“Placida” by Nic Kelman
--page 3
But back then, at that table, as she said, “Mom,” as she said, “You didn’t have the
money to get your boiler fixed, you’ve been taking cold showers for a month now
because you won’t take money from me or anyone else, and you bought a new dress?”
that patience was gone, replaced with exasperation, an intolerance I thought, until then,
she was incapable of. “Alex doesn’t care what kind of dress you wear—he cares more
that you have hot water! Don’t you Alex?“ And she looked at me in a way she had never
looked at me. Fiercely. Not the playful ferocity I had been privileged to see in her eyes
sometimes in bed, but a genuine ferocity, an animal’s ferocity, a survival ferocity.
“Um,” I said, wishing I was not so surprised that I could, in fact, look for the
waitress after all.
But things quieted down after that, Letitia quieted down after that, and began to
return to the person who had greeted her mother with a squeal and a hug. She cut up her
mother’s steak for her, she reminded her when she ordered Coke that they had her
favorite kind of root beer there, she boasted about me to her. Her energy returned,
returned with such force that it became as if she were almost compensating now for her
mother’s quiet exhaustion and feigned confusion that only allowed her to respond, for the
most part, with, “Oh really, mija? Hmmmm....”
And mostly, during that dinner, as they talked, I was thinking how hard it was to
believe this frail old woman in front of me, who had trouble stepping up into the booth,
who barely cleared the edge of the table, whose hands really resembled bird claws as they
grasped a knife, an enormous glass of her favorite soda, was the same woman I had heard
so many stories about from Letitia. The same woman whom Letitia had seen beat her
middle brother with a frying pan because he had spilled a can of tomato juice or watched
burn Ignacio with a cigarette when she came home early one day and caught him
watching cartoons instead of doing his homework. The same woman who had Tepi
exorcised. The same woman who threw her husband out of the house and then told
Letitia her father had been run over and was dead and that was why he wasn’t going to be
coming home any more. The woman who one day packed up a suitcase with completely
useless items like a souvenir pen from Toldeo and her crocheted christening blanket and
drove off with Leti and Ignacio to live in a women’s shelter rather than with their father.
The woman who once took Leti to the park on a clear day so she could push her back and
forth on a swing while she asked if her father had ever touched her and, when Leti had
said, “No,” the woman who had shoved her off that same swing to land face down in the
dry dirt below.
In fact, the most animation Placida showed during that dinner was when the
waitress asked if anyone wanted dessert. Then she smiled with her eyes—possibly for the
first time or, if not for the first time, the first time I noticed—and said, “Yes, please! I
would like a nice piece of your apple pie with vanilla ice cream on top.” She pronounced
“vanilla,” “vaneeya,” and when the pie came, she ate it like a child, with such focus, such
concentration, as if it were the universe. She certainly paid more attention to it than to
anything Letitia had said so far and it seemed impossible to talk to her as she ate it,
looking down at it, watching every soupy spoonful as it came up to her mouth as if she
were worried it might escape along route or, perhaps, that it would prove to be a
hallucination and she needed reassurance that when the spoon reached her thin, dry lips,
it would not be empty, warm.
After dessert, we had coffee—café—and Leti and her mother talked some more,
her mother once again quiet, slow, listening for the most part until Letitia, at last, brought
up the idea of moving her to New Mexico.
“No,” she said immediately, as soon as Leti had said her piece about how her
children had all discussed it and it would be wonderful for her and it wasn’t a home and
there would be all kinds of interesting people there and “Who knows? You might even
meet a man, mami....” “I don’t need to go,” Placida continued, “I too have some big news
I have been waiting to share with you: they are going to make me the office manager
where I work.”
Letitia, unsure what to say, unsure if she had heard correctly, glanced at me and
then looked back at her mother. “Sorry, mom, what’s happening?”
“That’s right,” her mother said with tremendous satisfaction, looking down into
her lap and flattening her napkin out over her legs, turning it so it was straight, “They’re
going to make me office manager,’ she looked up at her daughter’s face, smiling slightly
at the look of surprise she found there. “I found out last week but I haven’t told anyone
because I wanted to tell you first, in person, mija.”
Letitia looked at me again, still not sure what to say.
“That’s great!” I said, still looking at Letitia, “Great!” now turning to her mother,
“We have to celebrate!”
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