La Muñeca

Sara had only heard the story of her grandmother’s emigration first-hand once or twice, so she wasn’t sure about any of the minor details. However, she had regaled numerous friends, teachers, or whoever else would listen with the tale of her grandma’s bravery. The lens of her seven-year old memory also shaded the retelling, shaping it in her mind, even now as an 18-year-old, into the most incredible feat she had ever heard.

Her grandma had saved up for months to buy a plane ticket (despite all her best Googling efforts, Sara was still not sure how her grandma had procured a ticket in Ecuador in 1963. This detail of the story may have been filled in by her young brain, which had traveled by air, but never sea. She was always too embarrassed to ask). Her grandmother left on her own, departing from her older sister and younger brother, her parents, the land of people who shared her blood as far back to the days before the Spanish conquest, and a people who spoke her language. When she arrived in Nueva York to a city festering with January cold, she waited for hours trying to find her luggage, only to learn it had been lost. She went out into the world with the clothes hung to her body and the coins in their pockets. She was 34.

Sara was now traveling through a very different Nueva York, attentively watching her location move along the map on her phone as the train carried her over Queens to her grandmother’s nursing home. She’d traveled up and down Manhattan, but rarely ventured out into the other boroughs. Her friends had started school in midtown and the village, but no one from her corner of suburban New Jersey went off to the Bronx for college.

Sara was off to Chicago next week, one of the farthest schools chosen by any of her classmates, aside from the three who heard Manifest Destiny calling. She looked up at the clouded sky, imagined how the California air could have held her softly in its temperate arms. She’d convinced herself she’d hate to be so far away, but maybe leaning into Chicago winters was an act of contrarianism she could have rethought. But, if Grandma could do it, she trusted she must be able to adjust, too.

Today, she hoped to learn how her grandmother had made it through the first part of her journey, the part where she had just the clothes hanging to her body and the coins they held in their pockets. Sara hoped it would awaken that part of herself, whichever DNA strand that had yet to be activated. Perhaps if she could glean enough from this story, it could quiet the nagging voice in Sara’s head, hissing that she could never have her grandmother’s strength without embodying her grandmother’s culture. 

She had been taking Spanish classes at her school since kindergarten and asked her grandma recently to speak to her in Spanish. Puedo entenderte, she’d insisted, I can understand you. Sometimes that was true; whenever she was thrown simple affections, vocabulary that her curriculum had deemed important to emphasize like luggage or protest, she could pick it up in stride. It was when she tried to have a conversation that pushed past pleasantries that she recognized that there was still so much that she could not understand.

She tried calling her “abuela” once in an effort to integrate more Spanish into their interactions, back when Grandma was still living in her apartment. Her grandmother soured her face at the word. “No, I don’t like abuela. It’s, it’s no good. It’s…” she peered up to Sara’s father, missing the translation she needed. “Too serious.”

“She thinks it too formal,” her son provided.

“Abuelita is better, but I like Grandma.”

Sara was 14, and the shift to Abuelita felt too forced. She had looked at her older brother, who was nodding silently. He was always more adaptable, tried Abuelita on for size, but even he drifted back to Grandma. As they got older, the two began to roll the r, soften the word to ‘gramma.’ Now it was the only English word her brother would use in conversation, the other words mangled by the overplayed Catalonian accent he picked up when he had studied in Spain. Her dad would join her in poking fun at it when he first got back.

“C’mon, Julian, somos ecuatorianos, no tenemos un accento! Hablamos español más puro que nadie.” We’re Ecuadorians, we don’t have any accent, we speak more clearly than any other country. Sara held onto this idea when she struggled to keep up with her Dominican friend, Sophia, whose mother insisted on speaking to her in a Spanish that seemed to Sara to race itself. 

Regardless of the accent, though, their grandmother appreciated her brother speaking to her in a language she could fully understand. Sara knew she would lose her spot as Grandma’s favorite if she didn’t show her somehow that she was the incarnation of their family’s immigration story, even if her Spanish was weaker. She’d inherited her Grandmother’s face to fulfill that task, she had come to believe; they shared the same coloring, the same eyes and smile. And she certainly appeared more Ecuadorian than Julian, who had inherited their mother’s Mediterranean features.

The train began slowing, an electronic voice alerting her that she had reached her stop. She was the only one exiting at Astoria Boulevard.

As she walked, she noticed the concrete sidewalks matched the coloring on the sky above her. She took comfort in feeling like she was embraced by one collective, the sky and city working together to curate a concert themed gray. She figured her grandmother must hate the cloudy day.

Her grandma’s existence in the darkness was a representation Sara’s mind refused to create. Grandma sitting in her bedroom, chatting with her roommate as a beam of sun shone through their mostly covered windows, creeping in through that one sliver between the curtains that the nurse always forgot to finish sealing off, or better yet, sitting with her niece, the only other family member born in Ecuador to find a new place of residence, the lights in her old apartment on despite the brilliant New York sun which always got blocked off by the buildings on those late afternoon hours-- that’s how her grandma existed in her mind. Never under nightfall. She could remember coming home on evenings when her grandmother used to stay at her house but refused to join if they went out for dinner––My knees are no good, pepita linda, and I don’t want to bother to your papi, I’ll miss you, preciosa––, the glow of Sábado Gigante on the television beaming through their living room windows to light Sara’s journey from the car back to the house. Once when she was up late watching that same television, her grandmother came out of the guest room around the corner with her night gown on and without teeth. It was the only time she ever felt scared of her grandmother. Even then, Grandma appeared illuminated by the light of her room.

The only image of her grandma in darkness she could conjure up was from the night she fell. Right before Thanksgiving that year, Grandma tripped in her apartment, the home where she raised her two sons in their teenage years and had inhabited alone ever since. She was wearing an emergency necklace given to her by Sara’s uncle, but one of her arms was caught underneath her chest, and her free arm was too weak to lift herself up. She called out for help, moving inch by inch to get to the necklace. She finally freed her arm after two hours and called an ambulance. The fall took out her knees after years of arthritis consuming them inch by inch, and she was moved into a hospital to get both of them replaced. Her sons saw her struggling with physical therapy, saw her condemned to a wheelchair after her years of battle against such a fate, and lost their trust that she could live on her own. She moved to the eighth floor of her facility and had been there ever since.

Sara’s grandmother was sitting in her wheelchair right outside the elevator when the doors opened up on her floor. She was wearing a cardigan over her shirt that Sara noticed wasn’t wide enough for her torso but fit her short arms snugly. The nurses had been cutting her hair since she’d gotten there, and now the thin brown strands, infiltrated by streaks of grey and white, stopped an inch above her shoulder, which always felt wrong to Sara. She loved when Grandma had grown out her hair, even if the ponytail it ended up in was as skinny as a pencil. She had loved braiding it when she was little. Now her grandmother’s resting expression appeared melancholic, the same way Sara’s did. Grandma wasn’t interacting with the two women sitting next to her, who were notably less pale than her grandmother. One wore a filthy purple smock from what Sara assumed had been a painting class, and the other was shrunken by the pile of white hair that hadn’t let gravity best it quite yet. She was looking towards the wall, waiting for time to pass.

“Hola, Gramma!” Sara said.

“Oh, preciosa linda! Hi!” Her body suddenly became energized, her face moving as quickly as it could into a smile. As Sara leaned down for a hug, her grandmother’s dry lips brushed Sara’s cheek lightly in an attempt to kiss her. “Me sorpreses!” What a surprise, my beautiful girl!

“Good! Good surprise, right?”

“Yes, yes of course!”

Her hallway neighbors were now chiming in. “Es tu nieta, Maria? Se parece a ti!” Is this you granddaughter? She looks just like you!

“Sí, qué bonita!” the other praised.

“Sí, es la niña mía! La niña de la Grandma!” 

Sara felt a calm run through her body. Her grandma had trained her from the time she could speak that if she was ever asked whose she was, de quién eres, she was always to reply, “De la Grandma!” I’m my grandma’s, of course! She believed in her twenty-first century mind that she couldn’t be kept, but she didn’t mind the thought of belonging this woman. She could always give her grandmother that. 

Grandma’s expression of pride quickly shifted to worry when she saw that Sara remained standing. “Do you want to sit? Should we find an open room?” she asked in Spanish. 

Sara chuckled at her concern. “Sí, let’s go see if there’s an open space.” She squatted to unlock the wheelchair and started pushing her away, smiling at her grandmother’s neighbors as they gushed over her.

“You look just like your grandmother, so pretty!” one woman translated for her.

“Gracias, disfruten su día!” Enjoy your day, ladies! She tried to lay her non-accent on thick.

Her grandmother continued in Spanish, “What are you doing here? Not too busy getting ready to go to school?”

“No, I’ve been bored, not busy. I was in Manhattan today. I thought I’d visit. Dad didn’t tell you I was coming, right?”

“No, no, he kept the surprise. Let’s sit here, and you tell me about Manhattan!”

Sara pushed her into an alcove in the hallway with a couch and chairs. She recounted her day, mentioning the friends she had seen, most of whom her grandmother had no idea about since she couldn’t meet the kids who Sara brought home anymore. Even before moving into the nursing home, since Sara was starting high school, her grandmother hadn’t wanted to leave her apartment for fear of being too unhelpful.

“That sounds nice, but too many boys, no?”

“Well, I’ve got nothing else going on, why not?”

“No, no, you’re too busy with your school for boys.”

“Okay, Gramma. How are you?”

“Oh, you know I hate it here, but I’m happier now that I’m with you.”

“I’m glad, but it’s not so bad here. How can I help make you feel better about this place?”

Grandma shook her head. “There’s nothing you can do. I’m just too old. I can’t move, I can’t help. I wait for people to do everything for me. It’s miserable. Look at my arm. This is how high I can raise it; you see? What can I do with that?” 

Sara knew she couldn’t get through a visit without Grandma complaining about being old at least once. She hadn’t held a job that Sara could remember, but still she acted like her livelihood was stripped away from her the previous day, and she was fervently fighting to maintain her life’s work. They both knew this was impossible, though, so the conversation always ended the same way. “It doesn’t matter what you can do. You’ve done enough. Right? You’ve done so much. Now we want to help you, and I know everyone who works here does, too.” She took her grandmother’s hand. Her nails were painted ivory with chipped polish. It was almost pretty. The rest of her hands were so thin, diaphanous skin over gossamer veins. Sara remembered being fascinated with the ghostly cover of skin as a child.

“I don’t want to be a…in this place your dad and uncle have to worry about me, but I want…I’m old and weak.” She spoke softly, her voice wavering through the words so that Sara could not follow the Spanish. Sara asked her to tell her again, and her grandmother said in English, “I want to help. It’s terrible, being old. I’d rather just go away.”

Sara hated those words. She hated how easily her grandma forced them into the world. She hated that her forehead was growing hot as tears threatened to appear. “Hey, I want you here. Come on, I love you, and I want to be with you, always.” 

“Oh, I love you, muñeca Sara. I’ve just had enough of being like this, so weak.”

Sara ignored her grandmothers second thought, remembering back to seventh grade when a Spanish teacher had taught her the meaning of the word muñeca the first time: wrist. She couldn’t fathom why her grandmother had called her Sara Wrist for her whole life, but she imagined there must be some custom she was missing. The next year she looked it up, seeing that it had a second translation: doll.

She swallowed down the sadness, the realization that she couldn’t hold on to her grandma forever. Sara looked up, noticing the gray had shifted to black in the window behind her grandmother. It was creeping into the room, reminding Sara of a memory of Grandma at night with nothing but the weak glow of her television.

Sara was 8, and she had begged her parents to let her stay at Grandma’s that night. They had left her there while they went on a date in Manhattan, and they spent the night playing checkers and looking through all the photographs Grandma had framed around the small perimeter of the living room. It was a treasure trove of stories, her favorite of which came from a picture of her father at seven and uncle at five with Grandma, standing at Ciudad Mitad del Mundo. Mostly, she remembered laughing at the costumes Grandma had put them in, like toy soldiers in a teddy bear’s war; this clashed with their faces, all stoic and calm. She had told Sara that it was the first trip home she had taken with the boys, and she and her siblings saved up for a year to get the money for tickets. “They were not lucky; they did not have a papa like you to buy them things,” Grandma said.

“Yeah, no papa at all,” Sara had thought aloud. “But they had you!”

When Sara’s parents came to pick her up from Grandma’s apartment, the two were sitting on the couch looking for an English show that Sara could enjoy, even though they both knew her options were the news or the other news. Still, she was determined that if she stayed, Grandma could find one.

Her mother had some reservations about her sleeping so far away, but her father reasoned that she was with Grandma, it couldn’t be safer. Eventually her mom gave in when her father agreed to drive back out to pick her up in the morning.

They played more checkers, laughed at stories about her and Julian getting up to mischief as toddlers, and finally assembled the pullout for Sara to sleep on.

“Okay, do you want me to sleep here with you, or should I sleep in my bed?” Grandma asked.

Sara blushed. She was concerned her grandma would think she was too old for wanting to sleep in bed together. “You can stay in your bed.”

“Okay, muñeca. Let me know if you need anything.” She handed her the remote to turn off the television in front of the bed and kissed her goodnight.

Now, Sara realized that she couldn’t live with that constant fear of judgment anymore. “I want to learn. I want to know about your life. I’m about to start college, but what were you doing when you were my age? When you were 18.”

“Oh, I was cleaning. Yeah, I was…at the same houses that I’d been at for a few years, and my brother…but he was so lazy, he always preferred to play…I worked in one house with four boys…oh, he was so cute! He was too young for school, so he’d help…swimming…my sweet little boy. Anyway, nothing important, like college.”

Sara usually only allowed herself to cope with frustration by crying when she had gotten home after hours of bottling up the emotion, but in that moment, she couldn’t stop her tears from welling. If she concentrated on it too hard, she knew she would have understood even less. She blinked rapidly, trying not to distract Grandma. It was usually easy to play along since she displayed such big reactions to her own retellings, that Sara could just mimic her. She had lost the emotional pace of the story, and ended up leaving an extended pause before responding, “Wait, what was your brother doing?”

Grandma went on about him, Sara catching a bit more to piece together that they were working for one particularly wealthy family together, but her brother had gotten fired for never cleaning their yard well, apparently because he was always goofing off with the family’s son. There was also something about a fence, or maybe a street, that he was working on, but this seemed nonessential, since it didn’t make Grandma laugh as she spoke about it.

As she was finishing up, she sighed, “I wish I could visit him. I miss my brother, and my sister. Maybe it’s better if I go be with her.”

Sara again fought to control her body’s insistence on crying. Grandma’s sister had died two years earlier.

“Oh, don’t cry, chiquita linda,” Grandma cooed.

“Sorry, sorry.” Sara’s tears pushed past her barricades. She turned away as she wiped them off her face, forcing herself to conjure up a positive thought: navigating Tribeca with her friend today, her Jewish friend whose grandparents would never want to be with their dead sisters, since they had no Heaven. The calm weather, shielding an overbearing sun.

“You don’t need be sad.” Grandma decided this needed to be said in English. “I don’t want you be sad.”

“Well, stop talking about that then!” Sara smiled, but her voice continued to quiver without her control. Hearing her grandma’s declining English skills only made it worse, another reminder that they were drifting apart faster than she could control. Grandma had stopped practicing her English since she moved into the facility, stopped watching her news in English and interacting with Spanish speaking nurses only.

“Niña mía, I live a long time. Too long. I could do it before because I can move, I can work. Now, I just sit.”

“But I don’t. Don’t you want to see me and Julian graduate college, get married?”

“Eh, you do that with me here or up there. I can see.”

Sara sighed. She wanted her here.

“Besides, I don’t want to watch someone steal you from me,” Grandma said in Spanish, a smile creeping up.

“No one is going to steal me from you.” Sara repeated this in Spanish, slowly working through the translation. “Nadie, nunca. Jamás. Never.” Sara rolled her eyes, but mirrored the mischievous smile on her grandmother’s lips.

“It’s going to happen. A boy is going to take you,” she sang.

“No! Soy de la Grandma! Ask me, huh? Ask me who I belong to. Do it, ask me.”

Her grandmother laughed. “De quien eres, muñeca?”

“De la Grandma!”

“Sí, de la Grandma!”

“Para siempre, grandma.” Always. She squeezed Grandma’s hand. 

When she left later that evening, Sara noticed anxiety settle across her chest and stomach; it was the same feeling she had gotten since she was little, the same experience she had had that night at Grandma’s, about a minute into laying alone in the bed.

She had hoped the television would lull her to sleep, as it normally did when she stayed up with Julian, but not having access to any channels she recognized only caused more unsettlement. She missed her mom and the smell of her room.

She estimated it was an hour before she got up to see if Grandma was still awake––it was really about twenty minutes. By the time she was in the doorway, Grandma was already sitting up.

“I can’t sleep,” she said tearfully, a combination of embarrassment and fear weighing down her head, making her face grow hot with effort to keep herself upright.

“Come, preciosa, let me come to bed with you.”

Sara had resisted the urge to cuddle close to Grandma, as Grandma was always so cold. She watched Grandma watching the TV, giving all of her attention to the English news. Sara slowly drifted to sleep, exhausted just by watching Grandma’s effort.