The Soup and Sorrow Digest

What are you going to do Andrew?

Parents, teachers, relatives, smattered about Ricardo's unrealized potential. He could have been a competent sportsman—football or baseball or swimming or whatever diffused overbearing aggression the best. He should have continued with playing bass drums for the marching band. Selena rather preferred Ricardo was more serious about the vihuela when he and his father played together during family gatherings. Benito was more concerned about his grade report of C's. Jésus, on the other hand, nudged him a few times to mash up with the chicas. Their eyes goggling at Ricardo’s stout build would suggest that his combination of passivity and bluff affability could be romantic. Everyone agreed Ricardo could have been many things admirable and praiseworthy if he had tried to be more serious than a buffoon. And somehow in wake of his indiscretions, unremarkable Ricardo had achieved notoriety, a notoriety that seemed to have passed over Andrew Salazar.

Fifteen, Andrew was the same age as Ricardo, but of the lanky, pathetic stature that attracted the wicked attentions of his male classmates, the dismissive eye rolls from his female classmates, and the unending, upsetting barks from his father, Enrique, to snap up, to shape up.  Between his pale complexion the genetic gift from his mother, his hunched phlegmatic gait, and his patchy moustache, Andrew never could pinpoint the noxious chlorine in himself. Enrique had nothing helpful to say either. What things he had to say in their colonial home in their East Los Angeles neighborhood, were of rambling, grunting, slurry noises on which employee in his business empire of cavernous shops needed firing.

And now, Andrew was waiting in front of the orange glow emanating from the transparent door of the oven.  The air was aloft with the perspiration of his two hours of scholarly fitful preparations for lasagna. Dialing his eyes at the smudged knob of the timer on the stuff, he was not thinking how he would finish five pounds of lasagna for himself or if he must offer his father a plate even though Enrique never once deigned to help in the kitchen. He was thinking, wiping his sweaty hands repeating on his lap, about Columbia University and the rehabilitative allure of the East Coast.

Andrew had learned to bury his night shakes and day tremors by dreaming of his way out. It would take three years, but it was still the sure way out. Study. Study, study he must, and then he must force on himself enough social graces to be something more than an idler at his high school debate club.  It would work out. Straight A’s, suffer a leadership role in tutoring math to elementary school kids, add the sad story of his white mother Gilda absconding from his family for the moral decrepitude of Las Vegas—Perfect application to Columbia University.  And Columbia it would be because it was located as far away as possible from the coke heads, dope fiends, the gun shots, Ricardo’s surprise tackle, his father’s inane prattle on how pittance could grow into gold.  If not Columbia, he would settle for Harvard, or Oxford, but escape he must.

Suddenly there was the jangle of keys, labored hissing breaths from the darkened hull of the foyer.  Front heavy in a noisy swishing tracksuit and with a permanent Rocky snarl, Enrique came through the living room to the front counter of the kitchen.  Andrew concentrated for the ping of the timer.

Enrique tossed a stack of letters and keys onto the table. “The Puta wrote to you. It’s still March. Early, no?”

The Puta would be Gilda, and it was indeed strange to receive a letter in March. Her fifty page missives came twice a year: one on his birthday in June and the other on Christmas. 

Andrew picked up the letter and flopped it in his hands to feel for something different. It was thick, and he imagined no more informative than the last Christmas letter.  He had skimmed a page of short, fat handwriting, in which she yipped about how good she was feeling about herself in the man cave section of Nevada, felt composed, in control. Love, it seemed, had transformed her wandering spirit. Andrew remembered chucking the rest of the letter unread into the waste paper basket.