The finale began with a small box in the center of the makeshift stage. The lights dimmed and the audience grew quiet. Then a spotlight shone on a human hand, rising out of the box. It was a small hand, pinkish brown. Another hand followed, then a head, and then a whole girl appeared, swelling out of the glass box like an expanding sponge. She wore a blue leotard and her hair was pulled back in a tight braid tied with a blue ribbon. She stood without smiling, then made a low bow that became a somersault and then a series of rippling rolls. Next she stretched on her stomach on the spangled cloth and slowly lifted her feet and legs, until she was curled in a circle, holding her ankles with her hands and staring out between her legs into the crowd. Shifting the weight to her feet, she rolled herself upright, still with that blank look, and turned her back to us. There was a rose I hadn’t noticed before at her heels.

She tilted her head back and began to bend, until she was staring at us upside down. I remember the way her black braid slithered down her blue leotard and down her legs and finally hit the floor. And I remember seeing her teeth appear, bright and unexpected, to bite the stem of the rose.

On Palm Sunday Shelly and I wore our new dresses to watch the procession of the Virgin around the village. The women wore flowered hats; the men’s white shirts shone in the sun. Shelly and I followed the crowd to church. The church was at the other end of the village, a long, whitewashed building with a wooden roof. Palm fronds and flowers lined the path to the door. Inside, the church was hushed and cool, lit by the high windows and the candles on the floor where Jesus Christ lay, nailed to the cross. His wooden body was gruesomely pale, except where blood darkened his wounds. Shelly and I waited in the doorway, holding hands. We watched Balbina, and then we approached together and placed our sweaty coins in the collection tray, and bent to kiss his cold feet.

My mother had been working in the cane fields for about a month when she turned yellow. This was just after the dead man turned up in the Rio Hondo; people teased her, saying he must have been a relative. Her arms were yellow, her legs, her belly, her face, even the whites of her eyes. She crawled into her hammock and stayed there. Shelly and I brought her bottles of fresh water. Balbina placed steaming bowls of chicken broth into our hands and we carried them carefully down the hill to our house. ‘It’s hepatitis,’ our mother told us. But though neither Shelly nor I said a word, we were thinking the same thing: She had turned the color of the only dead person we’d ever seen.

Eventually, my grandmother in New York found out that my mother was sick. There were no telephones in San Antonio and no real way to reach someone in an emergency. My grandmother got on a plane, flew to Miami, changed to another plane. She flew into Belize back when the landing strip for an international flight was a clearing in the jungle. The airport was a two-room building where customs officers in khaki uniforms opened her bags and poked through them, then nodded. My grandmother rode in the back of an army truck over bumpy dirt roads, past trees hung with vines. She arrived at San Antonio in one of the cane trucks and took the ferry across the river. A group of people stood at the ferry dock, waiting to cross, and my grandmother accosted them. ‘I’m looking for my daughter, Jennifer. Where is Jennifer?’ They smiled back at her. ‘Ah, su hija! Yeni!’ They pointed up the Rio Hondo. ‘She’s out swimming in the river.’

Nostalgia is a funny thing. I remember vividly the very air of San Antonio, the warm, sweet, almost rotten smell of the river and the jungle, the feel of green clay between my fingers. I remember the taste of ripe guava and the taste of guava not quite ripe but eaten anyway. I remember all the words to ‘Springtime in the Rockies,’ a sentimental song our friend Lohinos played, the light of the kerosene lantern shining on his polished guitar. Everything from the language to the air was new to me, and so I noticed everything, without knowing I noticed it. I learned to see the way I learned Spanish, unaware, and it was in Belize that I learned it.

Now, twenty-two years later, I travel when I can, looking for amazement, for a girl in a blue leotard who seems to have no bones, for plants that wilt at the touch of a finger and then come back to life. Those months in Belize were among the most vivid in my life and I remember them with an ache of longing. But at the time it was a world too raw, too strong for me. And when my mother announced the following year that we were returning to San Antonio, I shook my eight-year-old head and refused to go.

That spring we lived in Canvastown there were mushrooms the size of dinner plates in the fields, frayed at the gills with lice.

My mother wore a feather in her hair, naked in profile, always painting.

My father, stringy ponytail, pink shirt, threw pots in a cow shed.

I wanted to be the neighbour’s child.

She, fat and breathless, would seat me on top of their enormous freezer, a mortuary of animal carcasses, feed me bright yellow pickle, doughy bread.

The odour of basset hounds, mutton gristle and hot vinyl.

She created nothing, sat indoors eating melted cheese from a dented frying pan.

Furrows on her husband’s brow plowed deep, skin red as raw beef.

He could listen with the trees, make a willow stick dance to the song of an underground stream.

The flick of my mother’s brush on canvas, buzz of mason bees building clay houses, the dull roar of my father’s kiln.

Across the road, the weaver at his loom, weaving a poltergeist’s footfalls into a vermilion carpet.

Sound gradually drinking in all its listeners.

The fat woman and I didn’t listen.

She was bored with the water diviner.

Resplendent in a green chenille housecoat, she turned afternoon into evening by watching Bewitched on TV.

I liked to lie in her overgrown garden, watch crab apples pull malevolent faces from the tree, poke out their wormy tongues at passersby.

Appetites

Sara said her father had been a thief; she remembered other people’s fruit lighting up the bushes, oranges like planets, old sweet apples falling into her father’s flour-bag shirt. She ate nasturtiums, waxy honey. Sugar was forbidden.

Dan would gut Sunday loaves, the colour and texture of kapok. After school, mouth stained green; jelly crystals straight from the packet. Every night chocolate pudding thick and dark as estuary mud flats.

He had a milk run, drank from scratched glass bottles, cream coating his throat when he swallowed.

Sara was allowed goat’s milk, thistle milk, any milk but cow’s. That’s what separated them, she said, his complacent suburban appetites.

She thought of milk from the top of the bottle as she fingered the satin skin of his inside wrist.

Kanji

My father and I slept in a Japanese car case, kanji printed on the wall in place of family portraits.

Nights I lay awake, the black characters assumed flesh.

Clothes rustling as they changed posture.

Every morning a walk through macrocarpa to a household of stained armrests, chapatis and chipped enamel mugs.

Only chopsticks lay in our drawers, Hand-whittled and oiled.