Butterknife

The first time I stepped into the kitchen of my home away from home, I thought of my grandmother. In that instant, I understood why the sanctuary of the kitchen meant so much to her. As much as it shielded her from the painful reality of the world beyond burners and stoves, it also served as a reminder of everything she had let go, chasing a cozy vision of family life. I stood in this kitchen and let these thoughts simmer alongside the rhythmic bubbling of the gloppy sauce beneath my nose, and my thoughts traveled to a time I never anticipated I’d miss.

I was sitting with my grandmother at the dining room table, smiling up at her face, beaming childhood delight into her crooked smile. She smiled back at me, admiring the unattainable innocence I carried in my cheery eyes. She was working on one of her infamous crossword puzzles, one of those things she turned to like prayer whenever she felt low. They kept her mind sharp, distracted her from the muffled chimes of the toys whose sound boxes had been infested with bathtub water.  She never had to speak it, she wore it on every other expression like heavy stage makeup: this was not the life she had hoped for.  My grandfather walked into the kitchen without exchanging so much as a glance with the wife he should have held dear.

He walked tall, proud, sauntering into the living space like he was walking into his very own royal coronation. “Y que hay para comer?”^[1] He cut the silence with his command, puffing out his chest like a proud rooster, and he turned to fidgeting in the refrigerator and picking up spice jars and cloves of garlic he would never know how to use. He was fortunate enough to have always lived the way he wanted. Handsome, wealthy, if there was ever such a thing as a Mexican version of James Dean, he would have both resembled him and perfectly emulated his bad-boy persona. Now what was left were simple remnants of what once was – an older man who had abused life, a viejo aniñado.^[2] “Te esperas por favor?”^[3] my grandmother returned his insolence in not even raising an eyebrow in his direction. My grandfather turned his nose up at the air, shared a look with me that asked, “What’s her problem?” I turned my attention back to my grandmother, who had already gone through three puzzles in what had seemed like only a handful of moments. “Cómo se conocieron abuelita?”^[4] I was attempting to break the tension. “De ninos,”^[5] she said.

A few years later, I would make the same mistake. I would meet someone at a much older age, an age that I believed earned me a badge of wisdom, but I was committing the fatal error of “una nina”^[6] in my grandmother’s mind. Again, I would sit with my grandmother at her table. By this time, I was old enough to have heard her story. Little by little, she would open up to me, telling me of her troubled childhood, the life she had had before she accepted her last name, Martinez. Choking down the anguish welling up in my throat, I would listen.

At 15, she had her first child and ran away from her hometown in Mexico City. By 21, she had two more girls, a home in the States, and she would shuffle around her house with a book under her arm like it was another baby. The last job that she would have before she began working for herself gave her that shuffle in her walk. She, like everyone else who makes the dangerous trek across the border in search of a better life, could only obtain a cleaning job at the mall. She had slipped on freshly waxed floors and banged up the right side of her hip. Her knees would never be the same either; she had always had this tilted walk. Being embarrassed of the way she looked when she walked was more painful to her than the memory of the fall. She never saw the beauty that I’d always seen in the woman who had lived so much of the uglier side of life.

After realizing she would never obtain the money to fix her hip or be allotted enough time to heal, she learned English. When she could no longer leave the home because it got too tough on her body, she secured her child-care license and started a business. This job would be still more physically strenuous, but she had no choice. She was in charge of supporting a home, three girls, and a husband who was more able than she was – but refused to work. A husband who brought her more troubles in his drinking, incessant gambling, and aggressive attitude. Both of them were old now, celebrating over 50 years of whatever they’d had, and somehow all was forgiven because they had put up with each other’s shit for so long.

Her dream had been to go to school, study something she cared about, maybe meet somebody that cared about her. Because of her, I had that – I had everything she ever wanted, everything she thought she had worked for. I even had her daughter’s face, and, in her eyes, I was throwing it all away.  I mustered up the courage to tell my grandmother for the first time that I had met someone and that we had moved in together. She couldn’t hide the fact that she wasn’t happy for me but she tried, I’ll give her that, she tried.

It wasn’t until I began standing in a kitchen that would always be foreign to me that I began to realize her face would speak volumes to the feelings she had color-coordinated within her body. Her expression spoke to me – it spelled out, you’re too smart for this, you don’t need to get serious with someone, you’re too young, it pleaded; please, don’t end up like me. I was now stirring the pot just to give myself some more alone time. Like a knife ripping through the shower curtains in Hitchcock’s Psycho, my warm and quilted daydream laced with the aroma of cheap pasta bits was shattered by the sound of, “Are there any butter knives?” I didn’t even bother to spin my head around to respond, “No, not any clean ones anyway.”

Footnotes

1. Translation: What is there to eat?
2. Translation: A man who is catered to like a child.
3. Translation: Can you wait please?
4. Translation: How did you guys meet, Grandma?
5. Translation: As kids
6. Translation: A little girl

Amanda Gonzalez is a second-semester junior at USC, studying Law, History, and Culture, as well as English Literature. She hopes to pursue a career in publishing after graduation, or perhaps apply to law school. In her spare time, she likes to volunteer at the nonprofit organization that she founded in high school, called ESCRIBE, which promotes creative arts in low-income neighborhoods, particularly creative writing.