Laia Jufresa - Umami

I flex my right bicep. Dad feels it and pretends to be impressed.

‘Beto and I bought your crickets off you then let them go in Alf’s milpa once you were asleep.’

Beto whistles and says, ‘I’d forgotten all about that.’

‘Can we have an inauguration?’ I ask.

Mom is wearing a blue rag. She smiles at me, does Protestant hand, but in the end says, ‘Fine.’

‘But only once your brothers are back,’ Dad adds.

‘Duh,’ Pina says, almost offended, as if we’d already taken that into consideration.

‘And by invitation only,’ Mom says. ‘And free entry.’

‘Voluntary donation?’ Dad pitches in. ‘Hey, if people want to help, why stop them?’

Mom takes one slow, deep breath, which I know means ‘OK’. Dad holds out his hand to me, then to Pina.

‘Deal,’ we say, and shake on it. But on the inside, I say something else. On the inside I say, ‘Squeeze!’

*

Pina and I go over to hers. The adults stay in my living room. Dad said we had to celebrate Pina and Chela’s reconciliation, hence tonight’s dinner, but only Pi, my parents and I know that. We told Beto it was in honor of us starting high school next week.

Pina passes me an envelope with some photos she developed. It’s pretty weird seeing her mom again. Was she always so good-looking? I tell Pina that the beach looks great and how jealous I am that she got to see hatching turtles. Then I let her braid my hair because she swears on her life she knows how. She doesn’t of course, but this is a necessary experiment. Daniela gave us elastic bands from her brackets. (She looks terrible, pregnant with brackets.) She told us that if we sleep with our hair in braids then take them out in the morning we’ll have ‘created volume’. We need volume for the yard inauguration. Pina braids and braids and tells me all about the beach at Mazunte and the people there and the turtles. Eventually she tells me that the weirdest thing is that the same thing happens as when she was little: when she’s with Chela, she doesn’t dare speak. Like she wants to say the right thing, but she thinks about it so much that in the end she doesn’t say anything. She says that this doesn’t happen with anyone else; apart from boys she likes. She says she bucked up the courage to ask her mom what the notorious letter said, and Chela told her that she didn’t remember.

‘Did she say sorry for leaving?’ I ask her.

Pi shakes her head, looking at me in her dressing-table mirror.

‘Did you get a boyfriend?’ I ask.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Men our age are all useless, Elizabeth, Liz, Lizzie; from now on I’m going to call you Lizzie.’

‘Men our age aren’t men yet, Pizzie.’

‘What are they?’

‘They’re youths.’

‘They’re what?’

‘They’re fayre flies with fucketh for brains.’

*

Pi has been asleep for hours. I can’t sleep because my braids are itchy and because the things she told me are crushing down on my chest. I don’t know if I could see Chela again; if I could manage not to hate her till the end of time. Or maybe I can hate her so my friend doesn’t have to. I could be a hate surrogate and Pina could let it all go and just forgive her. Maybe she has already. Not only for leaving, but also for what Chela confessed to Pina and Pina just told me now, before falling asleep: that last year, for her birthday, Chela came all the way here but didn’t get farther than the doorway. She was here and just left without a word. That makes me angrier than anything. That, and what the letter said.

It’s easy to hate Chela, but I can’t sleep at the same time as I do that; I keep waking up and it’s all still there, all jumbled up inside me and it’s like when Luz died: like I want to go back in time, open the door to the mews and catch Chela hesitating in front of the entry buzzer and make her ring the damn thing. At some point I notice the window is no longer black. I get up to look at the stereo: it’s five thirty in the morning. I get dressed, go downstairs and cross the larynx barefoot, stopping to touch the bell with my toes. It’s much colder than the floor. I stay like that for a while, like a charactress from a movie: standing alone, the dawn sky spelling sadness over me.

The other thing Pina told me was this: when she came back from her mom’s beach, Beto finally agreed to show her the letter. It’s just one sentence; one that none of us could have ever imagined. I think that’s actually what’s brought on the insomnia, because how many years have we spent wondering if it was a suicide note, or if Chela was really a spy and had been forced to leave on a mission? Basically, wondering if she wrote something that shed the light on her disappearance. But what’s breaking my heart is that the letter doesn’t say anything. The letter says: Pina, I only ask that you finish high school .

*

At home, the screen door to the yard is open. At first I’m worried, but then I walk closer and see my mom out in the middle of the lawn with a cup of coffee in her hands. She looks lost there, still in her white nightgown and with a woolen shawl wrapped around her half-heartedly, staring at it all as if she were deciding whether my plants are fact or fiction.

‘What are you doing here?’ I ask gently, taking her hand.

She’s barefoot too, and her wheat-colored hair is loose. Her wedding ring hangs between her collarbones. She never liked wearing it on her finger. Dad says she put it on a chain three weeks after their wedding. I realize then that it’s been ages since I saw this part of her body: it moves when she breathes, up and down, and the ring catches in the light of a streetlamp. Her shoulders look like two tennis balls implanted under her skin, the same as my brothers’: I didn’t remember that. Has Mom been hiding her body, too? I run a finger along the furrows between my braids and the itching starts up again. We look down at our feet. Mom holds on to my arm and shows me how, if you go in to touch the grass from the side, the droplets land on your toes. We have the same feet, too wide for pretty shoes. And now we have this too: dew, silence, green things.

Mom clenches her toes and pulls out a few blades of grass. She regrets it immediately and looks at me like a little girl who’s just done something naughty. I shrug my shoulders.

‘It doesn’t matter. We’ve got more. More of all of this.’

Then Mom blinks at me slowly, which I know means ‘thank you’.

They’ve only just sat down when Chela says, ‘Now we’re going to talk about happy things.’

The crepes, the cutlery, two plates and a selection from Chihuahua’s jelly collection are laid out on the table. They’ve also decanted some water from the twenty-liter bottle in the kitchen into a pitcher. Marina, who never sits at the table, feels like she’s taking part in a simulacrum.

‘You start,’ Chela says.

‘I invent colors,’ is the only happy thing Marina can think of.

‘With paint?’

‘With words.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Like… this one I thought of earlier. I’m still not sure if it works: “blacktric”.’

‘An electric black?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Nice. You got anymore?’

‘Scink is the pale pink you find after you pull off a scab. You know the one?’

‘Totally!’

‘Dirtow is the dirty yellow on the edges of sidewalks where you’re not meant to park. Cantalight is that melony orange you only see at twilight. Briefoamite is the ephemeral white of sea foam.’

Chela has her mouth full so she says yes with her index finger. ‘Go on,’ she gestures.

‘Green-trip is the color of ecological guilt-trips.’

‘Amazing!’