An Ofrenda for my Mother

I became a writer thanks to a mother who was unhappy being a mother. She was a prisoner-of-war mother, banging on the bars of her cell all her life. Unhappy women do this. She searched for escape routes from her prison and found them in museums, public concerts and the public library.

As a child she lived in the parish of Saint Francis of Assisi in Chicago, off Roosevelt Road and South Halsted Street, close enough to downtown that she could walk there. I have a photo of her as a very young girl on the steps of the Field Museum with her girlfriend. I know my mother often ran off all day with her friends and paid her younger sisters to do her chores. She did not know what awaited her in life, and if she had she might’ve run farther than the museum.

Because my mother needed to fortify her spirit, every weekend she herded us to museums, concerts in Grant Park and the library. I used to think this was for our sake, but now I realize it was for hers. She loved opera, Pearl Buck novels, and the movie A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Later she would ditch Pearl Buck for Noam Chomsky, but in the beginning she read novels. I know she dreamed of becoming some sort of artist – she could sing and draw – but I’m sure she never dreamed of mothering seven kids.
I think she married my father because he rescued her from a house with peeling paint and beds crowded with sisters and bedbugs. At least this is what my father reminded her when they argued. He came from Mexico City and spoke an impeccable Spanish as stiff and formal as the beautiful suits he wore. He was a gentleman, and I think my mother saw him as cosmopolitan and sophisticated. She did not know he was a dreamer and would give her seven kids and an unimaginative life.

My mother was the beauty of the family, used to being spoiled by her eldest sister. If there was one thing my father knew how to do, it was how to spoil a woman. He believed women wanted words more than anything, and he had a lot of them. Mi cielo. Mi vida. Mi amor. So for a little while she must have been happy. I have a photo of them dancing and kissing. It’s obvious they’re in love, but it didn’t last very long and was replaced with a more durable, daily love, and the words were replaced with more durable, daily words too.

‘Vieja, donde estás?’ [Where’s my old lady?]

‘No me llamas vieja, yo no soy vieja.’ [Don’t call me ‘old lady’, I’m not old.]

Because she couldn’t drive, Mother insisted Father take us downtown on Sundays, to the museums. Father waited for us in Grant Park under a tree, or, in the winter, on a bench by the coatroom.

‘My feet hurt,’ Father said.

He had corns from dancing all week around the sofas and chairs he upholstered, so we knew better than to ask him to come inside with us.

On Saturdays we walked with Mother to the library. For me, the library was a wonderful house. A house of ideas, a house of silence. Our own house was like that of the cook’s in Alice in Wonderland, a lot of shouting and banging of pots. Would someone hand me a baby and would the baby turn into a pig? Anything could happen in this kitchen. It was a nightmare, and I was condemned to the lowest job of scullery maid because I was too daydreamy to learn how to cook. The rice burned on me – too expensive a mistake – so I was ordered to cut potatoes into little squares, or scrub pots, or set the table, or anything else my mother thought of while she was busy banging pots and yelling.

Hell was a kitchen. Hell was having to go to the supermarket every Friday with her. Sometimes Father drove us. Usually we walked there and back with a collapsible shopping cart and a red wagon. It was a cross, buying groceries for our army. Neither Mother nor I enjoyed it.

Sometimes my father and mother went to the Randolph Street market to buy eggs and vegetables wholesale for the nine of us. Occasionally my mother walked down North Avenue, beyond Humboldt Park, to the bakery to buy us day-old sweet bread. On Sundays after scavenging the flea market at Maxwell Street, we stopped for Mexican groceries on Eighteenth Street; carnitas and chicharón served on hot tortillas with dollops of sour cream and sprigs of cilantro. These Sunday dinners were one of the few times Father ‘cooked’. He stood over the cutting board and chopped like a Japanese chef, humming while he worked, until the carnitas were diced to his liking.

Father was meticulous. He liked to remind everyone that he was from a good family, the son of a Mexican military man and the grandson of a pianist who was also an educator, but Father’s appreciation of the finer things in life did not extend beyond nightclubs. He loved the big bands of Xavier Cugat, Perez Prado and Benny Goodman, the sultry voice of Peggy Lee singing ‘Why Don’t You Do Right?’ – whose lyrics always made him laugh – and the dance halls and cabarets of Mexico City. He was a good dancer and a sharp dresser. And then he got married.

Like everybody we knew, we took road trips from Chicago to Mexico to visit family. We witnessed paper Judases exploding on Holy Week, saw Aztec pyramids sprouting in the middle of downtown, watched dancers swing from a giant pole planted in front of the cathedral, listened to ancient music played on drums and conch shells in the central plaza. Art was in the paper flags fluttering above us at a fiesta, in the mangoes sliced like roses and served on a stick, in the cheap trinkets we bought with our Sunday allowance at the market, in the pastel wafer candies studded with pumpkin seeds. We didn’t have to ask anyone to drive us to a museum. Art was everywhere around us.

On these vacations, Father caught up on his reading. His library consisted of Mexican comic books and pocketsize fotonovelas printed in a dark chocolate ink on paper so cheap it was used as toilet paper by the poor. When father was done with his little books, he’d turn them over to me, and I’d paint over the ladies’ chocolate-tinted mouths with a red-lead pencil dipped in spit. This is how I learned to read in Spanish.

Father also had a private library, a secret stash of ¡Alarma! magazines, whose covers were so savage, Mother forced him to keep them under the mattress in paper bags. ¡Alarma! featured sensational stories about everyday Mexican events – yet another bus drives off a cliff, yet another quake swallows a village, yet another machete murder. All with detailed photos. Mexicans love staring at death. I wasn’t allowed to read these magazines but once in a while I did catch a headline when Father was reading in bed. wife kills husband and serves his head in tacos.

Back in Chicago, Mother painted geishas in paint-by-number sets in the kitchen after her housework was done. She made fake flowers with crêpe paper until she grew real flowers from seeds she sent away for. She sewed stuffed toys and doll clothes, designed theatre sets and created puppets. But it wasn’t enough. Mother felt duped by life and sighed for the life that wasn’t hers. Father watched television in bed, content, chuckling, calling out for pancakes.

‘There’s no intelligent life around here,’ Mother said out loud to no one in particular.
When she was in a bad mood, which was often, she threw sharp words like knives, wounding and maiming the guilty and the innocent.

‘Your mother,’ Father complained to me, near tears.

Sick and tired, miserable, Mother raged and paced her cell. We tiptoed around her feeling gloomy and guilty.

I understood Father. He understood me. Neither of us understood her, and she never understood us. But that didn’t matter. A stack of pancakes. A pay cheque. A bouquet of dandelions. A ride to the Garfield Park Conservatory. A box of popcorn from the Sears. A language for the things we couldn’t say.