fingers.
Having siblings can be a blessing. Having siblings can be a curse. We learned this from the movies. And we learned that one sibling always saves the other.
Mercedes started having nightmares. Narcisa and I did everything we could to keep her quiet so Mom and Dad wouldn’t find out. They would punish me: horror movies, so obviously the bull’s fault. Poor little worm, poor little Mercedes, to have such a beast of a sister, a girl so unlike a girl, so wild, what a cross to bear. Why aren’t you more like little Mercedes, so sweet, so quiet, so gentle?
Mercedes’s nightmares were worse than any of the movies we watched. They were about school, the nuns, the nuns possessed by the devil—dancing naked, touching themselves down there, appearing in the mirror while she was brushing her teeth or taking a shower. The nuns, like Freddy, taking over her dreams. And we’d never even rented a movie like that.
“What else happened, Mercedes?” I asked, but she didn’t say anything, she just screamed.
Mercedes’s screams penetrated my skull. They sounded like howls, gashes, bites, animal things. Her eyes were open but she was still somewhere else, and Narcisa and I hugged her so she would come back but sometimes coming back took her a long time, and I thought, once again, that I was stealing something from her, just like when we were in Mom’s belly. Mercedes started to get really skinny. We were identical, but less and less so, because I was becoming more and more like a bull and she was becoming more and more like a worm: sunken eyes, hunched, bony.
I never had much love for the Sisters at school nor they for me. In other words, we hated each other. They had a radar for unruly souls, that’s the term they used, but I didn’t mind, I liked the sound of it. I hated their hypocrisy. They were bad people dressed up as good ones. They made me erase all the school’s blackboards, clean the chapel, help Mother Superior distribute alms—which was just handing out what other people (our parents) had given to the poor, the middlewoman keeping a bunch for herself, eating expensive fish and sleeping on a feather mattress. It was punishment after punishment for me because I asked why they gave out rice to the poor while they ate sea bass and I told them the Lord wouldn’t have liked that because he made the fish for everyone. Mercedes squeezed my arm and cried. She knelt down and prayed for me with her eyes closed tight. She looked like a little angel. While she recited the Hail Mary, I wanted to make everything else stop dead because I felt like my sister’s prayer was the only thing worth anything in this fucked-up world. The nuns told my parents that my sister would be perfect for their order, and I imagined her life spent locked away in that prison of horrible clothes and giant crucifixes like shackles: I couldn’t bear it.
That summer we got our periods. First Mercedes, then me. Narcisa was the one who taught us how to use pads because Mom wasn’t there, and she laughed when we started waddling around like ducks. She also told us that our blood meant that, with the help of a man, we could now make babies. That was ridiculous. Yesterday we couldn’t even imagine doing an insane thing like creating a child, and today we could. “That’s a lie,” we told her. And she grabbed us both by the arms. Narcisa’s hands were very strong, big, masculine. Her fingernails, long and pointy, could open sodas without a bottle opener. Narcisa was small and just two years older than us, but she seemed to have lived four hundred more lives. Our arms burned as she repeated that now we had to beware of the living more than the dead—that now we really had to be more afraid of the living than of the dead.
“You are women now,” she said. “Life isn’t a game anymore.”
Mercedes started to cry. She didn’t want to be a woman. I didn’t either, but I’d rather be a woman than a bull.
One night, Mercedes had another one of her nightmares. There weren’t nuns anymore, but men, faceless men who played with her menstrual blood and rubbed it all over their bodies, and then from everywhere monstrous babies appeared, like little rats, to gnaw her to death. I couldn’t calm her down. We went to look for Narcisa, but her door was locked from the inside. We heard noises. Then silence. Then noises again. We sat in the kitchen, in the dark, waiting for her. When the door finally opened, we threw ourselves at her, we needed her arms so badly, her hands that always smelled like onion and cilantro, her healing words saying we should be more afraid of the living than the dead. A few inches away, we realized it wasn’t her. We stopped, terrified, mute, frozen. It wasn’t Narcisa who had come through the door. Our hearts ticked like bombs. There was something both foreign and familiar in that silhouette, filling us with disgust and horror.
I was late to react, I didn’t have the chance to cover Mercedes’s mouth. She screamed.
Dad slapped each of us across the face and then walked calmly up the stairs.
Neither Narcisa nor her things were in the house the next morning.
GRISELDA
Miss Griselda made amazing cakes.
She had binders filled with photos of the most beautiful cakes in the whole world. It was always the cake, not the new dress. The cake, not the colorfully wrapped gifts. The cake, not the delicious food, that was the highlight of every birthday party: choosing it and imagining all the guests’ jealous faces as they saw how awesome our birthday cake was.
The thing was, Miss Griselda’s cakes weren’t round like everyone else’s. They were shaped like Mickey Mouse, a dollhouse, a fire truck, Winnie the Pooh, the Ninja Turtles.
Miss Griselda’s cakes weren’t white with colored sprinkles like the ones my mom made, or caramel or chocolate like the ones you saw at the other birthday parties. No way. If it was a taxi, the cake was taxicab yellow; if it was a police car, it had everything including the red lights of the siren; if it was a soccer ball, black and white; if it was Cinderella, it had everything down to her blond hair and glass slippers, even the brown mice.
Miss Griselda made unforgettable cakes. She made my brother’s First Communion cake in the shape of an open Bible, and on the pages made of sugar she wrote in little gold letters: There is nothing more perfect than Love. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. People couldn’t stop asking my mom where she’d gotten such an amazing cake, and they took pictures of it instead of my brother. Or rather, they took pictures of him, but always with the cake. Mom told Miss Griselda. She blushed, she looked happy.
When it was almost our birthdays, all the kids in the neighborhood would go over to Miss Griselda’s after harassing our mothers for days, our stomachs churning with excitement. Finally the moment would come when she would give us her stack of binders and tell us ceremoniously: “Pick whichever one you want. Take your time.” Her eyes shone as she waited for us to point to the chosen one.
“This one.”
We began to turn the pages. The decision, that terrible moment. And our brothers and sisters always interfering: “Mommy, I want this one for my next birthday,” “Mommy, I want her to make me a cake too.” We had big fights. Once, we argued so much that Mom got two cakes for my party: one that looked like R2-D2 and another that looked like Strawberry Shortcake.
While we decided, my mom would ask after Miss Griselda’s health, about her daughter Griseldita, about her plants. But never about her husband. People said that her husband had gone off with another woman. Or that one day he went to work and never came home. Or that he was in prison. Or that he beat her so badly she ended up in bed for days and she threatened to call the police. Or that he had kicked her and her daughter out of the house and they’d had to come here. I knew the house well because my friend Wendy Martillo had lived there before her parents got divorced.
Even though it was
