FELIZ ANIVERSARIO by Micah Stack
I have since come to know a good deal more, but here’s what I knew at the time about Doña Susana’s early life: She was born in Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border. Her mother died giving birth to her younger sister, who also died. She was raised by her aunt, who spilled a cauldron of boiling water on her when she was three; the scars were still visible, though they are blended now with the liver spots of old age. She had a fifth-grade education, a year more than her husband, Don Macario. The morning after her wedding, her aunt burst into the room, shoving the newlyweds out of bed to check for blood on the sheets. Fortunately for Doña Susana it was there. Not so fortunately, her aunt glimpsed Don Macario’s manhood, and only a few days later Doña Susana came in from wringing chicken necks to discover her husband satisfying her surrogate mother. Don Macario didn’t notice the aunt irritably waving Susana out. Later, her aunt scolded her for interrupting. Several of Don Macario’s mistresses behaved even more insolently. One of them dragged Doña Susana by her hair through the unpaved streets, saying if she wanted her husband to be faithful, she might as well cut off his pito now and spare herself the trouble. Doña Susana didn’t heed this advice, but she increased her rosary quota to four per day.
Alina, her granddaughter, inherited these stories and told them to me, in increments, during the first years of our marriage. Alina said her grandmother still loved Don Macario. She’d carried six of his children, two of whom died stillborn. She lived and worked alongside him in the jungle of La Concordia, and when the government flooded the town out of existence, she moved the family to the dry, dusty, no less brutal heat of Veracruz. She had served him as she believed a loving wife should for 59 years and 363 days. Alina and I were headed to Mexico to celebrate their 60th anniversary.
The timing was terrible.
We’d been fighting for weeks about an infidelity I’d almost committed with a woman who, like me, taught in the English department at Stonewall Jackson University. Alina had stumbled upon an email exchange with a friend of mine. What she found, amid academic talk and general gloominess, was this: “Almost slept with a co‑worker. Probably better that I didn’t – feeling miserable enough as it is.” When she confronted me, I told her I’d drunkenly propositioned Jenny at a happy hour and was delicately turned down. That was all. It was my fault. I regretted it, but nothing had happened. Alina wanted a frame-by-frame. Unable to believe my version, she hurled a few core questions at me over and over, trying to trip me up. My apologies were useless. My rationales grew tattered through repetition.
Usually I relished our trips to Mexico. This time I had no idea how we’d pull off the happy-couple routine. Her father had always been fond of me, and though he’d be disappointed if he learned the truth, he would also probably understand. Her mother’s approval was much more precarious, perched as it was on a myth. La Doctora and I couldn’t communicate much – I could understand more Spanish than I could speak, and her English was even more meager. Initially the language barrier allowed me to be the golden American: tall, smiling, educated, affectionate. Time had diminished the myth’s luster, as time will. Now I lived with the queasy sense that I was being tolerated, and that I should be grateful even for that – she had destroyed each of Alina’s previous relationships. That she’d be the end of ours was hardly impossible. All it would take was her finding out.
I wasn’t so sure Alina didn’t want to leave anyway. But I nursed the hope that her grandparents’ anniversary could somehow save us.
* * *
We waited outside the bus station in Puebla, weary from travel and the effort of not fighting in public. A breeze cruised through the afternoon and the sky was like a cracked-open Cadbury egg, sun oozing into the day’s whiteness. Alina’s father pulled up blazing with excitement; even his spectacles, snagging the light as he got out, shone like twin pools of sun. He embraced me before Alina, and she was his darling, his musical child (she’d been an opera singer before she settled for teaching Spanish). A physician like his wife, he’d retired and now got to be the gig-playing pianist he’d always been in his modest dreams. He stepped back to look at me, clapped me on both shoulders. With his charming accent he asked, “How are jou?”
I pulled in a long breath, unsure whether I’d exhale the saving lie or the wretched truth.
“Oh, we’re great,” I said. “Couldn’t be better.”
Alina’s eyes threw sparks in my direction.
“And jour parents?”
“Fine, fine. They said to tell you Happy Thanksgiving from America.”
I rode in the back seat, happy to fall silent while they caught up. Alina eased visibly as she reverted to Spanish with her father. He had come alone. La Doctora anticipated Alina’s visits so feverishly she couldn’t bear to greet us in public. She always waited at home, although wait isn’t really the right verb. She dusted and scrubbed, waxed and mended, worried the house into spotlessness. She supervised Margarita, their indigenous live‑in maid. Margarita was really there to listen to La Doctora and sprinkle salt-of‑the-earth wisdom in the space between monologues. La Doctora was never satisfied with Margarita’s actual work. She re-cleaned everything after she’d sent Margarita on some still more pedestrian errand.
The high steel doors opened to reveal their tight garage. La Doctora stood in the doorway, gussied up in white high heels, short lavender dress, a chartreuse shawl swirled around her neck. With her boy-short haircut and bulbous nose, she managed to be cutesy and bull-like at once. Behind her stood Don Macario, straightbacked and rustic, dentures gleaming beneath his silver moustache. His hair was a wave of electric white frozen above his bronze face. Alina’s mother engulfed her. Her father struggled up the stairs with our suitcases. Don Macario, smelling mighty musky, gave me a bear hug. I had always been put off by his machismo (even the huge nose he’d bequeathed to his daughter seemed phallic), but when he squeezed my bicep and asked if I was taking care of his favorite granddaughter, a contradictory thrill ran through me. I wanted to emphasize our differences and still keep him on my side. “Por supuesto,” I said.
Alina’s parents lived in a concrete fortress: narrow passages, marble floors. An edifice rich with echoes. There were two pianos, one in the dining room next to the china cabinet, another in the alcove to the left of the door. To the right, flanking the staircase, was a flowery couch where Doña Susana was resting, swaddled against the relative cold. Don Macario helped her to stand. Tears gathered in her unfocused eyes when she recognized Alina. Murmuring what sounded like incantations, she pulled her granddaughter down for a kiss. Alina slid the beanie off her grandmother’s head and smoothed back her hair, the gray of which had taken on the bluish tint of fresh milk.
“Cómo te sientes, Abuelita?”
“Bien, bien, ¡gracias a Dios!”
Five of us settled down for dinner, La Doctora at the head of the table, Alina and I across from her grandparents. Her father arranged himself at the piano. He began with something liquid – Debussy, maybe: a splash of chords, then arpeggios gliding out like ripples on a pond. Of course he’d eaten early so he could entertain us. It was, as they say, just like him.
La Doctora had laid out a bounteous table: salad, zucchini flower soup, rice, milanesas de pollo; utensils flanking hand-crafted bowls of yellow and blue talavera; saucers with avocado, pico, wedges of lime; tortillas and fists of baguette; two pitchers of freshly-squeezed juice. While Alina’s father played, we clinked through several minutes passing things around, mixing them in. The soup was steaming in the curtained light. Between songs I said, “Gracias por la comida, Doctora. Está riquísima.” She nodded without looking at me and said, “Okay,” with her mouth full. That’s how she always responded. Thank you, Doctora. Okay. She had to hear the thanks – Alina would hear about it otherwise – but when it arrived she could barely accept it.
Everyone ate quickly except Doña Susana, who moaned between slow sips of broth, avoiding the vegetables. Loudly, freely, she belched. I glanced around for a reaction that never came.
When she set her spoon down, her bowl was still full. La Doctora’s voice rose over the music. “Ya, mamá, come más.”
“Déjala en paz,” said Don Macario.
“¿Y tú qué sabes?” La Doctora said. “¿Eres doctor?”
Not sure I heard right, but I think she added, “If I left her to live with you she’d be dead in a week.”
“Ya, pues,” Don Macario shouted, thumping the table with a fist.
La Doctora’s laugh was a puff of air through the nostrils. She forked in the last few bites of her salad and sped to the kitchen, as if cleaning her plate first were a kind of victory. Who wanted coffee? Without waiting for a reply she brought out sugar, cups, saucers, cream. José? she said, and Alina’s father took the hint. His job was brewing the coffee. As soon as he left the piano, Don Macario switched the radio on. Old Mexico came syruping through the speakers, something like “Cielito Lindo” but not that. He seemed to sink into the music. He crooned to it, eyes closed, in a voice more tuneful than I would’ve imagined. He made no attempt to follow the radio’s rhythms. His voice floated up in the wake of the mariachis’, saturated, I thought, with yearning for the past.
Doña Susana still wasn’t eating. Her salad drooped under the weight of its dressing; her soup had clearly gone cold. Alina impaled a tomato wedge and urged her to take another bite. She moaned again, waving no with her knobby fingers. Another burp escaped her. From her stream of protests I made out the phrase mi gastritis. Alina, still holding the fork, tried a different tactic.
“¿Abuelita, hazlo por mi?”
Doña Susana smiled weakly and bit into the tomato. She chewed longer than necessary for such soft fruit then began theatrically to gag. Finally she spat the mush onto her plate. With an exasperated cry La Doctora clacked her cup on the saucer and lurched from the table. As she stalked up the stairs, her heels clock-clocking on the marble, she said, “It’s like trying to feed a child!”
Alina wiped her grandmother’s chin. I turned to Alina’s father and said, “She must be really sick.” In whispered English he said, “She does this on purpose.”
“On purpose?”
“It is because she does not wants to eat this food,” he said. “Healthy food.” In his voice was the mix of aristocratic condescension and doctorly concern that seemed to characterize his entire feeling toward his in‑laws.
“Why not let her eat what she wants?”
“And to show us she can suffer, always, a little more.”
I said, “I guess when suffering is all you have . . .”
Alina glared at me and said, “Yes, a gift for suffering is a good skill for a Mexican woman to have.”
Doña Susana’s eyes, those blurry fish, swam into clarity and fixed on me. I knew she couldn’t understand a word of English, but she’d obviously caught the quaver of trouble. Had Alina’s father caught it, too?
La Doctora came downstairs clutching her purse. “Vámonos,” she said.
Alina’s father said, “Leave them in peace for a while.”
She told him we were young, we could handle it. She told him he was coming, too.
Doña Susana was left in Don Macario’s care and Alina’s father sped us across town to a huge open-air market where we passed white-aproned teens clipping and weighing chickens; an old gringa who sold us oregano, bay leaves, and, for thirty pesos, a hunk of thyme that would’ve cost fifty bucks in the States (she said it grew wild on the mountains and she just picked it); an ancient indigenous woman, even shorter than Margarita but with the same long black braid, who was still strong enough to hand me an enormous bag of onions. The oddly handsome man in the wheelchair, begging, I gave him five pesos. The guy hawking pirated porn DVDs, I gave him nothing. A kid with a helmet of gelled hair pulled our 40 kilos of chicken in a bright red Radio Flyer. We followed him to the car, hauling all the vegetables needed to make pollo à la portuguesa for 200 people.
La Doctora was drunk on her vision. She’d spent the last year and a half building an outdoor reception hall in Puebla for the sole purpose of throwing this fiesta. No one else’s establishment would do. She’d never admit she’d had it built only for this occasion – it would be a money-making side project, she said, an investment for the day she could retire from both her jobs (general practitioner at the hospital, school doctor at a secundaria). For a fearless woman, she made plenty of pretenses. The fiesta itself was a pretense. It wasn’t a celebration of a sixty-year marriage; it was a hymn of thanks that her mother had survived it.
* * *
When we were lying in bed that night, Alina said, “My grandmother is sick again.”
“I gathered that, but how serious is it?”
“Her gastritis is flaring up, but she only wants to eat things she shouldn’t be eating: cream, Chiapas cheese. She wants to drink Coke, which she can’t have. But of course she has high blood pressure, too, and high cholesterol and heart trouble. Oh, and she had a small stroke that my mother failed to tell me about.”
“And yet the party’s still on. Why make the poor woman suffer any more – wasn’t being married to your grandfather enough?”
“Really, Charles? Are you going to get on your high horse about my grandfather?”
“Your mother does,” I said. “Even your father has – “
“My mother and father can talk,” she said, “because they’re faithful to each other.”
“Come on,” I said, “this is different and you know it.”
“Why? Because she turned you down?”
“Because it was only one mistake,” I said, reaching for her hand. “Not a lifetime’s worth.”
“Don’t touch me right now,” she whispered. Then, with rising force, “Why did you do it? Why? Why Jenny?” She stretched the name out, mocking its gringo-ness.
“Please, please, don’t make me go over this again,” I said. “I love you and I’m sorry.”
“What about her? Were you in love with her?”
“How many times have I told you I wasn’t? I’m not.”
“Then why would you do it?” she cried. “Just for sex?”
“I told you, we didn’t – “
“Right, you didn’t because she shot you down.”
I hurled myself out of bed. Thought about slamming the door. Thought better of slamming the door. Stood barefoot on gelid marble, shivering and indecisive. Wearing only my boxers. Maid in the next room, grandparents across the hall, parents just down the way. What could be more claustrophobic than fighting in this confinement? I could’ve gone downstairs, plenty of couches and quiet darkness, but La Doctora went there when her brain wouldn’t shut off – I couldn’t risk an encounter. I settled for the bathroom, where I sat on the toilet a long time. Of course leaving didn’t stop the argument, only drove it inward. The shouting continued in my skull. So I’d insulted her grandfather. The man – in her words, in her mother’s words, in his own words – had slept with every woman in La Concordia, even women just passing through. He’d cuckolded countless men, put Doña Susana through decades of distress. And I couldn’t say anything because I’d almost cheated once? I’d only insulted him in defense of Doña Susana’s health! The whole production of this fiesta was ridiculous, given how sick she was, yet they all acted as though her illness were a social gaffe or some childish recalcitrance. And Alina’s nerve, touting her parents’ fidelity! There was a rumor that, years ago, her father had cheated with one of La Doctora’s own relatives. Even if he hadn’t, they were miserable together: every two or three years they threatened divorce.
Then, as always, remorse flowed in. She wasn’t being reasonable, but neither was I. I’d be a furnace of rage if the situation were reversed. I would’ve refused to come on this trip, would’ve heaped excoriations on her and tortured myself with conjectures. So why couldn’t I bear with her pain more patiently? What did I expect, chipper forgiveness?
The truth is, I was lying to her. What actually happened was that after a few beers Jenny propositioned me, and I went home with her. She knew I was married and didn’t care. She was engaged and doubting whether she ought to be. Her fiancée was out of town, so I must’ve been, in part, a test drive, an exploration of alternatives. She was a “sex-positive feminist.” Had her undergraduates read The Story of the Eye and consider the liberating possibilities for women in porn. I’d always found her attractive in a slatternly way: her chewed‑up fingernails, her nose ring, her oily white-blonde ringlets. The wildly patterned tights she wore and the short skirts she wore them with. She was a woman to whom you might do things you wouldn’t want to do with your wife.
But it all felt wrong. When she freed her heavy breasts from her bra, they sagged like a much older woman’s would. Her scent, like a cigarette dropped in a piña colada, was so foreign, the texture of her skin sandy and alien. And all the way through I saw flashes of Alina’s face in tears. It’s painful to admit but I couldn’t get it up, even when she offered handcuffs, K-Y, and rear entry. Turns out I didn’t want the things you wouldn’t do to your wife.
She found a plausible way to laugh it off. “You’re just so drunk, baby,” she giggled. That baby was the crowning wrongness, this presumptuous intimacy more startling than anything else. I pulled the condom off and fell back. “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
I’d always thought of myself as loyal, fiercely so, and took pride in the fact that I’d never cheated on a girlfriend or spilled a friend’s secret. I would never do this again. I would never cheat on her again.
That’s why my heart had crashed so hard when Alina found the email.
I washed my hands and face. At the sink I saw sugar ants crawling over Doña Susana’s dentures. One by one I flicked them onto the counter. I pressed a finger on each ant, rolling it around until it was an unmoving blur on my skin. I spread paste on my toothbrush and scrubbed her dentures. Then I turned off the light and went back to the room, where Alina was hugging her edge of the bed. Sleeping or not, I didn’t know. Nothing would have felt better than hugging her, curving my body around the contours of hers, but I couldn’t bear the possibility that she’d reject me, that we’d spiral back into quarreling. I slipped in as noiselessly as I could and stayed on my side of the mattress, leaving between us the widest possible gulf.
* * *
It seemed I’d just fallen asleep when I heard Doña Susana’s parrot. Several months ago, after she fell and broke an elbow, she came to live with La Doctora, bringing the bird but not her husband. Don Macario had arrived only a few days before we did, having stayed with his land and his dog in Cuautla. The parrot’s name was Güicho, and this was the only word he knew. Each morning it began as an inarticulate croak, but as he repeated it, it rang out with a martial clarity that drew the whole house out of sleep.
The whole house, that is, except for Doña Susana, who was still sleeping. Her husband was outside pulling down limes from the high tree with a kind of shepherd’s crook. Alina’s father was playing the first of his three gigs that day. I noticed he wisely stayed elsewhere when Don Macario was near; the old demon thought his son-in‑law was a sissy and had no respect for his playing, for his philosophy books, for his French and Latin and Italian – he’d never done “real work” with his hands, as though being a physician were trivial.
The women had been in the kitchen for hours already, preparing food for the fiesta. I fixed coffee, listening to the gurgles of the percolator. In the heat of that kitchen, Alina and her mother and Margarita spun a delicate ballet around one another, washing dishes, stirring sauces, roasting tomatoes, slicing almonds. Anytime I tried to help I disrupted the fluidity of the dance. I couldn’t understand the need for such exertions – why not just have the damn thing catered? – but La Doctora was fastened to her principles: it had to be a family affair. She had put Alina in charge of the kitchen when she was 14, and though she had come to cherish her daughter’s dishes for their own merits, there was also a twining of female hearts in the rituals of cooking, rituals in which I could never be included.
I pulled the curtain aside and opened the sliding door to the patio. Don Macario must’ve gone upstairs while I was in the kitchen. I was alone with Güicho, whose cage hung from the creaky swing I sat on. His previous owner had disfigured him, knocked his beak askew, so it was painful to watch him split sunflower seeds. The high walls around the patio were covered with talavera suns, moons, and half-suns/half-moons curved around each other like yin and yang. The real sun was out but the leaves of the lime tree blocked it. Damp soil scented the chilly air, and when a violent shiver ran through Güicho’s plumage, exposing layers of red and dull lilac beneath his tropical green, I wondered if he was cold. I asked him, Will she ever forgive me for this mistake? In response, he told me his name over and over.
After a while Alina came outside. “I broke a nail,” she said, frowning.
“Pobrecita,” I said. “Does it hurt?”
She held out a self-explanatory hand, fingers splayed. “Did I ever tell you my nails break the same way as my grandmother’s? They split right down the middle.”
“I’m sorry about last night,” I said. “All I am lately is sorry.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You haven’t told your mother, have you?”
“Of course not,” she said. “She would never forgive you. Even if I could.”
“Can you?”
“¡Oye, Alina!” came her mother’s voice through the screen door. “¿Lore, me ayudas?”
“She can’t let you be for two seconds, can she?”
“She needs me right now,” Alina said. “I’m not so sure you do.”
“Hey, come on,” I said. “You know that’s not – “
But she was already walking inside, leaving me to stare at Güicho through the spokes of the poor bird’s cage. His eye dilated until it was all black pupil. He opened his beak to snatch a sunflower seed from his trough, his black tongue working like a finger, but he fumbled and the seed fell to the bottom of his cage. Thinking I’d try to help him, I bunched my fingers and squeezed them through the bars. He snapped in angry warning. As with the women in the kitchen, I could be of no service to him.
Then Alina’s father arrived and headed straight for the bird, whistling to him. He opened the cage and the bird hopped onto his outstretched finger – they had apparently bonded during Doña Susana’s stay. They nodded rhythmically at one another, a jig of routine joy.
On my way up the stairs to shave and shower, I stopped at the landing to look at photos of Alina: in one, she was seventeen-ish, smiling in her high school band jacket; in another, younger still, she was posed as if singing, her puffy garnet dress and coiffed hair endearingly dated, her lips forming a perfect O. I mourned the years I’d missed out on. I’d never catch up to her former life, her Mexican self, who spoke a different language and breathed an entirely different air. With a pang I realized I would never learn Spanish, though I’d taken classes and carried notecards around, trying to practice. It was hopeless – my tongue would never unroll a double r with that native trill, I’d never master the subjunctive or speak, as they did, with the fluency of water from a tap. All useless.
* * *
In the afternoon we went to the Salón Jardín. Doña Susana had brought Güicho with her. He perched on one of her index fingers; she stroked his bright green head with the other. Whispering to him, she reminded me of Felicité from Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart.” Don Macario, Alina, and I tended to La Doctora’s thousand demands. A staircase led from the dance floor to the band-space above the kitchen; she wanted wreaths tied along the balustrade. Blue and yellow arabesques spelled out the name of the Salón Jardín on squares of talavera; she wanted these plastered above windows and doorways. In the yard crouched a play set with a bridge, a rope ladder, a sandbox, a swing set, and a metal slide that burned in the sunlight; she wanted the sand smoothed out, slide and swings wiped down. We erected tunnels for the children, scoured the bathroom floors, hung decorative prints on the pale orange walls. She had us drag out enough tables and chairs to seat 200. Then she remembered the floor was dusty, so we hauled everything back to the storage room and hosed down the cement and swept the damp grime into the grass.
Pointing to the high wall guarding the garden, I asked Alina, “Who puts the shards of glass along the top? Do you hire somebody?”
“My grandfather did those.”
I turned to look at him. He was wielding a huge bag of soil, easily apportioning dirt around the potted palm trees. No wonder he held Alina’s father in contempt: here he was laboring joyfully through his eighties while his son-in‑law was off in his dandy shoes and piano-key necktie, tinkling the keys for fancy people. Don Macario’s days of fucking were over; work was everything now. But I still saw a sex-crazed macho for whom cheating was as natural as tilling a field.
Alina noticed Güicho was in his cage and said, “Wait, where’s my grandmother?”
“She was just sitting right there,” I said.
“You check the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll look in the bathroom.”
When I opened the kitchen door, a funnel of steam flowed over me. The whole room was sweating – walls, women, pots, and cutlery. With her back to me, La Doctora poured her whole body into stirring an enormous cauldron. Margarita, damp strands of hair spidering out of her rope-like braid, saw me peek in and coaxed me over, asking me to try the bacalao for salt. “Es perfecto,” I said. La Doctora acknowledged my presence by correcting me: “Está perfecto.” A smile splashed across her face but it dried up as quickly as it had appeared. She put her stirring paddle down to debone another chicken.
Alina was waiting for me outside. “She’s not in there?”
I shook my head.
“She wasn’t in the bathroom, either,” she said, her face pinched in panic. “She does this, you know – sneaks off. Scares the hell out of my mother.”
“Calm down,” I said. “She probably wandered into the men’s room by mistake.”
Sure enough, Doña Susana’s walker was leaned against the wall. Looking under the stall, I could see her crumpled form beside the toilet. She was crying softly and softly repeating, “Ayúdame . . . ayúdame.” I jiggled the handle but it was bolted. “I’ll go get La Doctora,” I said.
“No, no, por favor, ayúdame!”
I went into the next stall and crawled under the partition. The floors were still damp from the disinfectant; a fecal odor overpowered that clinical scent. When I stood and brushed myself off, my pulse felt as if it were throbbing in my throat, trying to get itself coughed up. She lay with one arm twisted behind her. Her sweatpants bunched around her ankles. Her stockings, rolled down like chocolate donuts around her thighs, were tangled up with an adult diaper. Must’ve missed the seat, poor woman, lowering herself on legs wobbly as Jell-O. She stretched a hand toward me, straining her neck with the effort.
I lifted her gradually until she could free the other hand and sit up on the floor. “Is anything broken?” I asked her.
“Ay, no sé,” she said. “Pero me duele. Duele mucho.”
It was a tight squeeze in the stall. She put her good hand over my shoulder and I hoisted her up. Her legs wobbled like a newborn horse’s. Where she’d toppled was a brown puddle, and the brown reek rising from it was stronger this close by. She’d soiled her clothes, too. I shouted for Alina but didn’t wait for her. My mind shifted into some purely physical gear and I managed to support her and wipe her backside and toss the tissue in the toilet. Alina arrived in time to help her rearrange her garments. I washed my hands and waited outside. When they emerged, Alina whispering solicitations, helping her grandmother hobble out, I went back to mop up the damage.
Outside I found La Doctora yelling at my wife.
“Hijita, what were you thinking? Why did you let her run off?”
“She still has a will, Mamá.”
“She’s supposed to be using her diaper! That’s what it’s for!”
“Is her arm broken?” I said.
“She wants to do things herself,” Alina said.
“You’re not the one who has to clean her shit off the walls.”
How humiliating for Doña Susana, I thought, this return to childhood: adults wrapping you in diapers, speaking of you as though you weren’t there.
Later, at the hospital, I told Alina, “Can’t we call off the party or postpone it? I think she broke her arm.”
“You don’t understand what this means to my mother. Two hundred people are coming. Some of them are on their way now. From Chiapas, from Veracruz, from Mexico City.”
“At what cost?” I said. “Can’t you see she’s dying?”
“She is not dying,” La Doctora shouted. It is always startling when she understands my English well enough to respond. Less adamantly she added, “She is sick, but she is not dying. She will survive tomorrow.”
* * *
And she did. Her arm was in a sling and she occupied a wheelchair, but she had made it. The guests flowed in piecemeal. Repeatedly the garage doors opened out to accept La Doctora’s brothers, their wives and children and cousins and friends, voices that spanned the octaves. The morning was brightly overcast. No rain to ruin the occasion, only a sun whose rays got lost in the wind.
My task was to film each stage. The chapel where they’d renew their vows was several blocks from the house, and we formed an unhurried cortège, taking up the whole street. La Doctora led the way, her husband behind her, not quite keeping up. Don Macario wheeled Doña Susana’s chair gently along; around them the rest of us fanned out.
With one eye squinting, the other pressed into the camcorder, I roved the chapel. I filmed Alina and her father practicing at the piano – Don Macario loved to hear his granddaughter sing. I filmed La Doctora, in a royal blue dress, her hair spiked with gel, and her three brothers standing very still. I filmed the goggle-eyed priest and the poinsettias at his feet. Christmas was a month off, but the Christmas tree loomed behind him; strings of tiny lights crested and fell on the walls. I filmed that. I filmed Don Macario steering Doña Susana down the aisle, stationing her in front of the altar. He seemed brimming with vitality, as if he’d gained strength in inverse proportion to his wife’s decline. His white hair was combed back, his skin shiny and tan as Apache leather. His buttonhole held a carnation. She wore a bright pink dress and a white angora sweater; her pink shoes matched her gown. Underneath it all, a battery-powered heating pad was burning away to alleviate her stomach pains.
When the ceremony started, I framed Don Macario and Doña Susana in a close‑up. She was nodding out from the heat and the pain pills they’d given her. When the priest asked him how old he was, Don Macario grabbed the microphone and rambled about how he’d been a brute to her but how wonderful she was, how happy she always made him. Speaking explosively into the microphone, he started listing all the people who showed up and how grateful he was that they could make it. The priest gently reclaimed the mic and asked if they were ready to renew their vows. Doña Susana’s head was wobbling on her neck and her eyes were intermittently open – she seemed not to know for a moment where she was. Don Macario prodded her softly. She mumbled, “¿Cómo?” The priest repeated the question, and without hesitation she said, “Yes, of course I do, yes.” Don Macario kissed her with aggressive joy. With her bright coloratura voice, Alina sang a beautiful solo. At the end of the ceremony La Doctora embraced her mother but not Don Macario.
The fiesta itself was a ceaseless bustle for Alina’s family, who worked harder than the waiters they’d hired. More people arrived than had been invited, at least 250. Children chased one another and scaled the rope ladder, laughing in the sun, whooping as they ran up the slide and then slid back down it. Alina’s father led a quintet of accordion players. Alina and her mother and her tías and primas moved deftly from kitchen to crowd, flowing around the tables, serving up dishes, drinks, and smiles with graceful speed. I recited my handful of Spanish greetings to people I’d never met, people I’d never see again.
The afternoon grew warm. The sun blazed at those seated nearest the yard. I helped La Doctora lower the retractable awning, which flapped like a flag in the breeze. When the meal was over and most of the plates cleared, she pointed to the camera. “Is the battery charged?” she said. “Everything is functioning?”
Those words plunged me straight into my failure with Jenny. For an awful instant I wondered if Alina had told her mother. Then I remembered no one knew that part, the unfunctioning, except Jenny. I recovered myself. “Sí,” I said. “Todo está funcionando.”
With a look of nervous courage and unshakeable pride, she commandeered the microphone. At the time, I missed much of what was said, but months later, when Alina could bear to watch the footage, I had her translate her mother’s speech for me:
“I want to thank my family,” she said, “the family who came from Chiapas, from Toluca, from Mexico City. We tried to contribute this little crumb, and I think it was worth it because this is the only way to get people together. I know I can be an overbearing person, but I feel a deep sense of gratitude to my parents. My brothers and I grew up without shoes, without running water in our house, and yet in that environment my parents formed four people who went to college, who went on to have careers. In our blood we have their work ethic. I would like to thank my parents, but especially my mother because she lived with a hard man, a difficult man. She carried this cross with dignity for sixty years.”
Even in the confusing moment I caught the sense that she’d said something harsh about her father. An edgy stillness rippled through the crowd, as if they expected a shatter of glass. Instinctively, as I imagine the guests did, I panned over to Don Macario, a jerky moment in my cinematography. His eyes were closed, his jaw thrust forward. Then he began nodding in vigorous agreement. “Es la verdad,” he trumpeted, like a Christian suddenly moved by the spirit. “La pura verdad,” he said.
Like the preacher she had for the moment become, La Doctora resumed her sermon. “She loves my father without qualification, a kind of love that, as my poor husband can tell you, I lack the capacity to give. And for this reason . . . for this reason, I admire this woman more than anyone. I have been unable to thank her, to thank her adequately, to thank her daily for all she has done. Everyone, please, raise a toast for my parents.”
People lifted reverent glasses and clinked them noisily against their neighbors’, shouting whatever Mexican equivalent of “Hear, hear!” In rising unison they chanted “Be-so! Be-so! Be-so!” With new alertness in her eyes, Doña Susana touched her husband’s face. She leaned in and kissed him with explosive tenderness. Then she turned her smile toward the warmth of loud applause.
* * *
Nighttime had fallen, the moon a bleach stain on the sheet of black sky. Don Macario had had too much tequila. After the dancing and the drinking, as the night was breaking up and men were shawling their women and everyone was spilling effusive goodbyes, he stumbled over and hooked a boozy arm around me.
“Mijo,” he slurred. “Mijo, tuve mujeres. Muchas mujeres.” With the patient enunciation of drunks who want to appear sober, he talked about his many women as if his wife were not in a wheelchair five feet away. Whatever I might’ve missed in the language he clarified with ribald gestures. How it was normal for him, how when he was younger, he sometimes needed it three or four times a night. Susana couldn’t bear that much, so he had to have other women, some women he paid and some he didn’t have to. And they had all given him something. Words to that effect.
La Doctora said, “Viejo bruto, how dare you talk like this in front of her. You can stand here and brag, but this party wasn’t for you. It was for her,” she said. “It was all for her.”
Don Macario kept his eyes trained on some distant point, perhaps the moonlight glancing off the glass shards he’d planted atop the wall. “I always loved her,” he said. “I gave her everything I had. I just had so much.”
I noticed then that Doña Susana was slumped and trembling. She began to wail. The sound was like an approaching ambulance, like a pre-echo of the ambulance that would take her, for the second night in a row, to the hospital.
Within hours, they found leukemia.
When we arrived, two of Alina’s uncles were at Doña Susana’s bedside. The nurse told us the two-at-a-time rule was in effect: we would have to wait until the others left. This rule was broken in a matter of minutes. I urged Alina and her mother to go in without me. The questions that would haunt La Doctora for years were born in this moment. She asked them aloud before they went in. How could she – a doctor – have been so blind? Why hadn’t she ordered more blood tests before when she knew everyone at the hospital? Of course no one could offer any answers.
A little chapel surrounded by glass partitions occupied a corner of the waiting room. I knelt down at the tiny altar. I stared at a lavender candle, its vase emblazoned with a sticker of the Crucifixion. I stared at the wreath of rosaries around it. Stared at the wax puddling beneath the flame, then at the Virgin of Guadalupe spread across the walls. For the first time in years I started to pray, but it had been so long. The Our Father kept slipping into the Hail Mary. I gave up and just tried to empty my head completely.
Alina summoned me. “My grandmother is asking for you,” she said. For me? Why would she want to see me? We could barely communicate. As she walked me down the corridor to Doña Susana’s room, Alina put her hand in mine, the warmest gesture she’d made in weeks. She thanked me for filming the celebration, said it meant a lot to her mother even if she couldn’t say it. She said she was worried about the painkillers they were giving Doña Susana.
“Whatever eases her pain is good,” I said.
“But they said the morphine could make her heart stop.”
“Better that she suffer as little as possible, whatever the outcome.”
“She asked for Güicho. Can you believe that? They finally made her understand it wasn’t possible.”
“It ought to be possible,” I said. “People ought to give the dying whatever they damn well please.” I thought again of Flaubert’s Felicité, wondering whether she had suffered more or less than Doña Susana. At least she’d gotten to have her parrot with her as she died, even if it was already dead. Then I realized how ridiculous it was to compare a literary character with a living woman, fictional pain with the very real, and I pushed those thoughts out of mind.
When I entered the room, Alina’s uncles tried to act as though they weren’t weeping. Alina ushered them out, leaving me alone with Doña Susana. She lay like a heap of bird bones shrouded in a standard-issue medical gown. Her head rolled on the pillow as I approached the bedside rail. She was utterly changed. The flesh seemed about to slide off her face; her lips caved in around the absence where her dentures belonged; her arms were plugged full of IVs. Already, huge purple splotches like wine stains were spreading beneath her skin. When I entered her field of vision, she flung her arms open. She clutched me by the shoulders and pulled me down, burying my face in her gown, my nose flattened against her breast. The grey, sweet-sick smell of her was dizzying. I couldn’t believe how firmly she could hold me. In Spanish simple enough that I could understand perfectly, she spoke straight into my ear:
“You’ve made errors with Lorenita,” she said. “Haven’t you?”
“Sí,” I confessed. “Sí, sí, sí.”
“But you’re not going to be like Macario, are you?”
“No,” I said.
“Promise me you’re never going to be like that.”
“Te lo prometo,” I said, my words muffled by her gown. “Te lo prometo.”
That was one thing Alina taught me early on: how to promise.
“We love you,” she said, using the informal – the familiar. “God bless you both,” she said. She allowed me to raise myself slightly. Her flooded eyes on mine, she cupped my face in her hands and said, “Gracias a Dios, I am ready now. Send them back in. Tell them I am ready.”
It wasn’t necessary: shoes were already squeaking down the hall; there was rustling and throat-clearing behind me. A priest stood in front of La Doctora and her brothers in his severe collar and flowing robes, waiting to administer last rites. I turned and took one more look at her. She was staring at the ceiling as if it were a portal to the afterlife.
She really had been ready. She died within half an hour.
* * *
If you’d asked me at the time why I lied about Jenny, about the way it happened, I couldn’t have said. Instinct handed me the story and I had to stick with it. Now I know I falsely took blame for initiating the incident to feel better about omitting the real outcome. Telling the truth would break Alina, I thought, break our marriage, and it would slay me to narrate my dysfunction. Then, several weeks after her grandmother’s death, the story overflowed me, the frame-by-frame Alina had wanted or at any rate asked for. She didn’t have to probe or ambush; it fell right off my tongue, down to the most degrading specifics. It was oceanically painful, but strangely enough there was no shouting, no rage. There was space between our words. The truth didn’t bury the trouble altogether – I still worked with Jenny, after all. But the music of Alina’s grief modulated, grew fainter and fainter until it disappeared. I think she finally believed my promise that I’d never cheat again.
I’ve kept that promise, the one I made to her and to her grandmother. I’ve come to think of it as a promise I made to Don Macario, too. After Doña Susana died, he lived alone on his land, trying to nurse his crops through two years of drought. His dog died and he’d left Güicho with Alina’s father – it was clear whose company the creature preferred. He rejected his children’s offers to house him, he refused the anti-depressants La Doctora prescribed. Two years to the day after his wife’s death, he walked the half-mile to his nearest neighbor. He said he’d been feeling dizzy, asked the neighbor to check on him the next day. He went home. On a piece of paper he scribbled a few names and how much money they owed him. Then he sat in a kitchen chair and bit down on the barrel of his pistol and fired it, leaving for his neighbor, his sons, and his daughter an awful mess to confront.
We flew in for the funeral. In the same chapel where he’d renewed his vows, he was housed in a small, elegant urn. There was Alina’s father again at the piano, and the same Christmas flourishes on the walls, same goggle-eyed priest, almost all the same people in the pews. We stood at the altar, Alina crushing her face against me, and I wondered about the man inside the urn, the mystery of him. Tuve mujeres, he’d said that night with such defensive pride. I’m told that while his wife was alive, he experienced moods of contrition – I suppose I witnessed one at the anniversary – but he could never quite grasp the wrongness of his habits. Two years, though: two years is a long time to live alone in your head, especially at that age, with your memories and your conscience tangling in some terrible new silence. As I held Alina’s head against my chest, feeling her tears soak through my shirt, I wished I’d judged him less harshly.
I remembered a story Alina told me shortly after her grandmother’s death. When she was a teenager, emboldened by her own recent plunge into sex, she asked Doña Susana, Do you like it, Abuelita, when he makes love to you? She said her grandmother’s face was lit with the joy of a child at Christmas when she said, Of course I do, Alina. He is my husband.
I kissed the top of my wife’s head. Looking over my shoulder to where they’d re-declared their love and loyalty, I thought if I focused hard enough I could make their silhouettes appear just as they had been, she in her furry angora, he in his pale gray suit, both of them fleetingly, exuberantly content. But there was a line behind us waiting to pay their respects, so I took Alina by the hand and eased her toward the long afternoon light, where we could breathe.
Micah Stack’s stories have appeared in Juked, Gemini Magazine, Oxford American, and The Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, 2017.