Chimichangas

Phillip Bartlet was a typical sixteen year old. Day-to-day life overflowed with contradictions, insolvable problems and mawkish bathos. No matter how hard he tried, he understood absolutely nothing about the chaos swirling around him.  Still, he crawled out of bed each morning hoping for a respite; normal would be just that - routine and unremarkable, but, of course, that never happened. 

“Where’s dad?” The boy with a mop of curly brown hair had just come downstairs for Saturday morning breakfast.

“Got called into work on short notice.” His mother cracked an egg, scrambled the yolk with a dash of light cream then poured the gooey liquid onto a plate in preparation for French toast. Tossing a pad of butter into the frying pan, she set the stove to medium heat. “How’s it feel having a bona fide driver’s license in your wallet?”

 Midweek, the boy passed the Department of Motor Vehicle’s driving test without a hitch. Philip grinned as he settled into a chair.“Like a bona fide grownup.”

 The first slice of French toast having turned crispy brown, she sprinkled it with cinnamon and brought the food to the table.“Then, perhaps, you can do your mother a favor by taking my car on your first major road trip.”

“Where to?”

“To visit Grandpa Bartlett.”

Phillip looked up in disbelief. “After what happened at the barbecue last summer I thought we weren’t on talking terms with grandpa anymore.”

“Nothing's changed,” his mother confirmed, “but I worry about an older man living alone, cut off from humanity, so to speak.” Cut off from humanity - that certainly was an understatement. Grandpa Bartlett, a dyed in the wool conservative, had gone off the deep end six months earlier, when during the Fourth of July barbecue, arguments spiraled out of control. “Your grandfather’s become something of a lone wolf, a misanthrope."

Phillip swirled a slice of French toast in a puddle of maple syrup before teasing it into his mouth. “That last word… what’s it mean?” 

“A mean-spirited oaf who hates humanity.” 

“So,” Phillip quipped, “you want me to pay the mean-spirited oaf a friendly visit?”

Mrs. Bartlett pulled her son close and kissed him on the forehead. “Yes, but because of the bad blood,  you needn’t tell dad, at least not yet.”

* * * * *

The cataclysmic argument that sent Grandpa Bartlett into banishment, like a wayward priest excommunicated from a religious order, took place at the mid-summer, family celebration, when Phillip’s grandfather launched a bitter diatribe cursing the Somali refugees. “Ninety-five percent of those goddam towelheads in Minnesota,” he groused, “are on welfare, sucking the life blood out of us hardworking Americans.”

The term ‘towelheads’ set several younger children into fits of hysterical laughter. For his part, Phillip pictured one of his mother’s plush, Liz Claiborne signature bath towels wrapped around a dark-skinned, hook-nosed Somali’s scalp. “Ninety-five percent!” Grandpa Bartlett sniggered. “The thieving bastards grab a small fortune in SNAP food stamps, Medicaid benefits and subsidized housing.” He rubbed his grizzled jaw with an arthritic hand. “And female genital mutilation… that’s another topic I could -” 

“Shut up already!” Phillip’s father tersely confronted his father. “This is a family gathering, not an opportunity for you to vent your bigoted spleen.” 

Grandpa Bartlett’s eyes blazed. “Want me to leave… is that what you want?”

 Mr. Bartlett shook a menacing fist in the air. “Your behavior’s disgraceful.”

The old man glowered at his son, then flung a paper plate, freshly loaded with a juicy cheeseburger, mounds of cole slaw and potato salad, into the trash. “That’s what I think of you!” 

• * * * * *

Later that night following the Fourth of July debacle Mrs. Bartlett entered Phillips bedroom lugging a cumbersome hardcover art manual that she still treasured from her college days. The temperature, which had topped off in the low nineties by noon, had receded, while the bittersweet scent of marigolds permeated every crevice of the room. “What’s with the book?” Phillip asked.

“Your grandfather,” she began in a halting manner, ignoring the question altogether, “wasn’t always so terribly bitter. Before Grandma Bartlett’s stroke he was a kind-hearted soul, their marriage full of light-hearted joy.” Thumbing through the weighty book, she paused at an unusual painting by the French modernist, Marc Chagall. “This painting tells you everything you need to know about what he lost when grandma died and why your grandfather acts the way he does.” She laid the bulky book on her son’s lap.

“Geeeez!” Phillip was staring at a garish painting titled The Birthday in which the artist was floating dream-like in the air above his fiancé, Bella, his head craned upside down and backward as he twisted around to kiss his future wife on the lips. Bella was depicted holding a bouquet of flowers and also floating high off the cozy apartment floor in a state of loving bliss. 

To Phillip’s untrained eye, the outlandish imagery seemed rather mawkish, poorly drawn by a third-rate artist with no sense of proper proportions or physical anatomy. The skin  tones were all wrong, and the painter never bothered to flesh out the facial details. “That woman in the black dress clutching the bouquet of flowers is his beloved wife, Bella,” Mrs. Bartlett commented.  “The couple met when Bella was still a teenager in their home town of Vitebsk, Belarus. In 1915, Chagall finally married Bella, despite her parents’ opposition. The Birthday was painted by Chagall in 1915 just a few weeks before their wedding.”

“That’s nice.” Phillip couldn’t wrap his teenage brain around the notion of Grandpa Bartlett, who called Somali refugees towelheads and welfare frauds, blissfully floating about the stratosphere, but what ther heck did he know. With her master’s degree in fine arts, his mother had worked as curator at a small museum west of Boston several years prior to marrying and raising a family. The boy yawned and cracked his knuckles.  He really wanted to go to sleep. Mrs. Bartlett finally lifted the weighty book off his stomach and left the room.

After Grandma Bartlett took ill, Grandpa Bartlett quit his job and took early retirement so he could nurse his wife back to health.  Phillip’s mother promptly began a novena, a nine-day prayer for spiritual intentions. In the Bible, the number nine is associated with suffering, as when Mary and the disciples waited and prayed for the Holy Spirit for nine days between the Ascension and Pentecost. She chose Saint Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost souls. Saint Anthony was well known for his powerful intercession with both physical and spiritual losses. Mrs. Bartlett repeated her daily petition and even fasted several days on weekends but with no demonstrable results. 

 Six months later, a massive heart attack put an end to all the family’s furtive prayers and best intentions. Once Grandma Bartlett had given up the ghost, things went badly awry. All hope having evaporated, like a rudderless ship on choppy waters, Grandpa Bartlett lost his bearing. Worse yet, he had nothing more to do with friends, neighbors or casual acquaintances; when Phillip’s mother telephoned her father-in-law, he refused to answer the phone  or return messages. 

•  * * * *

The twenty minute drive to Grandpa Bartlett’s house was uneventful. Pulling up in front of the rusty-red clapboard house, Phillip killed the engine and surveyed the situation. His grandfather’s pockmarked Ford pickup truck was resting in the driveway. The lawn was a tangled mess of weeds, crabgrass and broken tree limbs, the unsightly shingles and shutters in need of a coat of fresh paint. Before reaching the brick stairs, the door cracked open. “Phillip,” His grandfather, still dressed in flannel pajamas and bedroom slippers stood in the open doorway. “You got your driver’s license?” The older man was smiling broadly, waving him into the house.

In the kitchen a bronze-skinned woman with high cheekbones, fleshy lips and decidedly Hispanic features was sitting at the kitchen table eating an exotic concoction of beans, rice, chili peppers and intriguing spices that the young boy could not readily identify. “Who’s she,” Phillip whispered.

“Rosalita… the cleaning lady. She does my laundry, vacuums and takes out the trash.”

The woman, who looked to be in her late sixties, smiled sweetly and mumbled something in a language Phillip didn’t readily recognize.

“I’m not quite sure, but I think she wants to know,” Grandpa Bartlett explained, “if you’d like a chimichangas.”

After they finished eating Rosalita brought the soiled dishes to the sink. As she washed them, Grandpa Bartlett rinsed the soapy cutlery and stacked them in a metal strainer. “I want to apologize for how I behaved during the Fourth of July barbecue,” the older man confessed in a contrite, soft-spoken manner. Placing a wire whisk on the drying mat, he added, “I was totally in the wrong and acted like an idiot.” 

“You might have gotten a bit carried away,” Phillip agreed, “with that Somali nonsense.”

“Even though the Somalis were up to their eyeballs in food stamp fraud, I should never have called them towelheads. That was certainly a bit extreme, but they come from a country ruled by ruthless warlords.”

“So you don’t hate them?”

“I think," Grandpa Bartlett deftly parried the question, “few have any intentions of ever assimilating. Somalis don’t believe in America as the great ‘melting pot’; they’re a bedraggled band of cultural misfits with no use for the Protestant work ethic.” Grandpa Bartlett’s voice was tempered with deep sorrow not bitterness, fatalistic resignation having replaced toxic rage.

Rosalita, who had been hovering over the stove, returned to the kitchen table with three steaming mugs of frothy liquid and a tray of oversized pastries that resembled Mexican tortillas rather than traditional cookies. “Champurrada,” Rosalita said, rolling her ‘r’s with a thick, guttural accent.

“Traditional Guatemalan cookies,” his grandfather interpreted.

Phillip sipped tentatively at the creamy drink.“ Hot chocolate?” 

“Yes, but nothing like ours,” Grandpa Bartlett replied. “There’s unsweetened chocolate, cornstarch and fresh-brewed coffee along with cinnamon, vanilla extract and milk.”

Phillip sipped again. “I like theirs better than ours.” 

“The champurradas,” his grandfather gestured at the huge cookie, “are meant for dipping in the hot chocolate.” “They’re like Italian biscottis but with the nutty flavor of sesame seeds.”

• * * * **

Five hours later when Phillip finally arrived home, his mother was in a full-blown panic. “Dear God! I was ready to call out the National Guard. What happened?”

“You told me to visit Grandpa Bartlett,” Phillip replied nonchalantly, placing the car keys on the living room table.

“And what exactly did you discover?” 

When he finished describing the visit, Mrs. Bartlett retreated to the kitchen where a pot of beef stew was simmering on the back burner. An hour later, Phillip’s father returned home from work and the family sat down to eat. Midway through the meal, Mrs. Bartlett announced, “After I wash the dishes and put the food away there will be a family meeting.”

Her husband reached for a warm bun. “What’s the topic?”

“I fixed peach cobbler with whipped cream for dessert,” she replied, altogether ignoring the question. “Perhaps we can eat it in the living room along with a pot of fresh-perked coffee.”

A half hour later after the dishes were rinsed clean and silverware stored away, Mrs. Bartlett placed the peach cobbler on the dining room table. “This is rather unusual,” her husband noted.

“Well it’s been a rather unusual day, to say the least.” She cut three generous slices. “Phillip paid your father a visit. He’s hired a cleaning lady.”

Mr. Bartlett blinked violently and stared at his son. “My father… a cleaning lady?”

“Rosalinda Gutierrez… she’s not really a cleaning lady,” his wife qualified, “at least not in the conventional sense.” Mr. Bartlett’s jaw sagged precipitously, but no words emerged. Mrs. Bartlett poured her husband’s coffee. Handing him the steamy  cup, she gestured at the peach cobbler, indicating that he might want to sample the fruity dessert before they continued. “It’s a rather long-winded, convoluted story.” Only now did she turn to Phillip, who was sitting quietly on the divan next to the grand piano. 

As Phillip explained it, returning home from the supermarket several months earlier in November, Grandpa Bartlett heard strange noises coming from the rear garden. When he went to inspect, he discovered Rosalita, exhausted and slumped disconsolately on the ground under a scraggily shag bark maple tree. Cold and hungry, she had traveled north with a band of illegals and somehow became separated from the others. Grandpa Bartlett brought her indoors, gave her a warm meal and a woolen sweater. 

“One of my mother’s sweaters?” Mr. Bartlett asked. Phillip nodded. “Does the Hispanic woman speak any English?”

“Not a word,” Phillip replied, “and grandpa never bothered with foreign languages.” Phillip, who had taken conversational Spanish since middle school, could only manage a passable understanding of what Rosalita told him.

Mr. Bartlett screwed his head to one side trying to make sense of the unfathomable. “Then how in the name of God do they communicate?”

Phillip, who had been eyeing the peach cobbler since his mother laid it on the dining room table, chose a generous slice and raised the fork to his lips. “Grandpa says that, since he turned his back on humanity, he hadn’t spoken more than a half dozen words to anyone on the planet so a stray woman in the house was just more of the same.” In response to his father’s dumbfounded expression Phillip added, “Communicating without words.”

“She didn’t mind?”

“No, not in the least. Her children had all married and moved away, while her husband drank himself to death. She fled north to salvage what little was left of her twilight years. After being on the run for months, she’s finally found a safe haven, a warm home and friendly face.”

“So Rosalita Gutierrez is not really a cleaning lady.”

“She’s an undocumented alien seeking refuge and American citizenship.” “Grandpa already hired a lawyer specializing in immigration law to move the process along.” Phillip paused just long enough to finish his peach cobbler and fill the plate with a slightly larger slice. “After the dust settles they’ll marry.”

Mr. Bartlett rose from his seat, circled the perimeter of the room five times with his hands knotted behind his back and stared out the picture window into the darkened street then sat back down. “My father hates Hispanics.” “He calls them wetbacks, bean bandits, border bunnies, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, third world banana republic lowlifes…”

“It would appear,” his wife interjected, “that the twosome have fallen in love and your father’s bigoted beliefs no longer apply… at least where the Guatemalan, Ms. Rosalita Gutierrez, is concerned.”

“I like her,” Phillip spoke softly. “She’s very sweet and a damn good cook.”

Mr. Bartlett felt his brains careening into dazed mindlessness. “You ate with them?” 

“Chimichangas.” Phillip's eyes sparkled remembering the tangy meal of deep-fried burritos on a flour tortilla with beans, hamburger, salsa and guacamole. After savoring Rosaltita’s tortilla he couldn’t imagine ever crossing the threshold of a Taco Bell.

“Chimichangas,” Mr. Bartlett repeated. “What’s the woman like?”

“She’s older with dark eyes and a huge gold tooth in the front of her mouth when she smiles.” Phillip paused just long enough to collect his thoughts. “With or without spoken language, they seem to understand each other far better than most people.” 

“God works in inscrutable ways,” Phillip mused, not bothering to share his private impression. The ‘lost soul’ discovered Rosalita cowering under the shag bark maple tree. Grandpa Bartlett offered her his deceased wife’s woolen sweater, and the Guatemalan, undocumented alien returned the favor with heartfelt devotion and a new lease on life.