For La Flaca
Today I think about my sister María Irma, younger than me by almost a year. Along with my mother, Irma is one of the most hard-working women I know. Old-age is beginning to impose itself on my mother, but in her most mature and productive years, she was like Irma is today--totally dedicated to the cleanliness and comfort of her home.
My mother still calls her La Niña, being that she is her youngest child. My dad would call her La Gurmia or La Garrapata (The Tick) because in the orchards she would practically attach herself to him with her bucket picking peaches from the ground and asking him to rattle the branches so she could fill her bucket with the fallen fruits, something she would do, fast and furious to everyone’s admiration.
To me she is La Flaca, not because she is really skinny, but –let me explain- because any regular size woman next to me can be considered skinny.
Anyway…
La Flaca has a magical and child-like soul, a soul she keeps alive and luminous, and with whose imagination my sister transforms reality into a much nicer and gentler place, a resource that I have never been able to call mine. I surely have shown myself to be way more neurotic than her.
I think I have mentioned it before: As little girls my sister liked to play what in Spanish we call “comadritas” (“pretend”), game that apparently was beneath my mutism and emotional indolence. To compensate the lack of a playmate, from her kitchen my mom would become her Niña’s “comadre.” My sister would make ample use of the pecan tree in the front yard. As she would climb it, in her imagination and magical thinking, the first branches would become the rooms of her house, the kitchen, the living room and the bedrooms would be those higher branches up there (I still scratch my head).
When la Gurmia (maybe eight years old) would tire of living and interacting with her imaginary family, she would go visit her “comadre.” Sometimes she would go into the kitchen, seemingly crying and saying: “Ay, comadre, comadre, your compadre has left me and gone to Hawaii with his secretary. Pour me a glass of wine?” Surprised, my mother would respond with a barely-veiled seriousness and the anecdote would later be the reason for much laughter between her and our dad.
Another more remote image comes to mind: Irma and I are smaller still and we are playing with our uncle Ezequiel in Guadalajara. I think our uncle is trying to take a nap. My sister decides she is a nurse and the man in bed is very ill. She’s come to give him his shot. Without anybody realizing it, she sticks a real needle to the bottom of the poor “sick” man, who quickly straightened up and carried out the scene with us, asking me, his wife, to pay the nurse.
Such is my sister. My sister, now in her fifties too, lives in California with her sick husband. Two of her three kids are now married, one of whom has given her two beautiful grandkids. And my sister continues to be such a hard-working woman who never stops. She has two income-producing activities. The main one, as I understand is in a retirement and rehabilitation community. Irma is a supervisor there and responsible of making sure that the residents have a dignified, humane and kind experience in the center.
I say that my sister keeps her soul child-like and magical because last time she was here, Marga (our mother) told me that one day a lady resident, Molly in her 90s, was very upset and about to throw a tantrum because she was not allowed to smoke in the community’s dining room. When my sister became aware of the situation, she invited the old lady to go out with her to the patio. As they sat together, my sister pulled out an imaginary “carton of cigarettes” and started “smoking,” asking the lady to go ahead and take one, telling her that nothing beats a smoke after dinner. With her face lit up, the old lady smiled and took one partaking of the game and expressing her gratitude to my sister.
With a woman like my sister near, who wouldn’t?
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