Sabrina & Corina: Stories

The narrator opens this story by stating, “The day before Pearla Ortiz killed a man, she had lunch at home with her granddaughter Alana” (105). Alana works in marketing, in a skyscraper downtown. Presently, she tells her grandmother that they will be looking at a few housing communities for the elderly that week. Alana has previously encouraged her grandmother to sell her home on Galapago Street to move into senior housing. Alana reasoned that the rental market would fetch her grandmother a good price, and that senior living facilities were much better and sophisticated places than they once were.

Pearla avoids responding to Alana’s assertion that they will soon be looking at facilities: “Her granddaughter looked so bossy in her career clothes, but whenever Pearla looked at her, really looked at her, she still saw Alana as an eight-year-old girl who had come to live with her grandparents on Galapago Street after her mother, Mercedes, died. Alana arrived with nothing more than a suitcase filled with stuffed animals and chapter books” (106).

When Alana came to live with Pearla and her husband Avel, tending to the family grief became one of Pearla’s additional responsibilities. Although she often found ways to drown out the sound of Avel’s crying to protect Alana from hearing it, Pearla now wonders whether she should have let her grandmother hear those cries.

Pearla and Alana pause on the front porch before Alana leaves to return to work. As Pearla looks at the neighborhood, she realizes that many of its elderly residents are now gone: “While Pearla was once friendly with everyone on Galapago Street, now she knew almost no one” (107). Too, before she leaves, Pearla makes her desires known: “I have no interest in leaving, mija […] Hell, the Lord will take me soon enough,” she says to Pearla (107).

After Pearla killed a home invader, Pearla and Alana found themselves at the District 7 Police Station at six o’clock in the morning. Pearla was cleared of any wrongdoing. The police found that the man whom Pearla killed broke in using the back door and had a loaded nine-millimeter gun at the time of his death—Although Pearla remembered thinking that he only had a knife. When Pearla asked about the intruder’s age, the detective reported that the man was 19 years old. The detective continued: “The city is in flux, ladies. Lots of mixed income levels. They say things will cool down once the area is fully gentrified, but I’m skeptical” (108). Also, when he asked Alana where she was from, she told him that she was born and raised in the Westside, but now lived in Highlands. He corrected her using the new name for the neighborhood—the Northside. Before the two women left that day, Pearla was also sure to ask the detective for the name of the man she killed. It was Cody Moore.

Pearla was not a stranger to crime during her time in the Westside, on Galapago Street. The first break-in she experienced happened in the summer of 1956. Pearla and Avel were newlyweds then, and had come home from Benny’s Dance all, ready to make love, only to find their living room ransacked. A box of silver jewelry which had been stored in the bedroom closet was missing: “For over twenty years [Pearla] sought out the stolen silver in pawnshops, once reclaiming a turquoise cuff from the glass case at an antique shop on South Broadway” (109). The woman behind the counter had told Pearla that the cuff would “look wonderful with [her] coloring” (109). Avel installed metal bars in the home’s windows after this first robbery.

Another home invasion occurred during the fall of 1978. At the time, Pearla and Avel were grieving the direction that their daughter’s life had taken. Mercedes, their daughter, “was addicted to alcohol and barbiturates, hitchhiking from town to town across the Southwest. In Bisbee, Arizona, after going to an all-night club with a dirt floor, she slept with a man whom she only remembered as having one blue eye and one green” (110). She was pregnant with Alana and had rented herself a small apartment after landing a job at an office supply store on Sixteenth Street. Her baby shower’s lone attendants were her parents and her best friend, “a warmhearted gay man named Miguel Orlando” (110): “Within a decade, both Miguel and Mercedes would be dead—she of hepatitis and Miguel of AIDS—but the shower was beautiful,” the narrator states (110).

When Pearla and Avel arrived back at their home that day, Pearla told Avel that she knew the baby would be a girl, and a strong one at that. They reveled in their joy for a few moments, before Pearla noticed broken glass in the corner of her bedroom. She caught a glimpse of a small child perched on the bars of the shattered window, before the child made off with the diamond necklace that Avel had bought for Pearla after winning money at the slot machines in Central City. The following day, Pearla asked Avel to cover the bedroom window entirely with a wooden board. When the task was finished, the room was equally sealed off to both invaders and sunlight. Pearla decorated the window area with pink satin and multi-colored scarves: “One night, after the boards were up for nearly two years, Pearla dreamed of the child with light eyes, its legs sliding beneath the satin, moving like tentacles over everything in sight. Pearla then purchased a silver-plated pistol and placed it in her stockings drawer, never believing she would actually fire it” (111).

Even though Alana hired a professional cleaner following the shooting, Pearla still found dried blood inside of the cracks of the kitchen walls. As she waited for her granddaughter to come pick her up and bring her to the retirement homes, she sponged the blood off the walls using a salt and vinegar solution. She also “fought her mind’s tendency to drift” while having a flashback to the moments of the shooting (111). She remembered that “his fingernails were wide and chewed, and his saucerlike green eyes were dryly blank” (111). Pearla also lamented her own mistaking of his knife for a gun, lambasting herself for the failure of her eyes. Also, “she was ashamed that even in her old age, she wanted to live more than to die” (111).

Alana and Pearla arrive at the first residential facility, named St. Lorena’s. The facility overlooks a lake and is handsomely appointed. Pearla asks the tour guide if there is a Catholic church nearby, and the tour guide says that there is—and that it performs masses in Spanish twice a day: “We speak English,” Alana tells the tour guide curtly (112). Next, they tour a studio apartment, which the tour guide calls “a popular choice for independent elderly women rather than using the word widow” (112). When Pearla asks where the resident of such a unit is supposed to store all of her belongings, the tour guide gently says, “Learning to separate ourselves from unnecessary clutter is one of the hardest aspects of transitioning out of an independent living situation and into a community home” (113).

On another day, Pearla and Alana go to Mt. Olivet’s cemetery: “They first drove by the graves belonging to rich folks, those with marble angels and stone beacons. All her life, Pearla had put aside money for a respectable grave, prematurely using the money for Mercedes, giving her daughter a proper stone” (113). Pearla’s own parents had been laid to rest in the desert “with only wooden crosses to mark their bones” (113). Over time, their grave markers were lost in the landscape, forcing Pearla to leave “wildflowers and sage near a mile marker that seemed close enough” (113).

When Alana and Pearla arrive at Avel’s grave, it is unkempt. Pearla explains that the groundskeepers do not regularly mow this side of the cemetery, which is “what the archdiocese used to call the Spanish section. It [is] near what was once referred to as the Oriental and Negro sections, across the tracks from the suicides and unbaptized babies. The rules weren’t enforced anymore, but families were buried near one another and so things stayed intact” (113). Pearla and Alana then scrub the headstones themselves. There is already a stone there for Pearla, with the death year left blank. The two women say a prayer when Avel’s headstone is looking shiny, and place plastic marigolds on the grave.

The area where Mercedes is buried looks like a plain, empty field unless seen up close: “It was only standing directly above the graves that Pearla could read any names. Destiny Dixon, Sabrina Cordova, Susana Mullins, and there, toward a chain-link fence beside the train tracks, Mercedes Angelica Ortiz” (114). There, Mercedes speaks to her mother, telling her that she missed her very much: “Years ago, she had spoken of buying a nicer plot for her mother, but over time she had changed her mind or, worse, maybe she had forgotten” (114). Pearla holds back a sob. Her husband’s death had been easier to handle, as it seemed in keeping with the natural order for him to die before her. However, her daughter’s death had caused a singular and piercing grief: “I pray for you, my baby. Every day,” she says over the grave (115).

During the drive home, Pearla looks out at the new housing developments sprawling across the neighborhood. They put the image of locusts in her mind. She says, “If your grandfather was alive, mija, he would be ashamed to live anywhere but our home” (115). Alana replies, “Some drug addict came into your house with a gun and tried to kill you. You’re not staying there, Gramma, and that’s the end of it” (115). Pearla falls silent and begins wondering about Cody Moore’s final resting place. She wonders if it is in a nice part of a cemetery, and if anyone brings him flowers.

The night of the home invasion, Pearla dreamed a warped childhood memory of her time in Saguarita, where her father once worked as a miner. There, her family had lived in a company-owned home, where the floor was dirt and there was no electricity or heat. In the dream, Pearla was running:

between the mountains, the land beneath her feet jagged with quartz and sagebrush, her little body a blur of white lace and black braids. It was church Sunday and she was late. When Pearla’s legs couldn’t carry her any faster, the wind picked up and she lifted over pine trees and the mirrored ponds, where she saw herself sailing toward that adobe steeple with her arms open to the land (116).

Pearla had then jolted awake, after sensing foreign movement in her kitchen. A vision also came to her: “a young Anglo man with an exhausted heart, nearly dead as he shivered in a room without windows, without lights” (116). She then entered the kitchen with her pistol and found Cody trying to undo the locks to the basement door. The narrator tells us that there was actually nothing of value in the basement, and that the attempted robbery was therefore an “unfortunate misunderstanding” (116). Pearla remembers time slowing down in those moments, and becoming certain that Avel would be coming to the rescue at any moment, before snapping back to the reality that Avel was dead. Cody, with eyes and a body that refused to fully focus, then reached into his waistband for what Pearla thought was a knife. Pearla pleaded with him— saying “please, please” before ultimately shooting him in the side (117). She later told the 911 dispatcher that she aimed low, for his legs.

On Pearla’s last day in the house on Galapago Street, Alana helps her grandmother pack away the last of her belongings—“all of it junk, and all of it precious” (118). Alana tries to comfort her grandmother, telling her that she knows it’s difficult to take only the necessities: “It’s not like I’ll take any of it with me when I’m dead […] Might as well start now,” Pearla replies (118).

Pearla then finds a necklace on her vanity. It has a heart-shaped amethyst charm on it. Avel gifted it to her in the year before he died. When Pearla looks at the charm, she initially thinks that its color has changed. However, she realizes that it is a ray of sunlight that is distorting its color. Her eye follows the sun ray and she discovers a small hole in the board covering the window. She then enlists Alana’s help to take the board covering the window down: “She [jimmies] out the rusted nails bottom to top until the dusty boards [drop] with a crash and, for the first time in forty years, the bedroom [is] flooded with light” (118).