by Ivy Pochoda
Nearly seventeen years in Jefferson Park and Marella feels like a stranger. Crazy to be afraid of your own backyard.
You try to brush aside your parents’ insanity and see the world through your fresh, wise eyes because you’re hip to a new way of being and you know what’s up. But the fear slips in. She didn’t have sex until she was twenty-two and even the mild violence of the experience left her reeling.
There are several ways to get home from the gallery and all of them involve crossing the 10 on one of the bridges that keep South L.A. connected to the north. There’s Western, wide and grimy, busy with buses and homeless making camp next to the on-ramps. There’s Arlington, narrower and usually clogged with traffic. There’s Gramercy, the quietest crossing that ends in the elegant streets of Kinney Heights. And then there are the little-trafficked pedestrian bridges, caged off with fences overgrown with vines, perfect hideaways for all sorts of illegal behavior. These are out of the question.
Marella chooses Gramercy because it’s the closest and the most direct. But it’s a smaller street, which means fewer eyes on her, less oversight.
It’s eight P.M. And the freeway is going slow beneath her. It’s dark on the overpass. The lights of Washington Boulevard recede to the north. Marella won’t pass another store or busy intersection before she reaches home. It’s all residential here, people minding their own business and hoping you’ll mind yours.
She’s midway across when she hears someone behind her walking fast.
It’s easy to stand naked in a room full of strangers. Easy to cover herself in blue paint, douse herself with water. There’s no question of sex or desire. No wanting or needing. No giving. She strips that part away but makes herself visible. By standing there for everyone to see, she isn’t what they want. Sex is something people need from you, want to take from you, a violent exchange.
She steps into the street, waits for a passing car, then crosses to the east side of the bridge.
The person behind her does the same.
HERE ARE THE WAYS a body can come apart.
It can drown or be drowned and turn the color of a deep-sea creature that has never seen the light of day. It can get trapped between the dirty, barnacled rocks and bang on them for a day or more until someone takes it away. By then it will barely seem a body at all, but rather an obscene organism, a swollen alien form.
This is another way. A body can be ripped across the throat, a gash like a crescent moon. Its head can be secured in a plastic bag. It can be tossed in an alley, its arms and legs landing at angles impossible in life. It can be nibbled and gnawed by the feral creatures that prowl South L.A., cats and rats and worse.
It can fly off a scooter on Western, get trapped under a van, and be dragged for half a block. It can be lifted from under the chassis, trailing a sticky slick of blood that might initially be mistaken for hair.
These are the ways Marella has seen close up.
Of course, there are other ways too—collisions, electrocutions, falls. Unspeakable acts of violence, all of which Marella’s heard about, read about, been warned about but not seen.
Marella can hear the footsteps behind her drawing close.
The first dead body she saw leaps to mind—a woman bobbing in the water and scraping against the rocks behind her family’s former home in La Libertad, El Salvador.
The woman in the water was a puta. She worked the far side of the jetty where the prostitutes’ pimps robbed tourists during the slow hours. The body had washed up into the small rocky outcrop overnight. Marella had spied her from her bedroom window. She thought the thing bobbing in the water was a dolphin, so she’d run to the beach.
By then a crowd had gathered, watching the fish-belly-pale woman trapped in the outcrop facedown dragged back and forth with the waves. She was wearing an electric-blue miniskirt and neon halter.
This is how the world pays you back, Anneke explained when Marella had stopped crying.
It’s the traffic, Marella realizes, that is dragging her back to that moment. It sounds like the ocean.
Two more hookers died that year. But Marella didn’t see them. They stationed a policeman near the beach. She overheard two men saying that was bad for business. But she didn’t see any business on the beach besides the guys who sold mango and coconut.
Then Marella and her family moved to Los Angeles. Her father found a different job at a different school teaching ESL to Spanish speakers. Anneke quit her NGO and began working for a nursing home in Malibu.
WHAT IS IT going to feel like when this man catches her? Will he drag her to the shadowed area just before the public school where the carob trees have left their dark, sticky stains on the sidewalk? No one walks there because of the mess so no one will see her. What will happen? Will he toss her to the side when he’s done? Leave her and kill her or roll her down the trash-strewn slope that leads to the 10?
There’s a wail from below.
Marella wheels around and is face-to-face with a middle-aged Latina woman. She screams, her face inches from the stranger’s.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” the woman says, hurrying past, leaving Marella staring at the semitruck, chugging east, still laying on the horn.
2.
SHE IS OUT OF BREATH WHEN SHE REACHES TWENTY-NINTH Place. She passes her house, where the curtains are drawn with only a thin seam of light visible at the edges. She pulls the phone out of her backpack and opens the gate to the neighbors’ house. The hinges scream, startling her.
So she knocks, her fist rattling the iron riot gate.
Julianna’s mother opens the door. Marella doesn’t know her name. She can see past her to flowers and wreaths, casserole dishes and trays of cookies. Marella has brought no tribute, no condolence gift.
“Yes?”
“I live next door,” Marella says.
“I know.”
Marella holds out the phone.
“What’s this?”
“A phone. Maybe your daughter’s. I found it.”
Marella’s mother takes the phone, flips it around in her hands. “Hector.” She turns back into the house. “Hector!”
A young man emerges. He’s heavyset. His eyes are submerged in purple circles.
“Hector, does this look like your sister’s phone?”
Hector stares at his mother as if she’s speaking another language.
“This phone? Is it Julianna’s?”
“How come you think it’s Julianna’s?” the woman asks Marella.
Hector won’t take the phone from his mother. “Just click the button, Mami. Probably a picture of her on the screen.”
His mother stares at the phone in her hand as if it’s an object she’s never seen before. “What button? How?”
“Mami, the button. There.” Hector points at the top of the phone that his mother is holding upside down. But she just looks at her hand. “Come inside,” he says, pushing the door wider so Marella can step through.
The house smells like dead flowers and stale food. On the mantel is a row of photos of Julianna in ornate frames.
“What is this?” Julianna’s mother says, holding up the phone.
“It’s Julianna’s phone,” Hector says.
“How did I get it?”
“The girl next door,” Hector says.
“How’d she get it?”
For the first time Hector looks straight at Marella. “How come you have my sister’s phone?”
“I found it. Between our houses.”
“When?”
“A couple of days ago.”
“A couple of days? You had it for a couple of days?” He says it like Marella had been hiding his sister, not her phone.
Excuses and lies flood her head. All of them sound false.
“Sorry,” Marella says. “I only figured it out from the photos.” Even mentioning the photos fills her with guilt. “I didn’t know her well.”
“Photos.” Marella and Hector turn at the sound of his mother’s voice. “
Julianna loved her photos.” Her eyes go from the phone to the table. “There’s so much food. You should take some. We can’t eat all this food.”
“I’m okay,” Marella says.
Julianna’s mother finally finds the home button on the phone and wakes it up. Julianna’s face bursts from the screen. “There she is. There’s my girl. How many years you lived next door and you didn’t know her?”
Marella’s throat catches. But the mother doesn’t wait for her reply. “Probably twenty. Twenty years and you missed knowing my baby. She was too wild for this world. This place, it bored her. She was like a wildfire. We come from El Salvador. But Julianna was born here. A good thing to be born in America. To be an American. My American daughter. A gringa. That’s what my sister back home calls her.”
The smile on Marella’s face is getting tight as she listens.
“Everything was too small for Julianna. This house, school, her friends. She needed more. Like when my parents’ neighbors would burn their sugarcane fields in the spring. That fire was hungry. It wouldn’t stay put. It needed our land. Ate our fields. That was Julianna. She needed more than anyone could give. And she tried to take it. That was who she was. Beautiful. Destructive. A bomb.”
Hector puts a hand on his mother’s arm, but she shakes him off.
“So many things I feared for her. Boys. Drugs. Cars. Gangs. Police. She brought it all to me, dragged all that through the front door. I see girls like her on the streets, on the buses, going in and out of places, girls with tattoos and tight clothes and makeup and hair. Drunk girls and smoking girls and girls being escorted by men old enough to be their papis. And I think, thank God that’s not my girl. But it is. That’s my baby covered in tattoos. That’s my baby chain-smoking. That’s my baby smelling of marijuana. That’s my baby smelling of sex and worse.” Her voice catches. “You know what the worst smell on earth is? Worse than a body burning up in a sugarcane field? The smell of strange men on your baby. But I smelled that. And I saw the marks on her—the ones she did. The ones others did. I saw her red eyes and her bleeding lips. She couldn’t hide that from me. She didn’t try. And how many times did I have to listen as she tried talking to me, pretending like she was just fine? But she wasn’t making any sense. Just talking and talking and talking like she could talk her way out of all the things she’d put in her body. Like if she kept talking they would go away.
“And then one day your baby doesn’t look like your baby. She’s someone else. She’s got someone else’s hair. She’s got writing on her. She smells like someone else. She talks like someone else. She looks like one of those girls on TV. The ones who get arrested. Or worse, like one of those girls in bad magazines or bad movies. And you know what you want to do? Do you?”
Marella isn’t sure if she’s supposed to reply.
“You want to give up and say That’s not my baby. That’s some other messed-up chica who came and stole my baby—possessed her—and I don’t have to care about her because I don’t recognize her. And you don’t want to recognize her. You won’t want to recognize her. You’ll try not to recognize her. You’ll try and try. But it’s not going to work. Because she’s still your baby, even with all the things she’s done to herself. Every one of them, no matter how bad.”
Hector coughs quietly, catching Marella’s eye. With one hand, he gestures toward the door. Julianna’s mother continues, oblivious.
“There are bad girls. You see them everywhere. Bad, bad, bad girls. And you wonder about their mothers. You wonder what they did wrong. How they messed up. Maybe they didn’t pray. Maybe they ignored God. Maybe they accepted the devil. Maybe they drank or smoked or took drugs.”
Marella takes a step back. “Maybe they did crimes. Maybe they were thieves. Or murderers. Maybe they had abortions. Maybe they had many men. Because it has to be their fault. The mothers of these bad, bad, bad girls. But it’s not. I pray. I take care of my husband even when I’d rather kill him. I take care of my son. And I take care of Julianna. No matter. I do what’s right. And still people look at me like it’s my fault she was like wildfire. My fault she drew all over herself, let men have her body. Like it’s my fault my baby died. All this food? You know why there’s all this food? Because people don’t know what to say about my baby. So they bring this food. They don’t know what to say because they think it’s my fault. They think—”
The metal gate bangs into place behind Marella. She’s out on the porch. Then down the three steps to the street. Back on the bumpy sidewalk. She gasps for air like someone has just taken his hand from her throat.
3.
MARELLA’S HOUSE. DINNERTIME. THE RAIN HASN’T STARTED. But it’s coming. You can tell by the way the city seems to be holding its breath—how the trees stand in suspended animation, bracing.
The house, too, seems mired in time and fog. Roger is on the couch. He’s staring at the fireplace, which has never worked. The way he’s looking at it you’d think it was filled with leaping flames. Marella knows he’s in one of his fugues, black places that make Anneke’s moods even darker.
Anneke’s in the kitchen making beef curry. Marella knows her mother’s anger will find its way into the wild and aggressive flavors of her stew.
It’s been two days since she came here, two days since she found Julianna’s phone on the pavement between their houses. After that it’s been a flurry of work to get her new piece ready for the opening.
Marella squeezes her father on his shoulder. He turns and looks straight through her. He’s wearing headphones plugged into a first-generation iPod. She can hear the monotone of one of his audiobooks. War histories. Thousands of pages. Hundreds of hours. Details, data, stats, death tolls, longitudes and latitudes. Over and over again for days on end until he emerges from his funk as if he’d never been away.
Marella goes back to the kitchen. She places her hand on her mother’s arm. Anneke recoils.
“How long has it been this time?” Marella asks. She inclines her head in the direction of her father on the couch. “How long has he been listening?” There have been times when he’s listened for three weeks straight, only taking off his headphones to shower or to teach his ESL classes.
“Where have you been?” Anneke asks. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
Marella’s house is one of the few two-story Craftsman homes in Jefferson Park. Her room is upstairs. From her bedroom window she can see into the house next door.
Her neighbors’ lights are on. All the shades are drawn except for the ones in Julianna’s brother’s room.
Hector is sitting on the edge of his bed, his hands between his knees, his head down. There’s a girl next to him, patting his back until he swats her away. She scoots back on the bed to give him some space. His shoulders rise and fall.
A light behind the curtain in the living room turns it into a shadowbox. Marella can see the silhouettes of Julianna’s parents. She’s occasionally eavesdropped on their raised voices, their theatrical anger. She’s heard the crashes, the door slamming, the noise that reaches into her house. The bilingual curses and accusations. They are unashamed of their rage. It sparks, explodes, and fades. They run it out. Burn it off. Then they watch TV or do whatever else they were planning on doing.
Do you know what’s worse? The subtle violence. The hidden anger in her house.
Anneke always kept her voice low as she put her daughter to sleep, hissing about what a bad girl she was, listing the sins of her daughter’s day—the accidents, the things dropped, put on inside-out, or forgotten. Recounting the times Marella took too long to respond, the times she spoke too quietly to be heard. A litany of evidence that suggested Marella was willfully disobedient and had set herself on a path to reform school or worse.
If Marella took too long to settle into sleep, if she thrashed or kicked to make herself more comfortable in her bedding, Anneke would deliver a quick pinch or a slap on the legs: bad girl, horrible child, disobedient. She never raised her voice, never sounded angry
. She simply slipped these rebukes into the bedtime routine between books and songs.
She loves you, Roger told Marella. She’s challenged by how much she loves you. It overwhelms her. She worries about how you will make your way in the world.
Marella wished her mother would scream like the people next door. She wished she’d allow the world to witness her anger so that she didn’t make Marella feel the shame of it.
It’s the world that worries her, Roger told his daughter. Not you.
The figures behind the living room curtain next door are putting on a pantomime. Julianna’s mother is raising her arms above her head. Her father is standing still, a wall absorbing his wife’s grief or anger.
When Marella got too old for Anneke to pinch or hit, her mother changed course. She’d drag Marella to one of the bedroom windows that looked down at Julianna’s house. You want this to happen to you? You want to turn out like her?
She liked to time these lessons to a moment when Julianna, only a year older than Marella, could be seen climbing into a fast car driven by an older man, adjusting her crop top and yanking down her miniskirt.
The world destroys girls like that.
ANNEKE DOESN’T BANG THE PLATES and bowls on the table when she serves dinner. Everything is polite. No mention is made of the fact that Roger is at the table still wearing headphones.
The Battle of the Bulge. December 1944. Antwerp. Surprise. Bastogne. 410,000 men. 1,400 tanks. 1,600 something else. 1,000 something else.
Bits of information reach Marella’s ears. Her father’s eyes are fixed. He’s looking at the wall. He doesn’t see it. Marella taps his arm to draw his attention to the food. Roger blinks, glances down, and begins to eat.
Marella supposes it could be worse. Roger’s black moods don’t involve booze, drugs, or long absences. They aren’t violent or aggressive. Instead, he’s just lost in the world of his war histories, stories he must know by heart. Marella wonders if he’s actually hearing them at all.