Man of the House

“Ven mí niña,” Mama Maria said in a calm, soothing voice. She lifted screaming Ally from the blanket, drenched in her baby juices excreting from her nose, mouth, and eyes, but none of that mattered to Mama Maria. She carried Ally over to an old brown recliner, sat down, and began to rock. 

Ally’s mother, Tía Lucia, was nowhere to be found. She had left her abusive boyfriend before Ally was a year old, along with the few parenting skills and maternal instincts she might’ve had. They moved into my grandparents' house just a few months before me, and Ally’s wails never seemed to stop. 

I had spent the last fifteen minutes throwing my own tantrum, nervous about starting college the next day but blaming the Las Vegas heat instead. Hot air forced its way through old window seams and the unevenly bolted doors between us and the sketchy neighborhood. My complaining wasn’t enough to convince my cheap grandfather to turn down the thermostat. I felt like wailing too.

“Oh my gosh, Ally, please, shut up already!” I moaned. It was my turn to have a crisis, and no one was going to take that away from me. 

“Nachito!” Mama Maria scolded. “Don’t yell at her! It’s bad enough her pinche Madre doesn’t care about her.” 

Mama Maria was defensive when it came to Ally, but it was the same defensiveness that had protected me my whole life. When my mother, her oldest, was pregnant with me, Mama Maria was expecting her tenth child, a boy. But she suffered a miscarriage. A couple of months later, on Mama Maria’s birthday, I was born. 

“¿Nachito, sabías que Diosíto, did you know that God gave you to me as a birthday present?” she’d ask me occasionally. “That was the best cumpleaños ever.” She believed that God had made a mistake, calling her baby home, and amended it with me. I was hers, and we were inseparable. 

Mama Maria placed Ally’s cheek on her chest and held her close. She synchronized drumming pats softly on Ally’s back with the rocking of her chair. Pat-pat. Back and forth. I was unable to take my eyes off them. Then, Mama Maria began to sing. 

A la ruru nene,

Duérmete me ya,

Sí no, viene el Cucu

Y te comerá.

Pat-pat. Ally’s screams began to evaporate into the hot air. Pat-pat. I felt myself becoming more relaxed. Pat-pat. Hypnotized by the tone and sound of Mama Maria’s voice, the light rhythm she played on Ally’s back, the pendulum movement of their bodies in the chair. 

As Ally fell asleep, Mama Maria’s words turned into a melodic humming. She continued to rock and hum. Pat-pat. And her eyes looked into mine and smiled. She had a gift, Mama Maria did. She was soothing us both. There was nothing more instinctual to her than calming a child’s racing mind and broken heart.

A wave of familiarity came over me. She had soothed me like this before, when I was still a child, on the brink of another, far more terrifying change.

***

I sat in the hall outside the chapel for three days. I refused to go inside with all these strangers, family, distant relatives—I didn’t know the difference. Whoever they were, they would hug me close, suffocating me in their breasts or beer bellies. Then they would go inside, and I’d sit there with their pity and weepy condolences on replay in my head. Some would say, “Aye, pobrecito. You poor kid. Your father was an amazing man.” Others would look down on me with swollen eyes and scrunched red faces. I hated their looks of pity, but I preferred them over the comments. I didn’t have to respectfully respond “si señora” or “gracias” to the strange things their faces were doing, only to the weird stuff they said. 

“You’re the man of the house now. You must care for your mother, brothers, and sister.” This was the central motif—masquerading as wisdom.

I was informed of my new role as man of the house by Tía Malvina, my father’s youngest sister. She was a tiny, unfeeling woman who all the cousins secretly named The Beast. 

“Nachito, come here,” The Beast had commanded just a few hours after we learned of my father’s passing. I ignored her. 

Watching her interact with family, I had seen glimpses of beauty and wondered if she had been pretty once. She probably had, and maybe even been fun, too. The Beast got pregnant young, and like Tia Lucia, treated her daughter poorly. She did not like children. When visiting The Beast, we were not allowed to play in the apartment or sit on her floral print plastic-covered furniture. We had to stay outside. She forced us into bed by eight every night, and it was inevitable that she would be beating her daughter or spanking and grounding one of her sons during our weekend stays. I had never liked her. Mama Maria always told me not to trust a woman who left the house without applying, at the very least, mascara. Mama Maria didn’t like her either. 

“Nacho!” The Beast scolded, beckoning me again. 

I walked over, respectful and cautious.

“Your dad’s dead,” she asserted. 

I turned to look at my mother who was sitting at the kitchen table, burying her face in Mama Maria’s shoulder. “This means that you’re the man of the house now.” Confused, I began to cry. 

“See! This is what I’m talking about!” She grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to her. “You can’t do this. You need to be strong! Stop your crying,” she grunted, as her fingernails she occasionally snacked on dug into my arm. She pulled out a rough handkerchief that smelled of cheap perfume she must have worn to Sunday mass, then squeezed my nose to rid it of snot. “Go see how your mom is doing,” demanded The Beast as she shoved me in my mom’s direction. 

I knew my father was dead. That was tragic enough. But man of the house? That sounded awful. I was ten. What did that even mean?

That night, I lay in bed pondering it. Would I have to quit school and get a job? From what I knew, the man of the house worked all day, came home, stripped down to his undershirt and underwear, turned on the sports channel, popped open a can of Coors, and lit a cigarette. I was devastated. Cigarettes stunk, and beer was disgusting! I knew beer was repulsive because my dad had left an unfinished beer in the backyard a few days prior, and I nearly choked on a cigarette bud after taking a sip. Even worse was the idea of having to watch sports. I hated sports! 

Being the man of the house was out of the question. But over and over, well-meaning strangers, family, or distant relatives would remind me of my new role. 

I needed a plan. I could dig a hole through the ground until I reached Australia and found a new home. I loved kangaroos and koalas. Australia seemed like the perfect place, and according to The Rescuers Down Under, a Disney Cartoon I had watched earlier that summer, it was just beneath me. But I couldn’t dig a hole that big by myself. 

“Mama Maria?” I asked. She had been sitting in a chair a few feet away, watching me. “How big is my Papi’s box?” 

“It’s a coffin,” she corrected me, but I already knew. I just couldn’t say the words. “If you go inside the chapel, I can show you,” she answered. 

“But I don’t want to go in there,” I mumbled, looking down.

“Well then, mijo, you don’t have to,” she assured. “It’s pretty big. Porque? Why do you ask?”

“Can I fit in there too?” Maybe I could hitch a ride with him in his baby blue box.

“Nachito!” she leaned over and exclaimed quietly. “Why would you want to fit in there? Do you want to go with your Papi?” Her voice cracked, and I noticed her eyes begin to water. “I would miss you so much and be so triste. Do you want me to be sad?” 

“No,” I replied, then my own voice broke. “I just don’t wanna quit the fifth grade, and I don’t wanna start smoking, beer is gross, and I hate sports!” 

She looked at me, confused. “You hate sports?” 

Right then, The Beast came out of the chapel. She stood in the doorway, spotted me, walked past Mama Maria, and knelt to glare into my eyes. I whimpered as her red Lee press-on nails dug into my arm. “Those are new,” I thought.

“Your mother is in there,” she dug deeper, grinding her teeth. “Your younger brothers and sister are in there. Why are you out here? You’re the man of the house now! You need to go inside and be with them!” she demanded, tight-lipped and stern. “And stop crying!” 

I looked down and watched as my tears splashed onto the hardwood floor. I snuffed three short breaths, my body trying to calm itself. I wasn’t crying because my arm was hurting. I was crying because I didn’t want to go in there. I couldn’t go in there. Suddenly I felt a tug on my other arm, moving me out of The Beast’s grip.

“He’s not a man!” Mama Maria shouted, her voice raised dangerously above The Beast, who now looked like a crouched puppy, ready to run. “Es un niño. He’s a ten-year-old little boy,” she flipped her burgundy-red hair like the women in Pantene Pro-V shampoo commercials and pointed her freshly manicured finger into The Beast’s face. “And he’ll go in when he’s ready to go in, me entiendes? You understand me?” 

Mama Maria was a glamorous warrior woman who could kick anyone’s ass, and wear high heels while doing it. The Beast huffed and puffed as she stood up. 

“Fine,” she said glaring at me before going inside. 

Mama Maria dragged a chair over to me and sat down. I couldn’t hide my sobbing face well enough, no matter how low I hung my head. She pulled me over and then onto her lap, holding me like a baby. Mama Maria gently rubbed the claw marks on my arm, then kissed them before holding me closer. I closed my eyes, submitting to the pat-pat she drummed softly on my back as she began to rock back and forth. And then she sang: 

A la ruru nene,

Duérmete me ya,

Sí no, viene el Cucu

Y te comerá. 

Typically, I would have pulled away. I was ten, and this would have devastated my childhood career had anyone witnessed it. But curled up in Mama Maria’s arms, none of that mattered. Nothing mattered. I was held securely in another world, one where I didn’t have to quit the fifth grade and watch sports. A familiar world, like the one I used to have, where my dad would watch Saturday morning cartoons with my siblings and me or threaten one of us with tickles until the rest of us would wrestle him to the ground. A world where the pity of strangers, family, distant relatives was unknown to me, and I didn’t have to be the man of anything. 

When Mama Maria finished singing, I looked up at her and noticed tear trails on her cheeks. She was beautiful. Although I had stopped crying, she kept rocking back and forth, looking down at me with a smile. “I can go inside now, Mama Maria,” I said. She kissed my forehead and stood up, then, with a soft silk hanky she pulled out of her breast pocket, wiped the tears off our faces. After brushing the wrinkles off her black pantsuit, composing herself, she pulled out a compact mirror and lipstick for a quick touch up.

“Como me veo? How do I look?” she asked while flipping her hair with her right hand. 

“Muy bonita, Mama,” I answered. 

“And they wonder why you’re my favorite,” she said, gripping my hand tightly. Then, she took a deep breath, and we walked inside.