Shutter(30)
I walked into my apartment and went straight to the bedroom, placing Mrs. Santillanes’s mixtures in the corners of the room and the glass of egg under the bed. Old superstitions, I was sure, but I was at the edge of sanity.
Erma was already there, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching me. “I’m dead, Rita.”
“I swear I will get on it, Erma. Just give me a chance to rest,” I begged.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The City—Kodak Instamatic X-45
THE DAY I left Grandma’s house, Grandma and I both pretended that it was not happening. I fed the dogs and gave them water. I sat with Grandma on the floor beside her rocking chair and watched one of her soap operas with her. We bagged pi?on nuts and put bundles of dried tea into plastic containers. We packed my clothes and my pictures, but I left my Ektralite camera there on her dresser. That would be what I used when I came home.
We both cried when I said goodbye, even though Grandma told me not to.
“You’re not supposed to cry when someone leaves you. It puts the bad spirits into your journey,” Grandma said, tears falling down her cheeks.
Grandma stood outside in the late summer heat, one of those wet flour bags around her neck, her face shiny with tears and sweat. I cried the whole way back to my mom’s house.
AS IACCLIMATED myself to the new realities of city life, I still longed for the hot, dry days of Tohatchi. I walked the sidewalks of my mother’s neighborhood, taking pictures with my mother’s Instamatic. There was a bad-tempered drunk at the end of the block who I snuck up on one fall afternoon. The folds of his eyelids were heavy and created a tapestry of skin on his eye sockets. Something about the way the light hit the old man made him look like a tired seraph, his wings tucked behind his blanket of newspaper. When he heard the shutter of my camera, he jumped from his bench and knocked me back into the street—his laughter permeating our surroundings as he helped me off the ground.
“You owe me a pack of smokes for that picture, you know,” he grunted.
He was the best part about that first neighborhood.
It was good to be with my mother again, but I preferred being on the reservation. I missed my grandma—her words, her voice. There was a permanence at Grandma’s house that I didn’t get here with my mother.
My mother didn’t say much. She was a vagabond, an artist in the purest sense of the word, who was forced into jobs behind desks, filing colored folders and writing on chalkboards. She constantly fantasized, her eyes gazing into dreams—that same stare I remembered. By the time I made it to live with Mom, though, I could take care of myself. I didn’t need to worry about my mother’s unsteady hand at parenting when I knew how to navigate the world.
One day, her passion for her art left like a boyfriend who claimed he still loved her. On a Tuesday, she gave me her Canon AE-1 and all her lenses.
“Why are you giving this to me, Mom?” I was completely lost. This was the dream she had chased, for which she had left me with Grandma.
“I’m giving it up,” she’d answered. “I’ve outgrown it and I have a new position at the school, running the arts program. I won’t have the time anymore.” She moved my hair out of my eyes as I looked down at the bag. “You’re getting better, so you need a better camera anyway.”
After my mom got the job, we moved from our apartment to our first house, in a new development on the outskirts of Santa Fe marketed to the surge of retirees and big-city transplants. The town was filled with hippies and middle-aged yuppies trying to find either themselves or their next buzz. We only lived there for a few months.
My mother and I then moved into her boyfriend’s house, which had a huge cottonwood tree in the backyard. The walls were thick and natural, made with straw-filled adobe bricks. All the windows and doorways were rounded like a hobbit’s abode, the air cool and crisp. It was right by a Spanish-style church and small, improvised altars were scattered throughout the alleyway behind the adobe. In the evenings, the small altars illuminated the alleyways with sprinkles of ruby-red light from the candle jars.
My mom and her boyfriend were engaged within two months. My mom was the photographer and poet, and he was the writer. They seemed perfect for each other. Both were meticulous and intense. Both folded their clothes into eight-inch cubes and rolled their socks in impeccable rows in the dresser drawers.
At first, he wouldn’t tell me his name and wanted me to call him “Dad.” I chose to call him “my mom’s boyfriend.” He tied a yellow rope around one of the cottonwood’s highest branches and made a sturdy swing for me, still trying to win me over. It never worked.
After they got married, we moved to the center of town. The house was surrounded by a deep and vibrant smell of honeysuckle bushes and orange trumpet vines. A long, gated driveway led to a small guest house in the back. Couples moved in and out of there all the time, their arrival announced by a new beater car in the parking spot. I would spend my childhood perched atop the pitched roof and at the very edges of the crab apple tree that stretched out over the neighbor’s yard. I watched the young immigrant family who lived next door, occasionally talking to the two children that lived in the back room. The honeysuckle bushes constantly pulsed with the sounds of insects and feral cats, each eking out a living in the backyard.
Walton was my stepfather’s name. Walton Hughes. He was a white man who wore perfectly pressed T-shirts and jeans, thick wool socks, and old brown leather boots. This was his uniform and he never deviated from it. He carried a small fingernail clipper in his pocket and would pull it out when he was outside. He kept those nails cut within millimeters of the skin—short, clean, and almost painful. He smelled like vitamins and roots and ate nothing but peanut butter and tofu cakes. He was a writer. That’s what he told everyone. But really, he was the manager of a small publishing house in town that published hippie cookbooks, natural food almanacs, and household remedy collections. I tried to ask him about what he was writing, but he never seemed to know.