“Man, I can’t wait to bust the piñata!”
I’d been chattering some variation of that sentence at my mother for hours, and she’d had enough. She had wisely exiled me to the carport, where I dunked strips of newspaper into a flour-water paste and slopped them over the taut skin of a red balloon. After the paper dried, I would pop the balloon inside and be left with a hollow shell to decorate, fill with candy, and, finally, destroy. I imagined myself smashing it in a single blow, then dancing in an ecstatic frenzy as candy rained down around me.
Now I was back in the house, impatient for what would no doubt be the most joyous moment of my young life. “Mom, what should I bust it with? Should I bust it with a broom? Or the handle? A baseball bat would really bust it. Do we have one? I’m gonna bust it wide open!”
Mom huffed, set down her wine glass, and stood from the sofa where she and Dad had been sitting. “Come with me.”
She led me up the stairs to the attic door. I shrank back. My sister and I were not allowed in the attic; the floors, our parents said, were not safe to put our weight on. But Mom beckoned me up, and I followed.
The attic was dark, musty, cobwebbed, but not as spooky as I’d hoped. Near the door slumped boxes full of Christmas decorations and other old junk; further back, amid the pink heaps of insulation, lay other boxes and shapes, stuff left behind by the previous owners of the house. Mom showed me where to stand on the strong wooden beams and told me to come back. I gingerly took a few steps. The floor showed no signs of splintering beneath me, but I tiptoed just in case.
Mom pushed a few trash bags aside and pointed at a lumpy gray shape about the size of a Cocker spaniel. Squinting in the dim light of the single yellow bulb, I made out the head and shoulders of a man, roughly cast in cement. The man looked sad, perhaps constipated, his eyes cast up as if searching for a buzzing fly. He had a mustache, beard, and a crown of thorns.
“That,” Mom said, jabbing her finger at Jesus, “is a bust. You are going to burst the piñata.”
She continued, explaining grammatical nuances, as I stared at the cement Christ. What was it? Part of a statue or birdbath? How did it get up here? How long had it been pressing down above our heads?
“So your balloon can burst, your piñata can burst, those are verbs. Bust is a noun, a statue of a head and shoulders, like this one, but bust is not a verb,” Mom finished.
“A bust can also be a woman’s chest!” Dad yelled from downstairs.
Jesus rolled his eyes. How heavy must it be? Much heavier than me. That spot in the attic where it rested – was it above the living room? Or just to the side, above our dining table, where we no longer bothered to pray before we ate? Above my chair, where I was supposed to try at least three bites of everything on my plate but sometimes hid the more disgusting tidbits in my napkin?
“Right,” Mom called down to Dad. Then to me, “Still a noun, not a verb. Got it?”
I said that I did, and she allowed me to descend, back to the living room where Dad was enjoying his wine, Dylan playing on his stereo, the kitchen that smelled of beef and onions simmering in spaghetti sauce.
Outside, my lumpy piñata was almost dry. I don’t remember how I decorated it – a globe? a face? – or what I filled it with. I remember that when I hit it with a broomstick, the form didn’t crack open, but only dented. Dad had to finally tear a piece away to let the candy fall free.
We lived in that house for years, and I was careful, careful, to be good. I studied hard, obeyed my parents, used bust and burst correctly, and tried not to jostle the house. Meanwhile, God’s terrible jawbreaker trembled overhead.
