‘You have to take off the old soil first,’ says Pina, who doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about.
‘And what am I supposed to do with it then?’
‘You sell it to Marina. Or give it to her, so she can plant something and eat it.’
‘With lead in it?’
‘It’s a mineral, Ana. She could do with it.’
‘Maybe she could do with reading Umami.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Alf’s book. I lent it to you a zillion years ago.’
‘I gave it to someone else. Was it a novel about pedophilia?’
‘Not even remotely. It was an anthropological essay on the relationship between the fifth taste and pre-Hispanic food. Do you even know which mews you live in?’
‘Yes, Ana, I know what umami is, but why would he write a book with the same name as his house?’
‘You are so dumb.’
‘You’re the dumb one who doesn’t know what to do with your dirt.’
Dad comes out through the sliding door. He got rid of his beard a couple of weeks ago and I still haven’t got used to it. He looks younger. Or maybe uglier. The other day I turned up at one of his rehearsals so he could give me a ride home and I barely recognized him. Throughout his entire career he’s always sat at the very back of the stage, but even then I never had trouble picking him out. Obviously, this was because of the beard. But now’s not the moment to bring it up. I hand him the twenty pesos left over from the garden center.
Dad sits down on a bench with a beer and props his feet up on my sacks of soil. He puts the money in his wallet. I promised him the project would be ‘a sound investment’, but the truth is, I don’t even know what that means.
I explain about the nitrogen in the soil first: about how the corn will absorb it and the beans will replace it again. Then I explain about the lead, maybe exaggerating a little bit. (‘Toxic,’ I say. And, ‘carcinogenic.’) He seems interested so I go on. I tell him we’re going to nixtamalize our corn ourselves, the way Mexicans have always done, and unlike the Europeans, who took our corn but not our wisdom and went on to die of pellagra for centuries without the slightest clue of what was killing them.
‘It was the lack of niacin, in case you’re wondering.’
Pina rolls her eyes. Dad is watching Mom through the window. She’s wearing an orangey turban and her lips are moving as she washes the dishes. She looks like a Japanese carp. We agree not to tell her the bit about the lead because she’s one of those people whose heart breaks at the mere mention of pollution and/or progress.
I propose to Dad that we buy a hose. He makes some calculations. Fretting about money is one of his tics. It makes him go cross-eyed. I list off all the different types of tomatoes to distract him.
‘Some of them will be green,’ I promise him, ‘and others deep purple.’
Pina helps. She raises her tweezers and traces vertical lines with them.
‘Some of them will be stripy,’ she says.
Dad perks up at this. He goes into the kitchen for another beer and we watch him try to convince Mom to come out.
‘Tiger tomatoes,’ he’s saying to her. ‘Quality time,’ he adds in English, with his Mexican accent that used to make her laugh. But Mom doesn’t come out. She doesn’t believe in yards. In her head a yard is something pathetic and wasted; something that wallows in its own filth; something constricted.
‘Don’t you think she’s too skinny?’ asks Pina.
‘Who?’
‘Marina!’
Dad comes out and announces that he’s not going to buy me any tools. I’ll have to borrow some. I’d put money on this being Mom’s fault: she’s always telling him he spoils me. I ask him who exactly he thinks is going to lend me tools, but he just crushes his empty beer can with his foot. He’s played timpani in the National Symphony Orchestra for twenty years: when he makes a sound, he knows how to let it resonate. He looks up after a while and sits gazing at Pina.
‘Doesn’t that hurt?’ he asks her.
‘Yeah, it does,’ she replies.
‘Then why not just shave?’
‘Because then they grow back quicker,’ I explain through gritted teeth.
Dad takes the hint and doesn’t ask any more questions. Pina puts the tweezers in her shorts pocket, crosses her arms and clutches both hands under her armpits.
‘I better go pack,’ she says, getting up and giving us each a kiss.
‘Aren’t you staying for lunch?’
‘I can’t, I’m going to see Chela tomorrow and I still haven’t got sunblock and blah blah blah.’
‘Tell her I said hi,’ Dad says.
But I don’t know what to say and Pina leaves. Through the window we watch her hug Mom: Japanese carp, Chinese heron.
*
An email arrives from my brothers, who have just landed in Michigan. We always get our plane tickets courtesy of the airline that my granddad, the one we can’t remember, worked for as a pilot. When I was little, there was nothing in the world more exciting than flying with them, as if we were all part of one big, brilliant extended family, where there were blue washbags full of goodies for the grandchildren of pilots, infinitely better than my friends’ party favors. At the airport they’d hang a badge around my neck, and I’d take charge of my siblings. Back when there were still four of us, we didn’t all fit in one row. I would sit on the other side of the aisle and pretend I was traveling on my own. Emma didn’t even have Internet in those days. Now she can’t stop forwarding things. She sent us an email recently about skin cancer; one of those PowerPoint slideshows that get shared endlessly online. And this probably explains why in the photo attached to the email Theo is wearing a baseball cap, Olmo a visor, and Emma a conical Asian hat, no doubt from Penny Savers where she buys everything in threes because she knows they’ll fall apart. All three of them have the unique phantasmagorical skin tone of cheap total sunblock, and Emma has a cigarette between her fingers. There’s not a PowerPoint in the world that could convince her to give those up.
Last year, Theo tried to explain to Emma that it would make more sense for her to buy one decent-quality flashlight, let’s say, than three crappy ones. Emma let him finish then said, ‘Well, you obviously never lived through a war.’
Theo was too slow to react, because by the time he’d said, ‘Neither did you!’ Emma had already wandered off in the direction of the detergent aisle, her trolley packed with triplicate items. Whenever anybody tries to take her up on this habit of hers — so inconsistent with the rest of her so-called off-the-grid and, as she would have it, antiestablishment ways — Emma defends herself, arguing that by shopping in Penny Savers she’s doing her bit for the Burmese economy.
‘Or Taiwanese, or one of those countries in the process of expansion.’
‘The universe is the only thing expanding,’ Theo tells her.
And she says, ‘Alrighty, then.’
*
Mom cries at the email, and the photos. She gets worse in summertime. Like a dirty river carrying trash, the summer drags the anniversary of my sister’s death to our door. She was the youngest.
‘The dumbest, you say?’ a deaf aunt asked me one day during those weeks when family kept crawling out from under stones, like insects that only live for one day (the day of condolence).