Abuelita, Scott Yarbrough

In 1976, a trying year, Maria Carlson ended the longest relationship she’d ever had. Her courtroom successes were low even for the battle-weary public defender’s office, and her ’65 Plymouth died on Highway 176 between Columbia and Charleston when she was driving home for a birthday dinner with her family. When a state trooper had finally called a tow truck and her father for her, she’d been on the verge of tears.

Her grandmother took her to lunch the next day. “A pretty girl you are, Maria,” she told her. “But the hair so crazy, so big, these clothes so big too, you look like the gypsy, no? And the sad eyes. This is no good.”

“Abuelita,” Maria sighed over her salad, “You hate for people to say it, but the world does move on. Styles change. People change.”

“Yes. This I know. The world is now a place where young women spit at family to live with no good son of bitches who cheat on his woman. But believe me when I tell you, someday you see the picture of your hair, and you think is too big, is crazy.”

“But your hair used to be long—”

“Long, yes. Big, never.”

Maria sighed again, even louder.

When Maria Carlson’s grandfather was killed by a firing squad in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, he was one of the men in the firing squad. They lined the prisoners up against a solid granite wall and one bullet ricocheted back and struck Maria’s grandfather right between the eyes. Her grandmother spat when they told her and said, “It serves the fascist son of a whore right.” Two months later she was in America, in South Carolina, and three months after that, Maria’s mother was born.

Maria had always been fascinated with her grandfather’s death and her grandmother’s immigration to the United States. It had always seemed to her that she was destined to grow up American, that she—like the princesses in the stories—was intended for some marvelous fate. It was only when she became older that she realized her grandmother was, in some sense, fate itself, for her grandmother surely had the ear of God. If the priests were right, and God had created men in His own image, then what man could withstand her abuelita’s urgings?

She remembered once when she was twenty, still in college. Before law school, before Josh. Her grandmother had called her and after an exchange of pleasantries and inquiries had started describing at length a man she’d met at Mass, an employee of the state park service some ten years Maria’s senior, who, her grandmother went on to say, was soon to begin selling real estate with his father’s company, and who attended mass every Sunday, and like her grandmother, regretted that it was no longer performed in Latin.

Maria had finally understood her abuelita’s motives and laughed at her, saying, “Abuelita, this isn’t the old country. We don’t arrange marriages anymore. That’s why they call it the New World.”

Her grandmother had smiled and said, “Foolish, foolish, foolish child. This is the blood of your grandfather speaking. You see, someday.”

Now, years later, her grandmother narrowed her black eyes at Maria over her thin half-glasses and said, her perfect carmine nails rattling over the table top, “You need a man, Maria. You get too old soon and be all alone.”

“I’ve just now turned twenty-five, Abuelita—”

“Yes, true. Twenty-five and beautiful, big hair yes, and you sit all alone in the tiny apartment.”

Maria sucked the dregs of her Tab noisily through the straw because she knew it irritated her grandmother. “I’ve just gotten rid of Josh,” she said, although it had been months earlier, “and the last thing I need is another boyfriend.”

Her grandmother—four inches shorter than Maria, but bigger than anyone—gazed over her inverted crescent glasses and said, “No more boys, yes. Men.”

Maria’s father had well understood his mother-in-law’s power. “Your grandmama,” he’d told her more than once in his soft low-country drawl, “is a woman to be reckoned with.” Her father had been a captain in the U.S. Army, just home from Korea, where he’d earned a Purple Heart and a Silver Star in the same action for conduct that the Army called gallantry and he called stupid.

He’d been lounging outside the drugstore on Meeting Street in Charleston, the only place in all of South Carolina where her grandmother felt a woman could get such coffee as she’d been accustomed to in her youth.

Maria liked imagining her father as he’d looked then: tall, handsome, home on medical leave but barely limping, his short dark hair neatly combed, wearing a golden-brown tweed jacket over a white shirt, dark slacks pressed so perfectly that the creases could cut you, his shoes polished so that they shone in the sun. “You there,” her abuelita called, “you are the Capitan Carlson, you are the hero, no?” Her grandmother had read about him in the paper.

He took her in, and took in her seventeen-year-old daughter, Teresa, with the shining black eyes and soft falling hair and blue skirt. “I am John Carlson, ma’am, but I don’t know about that hero business.”

Her grandmother made a harrumph at the foolishness of male modesty, particularly unimpressed by the Norte Americano variety. She said, “This fool of a girl is Teresa. She is very beautiful, no?”

Her abuelita’s eyes raked him up and down, seeming to flay away his clothing and the hundred vanities and artifices we humans use to conceal ourselves from the world. “You have how many years, twenty-five?”

Her grandmother put her arm around her daughter Teresa and brought her forward a step. “You leave army and in two years, my beautiful Teresa, she will be ready for you.”

Maria’s father always described how his jaw fell and his eyes blinked before this diminutive, dark-haired woman with streaks of gray at her temples. And how she brought Teresa by to see him on his next leave home, and how he and Teresa, Maria’s mother, started writing to each other. And before long the young captain had resigned his commission and paid official court to Teresa.

When Maria was ten years old, her art class had watched a filmstrip on Michelangelo. That afternoon she broke the new Play-Doh set out again and tried to form tiny statues out of the modeling clay. Again and again, her sculptures collapsed. Arms were misshapen, head perfectly spherical, legs too weak to sustain bulging torsos. Her grandmother was there for what Maria’s mother termed the “weekly haranguing.”

Maria told her about the filmstrip, and about Michelangelo and his David, which was supposed to be on a pedestal fifty feet up in the air but wasn’t.

Her grandmother made a spitting noise although she wouldn’t actually spit within the house. “Italianos,” she sighed in disgust. “You want art, you look at Goya. Blood and death. True art. You see some day.”

Her abuelita sat with her awhile, asking her about her studies and the piano lesson and her friends. Maria told her about how Ricky Sanders had pushed her down by the swings. “Mama says it’s because he likes me,” she confided, “but he’s ugly and smells bad.”

“Listen to me, child,” said her abuelita. “You are a Cordova woman, not some silly Americano female. Your blood is like fire, like lava from volcano.”

“Your heart a wildfire, Maria! A Cordova woman!” Her grandmother seized a handful of the Play-Doh and said, “To a Cordova woman, men are this—” She squeezed until the dough oozed out between her white fingers. “You make them how you wish, no?”

“So, next time, Mr. Smarty Ricky come close, you sock him in the nose hard and then you cry the eyes out, yes?”

Two days later Maria followed her grandmother’s advice to the letter. Ricky’s nose bled. Maria spent the afternoon with the school nurse sucking lollipops and Ricky was paddled by the principal before being sent back to class with bloody toilet paper dangling from his nostrils.

When the birthday dinner was over, and her brother Thomas drove her grandmother home, her father said, “So, your grandmamma has this fella she wants you to meet.”

Her father said, “Sweetie, your grandmother won’t be around forever.” His own mother had died while he was in Korea. “Appreciate her while you can.”

Her mother, though, just laughed as she was drying the dishes being washed by Maria and her father. “Maria, for a lawyer, you’re not so smart.”

Her mother’s smile flattened for a moment as she put away a casserole dish. “Why would you think that there’s even been a time that she didn’t run your life? Or anybody else’s, for that matter?”

Maria stared at her mother for a moment until her father said, “Well, at least the boy lives in Columbia, so she hasn’t got you driving to Atlanta or anything.”

Maria had dated Josh throughout law school. They met their first semester at the inaugural Friday afternoon keg mixer hosted by the third years, and went out until the week before the South Carolina bar exam. They moved in together and had even gone so far as to consolidate their records and books. As law students they’d watched the Watergate proceedings on their tiny black and white set, and, appropriating the words of her abuelita, they decried the fascist sons of whores. They went to see movies, later discussing how establishment Hollywood was. Maria kept her love for old John Wayne movies like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance secret as she tried hard to like the foreign films thrust upon her by Josh.

They graduated in May, and just when Maria took a job with the Public Defender’s office where she’d been clerking for two years, Josh told her he’d accepted a position with the biggest law firm in Columbia. “But you always said you wanted to help people,” she said to him.

“Think of the good that I could do with the money they’re offering me,” he said. Maria watched his face as he spoke, and realized that she’d always thought Josh’s eyes were a little too close together. She also realized that she’d never known Josh to follow up on any of his idealistic ambitions. He hadn’t actually voted during the last election. He hadn’t done any volunteer work with her over the summer. And she’d noticed how he never returned money to a cashier who made a mistake. She tried to imagine her father acting that way, or her brother.

A few weeks later, she caught him out with a college girl. He’d told Maria that he was going to be studying for the bar at a friend’s house. “You know how I am with the state tax laws,” he said. “I really need to burn some midnight oil.”

She and a law school friend decided to have a few drinks at the Kickin Chicken, a favorite watering hole. Josh was there in a corner booth, his narrow eyes sparkling at a blonde girl in a halter top and short shorts, her bare leg draped over his, his hand on her thigh.

His mouth opened when she stood over their table. “So this is Midnight Oil,” Maria said, nodding to the coed.

“Maria—” he started. She stopped him with a wave of her hand. Then she spat on the floor and turned to leave.

Just before she got to the door, though, she thought of her grandmother. She leaned over the table of a clean-cut man in his twenties with blue eyes and good shoes. “May I have this?” she asked, reaching down to pick up his full mug of beer.

She wheeled back to Josh, stared him in his narrow eyes, and said, “Go to hell,” just like John Wayne would have, and then flung the glass of beer into his face. She turned and replaced the mug on the blue-eyed man’s table. “The drink’s on him,” she said, and the blue-eyed man erupted in laughter. She was out the door just as the college girl’s voice crossed over from loud to shrill.

She called her mother, who told her to come home to Charleston so they could bake bread together. When her father got on the phone, he offered to squeeze Josh’s head until it exploded like an over-ripe grape. Maria was surprised at how tempted she was, but told her father no thanks, and asked him not to tell her younger brother Thomas, a gentle, sweet natured boy who played tight end for Clemson and who could lose perspective where his sister was concerned.

“This I suspected,” her grandmother said. “His eyes, always too narrow, no? Such a man, he may not be trusted.”

Maria hadn’t cried a drop over Josh—until now. “Abuelita, why do I always end up with guys like this?”

“No no, Maria, You like these—these—boys. These—how you say? Guys.” Her abuelita said the word as if she didn’t think much of it or what it stood for. “You are a Cordova woman. You need men, not boys.”

“Listen to me, child. Why do you think I pick your father? I knew my Teresa needed the man who is all man, and such men are hard to find in this country, where now boys wear girl hair and girl sandals, and women wear pantalones. Your father, he is what we would call at home much hombre. Your brother, too.”

Maria had noticed for years that her grandmother had a precise control over her accent and her lapses into Spanish. They were usually timed for effect. Maria wasn’t always clear what effect her grandmother was reaching for when she began purposefully mangling verb forms and inserting Spanish words into her sentences, but she was equally sure that the linguistic sleight of hand was employed in order to somehow achieve the upper hand that her abuelita never, ever relinquished.

Maria had to acknowledge that her father and her brother were much hombre. But still—“Abuelita, your husband fought for the bad guys. He died killing political prisoners.”

Her grandmother laughed a short, harsh laugh that reminded Maria of a small dog’s ferocious bark. “José may have been a bastard, with his smiling eyes. But he was all man, that one.”

One Saturday when Maria had been twelve years old, her grandmother had taken her out for an ice cream sundae. It was a clear spring day in Charleston, and the azaleas were melting under the pink and white explosions of soft-petaled color. After ice cream, they’d walked around downtown Charleston, remarking on the houses and narrow, cobble-stoned alleys that reminded her grandmother at times of home.

When they came to the corner of Meeting and Broad Street, the bells of the huge, white, colonial era church on the corner—St. Michael’s—began tolling. Its great doors were flung open, and suddenly a chorus of tuxedo-clad groomsmen and bridesmaids in blue pastels flooded the sidewalk, where they welcomed the newly married couple as they walked arm and arm from the church and stepped up onto a waiting horse-drawn carriage.

Maria and her grandmother stood across the street as the bells tolled, her grandmother’s hand shielding her eyes from the afternoon sun. For a flickering second, Maria wondered if she saw something in her grandmother’s eyes she’d never seen before—sadness, melancholy, wistfulness—she wasn’t sure what it was.

As they began walking up Broad to St. Mark’s Cathedral, where they would light candles for her grandmother’s parents, Maria asked, “Abuelita, why did you never remarry?”

Her grandmother stared at her for a long moment and said, “I married the man I loved, girl. What more does one want than that?”

Her grandmother interrupted her by taking a handkerchief to her mouth. “Hush, Maria. You have the ice cream on your face.”

As always, fall tiptoed into South Carolina like a worshipper late to the Sunday service. Maria hadn’t even recognized the change in season until one evening when taking out the trash she realized she could smell burning leaves on the crisp, dry breeze that prickled her skin. For weeks, as leaves reddened and grew brown and then released their timorous holds on the pecan, maple, and sweet gum trees of Columbia, she felt change was in the air, as if the fallen leaves crunching and riffling underneath were the pages of her life previously flipped through, torn out, and discarded. And so it was no surprise when she answered the phone and her grandmother told her she wanted Maria to make the acquaintance of a young man she’d recently met.

The young man taught high school Spanish and had actually lived in Barcelona. He had been visiting his grandparents in Charleston and overheard Maria’s grandmother speaking Spanish to a woman at the grocery store, and he’d started up a conversation with her.

“Now, this I wonder,” she said to Maria. “Can you trust the one man who speaks Espanol in a land of ignoremuses who cannot speak their own language? This I do not know.” As excellent as her grandmother’s control of English was, she blithely ignored the correct form of certain words and idioms. She said “ignorimus” instead of “ignoramus,” and “old mother’s tale” instead of “old wives’ tales.” She continued in her evaluation of the prospective suitor, saying, “But he has good shoes and nice manners and opens doors for lady, which you as feminista do not care.”

“As you should. But he has hard hands and soft eyes, and in a man, these things are good things, Maria.”

Maria laughed. “So should I watch him around children and dogs? Or see if he will change a tire for me that I’ve ‘accidentally’ let get too low on air?”

“You joke, granddaughter, but tell me, would that boy of yours before, that Zhosh, would he fix your tire? Pet a dog? Play with children?”

Her grandmother arranged the date with the skill of a conductor whose delicate wand directs the various sections of an orchestra. They were to meet for drinks at a small café in the Five Points district that came as close to bohemian life as Columbia could reach. From there they would move a few doors down the street to a quaint and stylish restaurant.

Douglas Webb wasn’t exactly what Maria expected. She’d seen pictures of her grandfather, and he’d been an astoundingly handsome man. And her father could still turn heads. She’d almost assumed that Douglas would be tall and slender, with dark hair and white teeth.

He was only reasonably tall, with a thick, almost burly chest and broad shoulders. His dark blonde hair was shorter than the current fashion, and he was clean-shaven, dressed conservatively in a button-down shirt and corduroys. When she felt the calluses on his fingers when they shook hands, she thought that he seemed more like a carpenter than a teacher.

They both ordered bourbon and sat at the bar, talking to each other’s reflections in the mirror behind the arranged beer bottles and airliner-sized mini-bottles of liquor that South Carolina had begun requiring in all public bars and restaurants. Maria liked sitting at the bar. She could look down the copper-topped expanse and, through the glass front of the bar, see one of the sweetgum trees preserved on the side of the street, the sidewalk forking around it and merging on its far sides. Its leaves had gone auburn and red, and its spiky black seedpods littered the ground. Maria’s family had a sweetgum in Charleston, and she loved the crunch of the seedpods under her shoes in fall.

As they lingered over their drinks and enjoyed the pretzels and peanuts offered by the bartender, Doug told her he’d majored in History and Spanish in Charleston, and then had served for two years in the Peace Corps, living in Mexico City and Guatemala. He’d moved to Spain, where he had to learn to speak Spanish all over again, and then he taught English to Spanish children and Spanish to English children. Finally he’d returned home to take a job in the public schools. Maria, on the other hand, found herself talking about Charleston, about law school, and about Josh, to her great surprise. And, to her utter horror, she found herself talking about her grandmother.

Douglas laughed at her consternation. “She seems to be quite a woman. Did she really know Garcia Lorca?”

Maria finished her Beam and Coke. “If she says she did, she did.” She found herself telling about how her grandmother had found her father and presented her daughter to him. She realized that Douglas’ face had grown somber and perhaps even a little frightened. She laughed for a moment and then realized how neatly everything had fallen into place for her abuelita.

She straightened up and pulled her wallet from her purse. “Douglas, I’m sorry,” she said. “You seem like a real nice guy, but I can’t accept that the universe follows my grandmother’s whims as if they were the decrees of fate itself.”

She stood and began fishing for the twenty she knew was in her wallet somewhere. “I mean, it’s nothing personal, but she’s not God’s own agent, you know?”

He leaned back, his mouth open looking up at her. “Wait a minute. You’re leaving, and you don’t want to go out with me, all because your grandmother wants you to go out with me?”

“Just one more minute, Maria.” He paused for a second, finishing his bourbon. Then he looked at her with an arched eyebrow. “If you’re bound to do the opposite of what she tells you or wants you to do, isn’t that exactly the same as doing what she tells you? I mean, you’re surrendering your ability to choose either way, right?”

Maria sighed and looked towards the door. Then she turned back to him. They looked at each other for a long moment. She suddenly realized that horrible “Seasons in the Sun“ song was playing on the jukebox. Josh had loved it, but she despised its sentimentality. “So, how are you with dogs?”

He tilted his head to one side and she saw that he did, indeed, have a smiling face and soft eyes. “That seems an odd question. Why, do you have a dog?”

He shrugged. “All right. As a matter of fact, I have a big old goofy black lab named Poe. He’s a bumbling ray of sunshine and just about the best thing in my life.” And he smiled shyly and looked away. “Well, one of them.”

Maria rolled her eyes and snorted in exasperation, and then finally sat back down. “Of course you have a dog,” she grumbled.

“I have to believe that the future is not written and that I am master of my own destiny.”

Douglas Webb signaled the bartender for two more drinks. “You’ve got a thing about your grandma,” he observed.

And she wondered if somehow her grandmother was privy to the future unfurled beyond them, if she had some kind of temporal compass for navigating the wilderness of possibility and mischance that lay before all human endeavor. For a minute, just this one minute, she let herself think it so: she and Douglas were fated to be together. They would fall in love and get married and they would have a daughter who would be named for her great grandmother, Maria’s abuelita. And Maria saw how such a life would be in the years to come as she rolled forward into the future: so long as she allowed herself to slip along with the floodwaters of her abuelita’s will and didn’t spend her strength in futile struggle against the overwhelming current, life would reserve its rewards for her and offer her many sublime moments. And one day her grandmother would die and ascend to Heaven, taking her rightful place near the Father, just off his shoulder perhaps, within earshot of the Son, and there she would also have the Holy Virgin’s ear and the Holy Sprit would serve—either willingly or regretfully, but serve it would—her whims and wishes, and the world would, finally, make a kind of sense.

Douglas looked at her a minute and then at his watch. He picked up his drink. “You’re a bit of a nut, I think,” he said. “But I kind of like that. I’m afraid we’re going to miss our reservation.”

Maria grasped his wrist lightly. “There’s no need to hurry. We’ll find somewhere else for dinner.” And they lingered there, as the night grew cold and dark outside, talking on into the autumn evening, watching the leaves of the sweetgum outside fall one by one to the sidewalk.

SCOTT YARBROUGH