The Soup and Sorrow Digest

Change of heart

The sun was high in its peach pellucid glory, the day felt business-like for a Sunday, and the weather was as cool as was expected. Ricardo was waddling at the crosswalk across from the glass front of the laundromat where his mother and he would solve the sprawling puzzle that was their family laundry. From among the stacked steel boxes of kicking machines, women strode, fat and short, dour and grim, onto the business of washing. Perhaps the rotund figure folding clothes at a table was Selena. Perhaps the seated girls, backs and fountain-like black hair to the window, were Magdalena or Marisol grumbling and kicking their feet impatiently, waiting for the hot, fast dryers to beep its finish.  The thought rippled through Ricardo gently, lulling him into a warm lake of delight. But a monster truck of fruit blared down the boulevard, ripped mind and eardrum and hurled Ricardo back to the discomfort of his heavy sore eyes and the pain digging in his ribs. 

He clumped away from the crosswalk, left onto to the road careering into oblong houses fenced in with iron-wrought fences. A palm tree arced slightly away from him, like a sky arrow pointing to the one true way; then another a palm tree in need of a pruning, then the speckled patch of sidewalk underneath the canopy of a grandfatherly California Maple, then the sterile orderliness of Inez’s front yard.

Ricardo, fumbling for his pack of candy his pocket, hesitated by the entrance. Suddenly it was pressing to know why his parents never took them to visit Inez even though she lived only a few blocks from the Laundromat.  She herself never came over probably because she derided their heathen ambiance.

At this thought, Ricardo harrumphed, slightly unnerved at his presence before Inez’s gate.  Though no good came from engaging her, peace must be carved out, things needed to be done.  And so he must usher into her presence and try his best to keep his mouth shut.

Her house was the tidiest on the block, no doubt on God’s command.  The lawn trimmed and freshly green, the flowerbed respectable with its dollops of flowers red, pink and white.  He followed the atonal squawking of God’s praises into the backyard where she was kneeling over a garden patch. Remaining behind her small back, he wondered how prompt her telephone line to heaven worked.  How soon would she feel preternaturally his evil bilious shadow crawling over her Christ-sanctified back. He recalled morbidly of her last posolé and its taste like unwashed hair. But he had gobbled it zealously and declared it the bestest soup in the whole wide word. And now he would have to eat this blasted posolé ordered by the Trinity and praise her skill to the imaginary heavens. 

Ricardo was now feeling dizzy and swirly with the unease of lying to a holy woman. “Tía, God must not be talking to you today.”

She jolted, nearly falling over her knees, but quickly dug her trowel into the earth for balance.  Her hairy lips bunched up as she chewed a cud of chastisements that should be dealt.

Ricardo stood back with a respectable restraint from smiling victoriously.  “I give up Tía. I have come for your soup.”

Hairy lips still chewing. Brows growing bolder and thicker.  Her corrosive air etched Ricardo into a shell of regrets over his coming.  Then she arose sharply, forceful, stamped hands over her lap and behind just to clean off the dirt. 

“You should have come yesterday for the soup instead of getting involved with thugs.”

Ricardo dimmed. “I was counting on God to give you advance notice of my visit …. Bueno, if there’s no posolé, I’m off to Alexandro’s to get me some tongue tacos.”

An uglier look cracked her face, and before Ricardo could scramble to enforce civility, she slapped up to and pointed dirty trowel right to his nose.

“You should have come to me.”

“About what? I’m here now.”

“When Gaspar sent you back, you should have come to me. When your parents were being stupid, you should have come to me. Why did you go running off to an outsider?”

Ricardo’s neck felt itchy with claws of heat rising.

“I would not have turned you away,” she said.

Ricardo could believe that. Love your neighbor was the imperial edict laid from on high, and if she was to win the gold medal of Heaven, she would not dare flout it.  But she was Inez, judgment-spewing, trowel-wielding Inez.

“Si. Maybe,” Ricardo mumbled, “but I have to go.”

“Back to those amigos who beat you up?”

Those claws of heat marbled his face now.  He, looming over her quavering shiny head, snapped off the trowel from her hand and tossed it aside. The soft grass muffled its clang, could not dull the forceful edge of his tone. “Mis amigos don’t get up on my case on hell.  Shi—Half the things you say … I don’t understand, don’t even care to understand.”

“I have a truth that must be told. I won’t stop telling you the truth of the things.”

Ricardo nodded tiredly. “Si the truth.”

“Are you not a sodomite? Is it not forbidden?  Am I to pretend that you aren’t going end up dead if you keep this up?”

“Bueno. I’ll call you stark raving mad, a failed nun who needs a hard fucking.”

Her fine head wobbled tremblingly. “I’m not stark raving mad. I have a math degree.  I don’t pollute my body with extramarital sex.  My body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. A failed nun … that’s what I am, a failed nun. I’m happy to be a failed nun. I escaped ignorance of Catholic idolatry. Yes, I’m a failed nun.”

Her squeaky utterances of ‘failed nun’ knocked Ricardo off his high ledge of indignation into a sleazy pool of guilt at calling her names. He stared at the loops of his shoelaces, the ladybug bending a blade of grass. Feelings cascaded over his face, the world and its unbending demands rushed right up to his eyes. Frazzled, he looked up, but no relief beamed from her angular eyes, just the leaden aura of rules and truth.

“I’ll think about living with you,” Ricardo said.

She perked up and out flowed plans not to his liking. “You missed church this morning. You’ll come with me this evening.  We should see about getting you to join the church band. You still play the guitar, no? Ah, How much class have you missed? What have you been doing anyway not going to school? We’ll fix that—”

“If I live with you, I’m not going to church,” Ricardo said.

“What now? How else will you hear God’s truth?”

“See that,” Ricardo blurted. “Your rules—”

“Rules are everywhere you go.  My rules, your parents’ rules, even Carlos has his rules, no?  Look at your face. Tell me his rules are good?  My rules won’t get you face black and blue.”

“I have my rules.”

“And they led you here …”

Ricardo blinked away from her searching black eyes.

Inez sighed. “We have to talk to your mother first about staying with me.”

A snapshot of Selena bleeding with tears clawed through his brain, but he clenched fists and willed the guilt away and bitterness to ooze into him. “What if she says no? Why are you two quarrelling anyway?”

She ducked away from his gaze to pick up the trowel.  “If she refuses to step in, you can still stay here.”

Her voice sounded like the far away hum of a receding train, and in the moments leaking in the tenuous quiet, worries blared within his cage of his heart. He imagined his parents already knew about Carlos and the brawl. He could see his parents, king and queen upon the velvet loveseat in the living room, affirming dispassionately his irredeemable nature.  Selena would choose to satisfy Benito’s demands over being his kind and sweet Mami. And to top it all, how was he going to explain to Carlos that he spurned his good graces to live with a batshit crazy Inez? What happened to being the man with a plan?

“I don’t care anymore. Tengo hambre,” Ricardo declared, in half in surrender, half to beat down the bastard beetles of fear. And with that he shambled out to the hope for Alexandro’s tacos.