My Mother Looks Down When She Prays

IVIy Mother Looks Down When She Prays Angela Vasquez-Giroux I. My Mother's Mexico The stories are legendary, almost, and they all start the same way: Abuelito shaving before working the third shift. He is always half-through, the snow ofthe shaving cream still frozen to half his face—wearing a white undershirt, the brown of his skin coloring the shirt from beneath. Almost brown itself. I always knew Abuelito by his scent, the pine of his Old Spice aftershave. Abuelito who watched us building a snowman in the backyard ofthe house on Fairmont, shaving and then drinking coffee. Christmas had been dead three months before Abuelito went with it, napping on the couch that Tuesday, the scent of old brown pine in his nostrils. I don't remember seeing white at all, not heaven or cloud when I finally arrived at home, finally sat in the kitchen swallowing coffee with my mother. All she knows of Mexico are the gifts Abuelito brought her: beaten gold earrings, a fired clay donkey laden with small bottles of Kahlua. She holds them in her hands, warming them to the temperature of the cream stirred into her coffee, waiting for the ground to color the snow brown from beneath. 83 84ANGELA VASQUEZ-GIROUX II. Making Tamales This year, they will wait until days before Christmas to start it. I go with my mother, with my Abuelita, and the three of us drive to the small Mexican store in downtown Pontiac. Abuelita has been going there for years, since she was first married. Now that she is a widow, we walk her into the store, slowly; she has been ill. The store is so small that it almost doesn't exist: even Abuelita, thinning to a ghost this winter, fills the aisles of cilantro and chiles. She gives us instructions: forty packages of flour tortillas, twenty corn. Hot chocolate and sweet bread for New Year's morning, his birthday. A bag of some green spice I know by scent, but not name—something that boiled in the water with the meat on the stove of the old house on Fairmont. Years ago, before he dissolved into the water's vapot. Three days later, my mother leaves me early in the morning to make tamales. Her ceramic cup of chocolate cools, halffinished, on the kitchen table; I save it there for her. My sister, home for the first Christmas in years, comes to the house. We spend the day together baking die cookies our mother makes every Christmas, small balls ofdough coated in the snow ofthe powdered sugar. They bake, the whole kitchen warms; my sister is solid to me for the first time in months, is thicker than her buttery voice on the phone. MY MOTHER LOOKS DOWN WHEN SHE PRAYS85 Out mother spends the whole day with her sisters, her mother— she is ttying to make them exist: she is trying to remember the voice ofher father, the scent ofhis cologne; she smells him in the boiling meat, its green spice, the steam shrouding her mother in fog—flattening the corn husks until they are gauze, spreading the masa, filling it with the boiled pork. Wrapping diem, folding them until they are so heavy in the pot on the stove that they cannot rise from it like the water ofthe steam, my mother saying "Stay." ...