Family Rites (1986) Rosario Cruz-Lucero It was one of those days when the earth had desperately lied

about the weather so she could lure people out of their homes. The suns rays were so thick they shimmered in waves through the leaves in the park. And so, impulsively, Linda had responded to its call and suddenly shouted, Psst! Para! They had just passed the bus stop, but the driver stepped on the brakes anyway, more out of reflex than obedience. She stepped down from the bus, shutting her ears to the drivers caustic comments about next time taking a taxi if she wanted to stop anywhere she pleased. She had seen the park from the bus window, deserted at this time of the day, and had wondered what the animals in the parks miniature zoo did in their cages when there were no human beings to entertain them behind the bars. Clutching the sheaf of gabi leaves she had bought at the market, she stood staring through cage bars at monkeys listlessly staring back. One monkey sat by itself in a separate cage, its fingers wrapped possessively around its penis. Linda watched transfixed as it expelled its boredom in an exercise of calculated frenzy. I wonder, she thought, what female monkeys do for excitement? She had read somewhere that female animals did not share the privilege of sexual pleasure that their mates had. This brought a sudden wave of desolation over her, and she could have wept for all the female animals in the world, for Gods unforgivable absentmindedness. This was her weepy day, the one day of the month when all the events of her life fell together in a cosmic heap, and she would go around asking metaphysical questions and demanding answers from No One in particular and then sinking into despair when No One answered. Tomorrow, she knew, tomorrow the cosmic heap would collapse in shame when her menstrual flow would burst forth and wash away its philosophical dimensions to reveal,

reproachfully, a dung heap of feminine self-pity. But now she felt dry and abandoned, like a layer of skin that snake had shed. At lunchtime today, her 12-year-old daughter had come home from school to change because there was a chalked blob at the back of her skirt. Linda knew what it meant. Chris, she exclaimed triumphantly, as if this accident had been of her own design, your period had come. Was it your teacher who covered the stain with chalk? This was the first rite of womanhood that one learned, if it caught up with her in school. If one went to a girls school. Even if everyone knew what the chalk mark covered, one covered it up anyway. Yes, Ma. She also gave me a napkin to use, Chris went straight to the bathroom and locked the door behind her. She continued speaking through the door, Ive got a Math contest this afternoon. But, Chris dear. Linda called, you shouldnt go back to school today. You should rest, youre probably going to have some pains, if youre not already having them now. Open this door. There are so many things I have to teach you. The door opened and Chris peered out. Oh Ma. Im in a hurry. This is your first period. You cant rush this. What are you doing? Linda pushed the door open. Washing my underwear. Ive put another napkin on: I got one from the school clinic in case we didnt have a supply in the house. But the first washing! Wheres the first washing? Youve let it down the drain! What? Chris stopped rinsing her underwear to stare at her mother. You werent supposed to wash it down the drain. You should have taken the first soapsuds and washed your face with it! To prevent pimples. Oh Chris, this is the most meaningful day of your life, let me teach you what to do.

Ma, Chriss tone was patient and Linda felt that their role had somehow inexplicably gotten reverse. I know what makes pimples. We learned that in biology last month. Its from eating too much fat and chocolates and peanuts. I cant wash my face with bloody soapsuds. (It sounded, Linda thought, startled, strangely like a curse.) It stinks and its too yucky. Ma Ive got to go. Again the door closed between them and Linda felt that the thin wire that bound them togethernot mother and daughter now, but as two women sharing a secret, sacred rite__ had snapped and hit her on the check. Yucky. Youthful vocabulary had shrunk to that one word the way Lindas generation use to label everything vulgar. But no one, in her time, had ever thought to call the rites of womanhood vulgar. Certainly not yucky. Yucky sounded like something you flushed down the toilet bowl because you refused to acknowledge it as yours. Urgently, Linda banged on the door and called, Chris, you probably know this already too, but dont flush your used napkin down the. The rest of her sentence was stopped at the sound of the toilet bowl munching greedily and then giving one final burp. Again the door opened, and Chris face emerged, suddenly transformed into innocence and helplessness, defending a carelessness that could not be helped by the limitations of her age. Sorry, Ma. I forgot. Oh well. Linda said, defeated, you were so efficient you were bound to commit at least one mistake. After all, its your first period. Why dont we sit down for a while and talk? There must be so much you need to know about yourself nowyour body, your moods, your feelings Taking Chris hand. Linda led her into the living room and pulled her down on the sofa, where they sat side by side. Its okay, Mama, we have lessons on these things in school. If Im badtempered, its because of some hormonal deficiency; its called the premenstrual syndrome. And my notebooks full of stuff like what it means to be turning into a woman, our breasts beginning to grow out, the terrible moods

we were going to have. AndChris smothered a giggled with a handhair beginning to sprout in the unlikeliest place. Linda thought it sounded like a werewolf she was describing. Chris was the schools math and science genius, and she confronted every experience with a theorem, a syllogism of an equation. Sometimes Linda wanted to put her arms around her daughters brain and cry out fearfully: Oh no, its not like that at all, but she felt defeated by the infallibility of Chriss precise and measured thoughts. Now, with a determined air, Chris stood up again. I have to rush to school now. Ive still got to psych myself up for that Math contest. So Linda let her go. She watched from the door as Chris swung the gate open and then suddenly remembered. Wait! She ran and picked a bud from the sampaguita bush beside the gate and dropped it into Chriss pocket. Thats so youll always smell good. She could not stop her voice from being defensive, even diffident, at this, another unfounded belief, already rendered obsolete by some law in biology. Chris was opening her mouth to say something, so Linda gave her a slight push, and urged, Go. She would have to go to market and look for a gabi leaf wide enough to sit on and freshly picked so it wouldnt itch on the skin when it was touched. She remembered the authority with which her mother had made her sit on a gabi leaf, on her own first day, and her own awed obedience to her mothers instructions: This will ensure that you will never have those telltale accidents that can be so embarrassing. And when she had asked why a gabi leaf, her mother had explained. See this fuzz on the surface of the leaf? It keeps liquid from soaking through. Here, Ill show you. She let water run over it, and Linda saw how the water slid down the leaf into the drain. When her mother turned the faucet off, the leaf was dry again, every drop of moisture unable to cling to its surface. And thats why, If you sit on a gabi leaf, you will never have a stain in your skirt. Linda had accepted her mothers remarkable logic that day, the way she obeyed, several hours later, when her mother had made her drink bowls

and bowls of chicken broth boiled in ginger and mixed with sili leaves so she would have an abundance of breast milk for her newborn Chris. Now, for the first time in her thirteen years of marriage, Linda wanted to spend a day in the park by herself. Then the rain began. Gently at first and then more earnestly it pursued her as she ran towards the bus shed. She held the sheaf of gabi leaves over her head, thankful for the fuzz her mother had shown her years ago, although they served as little more than mere token protection. It was time to go home anyway, but it was just after five o clock and the busses would be full. She would have to stand all the way home. Surprisingly, on the bus a man stood up and offered her his seat. He accepted her expression of thanks indifferently and he stood beside her, facing her, but staring distantly above her head, each hand leaning on either side of her. As more and more people squeezed into the bus at every stop, she was grateful for his unexpected protection; and she would have turned to thank him if she could be sure that he was deliberately standing that way in order to shield her from the passengers, packages, bags and briefcases that pressed around her, smelling of wet, moldy leather because they had been drenched in the rain. Her palms itched from the leaves that had languished all afternoon in her hands. And all that jostling in the bus broke the leaves and stems so that the sap that brought the itch oozed from their wounds. The leaves were useless now; all they would give Chris would be rashes on her rump and no insurance against the telltale accident. She wondered what the scientific term was for that chemical in the sap that caused itching, which no doubt Chris would know. And then she felt ita soft, warm, velvety roundness, sticking into her ear. She leaned away a little, but it followed and seemed determined to stay where it had settled itself snugly in her ear. She knew what it was, from the texture and the size of it, but she hoped it could be something else. She could turn around to look but then it would poke her in the eye. She dared not move.

She felt all her senses trapped inside of her, unable to let themselves out, the sounds of the world muffled by the thing clogged in her ear, her vision fenced in as she stared straight ahead. She tried to shrink as small as the pores on her skin so she could flow inward into herself. The only sound that pierced her eardrums was the sound of the bus screaming periodically, as if mortally wounded, at every stop. A crab headache burrowed into the center of her skull, spindly legs skittering over it, from the corner of her eyes to her nape. As she hurried home from the bus stop, she tossed the gabi leaves into the nearest trash bin. Chris was waiting, accusingly, when she arrived. Rex had called to say he would be late because of an emergency meeting at the office. And Chris for the first time had to take her supper herself. Later, as they settled for the night, Chris sulking in her bedroom, Linda lay on the bed with the icepack, her ears perking up at the sound of every car passing by. She was bursting with the news of Chriss coming of age, and she waited. She sighed and looked out the window again. Love and marriage seemed to involve so much waiting and expectation. She had waited through their college years for him to realize that he wanted her for his wife; and she waited, during one dark, terrible period of their marriage, for him to come home from the hotel where his mistress modeled the latest in underwear. She could not let him touch her for a long time after he had come back to her, sheepish but satiated. All the little habits, the trivial, intimate things she knew about him, now revolted her. The way he stooped to disguise his more-than-average height, a leftover practice from his awkward adolescent days, was to her now a simian pose. The generous bush of hair under his arms and the growing paunch, which she had once assured him was just an executive belly, only emphasized the resemblance to this lowly brother of the jungle. At last, after another night, when she turned her back on him, shriveling under his hand crawling on her body, he had said angrily, All right, if thats

what you want, if you want to renege on your wifely functions, then dont blame me if I look for them elsewhere. My what? Nevermind. This time it was he who turned away. She hoped he had the grace to be ashamed, but she could not tell from his voice and his irregular breathing. No, I didnt hear you very well. Renege on my what? Your wifely functionswifely functions! he snapped So, she said thoughtfully, Thats what its called now? Later that night, it was she who ran her hand over his chest until he turned to take her into his arms. She opened herself to him and they took each other with viciousness that, she realized the next morning, they both mistook for passion. Now she waited, to tell of Chriss new alien nature, of this fresh new invasion into their settled lives. She looked around the room and realized, with a start, that their bedroom had begun to reflect the state into which their marriage had congealed. They had, in the thirteen years of their marriage, each drawn their own circle, into which the other was allowed only as a temporary guest. This room was the only thing left that they shared, but even this was nor her own territory, from which all traces of her husbands personality had been effaced. There was nothing in the room that betrayed his presence, except a stain on the bed sheet that proclaimed their groping, their fumbling in the dark, in ritual attempts to connect. She had, on more than one occasion, tried for meaningful dialog. Rex, you never listen to me. She would say to the newspaper propped between them. Often she wondered if she was actually a cartoon character trapped

forever in a cartoon frame, her words caught in a balloon floating from her mouth. He would politely put the paper down and reply. But I do. Its my answers that youre unhappy with. Just because I dont follow your script, you think I dont listen. But what you actually want is for me to have your female sensibility and you to have a male comprehension of things. She hadnt even known that that was what she wanted but is irritated her that he could sound so right about it. She had been attracted to Rex because he could always put some coherence into her thought-collages. She was excitable and impulsive. He was reasonable and controlled. He was a man who spoke seldom but when he did, he always said precisely and succinctly what she in passionate intensity would take so long to define, because she was always that to see how they sparkled, polishing them to give them added flashed of brilliance. He was, she had thought, what she needed to make herself complete. When she married him, she had gratefully felt that she was wandering Rib come home at last. But the very manly qualities for which she had married him were now the very source of her discontent. She studied his fingers: they were lean and graceful, the nails polished and whole. His fingertips and nails went together well, she reflected, like chrome and leather. The rest of him was cut off by the newspaper, which he now deliberately used, she suspected, to shield himself from her. This, she thought sadly, was what the violation of love was all aboutnot the slamming of doors not the raising of voices, but the slow corrosion, the frayed edges. When he arrived a little after midnight, she greeted him with the news of Chriss coming out. Oh, so thats whats been bugging her, Rex exclaimed as he lay his briefcase on the bed and began to unbutton his barong. She hasnt been speaking to me for the past three days and Ive been wondering what Id said or done.

He was doing it again, grasping at Lindas news with relief, finally finding an anchor with which to weigh down his daughters recent irrational behavior. And so Chriss depression was dismissed, rendered temporary and invalid, tied to the universal fate of all creatures born under the Curse. She was weeping, her tears drenching the pillow beneath her. But the sound of sobbing wafted into the bedroom somewhere far away, a sad, lonely, disembodied sound. Drowsily, she realized she was dreaming her pillow completely dry, like her eyes, Rex lay on top of her, snoring gently into her ear, having just expelled one last shuddering breath. And she was fenced in, safe and snug under his weight. But the sound came, insistently; and suddenly, now wide-awake, she knew the sobbing was coming from Chriss room. Very carefully, she eased off Rexs weight and went to Chris, who lay in a corner of the bed in one desolate, spasmodic heap. Silently, knowing the futility of asking why, Linda lay and put an arm around her, stroking her hair, the way Chris used to let her, years ago it seemed. And Chris linked her hands around Linds neck and wept. Linda felt solace in Chriss touch, to be held so close like this, not as prologue or epilogue to sex, but just to be held like this. Again, she felt that their roles had become reversed. With a vague sense of both guilt and release, Lind realized at that moment that she didnt miss Rexs weight on her at all.