LA MORENITA, Chapter 8

After the summer was over, Araceli found first grade even more boring than kindergarten. Her first grade teacher, Mrs. Cross, was a short, sturdy woman who never smiled. A stickler for order, Mrs. Cross spent most of her time making theme-oriented decorations for the classroom while her students worked from mimeographed work sheets. As they scribbled on the sheets, Mrs. Cross carefully mixed tempera paint with powdered cleanser and painted the classroom windows with different scenes and decorations, depending upon which season or holiday came next. She also cut different shapes from brightly colored sheets of construction paper to form objects and symbols that she taped into border designs along the walls near the ceiling. Araceli thought that Mrs. Cross must be trying to have as little contact with children as possible. She kept her reading groups in the same configuration that Miss Piccolo had set up the year before.
Most of the time, Araceli felt she was being ignored. But at least with Mrs. Cross, all of her students were being ignored equally. Araceli especially hated how Mrs. Cross raised her voiceand scared everybody when she thought students weren’t paying attention. This frightened everybody, especially Gordon, who continued to wet his pants, and Mary Jo, who nervously blew snot bubbles with her nose.
The summer following the first grade was an especially unhappy time for Araceli. Because Maria was sleeping so long during the day, Norm started coming home from work on time and spending hours with Chad in front of the television or over at the schoolyard, teaching him to throw, catch, and hit a baseball. Araceli tried to join them at first, but she soon gave up. She thought baseball was sillier than secret writing.
One particular day, Araceli went down to the river to meet the raven.
“Why so sad?” the raven asked.
“I’m by myself now,” Araceli said. “My father and brother are together all the time, and my mother just sleeps all day.”
The raven made a clucking sound with its tongue.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Araceli asked.
“What do you think?” the raven said.
“I don’t know. I think maybe she can’t help it.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know the reason for it?”
Araceli sighed. “How could I do that?”
“Your secret writing will tell you.”
“Secret writing is silly,” Araceli said.
“Have you tried it?” the raven asked.
“No,” Araceli said. “And I’m not going to.”
“Suit yourself,” the raven said. It flew off.
After the raven flew away, Araceli panicked. She thought the raven might never come back, like the butterflies. But the next day when she went down the river, the raven was there.
“Did you do any secret writing yet?” the raven asked.
“No,” Araceli said.
“But you are supposed to write,” the raven said.
“I want to talk about something else,” Araceli said. “Tell me a story.”
“No,” the raven said. It flew away.
Araceli felt so discouraged that she didn’t want go down to the river anymore. Instead, she stayed in her room, playing Mexican music tapes on the lowest volume setting while reading books she brought back from the library. Occasionally, she heard her mother moving around. When this happened, she would go out and ask her if they could do something together. Maybe go to Sunnyside or El Ranchito. Maybe watch Scooby Doo with Chad. Or read together. But Maria would just go back into her bedroom and lie down.
Norm and Maria were arguing daily about Maria’s sleeping habits. She said he needn’t worry because she left Chad in Araceli’s care whenever she took a nap. He said that leaving Chad in Araceli’s care was irresponsible and unfair. Besides, if she had an emotional problem, she should get some help with it. She said there was nothing wrong except she felt a little tired, but he could see it was more than that.
Finally, in mid-July, Maria admitted she had a problem. Norm took her to the mental health center, where she talked to a tall psychologist with frizzy hair and suspenders who looked like he might be Amish in one of the intake rooms. The psychiatrist agreed with Maria that she didn’t need to be admitted to the inpatient unit. He recommended she participate in group therapy sessions as an out-patient.
The next day, Maria began her pattern of sleeping until it was time to go to the mental health center, then leaving Chad with Araceli while she spent the rest of the morning in group. When she got back home, she usually went into her bedroom to lie down. Once in a great while,she would talk to Araceli about nothing in particular. Afterwards, Araceli would feel overwhelmed by sadness.
Sometimes Araceli tried to get Maria to talk about what happened at the mental health center. Maria always said that what went on there was strictly private and she couldn’t tell anybody anything about it. What Maria wanted to say was how much she resented the people who conducted those group sessions. They were a bunch of snotty college kids, mostly white, who sat in a circle on the floor with the patients and asked rude questions while trying to make everybody angry. The students called themselves therapists and kept talking about processing feelings and contributing to the ‘process’. Maria hated the process. It made her feel stupid, and most of the people subjected to it ended up sobbing, yelling, or banging pillows with their fists. She hated the idea of telling her personal business to strangers who didn’t know anything about her. She didn’t want any of them to know how lonely she felt in eastern Washington. She felt isolated from everybody, even other Mexicans. But the thing she hated most was being pressured by therapists and other group members to talk about her dead parents, how she couldn’t get back to Texas in time for their funeral, and how her sisters had shunned her because of that and because she had gone off and married a gringo. The therapist in charge of the group sessions was a short, squat fellow with rust-colored hair and metallic gray eyes. His name was Curt, and he seemed to take great pleasure in loudly declaring to the others that Maria was holding her sides, or refusing to speak, or looking down at the floor, or twitching her leg muscles because she was angry. She always thought Curt was the one who must’ve been angry. One day, she blurted out, “Yes, I’m angry now.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because you’re wrong, and you won’t leave me alone until I tell you you’re right.”
“Go with that,” he said.
“Go with what?” she asked.
“How you feel. What are you thinking?”
“I think that, if you take the word, ‘therapist’, and break it apart after the ‘e’, you get ‘the rapist’.”
“Don’t stop now,” he said.
“That’s how I feel when I come here,” she said. “Like my soul is being violated.”
“And?”
She fixed his grey eyes with hers and imagined shooting obsidian darts into them. “And you go to hell,” she said while clutching her sides.
Maria’s final breakthrough came about three weeks after she started attending group. One day, an old white man with bushy eyebrows was being forced to describe to the group what it felt like to be vilified by all of his children. While the old man stammered, “I—. No,—I. I—uh—,” Maria burst into tears.
Curt demanded to know why she was crying.
Maria stood up and wiped her eyes. “It was a cleansing cry,” she announced proudly, using the therapists’ words like social aikido. “I’m cured. Good-bye.” She got up, walked out, and never came back.
When she got back home, she grabbed Araceli and Chad and drove to Sunnyside where she knew a curandera lived. At the curandera’s house, the woman listened for a while, then gave her an envelope filled with dried herbs and a three-by-five inch card with instructions in Spanish. “Vaya con Dios,” the curandera said and made the Sign of the Cross. Maria thanked her, and she made the Sign of the Cross, too.
Two days later, while Maria was shopping at Buttrey’s supermarket on George
Washington Way, someone called out her name. She turned around and saw the old white man with the bushy eyebrows from group therapy. His name was Charlie.
“We really miss you in group,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
Neither one of them said a word for a while, then Charlie spoke again. “I wish I had the courage you had. So many times I’ve wanted to walk out of there and never come back.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Because something’s really eating away at me, and if I don’t get it worked out it’s going to make me crazy for the rest of my life.”
The silence between them seemed interminable. Then Maria said, “Do you know what’s really bothering you?”
“Yes,” Charlie confessed. “But I don’t want to tell anyone else.”
Maria nodded and fully expected Charlie to move on, but he kept standing there. “What I wouldn’t give,” Charlie said. “If I could just figure out how to deal with this thing and not have to go back to that group anymore.”
Maria wanted to say something to Charlie to make him feel better, but she didn’t know how to say it. Charlie continued to stand there, ready to accept anything she had to say as a gift. Finally, she said, “Are you Catholic?”
“What? Oh, yes. I am.”
“Do you believe?”
“Huh?”
“Are you a practicing Catholic?”
“Yes. I go to mass every Sunday.”
“I think I can help you so you don’t have to go back to group.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” She tore of a piece of paper from the supermarket flier that had been left in her cart and wrote her address on it. “Meet me here at one o’clock.”
“You can really help me?”
“I think I can.”
“I’ll be there.”
Maria completed her shopping, then packed the groceries into the red Impala and drove home. After putting the groceries away, she opened the envelope. The Spanish instructions told her she must take the herbs and brew them into a tea. After brewing the tea, she was required to write the thing that bothered her on a piece of paper, then take the paper and fold it into a tiny square, making sure to show it to no one. When this was done, she needed to set the paper on fire, make the Sign of the Cross, and pray silently. Then she must drink the tea. The instructions said that, if she did this for three days in a row, the thing she wrote on the paper will no longer have any power over her. She looked in the envelope and determined that it contained enough herbs for both her and Charlie to perform the ritual together.
At ten minutes to one, Charlie came by. She escorted him into the kitchen and asked him to take a seat at the kitchen table. As he sat, he sniffed the air. “What’s that horrible smell?” he asked.
“Would you think that smell was horrible if I told you it could release you from the power of whatever is bothering you?” she asked. She explained to him about the rules of the ritual and asked him if he could come to her house three days in a row.
“Oh, yes,” said Charlie. “Anything to lift this burden from me.”
“Do you believe?” she asked.
“Yes, I believe.
She made the Sign of the Cross, and so did he.
Together, they wrote tiny messages on small sheets of paper and folded these into the tiniest squares possible. Then they set the folded sheets into a dish. Maria took a candle and set the folded sheets on fire. “While the paper burns, let us pray silently,” she said. They both made the Sign of the Cross. She reached for his hands and they bowed their heads. Afterwards, they raised their tea cups and drank the bitter concoction down.
Afterwards, Charlie asked. “Is that all there is to it?”
“Yes,” Maria answered.
“Same time tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll see you then.”
Three days later, Norm came home from work at the regular time and was greeted by a dinner of roasted chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy. “What a nice surprise,” he said. “Are you feeling better?”
“I’m feeling quite fine,” Maria said as she crossed herself.
“See?” Norm said. “I told you going to the mental health center was a good idea.”
Maria smiled and nodded.