35.
THE CHEF STUDIED THE NOTES IN MY MOTHER’S OAXACAN cookbooks, ad-libbed the menu for the memorial spread: Mole chichilo with chicken and chayote squash, pork and guajillo chile tamales, black bean and cotija cheese tamales, fresh tortillas, cabbage and serrano salad, arroz verde, calabacitas.
We’d only given ourselves a week to pull together a service. We had to get to work.
The chef roasted and seeded and soaked the ancho chiles, the mulato, the casacabel, the pasilla negro, the chile de arbol, the guajillo, the costeño, and the New Mexico red.
We taught Maxito to peel garlic and he stood on his little stepping stool, concentrating hard as he slipped the skin off each clove.
The chef helped him press cooked tomatoes and tomatillos though a strainer, separating the skins and seeds from the juice and pulp.
Maxito said, “I see. We like this part. We don’t like that part.”
We posted pictures on Facebook and my friend China commented: Life is so hard sometimes. But you all really know how to live. You get together. You cook.
I wasn’t sure we knew how to live, but maybe we were learning; withstanding this time of learning. We were getting together, cooking, taking respite from the big world of death and meanness in this smaller kitchen-world where things made sense, where if we gathered the right ingredients and had the patience, things turned out the way we thought they would.
LILIES ARRIVED FROM relatives and friends and I lined them up along the walls of the house, vase after vase.
The chef soaked beans, cooked the chile base, the pork.
Leo had been camping with some friends outside of Truth or Consequences, so Leslie borrowed a car and headed south to retrieve him. They’d stop at the cut-rate cremation service in Albuquerque on their way back, pick up my mother’s ashes.
Abra ordained herself online and paged through The Bible and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and Mary Oliver poetry collections looking for the passages she would read aloud at the service.
My mother had left no instructions, so we made it all up as we went along. Improvising this death.
I STOOD IN line at Healthy Wealthy, a dozen bottles of wine and compostable wine glasses made of corn on the conveyor belt.
“I know what you’re doing!” a henna redhead squealed when she saw my haul. “You’re having an art opening!”
“Guess again,” I mumbled.
“A reception?” she chirped.
“Try again.”
ON MY WAY to the copy shop to make memorial programs I noticed a homemade poster glued to a utility box. “St. Henry Miller of Words,” it read. A black-ink portrait of the old guy and the quote, “The one thing we can never give enough of is love ... and the only thing we never give enough of is love.”
Henry Miller. Maybe Eve was with him by now.
THE MILAGRO CAREGIVER Octavio appeared in the open doorway. “I came by to pickup my check,” he said, then scanned all those white bouquets. “I guess I missed something.”
“Yes,” I told him. “She died on Easter.”
Octavio nodded, quiet. His skin was pockmarked. “Who killed her?”
I shrugged. “I think she just died. I think her heart gave out.”
Octavio scratched his chin. “She was asking everyone to kill her. Someone must have killed her.”
I wrote a check, held it out to him.
“Who killed her?” He asked again.
But I shook my head. “Octavio, not every question cries out to be answered.”
YOU KNOW, IN that old Russian story Vasilisa the Wise, Baba Yaga doesn’t kidnap the girl. Vasilisa goes to the witch’s house voluntarily – no idea what she’s getting into, but she does go voluntarily. She goes seeking light.
Vasilisa knows enough to know that not every question needs to be asked, that not every question has a good answer. And Vasilisa walks out of Baba Yaga’s place completely unscathed. She walks out carrying the light that will burn through all the complicated violence she’s been taught to call love.
OCTAVIO TOOK THE check from me, handed me a folded piece of paper in exchange. “Eve was asking for ‘Tiniest’ a couple of days ago but I couldn’t reach you on your cell. Your mom said she had to dictate the last scene of her memoir to you. So, you know, I wrote down what she said. If you want it.”
I took the piece of paper from him, stashed it behind a lily vase on the fireplace mantle as he walked away.
“MAMA?” MAXITO PRESSED a straw into his blue juice box.
“Where did all the crows go?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They flew away.”
Leslie and Leo ambled in now, two nights before the memorial, Leo carrying a plastic bag of my mother’s remains.
“We couldn’t afford an urn,” Leslie said. “Do we have anything like an urn?”
I pulled a Mexican ceramic casserole dish from a low cupboard in the kitchen, offered it up.
Leo placed the bag inside. “Just right,” he said.
The chef handed him a giant bag of corn husks and he washed them in the bathtub, took the scorpions he found outside.
We made masa, then made it again because the chef said the first batch wasn’t good enough for a final send-off. And we all sat around the dining room table folding the masa and pork and cheese and chile into the clean corn husks.
Ana, the woman who organized the annual Day of the Dead procession to the old cemetery south of town texted: May I play the accordion for your mother?
I texted back: Of course.
And on the morning of the memorial, the lilacs along the gravel driveway up and decided to bloom.
Maia dug through family pictures and wedding announcements, cobbled together a photographic display of my mother’s life.
I tore cilantro, cut limes.
The chef mixed the cabbage salad, made the green rice and calabacitas, steamed tamales.
Leslie built a fire in the backyard and someone put the Harold and Maude soundtrack on the boom box as the guests began to arrive – the caregivers and the nurses, Ronald and Sol, the strange blonde friend from the hospital and Moe Hawk, the worker my mother had fired for crying in the bathroom and Abra’s friends from the Native Arts College. All the queers turned out, too, and my Buddhist friend from Albuquerque. There were people we didn’t know, old friends we remembered from my stepdad’s church community back in California, people who lived in New Mexico now.
Leslie scanned the crowd. “Where did they all come from?”
Cat Stevens on the boom box. I shrugged. “They’re her friends. My friends.”
Leslie shook her head. “Geez. If a cray cray dying lady can create community, maybe anybody can.”
We borrowed chairs from the church across the street.
ABRA READ FROM The Bible. She read the Mary Oliver poem “Wild Geese.”
An old man with a French accent who I recognized from the disconnected images of my childhood told a rambling story about taking my mother to all the sex shows in San Francisco in the ’70s–Carol Doda and the rest of them – and the way his heart beat fast and nervous when he had to bring my mother home to her husband, the priest, and the way the priest didn’t blink, just wanted to hear all about Carol Doda and the rest of them.
The chef set out the food, the tamales and the mole, the salad and the tortillas. She poured the wine.
I REMEMBERED OCTAVIO’S dictation notes. The piece of paper I’d stashed on the fireplace mantle. I unfolded it.
The final scene of my mother’s memoir/screenplay had no dialogue.
Eve walks slowly through the brush behind the house, walks toward and into the foothills. As she walks, the snow gets deeper, the visibility less. A mountain lion walks with her. Suddenly, a shot is heard from the direction of the house and there’s a splattering of bright red blood on the white snow. The wind begins to hum. The snow falls more thickly. In the growing darkness and snow light, the ghost of a mountain lion walks up the mountain, and beside him the ghost of a woman.
FADE TO BLACK.
LESLIE LIT THE fire in the backyard, handed out little slips of paper and instructed all the disparate guests to write down the thing they were ready to let go of. As Ana played the accordion, the people approached the fire and, one by one, they let something go.