What Estrella remembered most of her real father was an orange. He had peeled a huge orange for her in an orchard where they stopped to pee. They were traveling north where the raisin grapes were ready for sun drying and the work was said to be plentiful. The twins wore diapers then, babies whose fists punched the air with hysteria. The boys managed to relieve themselves without ceremony by the side of the pickup, while Estrella and the mother had to walk to the middle of the orchard for privacy.
They squatted within a circle of trees and the oranges hung like big ornaments above their heads. The mother didn’t consider it thievery when she plucked a few, so many were already rotting on the ground. The two were alone with no foreman to tell them the fruit they picked wasn’t free, no one to stop her from giving Estrella an orange so big Estrella had to carry it to her father with two hands. Her father’s boot rested on the insect-splattered bumper of their pickup. What impressed her most was the way his thumbnail plowed the peel off the orange in one long spiral, as if her father plowed the sun, as if it meant something to him to peel the orange from stem to navel without breaking the circle. Sometimes she remembered him with a mustache, sometimes smoking a Bugler tobacco cigarette, but always peeling an orange.
The women in the camps had advised the mother, To run away from your husband would be a mistake. He would stalk her and the children, not because he wanted them back, they proposed, but because it was a slap in the face, and he would swear over the seventh beer that he would find her and kill them all. Estrella’s godmother said the same thing and more. You’ll be a forever alone woman, she said to Estrella’s mother, nobody wants a woman with a bunch of orphans, nobody. You don’t know what hunger is until your huercos tell you to your face, then what you gonna do?
Instead, it was her father who’d ran away, gone to Mexico, the mother said at first, to bury an uncle just as they settled in a city apartment with the hope of never seeing another labor camp again. Estrella hadn’t remembered a lot of those years, except that the twins started calling her mama. What she remembered most was the mother kneeling in prayer or the pacing, door slamming, locked bathroom, the mother rummaging through shoe boxes of papers, bills, addressed correspondence, documents, loose dollars hidden for occasions like this; the late-night calls, money sent for his return, screaming arguments long distance, bad connections, trouble at the border, more money sent, a sickness somewhere in between. Each call was connected by a longer silence, each request for money more painful. She remembered every job was not enough wage, every uncertainty rested on one certainty: food.
The phone was disconnected. She remembered the moving, all night packing with trash bags left behind, to a cheaper rent they couldn’t afford, to Estrella’s godmother’s apartment, to some friends, finally to the labor camps again. Always leaving things behind that they couldn’t fit, couldn’t pack, couldn’t take, like a trail of bread crumbs for her father. The mother didn’t know about change-of-address cards or forwarding mail and for a while Estrella thought the absence of his letters was due to their own ignorance.
Estrella would never know of the father’s repentance. Never know if he thought of them as the mother did of him. She could see it in the wet stone of the mother’s eyes.—Is he eating an egg at this moment like I am eating an egg? Is he watching the moon like I am watching the moon, is he staring at a red car like I am, is he waiting like I am?
It didn’t happen so fast, the realization that he was not coming back. Estrella didn’t wake up one day knowing what she knew now. It came upon her as it did her mother. Like morning light, passing, the absence of night, just there, his not returning.•
From Under the Feet of Jesus, by Helena María Viramontes. Reprinted by permission of Plume, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. Copyright © 1996 by Helena María Viramontes.
