Their Dogs Came with Them by Helena Maria Viramontes

Author:Helena Maria Viramontes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

PART III

NINE

The morning drone of freeway woke her, the communal heave-ho electricity of working people gathering, loading, preparing for, in departure of, en route to their place of employment. And on this balmy dawn hinting rain Ermila asked herself: Why even bother? Why bother to lift her head from the pillow, sit on her bed to stare at the dog scratching ticks, pull on her robe and march past the living room where Nacho snored on the couch and straight to the kitchen to holler out her guts at Grandmother about the dog, why even try?

Why bother to remember Nacho’s lips or glance at her alarm clock, and then place her feet on the hardwood floor and wrap the cinch of her robe into a fisted knot and crack the window slats to see so many people walking down First Street it could easily be six in the evening. People began cranking up this clunky machinery of human enterprise while others ended their workday by dawn. The El Gallo bakers had baked all night and by morning they had dusted the last batch of pan dulce, the sweet warm scent trailing her all the way to school. Too, the grocer of the Val U Mini Mart had already unloaded his selection of the freshest vegetables and fruits from the downtown docks where first come first served was the golden rule. And then there was the QA ever so vigilant and their cohorts the shooters. Peering from between the slats, the curfew roadblocks were suddenly stacked and stored and out of sight, delivering the streets to normal as if nothing had happened during those a.m. hours, though something had. And she knew it but couldn’t put her finger on it and now she was down to five because she had one injured hand and Ermila sadly regarded her fingers wiggling from the awkward bandage like a family of foreign tentacles.

Why did she make it a ritual, a habit, a routine to pincer the slats apart each morning and observe men wearing their butcher whites, others with paper-boat hats or baseball caps, passing her window alone or in pairs? Four freeways crossing and interchanging, looping and stacking in the Eastside, but if you didn’t own a car, you were fucked. Many were, and this is something Ermila always said in her head: You’re fucked. Though this morning she said, We’re fucked, as the men passed her window to gather on the corner for the Rapid Transit 26 bus where the women already waited, all ready.

Each morning Ermila saw them from her window: several women in several sizes and ages who carried with them the weight of a family or two or three, their backs slumped over as they sat on the bus bench, their sweaters draped over their shoulders for protection against the morning chill. They toted their history of muted desires packed tightly in the bags under their eyes, and carried with that the poker face of their responsibility, a grimace left over from their splash of cold water on their cheeks each morning.

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