by Packer, Vin
“Babe,” Pontiac says. “A nice doll.”
Larry says, “Well, that would make it pretty easy the first time, wouldn’t it, Marie? We’ll just shoot you, me, and Babe. My wife will work the cameras. Here, try one of these fig buns … Ummm, they’re delicious!”
• • •
The rain cannot drown the decaying stink of the apartment house, the cooking smells, the odor of too many people in too few rooms. Past the pile of refuse that is always there in the corridor, Gober leads Anita Manzi by the hand. They go up the stairs together, and outside the Gonzalves’ flat, Gober says, “Let me take your raincoat, Nita. I guess the building smells, huh? I don’t know. I sort of smell it, but I’m used to it.”
Anita hands him her plaid coat, and says, “Wait — let me comb my hair first. You sure they expect me?”
“Sure.”
“And it’s all right, Gober? You’re sure?” “They’re glad. They think it’s nice for me to bring a girl home.”
The walls around them are scratched with names, drawings of hearts, heads and bodies of women, and obscenities. Plaster is hanging by threads from the ceiling; the light bulb is the dimmest watt possible. Above them on the next floor, an angry mother is chasing her child up more stairs, yelling, “I’ll put you in the furnace when I catch you, and shut the door!”
“It’s pretty noisy today,” Gober says, as he waits while Anita fusses with her hair. “It’s not usually this noisy.”
“Where I live, the couple upstairs are always fighting. We can hear them. They’re always shouting at each other.”
“You look swell. Really!”
“I’m nervous, Gober.”
“So am I.”
“You are? Why?”
“Search me. I don’t know. I guess because I just never brought a girl home.” Gober shrugs. “Well, I guess we might as well go on in.”
“Is it your mother or your father who doesn’t speak English?”
“My mother. But my father doesn’t speak too good. Sort of broken.”
“I’m ready, I guess.”
“Well, we might as well. Come on.”
Gober opens the door and steps into the living room. There on the antimacassar-covered sofa sit Mr. and Mrs. Gonzalves, in rigid postures, dressed in their Mass clothes. Neither one moves as their son enters with the girl and shuts the door behind them. Beside Mrs. Gonzalves, her husband looks very little and fragile. His feet do not touch the floor. His knees are crossed and his legs just hang over the sides of the sofa, the black shoes he wears shined to a high polish, his tight, ill-fitting black suit shiny from the pressing his wife gave it this morning. He has on a striped shirt and flower-splashed tie, a vest with a gold watch chain looped across it, and in the buttonhole of his coat, a paper rose.
Mrs. Gonzalves, big and obese, has on her navy blue silk dress with the rows of long beads around the neck. Her black hair is combed back neatly into a bun, and she smells of too much “Evening In Paris” perfume, which was given her last Christmas by Rigoberto. In her lap she holds the green satin pillow with the gold-sewn Mom across it.
Grober stands looking at them and they sit looking at him for a slow moment. Then, taking Anita’s hand, Gober says, “Mama, Papa, this is Anita.”
Anita smiles, “?-how do you do. Ah — como está usted?”
“Buenos días,” Mrs. Gonzalves says. “Mucho gusto.”
“Hallo!” Mr. Gonzalves says. “Take the chair, no?”
“Haga el favor de sentarse?” Mrs. Gonzalves says.
“I’m afraid my one year of Spanish isn’t going to help much, Gober.”
“She says, sit down please.”
“Si.” Mr. Gonzalves nods. “Take the chair.”
Anita walks to the large brown stuffed chair with the claw feet, sits forward in it, and pats her hair in place lightly with her fingers. Gober puts their damp coats on a wooden chair near the door, then goes across to the hassock beside Anita, and straddles it.
“Everybody’s so dressed up around here. Think we were having a party.” He snickers self-consciously. His mother does not understand him, but she smiles and says, “Si!”
“Rain, rain!” his father says. “It no stop all day.” “We really needed it, though,” Anita comments. “Huh?” Mr. Gonzalves leans forward. “The rain. We really needed it.”
“I don’t,” he tells her. “No like. No work in rain. No like.”
“Oh, of course. I never thought of that.”
“Papa hates rain,” Gober says. “I can’t remember it raining much back home. I don’t know. Probably it did but I can’t remember it ever raining much.”
“No work in rain.” Mr. Gonzalves says. “Rain, rain. No good.”
They sit in silence for a while, Mrs. Gonzalves smiling at Anita, looking down at her hands, folded limply in her lap, then up again at Anita, smiling, then back at her hands. Her husband pulls at the gold fringe edging the pillow between his wife and him. He crosses and re-crosses his legs.
Gober says to Anita, “You want a coke?”
“No. No, thanks, Gober.”
“I get cokes, Riggie.” His father rises. “You stay. Talk. I get cokes.”
“Do you want one, Nita?” “Sure, I guess so.”
“Okay, Papa,” Gober says, as his father disappears into the small closet kitchen. “Not warm ones, Papa. I put some on ice last night.”
Gober’s mother reaches next to her on the end table for a small glass bowl filled with a combination of peanuts, raisins, and Rice Krispies.
“Desea usted — ” She bends across, offering them to Anita.
“No. I — don’t think so.”
“Desea usted — ” Mrs. Gonzalves repeats, continuing to hold the glass bowl out, grinning and nodding her head.
“No, mama, no!” Gober says.
“Muy bueno,” she persists.
Gober snaps at her, “Mama, demasiado! No!”
Mrs. Gonzalves withdraws her hand with a hurt look on her countenance. She stares down at the mixture, picks some up in her hand, raises it to her mouth, and then, suddenly, changes her mind. She drops what is in her hand back into the bowl, and replaces it on the end table. As she was doing this, Anita had mumbled, “But, gracias, anyway,” but Gober’s mother chose not to hear. Her feelings are hurt.
“That’s Mama’s trouble,” Gober tells Anita, while his mother sulks on the couch. “She’s touchy. She takes everything personal. She offers you something and you don’t want it, you don’t want her. That’s the way she thinks.”
“If I’d known that, I would have taken some. I’m stupid!”
“Why should you have! You didn’t want any.” “But I could have — ”
“Naw. What’s the point? Mama’s got to grow up someday!”
Mrs. Gonzalves is humming now; very quietly sitting and humming to herself. She traces the word Mom in the pillow and does not look across at her son and the girl. When Gober’s father returns, holding three cold coke bottles by the neck, handing one to Gober, one to Anita Manzi, and keeping one for himself, Mrs. Gonzalves stares at him. Her eyes are at first peeved, then offended, then bitter.
“Qué pasa?” she demands. With her thumb she hits his bottle of coke.
“You forgot Mama, Papa. Here, Mama, take mine.” Gober gets up and walks over to give it to her.”
“No,” she says, and in Spanish she complains, “I want mine. Not yours. Where’s mine?”
“There were only three on ice,” her husband tells her.
“And you three are the three? And I can go fly away. Because you three are the three. And all I do is cook around here and clean up. I am a maid, and you three are the family. You three are the three. Ah? You three!”
Gober says, “Look, Mama, look. I didn’t know Papa would be home for sure. I didn’t know last night it would rain today. I put three on. One for me. One for Nita. One for you.”
“Ah, so! We are the three,” she complains, “and your papa don’t count! Is that it!”
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“You just want a fight,” her husband says.
“Yah, you got a fight coming too!” she shouts back.
Anita Manzi sits gripping and ungripping her bottle of coke, trying vainly to pretend preoccupation as Gober’s mother and father quarrel.
“Mama, Papa,” Gober pleads in Spanish. “We have a guest.”
“Entertain her,” his mother says. “You asked her here. You want to marry her, you might as well know to entertain her by yourself. You don’t need your mother and father for that, Riggie. Go on, then!”
“Mama, I’m not marrying her. I’m only asking you to meet her.”
“She’s skinny and she would not cook you things I would, but go on and entertain. Have a good time. You’ll never do it any younger, Riggie. Just forget all about your papa and me.”
“Your mama wants a fight with me,” Mr. Gonzalves says, “so she can make up in bed.”
Gober sighs, and looks helplessly at Anita. “Why do they pick today to get their tempers going?” he says. “I’m sorry, Nita.”
“The rain maybe did it, Gober.” “I don’t know.”
“You see the empty bed you have tonight!” Mrs. Gonzalves threatens her husband.
“What’s it about, Gober? Is it me?”
“It’s about nothing at all. It never is. It’s exercise for them.”
“Good! Then I have room to move for a change!” Mr. Gonzalves taunts. “You can sleep in the hall.”
Anita raises the bottle and drinks some of the coke. Gober does not touch his. The arguing continues. Anita whispers, “Should I go, Gober? I think I should go.”
“We’re not here two minutes.”
“I feel uncomfortable, as though I shouldn’t be here, Gober. I could come back another time.”
Mrs. Gonzalves is yelling, “Riggie come home and bring a girl friend, all ready you got someone to cook for you and pick up after your dirtiness and you tell me I should sleep in the hall, and you live off your daughter-in-law, is that your big game? You play some big games. Yah! Yah!”
“Tonight you be begging me turn over!” his father yells. “You fight so you can love better. You love better when you make up, ah?”
“Yah, yah, you cheese! You’re an old man. You are too old for me!”
Anita rises. “Really, Gober. I think I’d rather go. I’ll come back again.” “I’ll go with you.”
“All right. I — don’t have to work until six.” “I’ll go with you.”
Gober takes her hand as they walk across to the chair where their coats lie. He is holding her coat for her when he hears his mother say, “Riggie!”
“Mama?” he answers glumly.
“What happens here? Hah? You bring your girl friend home and you don’t stay five minutes. Where you going?”
“Come back,” his father says. “I got some card tricks to show your girl.”
“Riggie, does she dislike us for some reason?”
“No, Mama,” he says, “She likes you. She just can’t stay long.”
“Tell her to come back, Riggie. I’ll show her my recipes. She can’t make rulino, I bet you.”
Anita smiles at the Gonzalveses, who stand before the sofa now looking as bewildered and as expectant as they did when she arrived with their son.
“Gracias,” she says. “Gracias.”
“Igualmente,” Mrs. Ganzalves answers, bowing a little, and smiling benignly, “Igualmente.”
“Okay,” Mr. Gonzalves waves. “No get wet in rain!”
“Buenos dias!” Anita says.
“Buenos dias!”
“Buenos dias!”
Behind them, Gober and Anita shut the door. Without talking, they go down the stairs, through the corridor, and into the entranceway. It is still pouring out. The rain whips the streets.
Gober sighs. “I guess we better wait for a while,” he says in a sour tone.
“Don’t feel bad, Gober.”
“Mama and Papa are funny. They fight but in a way they are making up to each other all through it.”
“I like them, Gober.”
“I like them too. They are so kiddish, though. Sometimes I feel like the parents of them instead of the other way around.”
“Gober? I have something to ask you now. Can you come to meet my brother Bob?”
“Sure.”
“Friday night?”
“Friday! Why that night?”
“It’s Bob’s night off.”
“I got something planned.”
“Bob and his fiancée want us to come over to Bob’s.” “Not Friday, Nita.”
“Gober — I — I’d sort of told him we would.”
“No,” Gober answers adamantly. “It’ll have to be another time. Friday is out!”
“Has it something to do with your gang, Gober?”
“I said it’s out!”
“Then it has!”
“Friday night is out and that’s that!”
“Gober, if your gang’s so important — ”
“What do you want from me!” Gober shouts at her. “I said I had something on Friday. You want me to change my whole life around for you! Move out of here! Quit the gang! Just change everything for someone I haven’t even laid!” The last word slipped out. Gober gets red. He looks at her and in her eyes sees the word’s hurt like a slap. Tears start stinging her eyes.
“You haven’t even kissed me either, Gober,” she says, “or do I get laid before I get kissed?”
“Either way you want it,” Gober answers gruffly, and then, trembling, he takes her in his arms for the first time.
• • •
Outside the doctor’s office, the rain lashes the window panes. The thin young girl clutches a plastic pocketbook and sits tensely in the chair, beside the doctor’s desk.
“What more do you want me to say?” the doctor asks.
“I don’t know. Isn’t there something — ”
“An abortion? No. As far as I’m concerned, anyway.”
“But you know of someone? Some other doctor?”
The doctor shakes his head. “You probably couldn’t afford it if I did. No, my dear, your best bet is to tell the man with whom you were intimate. You say you love him. Tell him. Marry him.”
“No, no, no. Can’t. You don’t understand.”
“I understand one thing. You’re ten weeks pregnant. I don’t know why some women think they’re particularly noble or heroic not to mention their pregnancy to a man. Even today, a married woman was in, three months pregnant and in shaky condition. Doesn’t want her husband to know. It beats me!” The doctor stands. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I can’t do anything more, except perhaps to caution you. Abortions cost anywhere from four hundred to a thousand dollars, depending on the doctor — if it is a doctor. And you can’t be sure of that. Under that price, you take an even greater chance. Either way you endanger your health, if not your life, and you’re committing a criminal act. I’m sorry to be so stern, but don’t do anything foolish.”
“Before I go, could I use your phone?”
“Surely.”
The thin young girl walks to the window sill where the telephone directories are stacked. She pulls out the city directory and pushes the pages past Q to R. Then she runs a finger down the long column to Roan, Danl. 322W122.
IX
So say okay, say sure, say yes,
Say by the way, I too confess.
I’ve got some news for you …
— A RED EYES DE JARRO ORIGINAL.
Ar EL PALACIO, Tea buys a ticket.
“Hay un asiento reservado para esta noche?” he asks the girl in the box office of the dumpy little movie house.
“A reserved seat, ah?” she says back to him in Spanish. “Go sit in the back. I have to see. What’s your name?”
“Tell her Perrez,” he answers.”
“Sit in the back. If there is a reserved seat an usher will let you know.”
“There better be one.”
“You can’t
predict about that,” the girl tells him.
The theater is crowded because of the rain. The picture has been shown for two weeks, a Spanish-speaking romance; almost everyone there has seen it once, twice, three times before. It is great sport. Tea walks through the shabby lobby to the inside. There is a bad smell, made up of a hundred awful odors; and noise — laughter and catcalling, shushing, and hissing, and myriad conversations. A white-haired old man shuffles up to Tea as he stands in the back. The old man wears a ragged black suit, a striped T-shirt, and a band around his arm with “Acomodador” written across it. In his hand he carries a flashlight.
“Asiento?” he asks Tea.
Tea says, “Asiento reservado!”
“Ah, si?” The old man shrugs. He points to the last seat in the last row and tells Tea, “Sit there until we know.”
Beside Tea in the row, a child sleeps. Next to her a young girl necks with a sailor. His hand is moving under her blouse. She moans and giggles and moans and giggles. It makes him bolder. His fingers slide to her skirt. The fat woman beside them chomps popcorn and watches them. They are better than the movie. On the screen a man in a mambo band winks at a lady in a tight-fitting evening dress. She raises her eyebrow. Someone in the audience bellows, “Cuidado!” Tea holds his arm up to see the time on his watch. Ten o’clock. Tomorrow is Thursday. Cold turkey day. His arm knocks the child’s shoulder and she wakes, pulls at the girl’s blouse next to her. “Mama?”
“Go back to sleep,” the girl says. She grabs the sailor’s cap from his lap and puts it on the child’s head. “See, you are a sailor, sleeping on a big boat!” The child does not buy this. She wants to go home. “Shut up or I’ll call a policeman,” her mother warns. The sailor bites the mother’s ear.
“Asiento reservado?” the old usher’s voice whispers in Tea’s ear. “Si!”
“Follow me,” he says to Tea.
They go up a worn staircase, into a small room behind the balcony. There are two or three chairs there, and a closed door leading into another room.
“Wait here,” the usher commands. “She will see you pronto.”
“Si, gracias,” Tea tells him; and the usher closes the door behind him, leaving Tea alone in the room. He does not have to wait long. The door to the second room opens and a plump woman in her mid-thirties greets Tea.
