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At Bob’s Big Boy, one day in the summer, my mother and I pressed together in the phone booth and emptied her purse out on the metal ledge. There were hundreds of scraps of paper, pencils, leaking pens, scuffed makeup tubes, brushes woven with a fabric of lint and hair, a bra, and finally, my mother’s brown leather address book, with the pages falling out. We wanted to call my father in Las Vegas. It was already over a year since we’d flown there. The number was written, carefully, in brown ink.

“This was when my dad was still living with us, but he would come to services from work, so when we went home afterward I’d have to choose who to go home with.  I don’t know if it upset my dad, but I always went home with my mom.  Mostly because she drove the Beetle, which was so much more fun. She would play these old Patti Smith cassettes, and I’d sing with her. But the best part was she’d let me put on the dome light, so it felt like we were in this little space capsule, just the two of us. That’s my favorite memory, me and my mom going home from temple Friday nights.  That car was like a lit-up igloo rolling through the dark.” 

“The American girl will judge the leg contest!” they announced. I was still hoping that I had misunderstood them, even as German techno music was turned on and all the boys in the camp, ages eight to fourteen, were paraded out behind a screen that hid their bodies from the waist up; identifying numbers had been pinned to their shorts. I was given a clipboard with a form on which to rate their legs on a scale from one to ten. Gripped by panic, I stared at the clipboard. Nothing in either my life experience or my studies had prepared me to judge an adolescent boys’ leg contest. Finally the English teacher, who appeared to understand my predicament, whispered to me some scores of her own devising, and I wrote them on the form as if I had thought of them myself.

And we divorced in the survives            and O

It was a comedy            and first you ever slept with me

And marry me and marry me and O

How fat I used to be

You will begin to listen to the story of Josie’s life in Spanish and English. You will begin to like the way she looks. At moments you will confuse her with the stripper dancing naked on the table next to where the two of you talk. Josie will be telling you about her marriage, about her husband, about her divorce, about her daughter, about her sadness and disappointment. You will have more drinks than her.

“Recipe” from THE MAGIC OF BLOOD by Dagoberto Gilb © 1993 by the University of New Mexico Press; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc. “Recipe” originally appeared in Winners on the Pass Line (Cinco Puntos Press).

Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.