The Fresco

by Sheri S. Tepper

The bait only works if the fish is hungry.

  Carlos was unresponsive. “Aw, Mom. Leave me alone. I need a break from school. I’m not ready for college. I need to, you know, give this gallery thing a chance! Have a time of self discovery!”

  Three separate times Goose or Marsh or Benita herself found jobs for Carlos, but Carlos didn’t want a steady job. He preferred to sleep until noon, to take long, long showers, eat like a lion and go out with friends most nights. He worked for his grandfather at the salvage yard every now and then, just long enough to earn money for his car, or when he needed money for gas or repairs. Now and then he’d get some odd job with his friends, moving furniture or bussing tables. The rest of the time he ate, watched television, slept, and drove around all night with several other young men who were doing pretty much the same thing.

  The bait only works if the fish is hungry, Benita would say to herself, wiping her eyes, remembering Mami’s face when she said it. You couldn’t make a fish hungry. You just had to wait.

  So long as Benita let Carlos alone, he seemed contented enough. If she tried to push him, he retreated into gloom. The sulks, her father said, who had no patience with the boy. Melancholia, Benita read in nineteenth-century books. Depression, Marsh said, but then Marsh had a family that reveled in despondency. The doctor prescribed antidepressants, but Carlos refused to take them.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me. Leave me alone.”

  Two years like that. He was nineteen going on twenty when Angelica graduated, proudly presenting her mother not only with her diploma but also a letter from a California university granting her a scholarship! One of her teachers had applied for her, and she had saved the news for a surprise.

  “I didn’t want to get your hopes up, Mama. Isn’t it wonderful? I’ve always wanted to go to California. The scholarship won’t be enough, all by itself, but I’ll get a job, and maybe a student loan…”

  That was when Benita held her close, crying happily, and told her about the secret bank account. Don’t tell Daddy, dear. You know why. But shortly thereafter, Angelica, all unthinking innocence, told Carlos.

  He was waiting for Benita when she came home from work, his nose pinched, his face haughty. “Angelica told me you’d been saving money for us. I think I deserve half of it!”

  “I saved it for my children’s education,” she said, her own cheeks pink with resentment at his tone. “And if you’re in college, you’ll get half of it.”

  “I prefer to take it in cash, now. Dad and I can use it to help start the gallery.” Haughty, that I prefer. Arrogant.

  She swallowed deeply, hating his tone, his resentments, his pomposity, hating the fact she could not meet any of it without tears and pain. She hated the way he resented anything she did for Angelica, as though his sister were negligible, not worth the investment. He got that from his father. Bert was big on the worthlessness of women. The books said sibling rivalry was normal, that confrontation was an ordinary thing, a difference of opinion, it should not hurt like this!

  “The gallery plans are between you and your father, Carlito. I was never part of them, so it’s up to you and him to make those plans come true. My plan has always been for your education. The money will be used for that only, for one or both of my children. If you don’t want to go on to school, if you aren’t ready to do so, then Angelica can use the money.”

  He hadn’t accepted this. Carlos never accepted no. He had done what he always did: badgered her, harassed her, talked her down, kept after her, but this time it didn’t work as it always had before. There were too many years of hard work in that bank account. Too many years of doing without and making do and, more important, Angelica deserved the help and would damned well get it. And something else happened she hadn’t counted on ever, hadn’t even conceived of. She went inside herself looking for the love she’d always felt for both the children and wasn’t able to find it for her son. He had done something to it, or she had, or it had dried up, all on its own.

  Strangely enough, throughout it all, Carlos never told Bert about the money. He was smart enough to know that would have killed it for all of them. A month later, all his harassment unavailing, he had said he would go to college as well, but not to the state university. He wanted to attend the school in California, the one Angelica planned to attend. They should, he said, be treated equally.

  Benita had cried, “I’ve always treated you equally, Carlos.”

  “No, you haven’t. When Angelica needed help with reading, you had her read to you while you fixed supper. When I needed help, you had somebody at school do it!”

  She stared at him, unbelieving. “Angelica was in the second grade, you were in fourth. All she needed was practice. You had a problem with dyslexia. I can listen while someone practices, but I don’t know anything about helping dyslexia. The school had a specialist who knew all about it. Equal doesn’t mean identical! It’s impossible to treat different people as though they were identical.”

  Again the sulks, the depression, the endless hating silences.

  Goose asked what was the matter, and she told him. “He’s digging up old, silly resentments from when he was seven or eight years old, Goose. And it’s been two months. It’s like breathing poison gas, being around him. He’s perfectly capable of keeping it up for months, even years, and I can’t take it.”

  “Well, I can’t stand to see you this upset,” Goose drawled in his lofty, patrician voice. “It’s extremely enervating. I’ve got some family contacts in California. Let me see what I can do.”

  He came up with the name of a Latino foundation that provided loans, tutoring, and counseling for less-than-perfect Hispanic candidates for college. Carlos hyphenated his last name, charmed the committee—like his dad at that age, he could charm anyone when he tried—and was accepted. Since he was twenty, he chose to share a house with several other foundation beneficiaries, while Angelica, only eighteen, lived in a dormitory.

  For Benita, it was the tape at the end of her race. She had a day or two of exhilaration, then she deflated slowly and inexorably, like a soufflé taken out of the oven. She had never considered what she would do when it was over, never planned for afterward when the thing was done. Mami hadn’t ever mentioned what she would do then. The worst was the unforeseen fact that with Angelica gone, not just to college but away to college, Benita had no one to celebrate with or sympathize with or mourn with. With both of them gone, she couldn’t stay busy enough not to think, and over all those mostly solitary years at the bookstore, she had learned to think.

  It seemed to her that up until then, she had been two people, one at work, one at home. The work Benita was decisive, crisp, intelligent, capable. She spoke to people directly, simply, without strain and without later self-recriminations over wrong words, wrong emphases, wrong ideas. The home Benita, on the other hand, was tentative, common, an ignorant woman who used a small vocabulary and bad grammar, who ventured comments on nothing more complicated than the dinner menu, a sort of wife-mother-sponge to soak up Bert’s rages and Carlito’s sulks.

  When the kids went away, however, there was no need for a mother-sponge anymore, no reason for that person to take up space. Perhaps it was time to let bovine Benita go. The planning that had kept her going all these years was over, so maybe it was now time to make another plan.

  She joined a women’s support group. She signed up for an aerobics class at the Y. She began going to work even earlier and—if it wasn’t group night—staying even later. Half a dozen fast food places were within a few blocks of the store; her little office was quiet and private; she had a comfortable old recliner chair and a little TV back there. She continued putting money away, for her own use this time, for sometime three or four years from now, when she couldn’t stick it anymore. She knew she would leave Bert eventually, the time just hadn’t come yet. She managed to encounter him only over occasional breakfasts or sometimes very late at night when he staggered in and fell on the couch. She kept food in the refrigerator
for him. She did his laundry. Up until the house arrest, they’d managed to get along without real damage.

  And that was the story of her life, which had now taken this totally unexpected and ridiculous turn, leaving her miles from home with a screaming cube in her hands and nobody to ask for help. Though, sensibly, asking for help would be exactly the wrong thing to do! She turned to Mami’s litany, instead. Help yourself, Benita. You can if you will. Think for yourself, Benita. Make a life for yourself. Take a deep breath and figure out what needs to be done.

  She closed her eyes, trying to clear the fog in her head, then leaned forward, gripped by a sudden cramp in her middle, or in her chest, or somewhere she couldn’t locate, all of her at once totally occupied by a spasm of pain that seemed to pull her apart, arms off in different directions, legs gone swimming away, head only vaguely attached, all the world going gray and hazy. She gasped, opened her mouth to scream, but was unable to make a sound, felt the gray go to black…

  And then it all went away, all at once, the pain, the grayness, all of it, and she stood up, breathing deeply, wondering what in the hell had happened to her? Was that a faint? A swoon? How remarkable.

  She climbed into the car and turned on the blower to air it out. The pain had filled her entire being, but now she could find no lingering evidence of it. Not the tiniest ache. Everything around her shone with an almost crystal clarity. She had never seen things so clearly. So. Figure out what came next.

  First thing: hide the cube and the money. Bert must not get his hands on either the cube or the money. Just counting it had dried her mouth again. She had never had any money except what she’d earned, and she’d always cashed her regular paycheck and paid the bills in cash so there wouldn’t be anything left for Bert to drink up. The other check, the secret check that included all her overtime and hourly wages above minimum wage, had gone into the secret bank account.

  She took the remnants of her lunch out of the pack, put the cube and money on the bottom and covered them with the sweater, the poncho, the leftover wrappers, peels and crusts from lunch, plus the empty soda can along with a couple more she’d found lying near the road. The mushroom bag went on top. She turned the car and started back down the road, the way she’d come, reaching out every few moments to touch the backpack, just to be sure it was there. A hundred thousand dollars! Oh, what she could do with a hundred thousand!

  Though maybe it wasn’t right to take money for doing one’s duty, which this thing probably was. It felt complicated and troublesome enough to be duty. If she was going to do what the aliens had asked her to do—well, actually hired her to do—then she would need some of the money to get to the right people, whoever they were. Not her senator, Byron Morse, with his new, sort-of-Hispanic wife and his far-right friends. Goose had worked for Morse’s opponent during the last election, and he’d talked about the unethical stuff Morse had pulled. Her congressman, though he was also a hyphenated-Hispanic, would be a better bet.

  The trip that had seemed a long one on the way out was all too short getting home. She saw immediately that she was not in luck. The studio-cum-garage door was open and Bert was perched on his so-called workbench drumming his heels against the paint cans on the shelf below. Neither they nor the dusty canvases against the end wall had been moved in years, but the beer cans scattered around him were new.

  “Where the hell you been?” he demanded, leaning in the open car window, the smell of him filling her breathing space with a rank, sweaty, beeriness.

  She tried not to breathe and kept her voice steady. “I felt like some exercise and fresh air, so I drove up to the mountains to hunt mushrooms and have a picnic lunch.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” he sneered.

  She opened the pack and displayed the contents of the mushroom sack. “Mushroom hunting, Bert. You used to go with me and the kids sometimes. I left you a note.”

  “Your note said you were going shopping.”

  “I plan to. I thought I’d do it on my way home, but I got rained on in the hills, so I decided to come home and change before I did the shopping.”

  “It’ll have to wait. Give me the keys.”

  She became very still inside. Something clicked, like a relay switch. She said softly, “Bert, you know what the judge said. Now’s not the time to get him down on you…”

  He jerked the car door open. “Give me the goddamn keys. The judge won’t do a damned thing, and you know it. I’m not drunk, I’m not going to drink, it’s Saturday, and nobody’s gonna be watching the goddam monitor on Saturday! I’m going over to Larry’s place to watch the game with him and Bill. Now come on!”

  He wore an expression she had learned to heed, one that was a half-step from violence, one that begged her to cross him and give him an excuse to go over the edge. Normally at this point she dissolved into sludge; tears and whines, attempts to dissuade him. Today, amid this new clarity, she did a much simpler thing. Leaving the keys in the ignition, she edged away from him, across the passenger side and out, taking the pack with her.

  “They impounded your car, Bert. If you get picked up in my car, they’ll impound my car too.” Without difficulty, she kept her voice perfectly level, normally an achievement in itself. “I won’t have any way to get to work.”

  He jeered, “Moo, moo. Bossie-Benita the human cow! You worried your hubby’ll let you starve?” He climbed in behind the wheel and backed out into the street, wheels screaming.

  She stood where she was, not moving. The car was stopped, half into the street, while he waited for her to do something. Come after him, maybe. Make a face. Stamp her foot. It wouldn’t take much. Any little thing. She turned to the trash barrel and took the empty cans from the pack, one at a time throwing them away, paying no attention to the beer cans, which ordinarily she would have gathered up immediately. Today she realized he would consider her throwing them away a comment on his morning’s activities, so she let them lie. Bert was always able to establish that she had done something wrong, no matter what she did, and ordinarily she kept a wary eye on him. Today she ignored him as she fiddled with the trash until the car went away too fast, squealing before it got to the stop sign, only half stopping before screeching around the corner and away.

  Six months ago there had been two injured, one dead. A trial date months in the future. And a judge with no more sense than to accept that “don’t lock him up, he’s a working man” argument. She had explained the situation to his lawyer. Benita’s father paid Bert when and if he showed up at the salvage yard. Since he didn’t often show up, he wasn’t really a working man. The public defender said his first duty was to his client, and it would go easier on him if he were a man with a job and a family to support.

  “But he’s not,” she said.

  The lawyer gave her a mulish stare. “Well, he must contribute something. The house…”

  “Right. His mother left him the house when she died. Bert sold his last piece of art thirteen years ago. For the last ten years, I’ve paid the property taxes and maintenance, because that’s the last time Bert worked for money. Last year Bert took out a mortgage on the house so he could pay cash for a new car, which he said he needed for a new delivery job he was taking. I don’t know what happened to the job, but he borrowed on the car for drinking and gambling money. When he was picked up for drunk driving, they impounded the car and the finance agency repossessed it. I haven’t made any of the mortgage payments and the house is about to be foreclosed. That’s Bert’s contribution to the family welfare.”

  “You didn’t make the mortgage payments?” the lawyer had asked, as though she had done something unfamilial.

  She had stared at him, making him shift uncomfortably. “It isn’t my house, as Bert often reminds me. I didn’t borrow on it. Foreclosure is sixty days away.”

  “And when they foreclose?”

  “Bert won’t have anywhere to live.”

  “Neither will you,” he challenged.

  “I’m moving in with my father,�
� she said. “Alone. My father doesn’t like Bert.”

  Actually, she planned to rent a small apartment when the time came, but that was no one’s business but hers. As it turned out, nothing she had said made any difference, for the lawyer totally ignored it, as did la raza judge. Typical. As time passed, more and more of the elected magistrates were women, but they were still too few and far between.

  She shut the garage door and went into the house, rubbing her forehead. If Bert followed his usual pattern, he’d spend the afternoon with his drinking buddies, maybe Larry, but just as likely that had been misdirection on his part. The police would show up sooner or later, and he wouldn’t want her to know where he really was. During the afternoon he’d go through stage one, which was boisterous conviviality, and stage two, slightly morose nostalgia, and when they ran out of beer, he’d move on to stage three, which might bring him home to tear the house apart, looking for liquor or money he thought he might have hidden sometime in the past. He was always sure one of his old caches was still there and if he didn’t find one, it was because Benita had stolen his money or thrown out his liquor. That’s usually when he hit her, if she was around. Stage four involved belligerence and violence, and she had this cube-thing to protect. Bert had the car, however, and she had no way to go except, maybe, call a cab, and they were so expensive…

  An audible click. Like that little relay switch. There was money. There, beneath her hand, was money. Quite a lot of money. She had planned to leave after the foreclosure, because that would focus Bert’s belligerence on the bank rather than on herself. But here under her hand was the opportunity to do it now. So call a cab. Pack a bag. Take Sasquatch to a kennel so Bert couldn’t take out his temper on the dog. The money was right there, and even though she hadn’t earned it yet, she planned to earn it, she could start earning it!

  Right away, here came the marching ghosts. Mami and Papa wouldn’t approve. It wasn’t fair to Goose and Marsh. The children might not like the idea…