“Go back to sleep, we haven’t touched the house, the house is all the same,” they say.
The phone is by her bed. She picks it up and listens to its tone and then hangs it back up. She falls asleep and wakes in the middle of the night and picks up the phone again, dialing Cal’s girls.
“Hello,” our mother says, answering the phone quickly because she is awake and has not been able to sleep.
“Hello,” the slut says. The slut pauses.
“Yes? How can I help you?” our mother says.
“I’m looking for the girls,” the slut says.
“They’re asleep. Are you in another country?” our mother asks.
“Another country? I don’t know,” the slut says.
“Because it’s 2 a.m. here in the States,” our mother says.
“Is it really? I’m sorry,” the slut says.
“What time is it where you are?” our mother says.
“There’s no clock where I am,” the slut says.
Our mother lights a cigarette.
“Why is it you want the girls? Can I help you? Who’s calling?” our mother says.
“I’m sorry to bother you, it being so late in the States, but I had turkey for dinner. I should say I had an awful lot of turkey. Perhaps I ate a bone. It’s a filling bird. Now I’m wide awake, in pain,” the slut says.
“Have you had some water then?” our mother says.
“Water? No, I hadn’t thought of water,” the slut says.
“Maybe you’d better ring room service, have them bring you up something, some soda maybe, to quiet your juices. Are there sodas there where you are?” our mother says. “You’re not in France, by chance, are you?”
“Oh, France, oh, no, I’d like to be in France. I’d rather be in France,” the slut says.
“Oh, so you’ve been to France? Have you been to Biarritz?”
“Biarritz is lovely, the water, the streets, the boats, I love Biarritz,” the slut says.
“That’s where I’m from, Biarritz,” our mother says.
“How lucky, you can always go back,” the slut says.
“I could go back, but the money, you know, and who is there now? My mother here and my father dead. My aunts and uncles too old to know who I am,” our mother says. “I would like to take the kids to see it someday, but really, it’s the money we don’t have. You see, their father’s left them, it’s terrible, even when he was here he was not with them, he never gave them money to speak of, but now he’s really left them, left no trace at all. The FBI, can you believe it, even, the FBI is involved,” our mother says.
“How could he just up and leave them, without a word?” the slut says.
“If you had asked me what kind of man I had married when I married him I would never have said this kind of man,” our mother says.
“You never know, do you?” the slut says.
“Yes, you’re right, absolutely right,” our mother says.
“He’s a lout and a cad,” the slut says.
“Oh, that’s the truth. It is,” our mother says. “People ask me if I’m lonely. Hah, lonely, I say, I’d rather be alone than with him. I’ve never been happier than without him. Oh, it’s sad for the children, it’s not fair to them, but for me, maybe it’s more a godsend.”
“Other women could learn from you, they should learn from you. What strength you’ve got, I admire that,” the slut says.
“Oh, not strength. I wouldn’t go overboard. I just learned a little something the big hard way,” our mother says, “Are you feeling better? How are your juices? Still acting up?” our mother says.
“I think I’m better now. A lot better. After all, it was just turkey. Thank you for your time,” the slut says.
“It’s nothing. I’m sorry the girls are asleep, but it’s late here in the States. Oh, I don’t even know who’s calling, who shall I tell them called? Leave your number. Or, please, call again,” our mother says.
“I’ll do that, I’ll call again. Thank you,” the slut says.
“Don’t forget to call room service. Call for a soda, if they have them where you are. A ginger ale always calmed me down,” our mother says, “or ask about the equivalent, there’s always something like it, just with a different label or a different name.”
“I’ll do that, an equivalent,” the slut says.
“Take care,” our mother says.
“You too, goodnight,” the slut says and she hangs up the phone.
Our mother sits smoking in the dark. She reaches out to pet the dog who is sitting by her chair.
“Oh, you’re a good dog, aren’t you. The very best,” our mother says, bending down in the dark, kissing the dog’s head, holding her cigarette away to the side so she doesn’t burn her fur. Our mother starts to sing. “Ditez-moi pourquoi la vie est belle,” she sings while she picks up her pack of cigarettes and her lighter and her drink and brings them to her bedside, getting ready for bed, wiping the bottoms of her bare feet before she lies on the sheet and falls soundly asleep.
The hot dog men are stuck in the year’s first snow, their tires struggling up over dirty plowed dog-pissed piles they melt with water from their bins and stomp on with the sandals they wear with socks. They knot their heads in scarves like women, the fringed ends flapping like wattles by their chins as they push and push their way up the avenue. A strong wind comes and they shield their eyes from the blowing snow with half-gloves and uncovered fingertips. I’d look for John but he is any of these men in a woolen shapeless dark coat and the scarf on the head and a hot dog cart whose steam rises upward from its bins, quickly mixing with the falling snow.
“You can forget him,” our mother says, meaning our father. She is knuckling a rhythm with her hand turned over on the table and rapping one knuckle after the other. The hand twists and curls from side to side and the rhythm is flamenco. We would like to forget him, wouldn’t we? A lap never sat on. His shirt buttons never played with, never pushed to make him a tiger, a bear, a monkey, a cow. Mickey Mouse never drawn. Shoulders never ridden, a neck never squeezed tight between playground-dirty, smeary sticky stick-thin little daughters’ legs. A hand never held through a strawberry patch, red never creeping up the sneaker’s sides, the seeds collecting in canvas tongues, leaves clogging eyelets, weaving under lace’s weave, never, not ever, our father was it, just a tall man whose hand we held, the hand the right height for holding the wrong tall man’s hand.
We are called about Spain.
“Malaga maybe,” the cop says over the phone. “We’ve got a restaurant credit card receipt with what looks like his John Hancock.” Are we familiar with parts of southern Spain? he asks. Not us, but our mother is. “Tell him once as a girl, but what’s it to anybody now?” she says. “Their father’s not at the beach, his bald head blisters in the sun. He even burns through window glass,” our mother tells the cop.
“This includes another region now,” the cop says. “You may also get calls from federals hereon.”
School is steamy. The building warming the wool of our soggy mittens and hats and coats, wet from snowball making and snowball fights. We can hear the snow melting, dripping on closet floors, puddling out from the doors. Everything seems to be seeping out. Lunch can be smelled from first floor up to fourth. The odor of fish cakes, spawning its way up the up and down stairs to our rooms. The perfumes of teachers reaching seated pupils, spreading through the air from their slight exertions, the use of pointers, page turning and the rolling down of foreign countries’ maps. Something crackly from the loudspeakers. Holiday music played so low between first bell and late bell it could be mistaken for the constant hum of private thoughts. I wait to be called. I think it will happen someday, some monitor with a piece of paper in hand for one of my teachers will have my name on it. I’ll be sent down to the offices, handed the phone, my father will talk and I’ll listen, static carried over the overseas lines and a slight delay clues to his distance. He’ll say I’m to go to the airport, catch a plane to
the south of Spain. We’ll drink wine poured down our mouths in bars and bed ourselves in small boats on rocky moonlit beaches. We’ll tell each other stories before sleep from our hard wood boat bottoms, then dream, safely down, the curving boatsides’ briny ribcages shelters from North African winds.
Rena comes home rattling after Christmas break. Small shell bracelets reach up past elbows on each arm and earrings of small clustered periwinkles hang from her ears and coral necklaces with red branches jab at her neck. She looks like what fishermen don’t want after hours spent cutting debris out of their nets. Rena weaves the shells through her long hair.
“You’ve been home already long enough, put your shells in boxes. Your tan is fading,” Bonnie tells her and she arranges Rena’s hair so that it covers her ears instead of being held behind.
Rena makes bracelets for the boys who love her. She strings a small clam shell on a strip of leather cord. The boys knot them at their wrists, wear them in their baths and the cords loosen and darken.
“Baby,” she tells me, “I’m going back to live there.”
“When?” I ask.
“Soon. My father wants me there. He says he’ll send for me. He’s sent me letters,” she says. She shows me the letters. There are a lot of them, all in a stack.
“Aren’t the stamps beautiful?” Rena says, but what I think is beautiful is how her father starts the letters. They all begin with “Cariña” or “Mi Amor.” Sometimes he draws pictures in the margins of his pages. They are drawings of sunsets and beaches and palm trees and he has even drawn Rena and himself standing on a beach, and in the drawing he is holding her hand.
Our brother says he has seen her, the slut. Stopped at a window in midtown, looking at herself or at shoes, he couldn’t tell. She looked like a bum wanting in, looking through glass at a Christmas meal, but it was only shoes in there, he says. He says he even looked himself to see if there was something else, perhaps someone motioning to her behind the pane, waving her in. But there wasn’t, he says.
“She was ancient,” he says, her eyes so wrinkled she must have been squinting continuously, even in her sleep, ever since they last saw her. He can’t imagine any other way.
“You don’t understand the ravages of time,” our mother says. “Look at this,” she says, and shows us her hands, holds down the veins and lets them pop back up again. “Ravaged,” she says.
Our brother said hello to the slut, put his hand on her shoulder and she jumped and held her hand to her mouth and then looked at herself in the window and brought her hand down. He was amazed by her thin wrists. Had their father held them, held both of them at the same time between one hand’s circled fingers? Our brother says, “She wasn’t any bigger than a bird.”
There’s been no word of your father, she told our brother. She had written to consulates and dignitaries. She was almost learning Spanish from all the overseas communication she had received, flowered with Señoras and permisos and disculpes and finally firmados.
“Signed,” she said, “it means signed.”
And our brother said she reached up and gestured as if in her hand she held a pen and was signing her name to the air. Next, she was planning to go to Spain. She said she would like to go and then give up there, too. Search all she could and then stop, live in some house on the beach, cut ties to home and sit on a balcony watching fishermen string nets. She grabbed my brother’s arm, he says. “Do you know what I mean?” she asked.
He wanted to take her in, anywhere. He tried the shoe store, but she held fast to the street, inviting him for coffee at the corner. She told him there were other men besides his father. “But men who were too big, or too small,” she continued. “Men who coughed through the night into handkerchiefs or men who could not pick up their feet and scuffed their slippers when walking across the floor. Men who lifted their feet too high, as if always walking through deep snow. Men who woke me because their breaths through stuffed nostrils sounded like crying children or cats. Another one,” she said to the waitress, before the waitress even set the first one down. Our brother tried to leave, pointed to his watch, tried to put on his coat. She grabbed his silk robe’s collar, saying, “That’s not what you want to hear, I know.”
He was afraid for her eyes, thought they were somehow wired and lit up from the back and smoke would start to pour forth soon. He wanted to tell her to rest them awhile. He almost reached across the table and shut them himself, in the way someone would shut a dead man’s eyes. She said she wouldn’t try to hide it, said she couldn’t, it was wearing her down. All she heard in her ears was the constant screech of trains braking, that’s what it’s like, she told him.
“That’s what it does,” she said, and she held out her hands, the fingers shaking, “an expensive manicure ruined,” and showed him where the Asian girl had gone outside the boundary of cuticle, painted polish on surrounding skin instead.
It began to rain and he thought how it would stain his silk robe and so he stayed. She ordered more and more. He wanted to hold her arm down, she had coffees so many ways, au lait and American, cappuccino and decaf and also cinnamon buns and apple tarts and iced confections and soon there was no room left on the table, they used another table beside them just to hold all the plates. Finally, he did hold her arm down, no more, he said, enough, and so she stopped and began to eat. Glazed flakes of pastry hung on her lipsticked lips. She said if only his father had left some word she would not be this way, and she took her hair and held it up scrunched in her fists and she pulled on the ends to show him the way it was that she was. A letter, a note, a fingered sentence on a misted window, anything at all, and she would not be the way she was, she says.
“Let up, rain,” our brother says was all he thought. She did not take her hands down from her hair until he held her by the wrists and brought them down. He thought they shook too, not just her hands, it was all of her, he could not tell from where the shaking started. She was crying now and still eating, still chewing and swallowing and then she spoke with her mouth full, saying this is how it was with most of her meals, they tasted of salt from her tears. “Come with me to Spain,” she said to him. “Help me find your father,” she said. He says he looked out the window when she said it. He says he pretended he did not hear her. Then she asked about his mother.
“My mother?” he said.
“I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to ask that, am I?” she said. “Shame, shame,” she said, she slapped one of her hands with her other hand. And it did let up, in fact the sun shone, our brother says. Weakly through clouds that looked like more rain. He stood up and left money and she stood up too, said they could walk together and she hooked her arm through his. They passed the shoe store again and she stopped and looked in. He kept trying to walk down the street, but she held onto him, still looking in. She said she swore the shoes were already worn, showing him scuffed toes and heels already lower on one side from a wearer with a weight problem.
“Should I go in and say something?” she said laughing. “The manager should be told he’s selling used shoes. Look at the stilettos, tell me they haven’t been on some Latin dance floor before, or the riding boots, haven’t they gouged a little horseflesh lately?” she says.
Then came the rain again, our brother said, and it came down so hard they could not see in the windows. They could barely see each other when they said goodbye, when he helped her up the steps and held her rain-soaked arm as she climbed into the bus.
The slut calls our house. “This is Louisa,” I tell her, when she asks who she’s speaking with.
“Is your brother there?” she asks.
“No,” I say. My brother is in his room.
“Tell me,” she says, “Has he said anything about coming with me to Spain?”
“Spain?” I say. He has not told me about going with her to Spain.
“We have to find your father,” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “He said he would go with you, but it’s the money,” I say. “He hasn’t got
enough.”
“Yes, I thought that was the problem. I forgot to tell him. Tell him for me, would you, not to worry about the money. I’ll take care of everything,” she says.
“Sure,” I say. “You’ll take care of it all.”
I go into my brother’s room with a cup of coffee I poured into a bowl because there were no clean mugs. He’s sleeping in his robe, the embroidered dragon on his back facing upward, looking like it’s just touched down and is about to take my brother up in its talons and out the window and carry him to a lair somewhere beyond the roofs and tall spires of the city. I put the bowl of coffee by my brother’s nose to see if the smell of it will wake him. My brother just snores into the bowl, though, rippling the brown liquid. I put the bowl of coffee down and whistle for the dog. She comes right away. I point to the bed and she jumps up on it and stands over my brother, looking at me, waiting for my next command. “Wake him up,” I tell her.
What a dog. She takes her paw and puts it on his head. He mumbles in his sleep. “Again,” I tell her. Now she is really pawing at his head, her nails scraping against the inside of his ear.
“Get the hell off me!” he yells with his eyes still closed, and he tries to shove her off, but she holds her ground. Then he opens his eyes and he sees me standing there.
“What do you want?” he says.
“I want you to go with the slut to Spain,” I say.
“Spain, fuck,” he says. “Get the dog off me,” he says. I call the dog down. She stands next to me and I pet her head, then I give my brother the bowl of coffee. “A bowl?” he says and I don’t say anything and he drinks it.
“I got you a free trip,” I say. “And the girls,” I say. “I’ve heard a lot about them. Not like here. They’re mysterious, they’re beautiful. You’ve never seen such darkness,” I say.
“He might not even be in Spain. The feds could be wrong. I could go to Spain for nothing,” he says. “He’s probably right here in town. He’s probably throwing back some beers across the street in the Charlie Bar,” my brother says.
Here They Come Page 10
