Reading Retta

Honorable Mention-Austin Chronicle  Short Story Contest, 1998

by Amy Goodwin

The pediatrician blamed colic. The dentist blamed a nursery rhyme; a Wednesday’s child is full of woe. Her mother blamed herself for drinking wine while she was pregnant. Her father blamed her mother. Retta saw every doctor on her list of providers. They couldn’t help, so she saw a chiropractor, an acupuncturist, a psychologist and a nutritionist. Retta still hurt.

Retta first heard about the curandera at work. Sitting alone in the break room, eating her one a day Snickers, she often heard the Mexican women talk of the curandera’s readings. She predicted that Sylvia’s husband would leave. She knew Delia was barren well before she even had a boyfriend. If a reading foreshadowed danger, the curandera had an intervention potion to bring a husband home and herbs to make a woman fertile.

Retta had nothing to lose. All day she’d walked around too tired to live. The night before she hadn’t slept; too afraid she’d die. With every ounce of strength, Retta ascended the rotting staircase and knocked on the curandera’s front door. As she waited on the porch, she looked out on a yard, overgrown, landscaped with poison ivy. An old Ford truck sat stationary just right of the driveway, useful only to the goat that stood atop its hood, lording over his chicken and rooster subjects. The porch on which Retta stood swayed like a bad bed, boards warped by standing water. A surveillance camera perched above the front door was the only marking of modernity.

Retta looked anxiously at her watch, then knocked again on the front door. She looked into the camera eyeing her suspiciously and waved, “I’m here for my two o’clock appointment.”

The curandera opened the front door and studied her. Retta felt suddenly aware of her young, frail body.

“Come,” the curandera said in a thick Spanish accent, motioning Retta to follow. The curandera looked buxom and strong, but her eye-catching beauty had faded.

They walked through her living room, lace curtains dancing as a breeze ebbed and flowed through an open window. A television shouted a Spanish soap opera to two stuffed chairs. Four walls bore the family photographs, still-frame proofs of a life’s investment. Retta’s stomach growled from the smell of fresh tortillas drifting from the kitchen.

The curandera reached in an apron pocket, pulled out a key and opened up the door to what had once been a walk-in closet.

“Sit,” she said assertively as she entered, motioning Retta to a folding chair. Retta sat down obligingly.

Little packages of dried herbs hung from a clothesline, clipped with pink plastic clothespins. Extending his stigmata, a tapestry of brown skinned Jesus hung on the wall behind her. Brightly colored candles filled the bookshelves — red for love, yellow for courage, green for wealth and fortune. Retta wished that she was Catholic for a moment. She wanted the pretty glass Rosary beads that were draped on a stand in the corner.

Lifting the reading glasses hanging from a chain around her neck, the curandera squinted. “Hablas Español?”

“No,” Retta said, then wished she hadn’t. The disadvantage might affect her reading.

“It’s okay,” the woman said laughing, reading her thoughts. “I speak English.” She reached into her maple desk and produced a pen and paper.

“Write down five questions,” the curandera said, as she pushed the pen and paper across to her.

Retta had her questions ready. Would she ever feel better? Would she find love? Would she leave her parents house and find her own place? Would she have a real profession? Would she ever be able to sleep in the dark? She wrote them down, then looked when she finished.

The curandera reached behind her desk and opened the bottom drawer. With a big heave, she then lifted the biggest Bible Retta ever saw and dropped it on the desk, dust flying out like puffs of smoke.

“Open it and point,” she said. “Then read me the verse where your finger lands.”

The Bible smelled of musty leather. Its pages, matted together, required peeling rather than turning. For convenience sake, she opened the Bible near the beginning. Her finger landed on Genesis 19:8 and she read aloud.

“Now behold, I have two daughters who have not had relations with man; please let me bring them out to you and do to them whatever you like; only do nothing to those men, in as much as they have come under the shelter of my roof.”

This wasn’t a good sign. Retta wanted another reading.

“Hum,” said the curandera pensively.

What did hum mean? thought Retta. She looked at the curandera for a sign. The curandera gave no sign. Instead, she bowed her head, rocked back and forth in her chair, chanting in a low, monotonous tone. “Holy Spirit come down on me. Use me as an instrument of your Word. Holy Spirit guide me, direct me. Show me the way, the truth and the light.”

Then she opened her eyes and answered Retta’s questions.

The answers Retta received were surprisingly promising. The curandera even offered up her nephew Domingo as a possible date. The pain, however was a curse that only ten prayers, two anointed candles and eight more visits could reverse. A curse was just another name for the same familiar pain. To be polite, Retta bought the candles, took the prayers and paid her for her services. Then she thanked her, left and never went back.

Nothing helped. Pills didn’t. Books didn’t. Talking didn’t. The only relief that remained was daydreaming, imagining herself somewhere else. Her favorite place to visit was her own funeral. Hundreds of people sat crammed into upright pews. Plastic speakers piped her eulogy, accommodating latecomers overflowing in the annex. Retta kept a running list of attendees in her head and secretly recruited. That was the main reason she went out and made friends in the first place. Her parents said it was morbid making death a reason for living. Retta said it was just a different twist on things.

In the mornings over breakfast, while her father read Sports and her mother read Lifestyles, Retta read the obituaries. Scanning the casualties of life gave her a sacrilegious satisfaction. In the race with the moving finish line, where bodies just gave out, Retta prevailed. The accomplishment spurred her out of her breakfast starting blocks and into the drudge of the day.

Weeks later, Retta came across the curandera’s name over breakfast. At 72 she died, leaving four grown children and a husband. Her Rosary was 9:00 a.m. at the Catholic Church. A graveside service followed at the Mexican Cemetery. Retta thought about the curandera’s clients. Would they be notified or come for an appointment and find out she was gone? She wondered what would happen to her walk-in closet office. The classifieds held her answer.

As Retta drove to the garage sale, she imagined the garage sale regulars, scavenging through the curandera’s possessions, searching for bargains. Opportunists, they came to capitalize on an American tradition; forget the dead and move on. The image made her angry.

Like an onlooker at a bad accident, Retta knew she shouldn’t look. The urge was too great, however, she couldn’t fight it even if she wanted to. Something called to her. Perhaps it was the spectacle of death. She rarely knew the people in the paper. Maybe it was reconciliation, a chance to bring an enemy closer, or an opportunity to stand in the wake of death and feel its power. She talked herself out of the guilt by promising not to buy anything. She wouldn’t get out of her car.

Retta pulled up to the curb in her Toyota. The poison ivy was gone now for show floor safety. There in the curandera’s front yard lay her shrine dismantled, attractively displayed for inventory close out. To Retta’s surprise however, there were no scavenging regulars. Instead she saw Sylvia and Delia from work, and many other clients, expending considerable time and effort evaluating each of the curandera’s belongings. News of the curandera’s death had somehow spread. They’d come like a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to pay their last respects and purchase relics of their gone Messiah.

One of the curandera’s middle-aged sons stood in the yard, wearing an Allen Auto T-shirt, holding a fistful of money.

“I’ll pay you ten dollars for that candle,” said one woman to the curandera’s son, handing him a candle.

Another woman standing nearby overheard the offer. She too was considering buying the candle and the competition solidified her commitment.

“Mira,” she to the curandera’s son. “I’ll pay you twenty.”

Like a Mexican version of Christie’s, each item sold to the highest bidder. The curandera’s son took the twenty dollars from the second woman and closed the deal.

The urgency for a curandera keepsake infected Retta. She forgot the promise she made herself and left her car. Retta walked around the yard, trying to look discreet. A card table stacked high with books caught her eye. She liked books. Retta flipped through a few pages. She saw diagrams that made her think they were books on Santeria, what whites called Mexican witchcraft.

She closed the books. As she moved to walk away, she stubbed her toe on the corner of something jutting out from underneath the table. There camouflaged in steeping grass sat the curandera’s Bible. Like an undiscovered treasure chest, it waited, large, vintage, arduous to open, yet promising a wealth and richness if unlocked. The Bible needed a new interpreter to decipher its hidden messages.

Retta couldn’t believe her good fortune. Adrenaline rushing, she picked the Bible up almost effortlessly and headed straight for the curandera’s shrewd negotiator.

“How much for the Bible?” she asked. He paused and stared at her a moment.

“Five dollars?” He was unaware the Bible was one of his mother’s most cherished possessions.

Retta nodded. With a concerted effort she balanced the Bible under one arm and reached into her pants pocket for a wadded up five.

Out of the corner of her eye she felt another’s stare. A Mexican girl, no more than seventeen, pregnant with toddler in tow, walked toward her.

“I’ve looked everywhere,” she said desperately as she reached Retta, pointing to the Bible. “Where did you find it?”

Before Retta could answer, the woman interrupted. “Please Miss, please. It’s all I have,” she said, handing Retta a Zip-Loc bag chock-full of quarters.

Retta stared at the woman, sadly. She couldn’t understand how someone could trust another human being that much, give another so much power in her life. The woman believed in someone that now was gone. Retta imagined the fear she felt, and the feeling of abandonment. That she could understand. She handed the woman the Bible. She needed it more than Retta did.

In one afternoon the curandera’s life was scattered across the countryside. Her belongings were placed in new shrines of their own. As she drove, Retta thought about the curandera. No longer a channel to God from earth, she now sat face to face with Him and could speak on her clients’ behalves. She realized they could still believe; they could still have faith. Retta stopped worrying about the Mexican woman and started worrying about herself. Where was her faith? Where was her trust? Why couldn’t she believe?

At the next light Retta made a U-turn and drove to the local bookstore to buy herself a Bible, a small version with crisp pages, the kind that she could carry. The original book of answers went to someone more deserving, but it wasn’t too late for Retta. She could teach herself to read the Bible, interpret and discover its hidden meanings.

Retta has her own place now, a small garage apartment a few blocks down from her parents’ house. Her new Bible rests on her coffee table. Two yellow anointed candles are proudly displayed on her borrowed entertainment center. Every night before she goes to bed, she reads her Bible and the ten prayers. Occasionally, she burns her candles. She thinks often [of] the woman who prayed souls to heaven, sat with sin and sorrow, kept life’s many secrets and looked into tomorrow.

As published: http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/annual/stories/98/hm.goodwin.html