Tropic of Orange | Asian American Bookview

Tropic of Orange
by Karen Tei Yamashita
Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 1997, 270 pp, $14.95
A talented Japanese American novelist slices into the L.A. scene from the perspective of a pair of Mexican illegal aliens.

EXCERPT

afaela Cortes spent the morning barefoot, sweeping both dead and living things from over and under beds, from behind doors and shutters, through archways, along the veranda -- sweeping them all across the the deep shadows and luminous sunlight carpeting the cool tile floors. her slender arms worked the broom industriously through the air -- already thickening with tepid heat -- and along the floor, her feet following, printing their moisture in dark footprints over baked clay. Every morning, a small pile of assorted insects and tiny animals -- moths and spiders, lizards and beetles -- collected, their brittle bodies tossed in waves along the floor, a cloudy hush of sandy soil, cobwebs, and human hair. An iguana, a crab, and a mouse. And there was the scorpion, always dead -- its fragile back broken in the middle. And the snake that slithered away at the urging of her broom -- probably not poisonous, but one never knew. Every morning it was the same. Every morning, she swept this mound of dead and wiggling things to the door and off the side of the veranda and into the dark green undergrowth with the same fluorish. Occasionally, there was more of one species or the other, but each somehow always made its way back into the house. The iguana, the crab, and the mouse, for example, were always alive. On some days, it seemed to twirl before her broom communicating a kind of dance that seemed to send a visceral message up the broom to her finger tips. There was no explanation for any of it. It made no difference if she closed the doors and shutters at the first sign of dusk or if she left the house unoccupied and tightly shut for several days. Every morning when the house was thrown open to the sunlight, she knew that she and the boy had not slept alone that night. Hummingbirds and parakeets fluttered across the rooms, stirring the languid humidity settled by the night, frantically searching for escape through the open lace curtains while crawling lives hid beneath furniture or presented itself lifeless at her feet.

     When she first came to the house, she couldn't find a broom to accomplish this daily ritual, not to mention for sweeping the clouds of cobwebs from the dark, rough hewn rafters. Gabriel had left an American vacuum cleaner in a closet -- an old steel Electrolux purchased at the Rose Bowl swap meet for thirty dollars. When the electricity wasn't shut off, Rafaela dragged the vacuum -- the hard Bakelite wheels bumping over the clay tiles and the woven throw rugs -- from one room to the next, but soon depleted Gabriel's supply of vacuum bags. Recycling these bags was nearly impossible, and she did not have the heart to dump them without releasing the trapped animals inside. One day, attempting to use the vacuum cleaner without the bags resulted in jaming the gears with pieces of the crab, not to mention everything else, and that was the end of the electrolux.
     When Rafaela told Gabriel that the Electrolux had died, there was an uncomfortable silence on the other end of the line, probably because Gabriel had had some idea that a stainless steel vacuum cleaner was something incredibly wise to have in the salty humidity of Mazatlan and also because he had lugged it 1,000 miles on one particularly sacrificial trip made in a borrowed Volkswagen van. The story about the crab seemed unlikely. His land was much too far from the sea. Yes, it sounded impossible, but why would Rafaela make such a thing up?
     "I bought a broom," she said, pressing the back of her hand against the sweat of her forehead. "If things get better between us, maybe I can get one of those upright vacuums from Bobby. Actually a dry-wet vac would be best. Bobby swears by them."

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