m i g r a n n y

My grandma has an oxygen mask on, she mumbles in her sleep. I am writing from the Cleveland hospital in Miami. Her room is on the forth floor, right next to the information desk so we can hear the nurses and doctors laugh, listen to papers being fumbled around, phones ringing. I rushed from San Francisco to come see her. I still think she is going to die and yesterday when I got here the doctor was telling her in Spanish they had given her plenty of Iodine and Alba Corina de Jesús asked him, doctor eso me hace adelgazar? 

He is Venezuelian, the sister country, he said.

I can see palm trees lining up like soldiers and a bleeding cloudless sky from her room. People brought her pink flowers and a cheap teddy bear holding a “be mine” heart, surely a left over from Walgreens Valentine’s. Whenever she remembers, she makes me water her plants. I’ve been in Florida for 24 hours now. I lived here for five pandemonic years.

Everyone in this hospital is funny looking, they all got the potential to be part of the Jerry Springer Show. Most doctors don’t speak Spanish so I translate and grandma nods and says “tan-kiu tan-kiu” every time a white robe comes in.  She is an owl, my grandma, wise and silent, watching everyone rush busily around her, listening to the beep beep beep every time the machine dispenses more pain killers to her I.V, staring with those wide fish eyes. A brown leather chair hugs her. She sits still, holding some greater truth we do not understand. We run around trying to inject life into her. We wanna save her, we wanna save her for us.

My aunt Fanny, my grandma’s sister, sits next to me reading some panphlets on “Hear Failure” which Marta, the pharmaceutical specialist, gave her so we may better understand why my grandma’s heart is bored and tired. Why her heart, just like her, wants to be quiet and left alone. Fanny is now standing right in front of Corina, watching her snort with her mouth open. She could be dead if it weren’t from all the mumbling and the talking. She fights in her sleep.

She is the color of urine.

My grandma is the epicenter of our matriarchal family and her loss would disintegrate our hermetic gynocentrism. I look at her and miss her. I don’t want to be selfish, I told myself last night, but I am and I, too, am aimlessly walking around the hospital searching for that elixir to bring her back. I walk and walk down the white tiled halls, peaking into doors slightly open, terrified at how many tubes and needles doctors fit in people’s bodies. Watching out for wheel chairs and dead people with fake orange skin. Drinking bad, terribly bad, Starbucks coffee.

A woman in apple green uniform brings her lunch. Fish, mash potatoes, green beans.

“Dile que es muy temprano”

“it’s too early” I translate.

I cut the fish and feed it to her.

“ay dios! I should be teaching them how to cook”

She is upset because she is such a wonderful cook.

“You cant eat anything with salt, abuela”

“Pero sabe a mierda”

It takes like shit, she says.

Give me something mija, my mouth tastes like fish.

I want to make some lesbian joke but I don’t think she’ll get it. My grandma was the first person in my entire family to whisper one day, before I moved to San Francisco, that she didn’t quite understand what was happening, why I was so urged to move, but she didn’t care I was different, she didn’t care that I was gay.

My aunt Mónica just called. She is bringing me some ajiaco for lunch. I haven’t had ajiaco in years. Ajiaco is a soup from Bogotá and I haven’t been to Bogotá in a year and even then I didn’t have ajiaco.  “Your tío is bringing you the ajiaco in a navy blue lunch box, there is rice, crema de leche and a bag of M&M’s, okay Julianita?”

“I don’t eat chicken” I tell her. Every time I see my family I have to remind them I’m a pescetarian, “and I also don’t eat sugar” and that I have an insulin problem.

“What do you mean you don’t eat chicken? Since when?”

“Since like five years ago”

“Every time you come here niña,  what’s with the sugar? What the hell is wrong with you?”.

My grandma wakes up. She looks at me

“mami, dont ever get married”

Her voice is faint, her eyes are close

“why is that abuela?”

“well, dont you see your tía taty? tanta cambiadera de apellido. Changing her last name every time she gets divorced. It’s just not worth it.”

to be a priest and get everyone’s babas.

I want to be a priest. It’s 9:45am and we’re in recess. Paula and I are laying in the sun pulling out grass and biting on the tiny little white roots at the end of it. Everyone at school does it. I wonder what happens if you eat the tip of a grass where dogs have peed.

“Why would you wanna be a priest?” Paula’s uniform is far above the three-finger-above-the-knee limit set by the nuns. I can see her pink panties with teddy bears on them. I can’t believe she still wears little girls’ panties.

“Porque i wanna give people communion and hear their secrets and make them say a thousand hail marys.” I am biting the nail off my right index finger, I spit it out into the grass.

“And I know where the priest keeps the recortes de ostias.” I pause. “And, the actual communion wafers”.

I open my metal Pitufos lunchbox with discretion, moving my head slowly to the sides to check for possible “sapas” a.k.a the girls who wear their uniform far below the three-finger-above-the-knee limit, who eat those nasty huevos de codorniz we get for lunch and who have the ten commandments glued to the first page of their school agenda.

“Okay Paula no vayas a decir nada, you cant say anything.”

I gently pull out a transparent plastic bag filled with ostias and recortes de ostia but mainly ostias. Paula gasps. Te van a matar Juliana, you are gonna be murdered. She says this but smiles and giggles.

“I’ve never tried them” she whispers, “It’s so stupid that we have to wait to make our first communion to get an ostia.”

“You wanna try them?”

I’ve stole ostias before but never told anyone. We are going to make our first communion soon but I’ve already eaten ostias and I’m not sure if God is upset and if I should include that in the list of sins Sister María told us to make for our first confession next week, because I’ve already written fifteen sins down and I don’t want the priest to think less of me.

Paula nods but doesn’t say anything.

“If you wanna try them you have to put your hands together like you’re about to pray. And then I’ll say ‘cuerpo de cristo’ and then you have to say ‘amén’ and kneel and ask God to give you something. But you can’t ask for something stupid. Don’t be wasting God’s time. Okay?”

 “Está bien” She says and stands up with her chubby hands together. Paula looks like a chubby virgen. Why is the Virgen always so skinny? I think as she gets up.

 “Now walk towards me.” I grab my bottle of water, “Let’s pretend this bottle of water is the wine and I’ll hang my scarf like this so I look like a real Padre”.

Paula walks like she is a flower girl at a wedding. One step forward, then a stop. Another step forward, another stop. This is taking forever. If everyone at church walked like Paula, mass would take like a gazillion hours and more people would fall asleep. If I were a priest I would never let anyone walk like Paula when they’re getting communion.

“You can just walk normally. Nobody walks like that during mass Paula. Let’s start again.”

 She stomps back to her starting point, three meters away from me.

“Like this?”

Paula gets closer and closer. I pull out one ostia and dip it inside my fake wine.

“Cuerpo de cristo” I say extending my arm right infront of her eyes.

“amén”.

I place the ostia on her tongue. I’ve got some of Paula’s babas on my fingers.