According to the dogs, Aunt Isabel could do no wrong. She would lie on the floor and let them lick her hands and feet, nibble at her ears, spread themselves across her belly and take naps. Sometimes we’d come into the living room and there they would be, all of them asleep: Aunt Isabel and the three mutts. The sun would be slanting in through the window and they would all have their eyes slammed shut, smiles on all their faces, and slow regular breathing filling the space around them. When Aunt Isabel woke up, the dogs woke up too and they all stretched. Aunt Isabel would stand up and we would say, Aunt Isabel, you are covered in dog hair. She just laughed.
According to our great-aunt Sassy, Aunt Isabel has always been “muy loco” which may be a compliment because we are never sure with great-aunt Sassy. What we do know is that Sassy is entirely white and doesn’t speak any Spanish except for, we guess, muy loco. Sassy raised Aunt Isabel when her mother – Sassy’s sister – walked away. This was right after she injected the Mexican strain into the family by having relations with a very nice Mexican boy in the back of his car down at the end of the block where the vacant lot awaits all kinds of illicit activities. The Mexican boy was sent home to Mexico and Aunt Isabel’s mother gave birth and walked away. We are convinced she walked to Mexico, but we don’t know anything for sure.
According to our great-uncle Howard, Sassy and her sister were the ones that were muy loco. He adores Aunt Isabel and ever since she was a little girl he taught her everything he knows. Great-uncle Howard doesn’t know very much, being brain-damaged from something that happened in Vietnam, but still he taught her bird songs, folk songs, five chords on the guitar, whittling, composting, vegetable-garden growing, and sitting in a rocking chair to study the world. That’s what he did best and he told us that even as a little girl, Aunt Isabel could sit and watch the world as good as any man he knew. He told us this whenever we tried it, mainly to chastise us since we couldn’t sit still for any length of time. “How you gonna see the world change,” he would snort, “if you don’t sit still and watch for it?”
According to Aunt Isabel, the best way to be in this world is to dive in like it’s one big swimming pool and feel the sensations – warm or cold or salty. Aunt Isabel likes to dive into the neighborhood trash cans and come home with her treasures that we find meaningless, but she will cut the sleeves off a sweater and sew lace doilies on the shoulders and wear it proudly. She will return with several pieces of a rocking chair and reassemble it into a low-slung lounge chair that sort of rocks if you balance on it just right. Which she does, leaning back on it while she sits next to great-uncle Howard on the porch.
According to the police, Aunt Isabel is diving into things that are not trash cans, has taken to diving through kitchen windows or cellar doors that are not locked and roaming through houses to find more interesting treasure. According to the judge, Aunt Isabel will have to spend some time in a jail cell watching a limited part of the world go by and deprived of any treasures to refurbish. According to the guard that meets us during visiting hours, Aunt Isabel sits in her cell whistling bird songs and refusing to meet with us. Refusing to eat jail food because it is not freshly grown. According to the county’s lawyer, Aunt Isabel will have to be placed in a jail hospital bed and fed via tubes to keep her alive. We all know that no one can make Aunt Isabel do a single thing she doesn’t want to do, because she is muy loco. Great-uncle Howard shakes his head and says, “You can always see death in a man’s eyes just before the bullet hits him.” According to the county coroner, Aunt Isabel did not die of starvation or a heart attack. She just stopped living, he told us.
We lie down on the living room floor and let the dogs drape their furry bodies over ours so they can feel what it is we know and although it makes them sad, at least the dogs understand why Aunt Isabel won’t be coming home.
