This Angel on My Chest

by Pietrzyk, Leslie

  It was an easy thing to do, to slide the switch from OFF to HEAT, to listen to the rush of invisible air painlessly warming and blowing its way into my house as the wind pushed from the outside.

  I didn’t even think of turning down the heat that night or any of the nights. In fact, the next day I bought more blankets.

  IN A DREAM

  Like me, you would have remarried. I know it.

  We swore that we wouldn’t, if one of us were to die. We were twenty-five when we made that promise in Nogales, Mexico—a three-hour drive from where we lived in Phoenix, in a patched-together grad student life that involved lots of rice, beans, and books. Nogales was a cheap day-trip, and you weren’t afraid of anyone’s culture; wherever you went, you slid beyond the tourist zone, looking for local restaurants and shops, needing an experience, a story, a ping of danger. Most Americans wandered the blocks fanning Nogales’s official border point, with their cheap blankets and garish piñatas for sale, maybe climbing onto an ancient burro for a five-dollar photo before loading up on cut-rate pharmaceuticals and returning home.

  Not you, and I followed you.

  We wound through tight, snaky streets, on dusty uneven cement, passing open doors and inky puddles, catching lacy Spanish and whiffs of cooking oil and diesel, shards of bold colors with every turn of our heads. Above us the same measureless, pure blue sky from our own side of the border, the same sun and its panting heat. You stopped outside a restaurant on a corner, trickling two fingers over the blue stucco and the sweeping mural of a herd of horses wreathed in flowers, pointed to the curly script proclaiming, No Hay Otro Mejor, and your eyes glowed bright. We passed through the propped door, and a man with a walrus moustache and gray snakeskin cowboy boots leapt up from a table in the back, greeting us like best friends. “Amigos! Welcome!” and he reached to the tiled bar, grabbing the neck of an open bottle of tequila. He shot more Spanish through his smile and hurried us to a tiled table at the front picture window, letting us settle into the vinyl chairs—sticky against the backs of my thighs—before splashing a good, solid pour of tequila into each of two juice glasses there on the table, as if he had set them up especially for us and he’d been wondering why we were late but was too polite to ask. It was ten thirty on a Sunday morning, and the only other people around were three silent Mexican men at a back table, rhythmically spooning soup, their faces shadowed by the brims of their cowboy hats. Flies buzzed against the thick glass of the window, and at least a dozen dead ones were sprinkled legs-up on the ledge.

  You eyed the glass of tequila: I knew you planned to drink it, a straight shot, and I knew that I would follow even though I also knew that we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t be in this strange part of a strange city drinking out of these filmy glasses, surrounded by dead flies, about to eat strange food cooked in a strange, foreign kitchen. I shifted my legs, already a slick of sweat under them. The owner kept smiling—one tooth rimmed with a thin line of gold—his hand upraised in the international signal for “hang on”—and a young girl, twelve or so, scurried from the kitchen carrying a chipped plastic plate of lime chunks and a small bowl of salt, which she presented to us, placing them on the table before us with ritualistic precision, as if this were the lost component of the Catholic Masses I’d grown up attending. The owner’s hand whooshed forward, meaning, Go, meaning, Now.

  You pinched up salt to dribble onto the V of your loose fist, between your thumb and your forefinger, then you wrapped your other hand around the glass, raising one eyebrow at me in that way you had—did you really think I would not follow; did you really? You knew I would. I copied: salt, my palm on the juice glass, warm from a shaft of sunlight hitting it exactly so.

  I was afraid, so I jumped first: a smooth lick of salt, sour liquid rolling over my tongue and plunging down my throat, spreading a familiar fiery scorch, and at last, the stab of the lime, its acidic flesh shredding under my teeth.

  You laughed, and then you followed me.

  The owner clapped his hands—“Amigo, muy bueno, muy bueno!”—speaking the kind of childish Spanish he thought we might understand. Then he tilted us each a second shot from the bottle, and another. You kicked out the third chair, motioning for him to sit down and join us. Instead, he patted your back and winked, suddenly fatherly, and the young girl appeared with tattered, salsa-stained menus.

  The world spun through me: I wasn’t much of a drinker back then, and neither were you. At ten thirty, the day was already burning through the nineties, and the burr of a few flapping fans wasn’t keeping us cool. Neither of us had eaten breakfast, and the morning turned exhilarating and shiny with tequila firing my nerves.

  We ordered—chilaquiles for you and tamales for me—and just as the owner said again, “Amigos, muy bueno,” I jumped in to ask for two bowls of menudo, the traditional Mexican tripe soup rumored to cure weekend hangovers: “Dos menudos rojos, por favor,” and to be clear, I pointed to the men in the corner, empty soup bowls and beer bottles a clutter in front of them.

  You reached for my hand and squeezed “yes,” and I silently hoped we wouldn’t be up all night racing each other to the bathroom, hoped this wasn’t a foolish thing to do or an embarrassing way to be, hoped that the man was genuinely kind and not mocking us and our American life that we could never shrug off no matter how many blocks we walked beyond the border checkpoint.

  Tequila kills the bacteria, you whispered—always seeming to know what I was thinking—and then the lime kills what the tequila doesn’t get.

  I love you, I whispered back.

  I love you.

  Better soup couldn’t exist, more flavor couldn’t overflow a single bowl. Red chile-spiked, meaty broth thick with spongy strips of tripe and marble-sized globes of hominy. Handfuls of cilantro and onions to fling on top, ragged flakes of chile for more spice, another heap of lime chunks. I hadn’t thought I could or would eat cow’s stomach ever in my life, and not in a Mexican border town, and not in a random restaurant we stumbled into because you liked the painted horses on the wall, because you had a “feeling.”

  The owner plunked the bottle of tequila on the table. Again, you gestured for him to join us, and he sat, the three of us downing shots of tequila in unison, licking sweat and salt and lime from our lips. I tried my ancient high school Spanish, creaky at best, and he went on a rapid-fire tear, sweeping one arm in circles from time to time, calling for the girl to bring more tortillas, to get him a Coke, and we nodded and smiled, and somehow we came to understand his story: how his grandfather had started this restaurant with money he won gambling, and the man had worked here every day since he was eight, missing only for weddings and funerals; it was his restaurant now, and one day it would pass to his three daughters. The menudo was his great-grandmother’s exact recipe: days to soak and scrub the tripe, a pig’s foot making the broth richer. He paid an artist to paint the mural of the horses because his wife grew up on a ranch and liked horses. He told us he was a lucky man, the luckiest man alive. He pressed one palm flat onto the picture window, stared at his hand for a long moment.

  An extended family of a dozen or so people and three strollers piled in, and a couple just out of church, fanning themselves with paper funeral home fans, and a man with two little girls with floppy sky-blue bows at the back of their dresses, and the rush was on: the owner jumped up, bustling everyone about, pushing tables, sliding chairs, smiling and pinching cheeks, calling for the girl, flipping on the boom box to a burst of horns. We were the only non-Mexicans.

  You leaned in close and whispered, I’m the luckiest man alive.

  I whispered, Then I’m the luckiest woman alive.

  I’ll remember today forever.

  Me too.

  Even when I’m dead, you whispered. Exotic, whispering through the noise, in this place where no one understood us or wanted to, because we were passing through in a quick dip out of our little life in America.

  Me too, I whispered back. Even when I’m dead. But that won’t be for a long time,
right?

  A hundred years.

  A hundred and seventeen years.

  A hundred years plus infinity.

  A hundred years plus infinity plus one.

  You were so happy, with your tequila and your menudo and your chilaquiles and me. Later, we walked around town. We bought a silly piñata shaped like a red chile pepper and a yellow painted enamel parrot the size of a football that I named Sammy and a couple of striped blankets to throw on top of our futon back at our apartment in Phoenix.

  Now, I can’t remember why the parrot got named Sammy. Also, whatever happened to that piñata?

  Now, I’m the only one who remembers that day, unless the man or his daughter or the Mexican men slouching in the corner slurping menudo remember us—and why would they? Our happiness was special only to us.

  I’ve got one of the blankets in the trunk of my car, but the other one vanished in a move or a cleaning purge or truly into thin air.

  So it wasn’t the restaurant in Nogales where we promised not to remarry if one of us died, but during the drive home from the restaurant in Nogales. The darkness of the desert folded around us—the sizzle of the day’s heat easing to a smolder—as the straight shot of interstate carried us north to Phoenix. You always drove fast, the assumption being that where you were going next would be even more fascinating than where you were now. You were edgy whenever I drove, picking at me—I was too slow, why didn’t I pass that truck—so I preferred playing passenger, keeping us alert in the dark with conversation and questions.

  I asked about your high school hockey team in Michigan and its good luck rituals, and you told me stories about kissing Alan Preysler’s collie on the lips before every game, and his mom sneaking the dog into the locker room and driving the dog to away games because the school wouldn’t let animals ride on the bus.

  I asked what the dorm room looked like when you were teaching geography in a Jamaican high school, and you described the shimmering white cinderblock walls with pencil sketches of race cars that someone before you had drawn, the tile floor with the worn spot near the single window, the way the sheets on the iron-barred bed smelled like bleach and scratched at night.

  I asked what your five favorite foods were when you were a teenager, and you told me pizza, Coke with crushed ice but not cubes, your mother’s flank steak, yellow cake with an inch of chocolate frosting, and pizza again because that’s how much you loved pizza.

  I asked how you thought the world would end if it was going to end, and you said nuclear annihilation but then changed to the outbreak of a contagious virus and then you said no that it would be a meteor like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs and you wondered if it would be the meteor killing us all or the aftermath.

  I was staring out the car window then, watching the darkness, feeling it. I pressed my palm tight against the glass and stared at the shape of my fingers spread out, traveling the ups and downs with my eyes. The glass was warm, almost something alive. Driving through night often gave me a sense of being whisked too fast through something, the sense that I was missing the important thing. I was aware of the unseen: coyotes loping through brush, owls swooping lethally for mice, jackrabbits hunched along a rock. That churn of life and death while we were safely ensconced in this car, with its air conditioning and upholstery, though statistically a car on a highway wasn’t safe at all. Abruptly, nothing seemed safe, and I yanked my hand off the glass, and even though the world wasn’t about to end and even though you were a very fine driver, I interrupted as you changed your mind again, suggesting the world would end because God—ironically it would turn out there was one—because God would smite everyone down the way He’d been promising to.

  I said, What happens when we die?

  You said, We die.

  No, I said. What happens?

  It was a stupid question, as stupid as naming a yellow parrot Sammy, as stupid as buying a yellow parrot in a border town in Mexico—bargaining over a stupid yellow parrot, getting down to five dollars after ten minutes of round and round and threats to walk away—as stupid as drinking too much tequila and ending up hungover at seven o’clock on Sunday night.

  You explained what you knew about decay and maggots. I let you go on, not because I especially wanted to hear about maggots, but because my voice would shake if I spoke. I let you go on because though you were talking about maggots, you understood my real question. You just didn’t want to think about it. You did that sometimes, switched the focus to facts, as if only facts existed.

  I sucked in a deep breath. One spot in my head ached more than the rest, a round place the size of a dime at the back-center of my skull.

  You talked about a law of science, that no matter is created nor destroyed.

  Finally, I said, No, no. What happens when I die?

  We were doing eighty. So was everyone else on the road. We weren’t close to the fastest, even at eighty. I imagined the conversations in the cars around us, the personal mix of maggots and pizza and kissing dogs on the lips and yellow parrots. I worried that no one in those cars was having conversations they would remember. I worried that it was all going too fast, whatever “it” was.

  Maggots, you said. Same as everyone else. I wish we were special, but we’re not, you said. You weren’t mean saying it, just factual. A fact, it was a fact.

  I hate that I ask that question and you say “maggots,” I said.

  You said, I hate that about me too.

  Silence. Only the tires cutting the road, the radio suddenly jumping forward into that open space—Fleetwood Mac—and you said, I can’t stand this song, though I knew that wasn’t true, so I didn’t twirl the dial. This all was back when people listened to Fleetwood Mac, when cheap cars like ours only had radios, when radio stations weren’t all owned by one watered-down behemoth of a conglomerate. This station had a real DJ, a human being behind the music pulsing out of the dark; I imagined this man selecting this Fleetwood Mac song, imagined him wondering who was listening to it, who would be singing along, who would be breaking up while this song played, who would be having sex, who would be washing dishes, who would be driving home after getting fired for mouthing off to a customer. Who would remember this song and this moment of hearing this song?

  Stevie Nicks sang about another lonely day.

  It’s just a question, I said.

  I don’t like thinking about it, you said, if you were dead.

  You prefer thinking about my body covered in maggots? I asked.

  Haha, you said. Sometimes you did that, when something wasn’t funny, but was me trying to joke us somewhere. Haha, you’d say, just like that, just the way it’s spelled. I miss that. I never met anyone else who did that.

  We had a great day, you said. Ask me another question. Ask me what color I see in every one of my dreams.

  Blue, I said. I already know that. Of course I also already knew about the hockey players kissing the dog on the lips. I knew lots of things about you, but I never thought that what I knew was everything. I expected that we had infinity plus one for all the questions and stories.

  Blue, you said. I’m always inside some big blue sky in my dreams. What does that mean, do you think?

  That you’re happy, I said, that you see unlimited possibilities.

  I do, you said, I truly do.

  So, well. It wasn’t on the drive after the time at the restaurant at Nogales when we promised we would never remarry. It was when we got home that night, back to our cheap apartment. Before we lived in Arizona, we lived in New York City, grubbing at various artsy pursuits, and moving to Arizona was being dropped into the Garden of Eden: our apartment walk-in closet was the size of my first Manhattan sublet. Sure, the place was hideous: gold carpet, cheap painted wallboard, the light fixtures glued to the ceiling, brown refrigerator and matching brown stove. But so big! Two bedrooms and two bathrooms and a tiny balcony overlooking an old tennis court with a crack running parallel to the center line; players aimed for the crack, so the ball bounced a
skew. The complex included two swimming pools and two hot tubs, and from our tiny balcony was a straight-on view of one of these swimming pools, glowing like a blue jewel all night long. It was a marvel to us, but to anyone living in Phoenix this was nothing extraordinary; most apartment complexes had these amenities, and often we were the only people at the pool or in the hot tub. Everyone else was inside watching TV in air conditioning. People in Phoenix never asked about pools and tennis courts; they knew to want covered parking, which this complex did not have. The sun beat into our black car, baking the black vinyl seats. The steering wheel was like a blacksmith’s forge until we bought a polyester sheepskin cover from a guy in a grocery store parking lot selling “skins and kins” from his pickup. We’ve gone native, you said.

  The electric bill was so high that whenever we left for more than an hour, we pushed the AC thermostat to eighty. There were discussions about whether holding steady or going on-off was cheaper in the long run—but this is what we did, which meant that when walking in, the apartment would slam up a wall of heat.

  We had only been in Arizona three months but that seemed like forever. We complained that there were no good bagels and no good Chinese, but New York was a distant landscape—the moon, maybe; maybe even the dark side—and we weren’t staying in Arizona always. It was the in-between place for grad school, and we would step into another life the way we’d stepped into and then out of the restaurant in Nogales, the way we’d stepped through the gate from America to Mexico and back.

  Because something needed to feel definitive and certain, I had insisted that we get married before moving to Arizona. We took the subway downtown to City Hall on a Wednesday, waited for about fifteen minutes, and there we were, married. Parents were furious, especially yours, because they liked throwing parties as a competitive sport, and my mother didn’t talk to me for two months, which I only noticed after ten days. My father sent a big check from Chicago. It was a relaxing way to get married. You called me Mrs. for a week.