“This one goes to eleven.” Please excuse the Spinal Tap reference. Anyway, if you just popped into this memoir, you should probably start at Chapter One, here.
Pingas, your comida is ready, she yells at us from the small kitchen. A pinga is a little twerp in Spanish, and the way Martha Ann and I are always underfoot, we deserve this title from her mother’s lips. We set down our pencils and drawing pads to go eat the quesadillas she’s made with homemade tortillas and fresh Muenster cheese. I stare at a miniature vase filled with a sprig of daisies on the little card table in the kitchen and drink lustily from the colored aluminum glasses that make the water seem that much colder and refreshing between bites. She takes off her apron, folds it over the chair, and joins us, probably sitting for the first time today.
Martha, Sr. is my chosen mother and her kitchen is my sanctuary.
She was born in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, and as a young woman met a tall gringo twelve years her senior on a Greyhound bus ride from San Antonio to Monterrey. They fell in love, married, and crossed the border to settle in El Paso many years ago. Round, weary, and a wonder, she’s four-foot-eleven and a workhorse, the mother of one child who came later in life, and the director of hospitality at a large Methodist church downtown. It’s the same church where my grandparents attend, where my mom and dad were married, where I once lit the candles for Advent. As a baby in the church nursery, I slept in the same crib as Martha, her daughter, and we’ve been friends ever since.
Of course, I never tell Martha, Sr. about my devotion to her. I’m not fully aware of it myself at ten years of age. I just know that when I peer into her fridge and see nothing but real food that has to be prepared by knowledgeable hands, I call her and she comes to feed me, to return the pink to my white little cheeks like she has today. I love her because she’s reliable and capable and full of moxie, making her the counterpoint to my own mom.
After we three finish our quesadillas, she puts her apron back on and calls for her husband, John, to drive her to the church for work.
Martha Ann and I go wash our hands with the pink Dove soap in her salmon-colored tile bathroom and then trot back to her room to resume our play. Plopped down on our tummies, we pull out Cindy Larimore’s How to Draw and Paint Horses again. The late afternoon desert sun stripes through the blinds adding a warm, ambient haze to the room. And on the radio, George Strait’s “Baby Blue” is playing. But the sad lyrics are distracting me a bit, so I try to refocus and pull graphite steadily over the page, only to rub my pink eraser over the failure again. I was struggling to make the dish in my Arabian’s brow look real before we ate, and it’s not getting any better.
Horses are my obsession, our obsession. Ever since I was four and took a trail ride during a vacation in Pike’s Peak, Colorado and she first rode during a visit to Prude Ranch in Fort Davis, Texas, Martha Ann and I’ve spent hours each day dreaming about being “country girls” (said with an appropriate twang). We’re dead serious about it, too. We save our money up for spurs and saddle blankets and live for the chance to ride. And when we get cross, we label each other “city slickers,” an affront so insulting it'll keep us from speaking to each other for days.
When are we riding again? I whine out loud.
Martha rolls her eyes. I told you, my dad won’t let me take lessons until I get straight As this semester.
Why are dads so mean? I say, letting out a deflated breath. I keep begging and begging and Dad says we can’t buy a horse, that they’re too expensive.
Where would you put it, Katy-Nick? she asks, one eyebrow raised. Your yard’s way too small.
I hate it when she flips on me like this, reinforcing my parents’ position with good, sound logic. So I blow out an exacerbated breath pfft and turn back to my papers, pulling out a fresh white sheet for a new drawing. Quarter Horse, Thoroughbred, Tennessee Walker—what will it be? Each has a different jaw and cheekbone and placement of the eye. Star, blaze, paint, buckskin, bay—the markings on their brow and pattern of their coat offer up endless possibilities for my musing. But before I can make a decision, Martha’s dad calls for me to come so he can drop me at home while he’s taking Martha, Sr. to work.
In the car, Martha, John, and I sit in silence and I stare at the wiry silver hairs that dapple the forearms below his snap-buttoned cowboy shirt. We pull up my gravel driveway and he says, Y’aright from beneath his ten-gallon hat and wire-rimmed glasses as I hop out of the truck and wave goodbye.
When I slip in my house through the periwinkle-blue front door, I’m struck by the darkness in the hall. To the left, at the end of the corridor, I hear the kitchen faucet running and see my mother’s back arched over a sink of soapy dishes. Her shoulders are shuddering with sobs, and it sounds as if the basin might overflow at any moment.
Mom? I call down the hall.
The back of her head jerks up and she shuts off the water and wipes underneath her eyes with her silky sleeve.
Mom, what’s the matter? I ask. And she, because she’s Heidi, hears this question as a child, as if I’m a parent arriving to console her after scraping her knee. She begins to sob again.
What is it? I ask in a mousy voice, swallowing my fear.
The mascara makes black watercolor rivulets run down her cheek, and she keeps trying to blot them away with her forearm. It’s your father, she says, barely able to get it out. He’s called me a spendthrift!
With this turn of phrase I’m way out of my depth. I cock my head at an angle for one beat, then grab the kitchen towel on the hook and give it to her to dry her soapy hands.
Why don’t you go lay down? I say and gently pull her away towards the opposite end of the hall where her bedroom is. We walk together, me with my hand on her shoulder, and then she lays down on the soft comforter without kicking off her black high heels.
I turn around and walk to the bookshelf in the den and pull out the massive Webster’s Dictionary. Spend-thrift, I say out loud, thumbing through until I find the entry. I read the definition and then put the book back up where I found it. I knew money was a sore spot between my parents, could feel it whenever Mom bought a new outfit and modeled it for my father. The look on his face was never the look of a man beholding a lovely woman who belonged to him; it was the face—I understood now—of a man stressed about being married to a spendthrift.
I’m caught in these memories when our cocker spaniel begs to be let out of the sliding glass door that’s covered in his wet nose and claw prints. So I walk catatonically to the door, let him out, and without knowing why follow him out to our backyard. I crunch along the brown grass, then hoist myself up on our cement-rock wall and sit straddle-legged on it as if it’s a mount, as if it’s the glorious Palomino mare I was about to draw before I left Martha’s house.
I grab my pretend reins, cluck twice and kick the wall-horse, urging “Peaches” to canter towards the sand dunes that border the south side of our property. We slow to a walk and I stroke her cornflower mane and reach behind me to give an affectionate pat to her haunches. She’s an easy ride, sensitive to the rein and content to fumble with the bit as we glide along together in the break of day.
When my imagination is halted by the hardness of the wall or the traffic on our street I think of my mother, surely fast asleep now in her bedroom. I do want to understand why my parents seem so unhappy with each other, but most of all I wish I could ride away from it towards a warm and welcoming sunset. So I stay outside as long as I can, mending reality with a rock wall steed.
When it’s finally too dark to see and my hands are stiff and tinged red from the cold, I go in to join my family at the dinner table where Mom and Dad smile and speak to us but not to one another. More than anything, I want to return to the sunlight in Martha’s house and the smell of fresh tortillas baking on the electric stove.