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 the same house, Miss Griselda’s place was very different from my friend Wendy Martillo’s. Maybe it was all the very large and very dark furniture in the tiny living room, or maybe it was the thick curtains that were always shut tight. Miss Griselda’s house smelled stale, old, dusty. But none of that mattered, because all you had to do was open one of her binders and it was all bright colors and Disney characters, Barbies, Spider-Man, soccer fields with green-sugar grass, candy goalposts, and cookie-crumb players, hearts, teddy bears, baby booties, treasure chests filled with chocolate coins—anything we could ever wish for on a cake.
Miss Griselda didn’t make a living doing this. Actually she didn’t charge much at all because everyone in the neighborhood was broke. Her daughter, Griseldita, was the one who supported them. It seemed like she was doing pretty well. She’d gotten two new cars and always wore new clothes. She bought entire suitcases of items from Miss Martha across the street, who brought things from Panama, and it was this woman who spread the rumor that Griseldita was in with a wayward crowd. That’s how she said it: “a wayward crowd.” Griseldita was blond, very white, and she always wore heels that made her look really tall. She came home at four in the morning a lot, making a ton of noise screeching her brakes, jangling her keys, and click-clacking her heels. What no other woman in the neighborhood would do, Griseldita did.
One day we went to pick out the cake for my eleventh birthday, and as soon as we got inside, my mom, who was in front of me, sent me back outside. But I got a glimpse. Miss Griselda was lying on the floor, her robe askew, her panties showing, and she looked dead. I screamed. My mom was furious, and she sent me home. Then a little later I saw Miss Martha run across the street, then Miss Diana and Miss Alicita. Then the whole block was out on the street. They were shouting for Don Baque, the neighborhood watch, to come help. We peeked out the windows in spite of our mothers’ shouted threats.
It seemed that someone had called Griseldita because she arrived shortly, more angry than afraid, and shooed away all the women who had surrounded her mother. She shrieked like a madwoman for all the nosy old ladies to get out, that there was nothing wrong, shitty old ladies, to mind your own business, you bunch of old whores, don’t you have your own houses, you bunch of old bats. Miss Martha stood on the sidewalk murmuring, “The nerve of that girl, her calling us whores. And while we’re helping her mother.”
My mom was the first to come home because she didn’t like all the ruckus. She said just that: “I don’t like all the ruckus.” She had blood on her hands, and we got scared and started to cry. “Miss Griselda fell down, everything’s fine, she’s all right, she slipped because she’d just mopped the floor.” Later I heard her talking to the other women. Miss Griselda smelled of alcohol, Mom told them, she’d fallen down and busted open her forehead. She was covered in vomit, Mom whispered, and dirty. The other women said that Griseldita might have hit her, that she beats her senseless.