I take my foot off the hammock and push myself on the edge of the table until I’m really, really rocking. Every now and then I have to take my foot off and do the pushing again so it’s not so boring. I liked Grandma before, but I don’t like her anymore because I feel like she brought me here to get rid of me. I bet she wants to talk about adult things with my mom. She doesn’t know that at home I always hear everything anyway and nothing bad ever happens. I try to reach the can of pencils with my toes so they make an avalanche but she left them too far away. I think I want to go back to the front porch, or the back porch. I don’t know which is which anymore. Then I think I’ll go when the sun stops shining on my feet, because it’s really yummy. The sun that passes through the threads of the hammock draws shadows on my legs. The shadows are like eyes, and they can see everything I’m doing and everything I’m thinking.

I guess I do fall asleep a little bit in the end because when I wake up the eyes are gone and I’m cold and it’s raining. I want my mom, but when I go inside the house I see Cleo on the sofa, and maybe it’s better if I lie down there because there’s a blanket and because Grandma will find me here and feel bad for leaving me outside with so little on. But I can hear them laughing outside and I fall asleep again before anyone comes and finds me.

When I wake up again it’s almost nighttime. Cleo and two of her brothers are asleep on the rug next to my sofa. I can’t hear the adults, so I make myself into a caterpillar with the blanket and go out onto the porch to find the grown-up girls. Just like I found the trumpets. The table is covered in dirty plates, but there’s no one there. I hear voices and run toward them. It’s not raining anymore but the grass is wet. I find Emma sitting by the biggest pond. The ledge is made of bricks but she’s stroking it like a dog.

‘Who are you talking to, Grandma?’

‘To her.’

I look around.

‘Her who?’

‘Emma.’

‘You’re Emma.’

‘You too.’

I laugh, but I don’t really feel like laughing. I ask her where my mom is. She leans her head to the right, pats the side of the pond and says, ‘I made it.’

‘I know,’ I tell her. ‘You told us this afternoon already, and yesterday, and the day before that.’

‘What a pretty wig. Purple really is your color,’ she says.

She’s speaking like she was asleep. Maybe she’s sleepwalking. She has her hand over the water, palms facing down, and she’s moving them slowly, as if she was waving.

‘And Mama?’ I ask her again.

Emma points to an orange carp and says, ‘There she is!’

‘In the pond?’

‘Yes! Your mom turned into a fish.’

I don’t believe her. Plus, she’s laughing.

‘It’s true, honey; ever since she was a little girl, once a month your mom turns into a fish.’

She nods her head saying, ‘It’s true, it’s true’, which makes me doubt her.

‘Which one?’ I ask, to try to prove her wrong, and she points to an orange carp, but I can’t tell if it’s the same one as before. It swims off and hides among the lilies.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Because her eyes shine differently,’ she explains, ‘like a mammal’s.’

I can feel my lips start to quiver.

‘Don’t you worry now, she always comes back.’

‘Don’t be a liar,’ I tell her, but my voice is very small like a flea so I run off.

‘Come back,’ says Emma, but I don’t turn around and she doesn’t follow me. I want to get lost in the trees, and I want a wolf to come and bite me so that when Grandma finds me she feels really, really bad about lying to me. But I’m too scared to go into the grove. It’s dark between the trees. Scaredy-cat! You spent the whole morning in there! I run back into the house from the side with the terrace and the hammock, and go straight to my sister’s room. Ana and Pina are sitting in the dark in front of the TV. There’s a girl on the screen who’s half green and her head is spinning around and around like a carrousel.

‘Is this your series?’ I ask them. But Ana screams, ‘Get out! It’s not for kids!’

I don’t like it when she shouts at me. I throw my blanket at them and go to Mama’s room. It was her room when she was a little girl. There’s a patchwork quilt and instead of a door it has a woven curtain in different colors which Mama washes when we come. She washes all the curtains in the house every time we come because Grandma doesn’t really care about the dust. Sometimes it makes Mama nuts that Grandma lives camuflashed between the trees and the dust. I pick Bedtime Bear off the floor and we climb onto her bed. It’s made of iron and my mom says it’s a princess’s bed, but I don’t think princesses’ beds squeak this much. Ana and I always used to sleep here but this summer she sleeps with Pina in the TV room. A bunch of airplanes hang over me and Bear: wooden planes Mama made with her dad when she was a little girl, before they moved to the lake, and before her dad shacked up with Emma.

Mama’s first cello lives in one corner of the room. It’s basically the size of me. I feel like pushing the cello over and breaking it a bit because my mom isn’t here, because I don’t know where she is, but I don’t want to get down from the bed because the green girl really scared me.

Someone opens the curtain to the room and I scream, but it’s only Grandma. I thought we were mad at each other, but she smiles at me so I guess we are friends again. I think she’s here to say something nice to me, like how I’m a sugared peanut, but all she says is, ‘Look who came back.’

Grandma draws the curtain more so I can see. On the other side of it there’s Mama, soaking wet. Her clothes and hair are dripping on the living-room rug and the rag in her hair has gone dark it’s so soaked. There’s a water lily stuck between her boobies. Mama was in that pond! I feel my mouth fall open like they do in cartoons.

‘You see?’ Grandma says.

My mom inflates and deflates her cheeks. Cleo and her brothers run in barking at her. Dogs really, really don’t like fishes.

Pina hears the camper rumbling outside. Chela went to start the engine because it has to heat up a while before they can take it on the highway. On all fours and still half-asleep, Pina feels a sudden urge to run out and stop her. But she doesn’t. It’s a steady rumble; Chela won’t leave without them. She searches carefully under the bed, her heart still beating fast. Beto is checking the closets in the bungalow. Pina hears them opening and closing. When she comes out of the bedroom, her dad is in the kitchenette, tapping his fingers against the worktop tiles.

‘Nothing there,’ Pina says.

‘Let’s get out of here then,’ he says.

They switch off the lights and leave together.

Beto is wearing a suit but no tie. At this time of day, his eyes look like two slits behind his round glasses. The shoulder pads on his gray jacket are creeping up his neck, crumpled by the weight of the load he’s carrying: a backpack, a suitcase, the coolbox, a basket. Pina sings softly, ‘Little donkey, little donkey, on the dusty road,’ and he joins in, ‘Got to keep on plodding onwards, with your precious load.’

It’s not yet dawn. The bungalows have their eyes closed. The trees, the grand domed roof, and the two long chimneys where the swallows live are all reflected in the pool. The surface is perfectly still, and Pina can’t tell if the blue is the water, the sky, or a mixture of the two. She regrets not having swum once all weekend.