Recuerdo: My Sister Remembered

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Recuerdo: My Sister Remembered

In the picture, my sister, Michelle, sits in her wrought-iron throne, and her long white gown drops to the wood floor of the rental hall. It is her fifteenth birthday. She’s a señorita now. In my mind though, she will forever remain a teenage princess, dead before she was able to fulfill her promise as a woman in the world. She holds a bouquet of pink ribbon and carnations. My mother wears a matching corsage pinned to her rust-colored dress. My kid brother, Marco, stands taller than most of us, wearing slacks, a button-down shirt, and cowboy boots in dusty shades of brown. My baggy shirt and pants shimmer with the iridescence of middle-child neglect. Behind me, forced into a pale gray suit, my father stands with his shirt open at the collar. His mustache is dark. His hair brushed back. He faces the camera with his eyes closed, as if he wants to forget this night, or the more terrible night that will come later and stamp a permanent shadow over the family. For now we are caught in the glare of a photographer’s flashbulb.

*

Many years later, while I am home on a visit, I sit in the gloom of the dining room of my parents’ new house. The shades are drawn against the hot summer afternoon. This is the Valley, where most of my family still lives, and where the sun shines more than three hundred days out of the year. I moved away years ago and only come back for the memories.

I flip through the photo album the hired photographer had prepared for my sister’s quinceañera. My father, now in his sixties, his hair and mustache gone gray, looks at himself in photo after photo and doesn’t know what became of that suit. He scratches at the collar of his V-neck undershirt, at the tattoos that have turned green, remembering a much earlier night as a teenager, when he escorted a quinceañera.

“One of my ex-girlfriends,” he says. He laughs and then mutters that he shouldn’t say more because “your mom gets mad.”

My mother, who used to pay me a nickel when I was a kid for each white hair I plucked from her head, would be completely gray now, too, if it weren’t for the dye she works into her curls every couple of months. Overhearing us, she comes in from another part of the house and asks, “Get mad? Porque me voy poner mad?”

When I tell her, she shakes her head and sighs, “Déjalo que diga.”

Not like my father remembers all that much anyway. He can’t even recall his girlfriend’s first name, just the last. “Martinez,” he says. “We were going steady.”

He was either sixteen or seventeen or eighteen. He’s not even sure of that. But she was younger and then, the way he tells it, “The dreaded moment came.” Martinez turned fifteen and needed a chambelán to escort her at her quince.

My father remembers that instead of a tuxedo he wore a “regular blue suit.”

“I don’t know from where,” my mother cracks. She’s always considered him a horrible dresser, the kind of man who wears white athletic socks with dress shoes.

“I dunno if I borrowed it or what, pero I had a suit,” he defends. “It was kind of a bluish suit.”

My father says he really didn’t want to go through with it. “I was from the rancho,” he explains, meaning that he didn’t live in town like his girlfriend. Growing up in the outlying community of Madero, he lived among recent arrivals from across the river who settled and raised families and worked at the German-owned brick factory nearby, which everyone called the Little Prison. On weekends, in your neighbor’s backyard, cow heads slow-cooked in ember-filled holes in the ground. My father, who was born and raised along the muddy banks of the Rio Grande, says he doesn’t remember any of the local girls holding a quinceañera. His sister Lucy never had one.

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