by Ana Simo
Even now that I was back—thirty years older, wiser, richer (in strings to pull and big words to use, if not cash)—white Elmirans, rich or poor, still scared me. I couldn’t get into their skins, guts, or brains. Uncomfortably, like someone trying on a coat that’s too small or too big in an overheated store, I nevertheless managed to penetrate most of Spicdom, and on certain, narrow wavelengths, even most of your blacks and Orientals. Around white Elmirans I felt gaseous while they seemed solid and tri-dimensional, or vice-versa. Physically different, as in Law of Physics, not flesh.
Against my will, then, I was often forced to be near to Mrs. Crandall’s disturbing buttocks. It would have been out of character for Señora Mirtila to want to read Turgenev’s complete works in English, as I did. So I cleverly pulled out the yellowing library index cards for all of Turgenev’s novels, shuffled them by order of desire from top to bottom, and took the deck to a horrified, but bravely collected Mrs. Crandall. Señorita Maké wants me to bring her two of these each time, I said in laborious Mirtila English. Mrs. Crandall tried not to stare at the flowery peasant scarf on my head, but its visual pull was irresistible. She stood up, shaking her head to regain control, then took me to the library’s humid cellar where all the old books no one read anymore had been relocated after a flood. Only the new ones everyone craved (the Harlotquins, the astrology and demonology self-help manuals, and the Nostradamuses) were displayed on the safer main floor. Below, we stood silently before the hand-carved oak shelves holding exquisite nineteenth-century editions of the canon of our dying civilization: The Alexiade and Tirant lo Blanc and the complete Hawthorne, Justinian, Dostoyevsky, Saint Theresa, Melville, Prodromos, Balzac, Cervantes, Akindynos, and so on, awaiting the next flood to destroy them. “Here,” Mrs. Crandall said in a soothing, nightingale voice, pointing at the Turgenevs. “We will come here every time to find the books Miss McCabe wants,” she added, enunciating each word carefully. She then smiled the pained smile with which white Elmirans, who are very good-hearted, show compassion for the less fortunate.
6
Scratching
A scratching noise woke me up in the middle of the night on our third week in Elmira. I jumped out of bed, drenched in sweat, imagining it was Glorita’s front door. It took me a few seconds with my eyes open in the vibrating darkness to realize that it was now thirty years later and Glorita no longer existed. Someone by that name might live somewhere, perhaps even on the other side of town, in the muddy lowlands across from the river where the spics had moved, but my Glorita was no more. Glorita, who, I could now see, announced Bebe. Even if Bebe had never reminded me of Glorita. Why could I now glide in the dark from Glorita to Bebe, cause and effect, but still not backward? This was not normal. I listened to my ears in case there was a tiny palpitation, a sure sign, I had recently read, of an aneurysm. A lesion to the left or right lobe of my brain might explain why I could go forward, but not backward in this memory, and a lesion to the hippocampus or the middle temporal lobe why I had never thought about Bebe and Glorita in the same breath, as obvious as it now seemed. I was blinded by appearances. Bebe’s milk-white, peachy-creamy boobies (her words) and Glorita’s tanned, assertive earlobes with the old-fashioned half-moon golden earrings decorated with peacocks. So contrary in substance and flesh, yet so close to each other in my heart of hearts. I sat on the bed in the dark, in a Buddha pose, holding in my mind Glorita’s right earlobe and Bebe’s left nipple. Floating over the bed in ecstasy and revelation: elle est plongée dans un oubli étrange.
A grating sound brought me back to earth. I got up and looked out the window. McCabe was walking on the gravel path toward the front gate. A dark blue sedan pulled over silently. She slid inside. The car took off as noiselessly as it had arrived. Where was she going on a Tuesday at three in the morning, in a town that shut down the moment the sun set behind Round Hill? When I woke up the next morning, I thought I had dreamt it all. Until I got outside the gate and noticed the fresh tire marks.
At dinner, McCabe was uncharacteristically dry. Her soliloquy lasted no more than two minutes and covered only one subject: the severe cognitive disorder which had suddenly struck first-generation “new humans” on the eve of their fifth birthday; pending tests, they’d been isolated from their one- to four-year-old cohorts in the secret facility outside America where they were being raised. That was all. I pricked up my ears. She had not quoted her sources, as was her custom. “Where did you get all that?” I asked. “Everybody knows it,” she growled, baring her teeth. I knew she was lying. There was no word of this in the Times or the Journal. Was it fantasy, gossip, perhaps truth? But where did it come from? I had persuaded McCabe not to bring a cell phone or a tablet. After all, this was to be a period of healing. And Elmira was blessedly disconnected. McCabe didn’t receive any mail. Anything requiring her signature was FedExed to her overnight by her assistant, along with the daily Times and Journal, and returned by her immediately. There was no TV set in the house (the Judge hated them). Other than the two papers, the kitchen radio, locked on the Elmira station, was our only source of information. There was a phone in the kitchen and another one in the Judge’s study, but none in her upstairs room. Besides, the story that McCabe had just regurgitated sounded like a written report, not phone gossip. Could she have gotten it from the blue sedan driver, or from someone they had met? After that day, I began to listen carefully to McCabe’s dinnertime monologues. She was up to something and, stupid as it might be, I should know about it. Crime and punishment is a fragile mechanism that can be upset by even a microscopically unaligned event. Like Monsieur de la Trouille’s famous automaton, the one that was supposed to release a miniature guillotine over the neck of an equally tiny curé figure but, due to a .000001-mm misalignment on the guillotine’s dented wheel, instead sliced off the tip of Monsieur de la Trouille’s index finger, eventually provoking his death of septicemia at the Hôtel-Dieu. I read this in an antique clock magazine that my mother fished out of Judge Wilkerson’s garbage one rainy afternoon and put in my hands with the warning, “Don’t let the Judge see you reading this.” I must have been six or seven. “Why?” I asked. “I don’t want him to know I’m taking his magazines home,” she said, polishing the Judge’s desk with the kind of cheap wax that always has a slightly rancid smell, even when new. “But he threw them in the garbage,” I said. “Precisely,” my mother said, turning her back to me to signal that the matter was forever closed.
A few days later, when McCabe and I were eating stuffed Cornish hen, she suddenly burst into tears. Fat, abundant tears fell on her plate and began to liquefy the bird’s grease. I kept a sympathetic expression on my face while I observed the interaction between the warm, salty water emanating from her beady blue eyes and the slowly de-congealing grease of the hen. “I did not love,” she hiccupped. “Not deeply, I mean, not really, not the way I should have loved.” I controlled a tickle in my throat, a tremor in my stomach, afraid my own half-digested hen would shoot out of my mouth and hit the pervert on her reddening nose. Was she referring to Bebe? I dared not ask. I hoped she wouldn’t tell. I did not want to kill her in a rage. Besides, there was nothing on the table to kill her with. You don’t put out a carving knife for Cornish hen.
She was a brute, McCabe, particularly when she drank, and she had already polished off a bottle of the cheap red wine I got for her (given that she couldn’t tell the difference, was unwilling to learn, and mocked me when I tried to teach her, I reserved the good bottles for solitary consumption in my room, and drank water at table while she contentedly guzzled crap). Once before, drunk on the day after our arrival, McCabe had socked me in the nose after I broke the rule and mentioned Bebe. I lost consciousness. When I came to, McCabe wasn’t there. She had locked herself in her bedroom—her suite, really, because it occupied the entire upper floor of the house. The Judge’s only folly, as Monsieur de la Trouille would say, in an entire life of sobriety and civic uprightness, was to have knocked down all the partition walls on the upstair
s floor shortly after his wife’s death, turning a warren of dark tiny rooms into a stupendous open space. I saw it briefly the day McCabe and I arrived, after which I forbade myself to go up the stairs to her landing, much less to knock on her door. Only once did I feel any desire to break this rule: when I got back on my feet the night she knocked me out cold. I almost banged on her door and kicked in her ugly teeth. I did not do anything of the sort, but only added another line to her indictment. Next day, her first on the job, Petrona came down from McCabe’s room holding in front of her, sleepwalker style, a bundle of vomit-soaked sheets.
7
Elmira
The Little Ohio River, which is not a branch of the Ohio River, but of the muddier and narrower Wanetka, slices through Elmira in a fairly straight line. The east bank rises steeply for about half a mile in a succession of hills and meadows culminating in the one where Judge Wilkerson’s house sits. Geographically, this highest point is Round Hill, but Elmirans call the entire area by that name. It is here that the town’s masters used to live before the Great Hunger and where they still occasionally return. The successful doctors, lawyers and orthodontists (no dentists) near the river, the more serious money higher up, say, for instance, the CEO of the now defunct Krimble Dairy Industries, the biggest in the state, or the owner of the equally defunct ARCO Engineering Corp., who had a lock on all highway work in these parts. There was also a former state Governor or two, magically able to afford Round Hill after leaving office. Even higher up was whatever was left of the old money, entrenched in their hereditary estates, people like Judge Wilkerson and his wife, Myrna, whose family house this was, and whose great-grandfather built railways as far away as Chicago and Biloxi. The Judge and Mrs. Wilkerson used to visit New York once a year around Christmas, to meet with their portfolio manager and shop at Bergdorf’s and Paul Stuart’s, moderately, for they were not showy.
Downtown Elmira is on the west bank flatlands, directly across from Round Hill and linked to it by a short bridge. Main Street, with its graceful nineteenth-century brick buildings that still house the inept county bureaucracy, ran decorously along the river for about half a mile before it dissolved into a decrepit shopping center, two white-trash trailer parks and several car dumps masquerading as garages.
Beyond the grisly Royal Tire and Brake, where car, dog, and perhaps human carcasses intermingled, began a swampy area that stretched all the way to the county line. It was there that a local man, after bribing the proper authorities, slapped in an illegal sewer line draining into the river, built a two-way road above it, and began selling lots on either side. He called it Shangri-La.
For fifteen years there were no takers. Then one day, some Negroes who worked at Elmira’s poultry factory were spotted building a small cinder-block house in the lot nearest the main road (the degenerate continuation of Elmira’s Main Street). Soon, others followed, working nights and weekends to build their little grey houses. By the time I, the first spic baby, was born, all the lots on either side of the original Shangri-La road were built, down to the cheapest ones by the river edge, where we lived, and which periodically flooded. Afterward, five more roads sprouted parallel to the original one, with lots snapped up by the Mexicans who replaced the Negroes in Elmira County’s remaining poultry factory. But that happened long after I left.
When I was little, there were only two spic families in Shangri-La, Rafael Cohen’s and ours. Neither was Mexican nor worked with poultry. Rafael’s father was a janitor in our grade school until he retired. He never learned English. Not a word in forty years, beyond gumornin, guafernún, zenquiu, gubái, no spic inglich. According to my mother, the good and the bad thing about Ezequiel was that he was content with his fate. My mother and Ezequiel had grown up as next-door neighbors in La Esperanza, a dusty-red sugar mill town in the old Cuban province of Santa Clara, and gone to grade school together. Ezequiel had ended up marrying my mother’s cousin, Genoveva, a few months after my parents’ own wedding. The two couples had left La Esperanza together in 1958, looking for jobs up North. Ezequiel had left reluctantly. My mother’s mother, recently widowed, soon followed them. Somehow (I never got a satisfactory answer why) they had ended up in Elmira’s Shangri-La, where Rafael and I were born in 1964, two days apart: he on the twenty-fifth of December, I on the twenty-third.
Now our four parents were buried side by side in Shangri-La’s small cemetery. They braved the Great Hunger, refusing evacuation to protect their homes, and survived on potatoes, wild roots, and questionable fish for seven years. Then, they all died of natural causes statistically much sooner than the national median in both their native and their adopted countries: phlebitis (Ezequiel), lung cancer (Genoveva), heart attack (my father), diabetes and renal failure (my mother). Genoveva and my father would have died anywhere anyway, but Ezequiel and my mother were killed by the Elmira General Hospital, which sent the first one home to die unattended and grossly mismanaged the second’s treatment. If only I could graft McCabe to Elmira, so Elmira dies with her: two vultures with one stone. Now there are only two little founding spics left: Rafael and I. He is in besieged Constantinople today on a surprise national security mission, the radio says. And I am looking at Shangri-La from the top of Round Hill, a brownish spot on the river bend, barely visible in the early morning mist. I should weep: it’s the appropriate thing to do. I try but I can’t.
8
Fasting
McCabe did not come down for dinner on the evening of September 14. The precise date is carved in my ears, where the braying from Saint Glykeria, Martyr reverberated all day—it was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and one hundred frenzied Kyrie Eleisons were sung every time the bearded one lifted the cross. When cotton balls failed, I plugged my ears with melted wax, burning my fingertips and the outer rim of the ear canal, and the thunderous braying became a mere muffled sawmill screech. Deprived of hearing and, oddly, olfaction for the day, I suspected something was afoot only when I saw Petrona leaving a tray by McCabe’s door. The tray held a silver bell cover, a bottle of Perrier-Jouët, and a vase with a yellow rose freshly cut from the garden. The dinner table was set only for me.
Petrona was pureblood Aztec, thus inscrutable. Today there was an additional shroud drawn over her face. She had done three things she was absolutely forbidden to do, which would have allowed me to rip her heart from her chest had I been one of her ancestors: gone up the stairs to McCabe’s door, cut a rose (had she used a kitchen knife, or had she broken into my gardening shed?), and brought a champagne bottle up from the cellar (had she picked the lock or stolen my key?). Worse, she had not consulted me, the housekeeper. I, and only I, was Petrona’s interlocutor in the household. She was allowed to speak only to me. Never to McCabe. I had made this threateningly clear to Petrona from the moment I hired her. Was she now taking her instructions directly from McCabe? I put on my own zombie mask, so that my Popocatepetlian rage would not erupt over Petrona’s head. It was a delicate situation. If Petrona realized that I had noticed, I would be forced to question her. This would be a sign of weakness, proof that I did not know what was going on. Would Petrona dare do all of this without McCabe’s approval? Doubtful. But if McCabe had broken our contract and ordered around Petrona behind my back, it was McCabe I had to dress down, so that she, not I, could set matters straight with Petrona the next day. After which, I would have a stern talk with Petrona and reluctantly forgive her, just this time, because Señorita Maké had been confused for a moment about the lines of domestic command.
I chewed on my odorless tofu stew while rehearsing these disciplinary scenarios. The back door fluttered, signaling Petrona’s exit. Lord, have mercy, I said, unplugging my ears. There was absolute silence. I stayed in the darkening dining room for a long time, listening, but not a sound came out of McCabe’s room. When I glanced up the stairs, the tray was gone.
The cellar key was in its place, in the top drawer of the Judge’s desk, which I kept locked at all times. The brass key that opened the dr
awer was in my pocket, on a key ring that included the house and gardening-shed keys. I checked the drawer lock with a flashlight and the tiny magnifying glass that I used when tightening the screws on my reading glasses. The drawer did not seem to have been forced, but a professional would know how to pick a lock without leaving any trace. I could not imagine Petrona having that skill. (But, for all I knew, she could have been Raffles, the silk-handed thief. My lack of imagination about her was purely racial.) The gardening shed appeared equally free from human disturbance, although there were animal footprints on the dusty floor, something small and clawed, a field mouse or perhaps a weasel. The only window hung unevenly from rusty hinges, closed but not locked. Animals are stronger and smarter than we think, even mice. They could have broken in and left without a trace. I nailed the window shut. It was beginning to drizzle when I shone the flashlight on the yellow rosebush. There were twenty-seven roses, including three unopened buds. I memorized their position: it was too wet to make a diagram. From now on, I’d be able to tell if one was missing. As it turned out, I never could. The yellow roses continued to appear on McCabe’s daily tray, and my nightly rose count yielded numbers so disparate that they signified nothing: fifty-three roses and seven buds on the second night, thirteen roses and seventeen buds on the third, and so on. But that first night under the drizzle, I went back in with a feeling of accomplishment and quickly fell asleep.
