by Julie Mars
“It feels like nothing,” Rico said. “I never even saw the book.”
“You never saw the book?” Margaret repeated. “Why not?”
“The guy who wrote it, you know, he invited me to a bookstore where he was signing it, but I didn’t go. It wasn’t like I was going to buy it. He told me it was, like, forty bucks. And after that, where would I see it?”
Margaret shook her head. “The rey without an ego,” she said.
“Margaret, speak English, will you?” he said. “Or Spanish.”
She shifted forward in the chair and reached down to the floor where her big bag was waiting in a pile. “All is not lost,” she said. “I just happen to have a copy on me.” She reached into the bag and extracted a book that looked, on first glance, too big to fit in there. “Ta-daaaa.”
She placed the book on the desk and opened it to a page marked with a yellow sticky note. Rico stood up to cross to the desk, bringing his folding chair with him. She had rolled her chair close to the desk too, and soon they were sitting elbow to elbow, the book spread open between them.
“Here you are,” she said, pointing to a full-color picture of Rico squatting down next to the fender of an old Impala. He wore goggles that obscured his face, but he was still recognizable with his tattooed arms and long ponytail. He leaned in to get a better look, and so did she, and that was when he heard the car pull up, stopping in front of the garage office, in front of the window where he and Margaret were framed like a painting. Rico glanced up and saw, with a thud in his heart that felt like an electrical short circuit, that it was Rosalita.
1988
VINCENT TEACHES the illiterate prisoners how to speak, read, and write English. He does this to pass the time. He does it to make some form of contribution. He does it because the prison officials give him a small cell of his own, a closet really, where he is frequently visited by one of the prison cats, an orange tabby he calls Gladys. Gladys, like all the cats, helps with the rodent problem. She also helps Vincent feel more human.
He is working with his students in a corner of the prison compound, drawing the letters of the alphabet in the dirt with a sharp stick, when he sees Thomas Yazzie for the first time. Thomas lingers at the edges of the lesson. Watches. Offers nothing.
He is dark-skinned, black-haired, like everyone else, but there is something different about him. Different enough that Vincent takes notice. When the lesson is over and the men disperse, Thomas moves forward.
He is Navajo, it turns out. An ex-soldier who has seen too much and done too much and desperately needs healing. He has left the army, finished his tour of duty, received his DD-214, and headed out to see the beauty of the world as a way of counteracting what he’d seen and done.
He came to India.
He needed money, and he made the same mistake Vincent had made, fourteen long years before.
“The prisons here are different,” Vincent tells Thomas, who, he learns, arrived just nine days ago. “They keep you here for years before they even charge you with anything.” He offers his hand. “I’m Vincent,” he says. “Let’s go find a place in the shade to sit.” He begins to cross the dirt yard, stepping around squatting men who play a game involving little piles of stones and a great deal of yelling.
Thomas follows as quickly as he can.
ROSALITA NEVER took her eyes off Rico’s, not from the time she opened the door and got out of her car, to the moment she stepped out of the sun and into the office of Garcia’s Automotive. Rico watched her coming with the same sense of trepidation and dread he might feel about the approach of a tornado from across the plains. He had no doubt how the former Rosalita—the Rosalita from before this morning, last night, or the past four years—would handle her entrance into a scene like this. It would involve screaming and yelling, and she might even come at him, her arms flailing. But her hot Latina blood appeared to have cooled to the point of neutrality over her long winter, and now Rico had no idea what she might do.
When she stepped across the threshold, he said, “Hola, Rosalita,” as if nothing at all were wrong with her finding him huddled down at his desk in the middle of the day, shoulder to shoulder, with an Anglo woman, one with long black hair, green eyes, and lips the color of peach blossoms.
“Hola, Rico,” she said, and her voice had a quality in it that made Margaret sit up straight and glance at him, as if she was waiting for him to present her with an explanation of what was happening.
“Rosalita, this is Margaret,” he said. Then he turned to Margaret, whose face was not more than a foot away from his, and said, “Margaret, this is Rosalita, mi esposa.”
“Hi, Rosalita,” Margaret said with an easy smile. “We were just looking at this book I found in the library. Rico’s in it. Come see.” She said this naturally, as if she were an innocent person, which she was, though how could Rosalita believe this. She said this in a voice that somehow reduced the visuals of this moment to unimportance, as if she had the power to take the questions hanging in the air and drive them all like a drill into the book on the desk. She even slid out of her chair and made a gesture toward it, as if it were a seat she had just been warming, waiting for Rosalita to come along.
“Rico, what’s going on here?” Rosalita said.
Rico stood up. “She just told you. We’re looking at this book.”
“It’s about low riders,” Margaret supplied. And then she repeated, “I found it in the library,” as if she had a limited vocabulary and, under tension, had to resort to repetition.
Margaret, with her years behind the bar, knew very well that, when the force field suddenly charges up between a man and a woman—and even more so, a husband and a wife—it’s time to beat feet. And, just by the nature of being a bartender and an attractive woman, especially in her younger years when the rage she felt seemed to telegraph itself as sexy wildness, she had often been the spark that ignited trouble, which she had no interest in doing anymore. She was finished with trouble, had left it behind her in New York, and now all she wanted to do was clear out fast. “Time for me to take off. Thanks a lot, Rico. I’ll leave the book so you and Rosalita can take your time looking at it,” she said, purposefully making no reference to the nature of their relationship, which truly was only teacher and student though it felt, even to her, like more. She simply hefted her bag onto her shoulder, said, “Nice meeting you” to Rosalita, and left. Both Rico and Rosalita were stone silent as she crossed the parking lot and continued up Barelas Road.
“So who is she?” Rosalita finally asked. Normally such a question comes with a scarlet edge of anger in it along with a list, being composed on the spot, of suspicions, but Rosalita’s had none of that. It barely had curiosity. In fact, as Rico scanned her tone for hidden meaning, the only word that came to his mind was defeated.
“She’s a gringa who wants to learn to weld,” he said. “She lives in the neighborhood.”
Rosalita sat down in the chair Margaret had just vacated. “Have you known her a long time?”
“Not even a week,” said Rico, all the time feeling as if he were walking blindfolded along the edge of a cliff.
“Are you going to teach her?”
“We already started.” It felt good to say it, Rico noticed. “Yesterday.”
Rosalita looked up at him, as if she were doing some mental calculations, and then she said, “Oh. That explains last night.”
“Now you know,” he said, echoing her exact words from just a few hours ago, and then some vindictive streak in him, the same one that everyone possesses, prompted him to continue with the rest of the words she had used on him this morning. “I hope you feel better, knowing, Rosalita.”
Some moments between lovers are like storms, where winds whip up debris that might have been settled for years, and some reach the freezing point, where, in the face of repeated cold blasts, the lovers can only run in opposite directions for cover. But some have no air in them at all. They are the quiet, suffocating ones that seem inescapable, insu
rmountable, and hopeless. They are the ones that feel like a trap, or quicksand, or drowning. This is exactly where Rico and Rosalita found themselves. They should have been at each other’s throats, but instead they spoke in quiet, civil tones. They should have held knives to each other’s heart, but they didn’t, because both knew that the knives were already embedded and all they could do together, at least in this precise moment, was bleed.
Meanwhile, Margaret walked home in an apprehensive mood, as if whatever Rico and Rosalita were not saying was ricocheting off the concrete block walls all around her, and she had to keep her guard up to fend it off. Back in the bar business, she had a name for what had been hovering in the atmosphere of the garage, preparing to incarnate: stingrays—or, if they were particularly vicious, killer stingrays. If she was on the receiving end, ninety-nine percent of the time the sender of the stingrays was female, though, given the right circumstances—which usually arose when a girlfriend or wife Margaret had never known existed showed up unexpectedly—males were more than capable of generating them too, and theirs were always of the killer variety. Oddly, Margaret did not know if she herself was capable of it. As she strolled the four blocks toward home, she attempted to remember any time or any place when she had shot off a round of rays toward anyone, and she simply couldn’t. She was jealous by nature, she thought, but in a more theoretical way. In real life, when the stingrays started, she erased whatever had caused them from her consciousness and just went on.
The initial scene with Rico, when he had shown up in her yard expecting her to fuck him stupid, was one she had erased, but now she felt a need to conjure it up again for the purposes of reexamination. Once you got to know Rico, she mused, he did not come across as a horndog, or even close to one. But that first impression could certainly be filed under that heading, and his wife—who was so pretty, who looked like some feisty Mexican woman in an old western movie, one who could ride a horse like a circus performer, wear her hair braided, piled up on top of her head, and tote a rifle for the purposes of running bad hombres off her land—had stepped into the scene as if she’d been there before, perhaps so many times that she had run out of energy for it. Her stingrays were present but weak. And Rico had not sent out any at all.
Margaret turned onto her own street, where an ice cream truck blasting the song “Greensleeves” at top volume was parked mid-block surrounded by children who apparently had never heard of the concept of getting in a line. They clamored around the little service window on the side of the truck, over which the owner had screwed a heavy wrought-iron grate, impatiently attempting to pass their money through the bars and receive their pre-packaged ice cream treat. Margaret had to weave her way through them. She glanced at the side of the truck where the ice cream choices were stenciled. They all came on popsicle sticks or in pointy sugar cones. She had loved pistachio ice cream as a child, primarily due to its vivid and unexpected color, though she never ate it after age five, probably because of the one clear memory she associated with it. On a hot summer day, she and her father had descended the six flights of stairs from the loft where they lived, and walked a few blocks to a sidewalk café in Little Italy. Vincent had ordered a big dishful of pistachio ice cream for her, complete with a cookie that could be used, at least for a while, in place of a spoon. That was the day that her father had told her that she would be living with Grampy for a few months while he and her mother went on a trip to India.
“Can’t I go?” she had asked, over and over, and Vincent had said no, it wasn’t a good idea. India was dirty and disease-ridden, dangerous and poor. It was no place for a little girl. “Are there any little girls there?” she had asked, and he had said yes, but they belonged there, and Margaret, just five years old, had tried to find a way to say, “I belong with you and Mommy,” but she couldn’t quite locate the right words. So she ate her bowl of ice cream instead, and she felt, with each little bite, like she was swallowing sorrow. The children around the ice cream truck showed no such sign of sorrow. They opened their treats and tossed the wrappers to the ground, where they remained, poised like a flock of pigeons waiting for a breeze.
Margaret walked a few more feet and turned into her driveway. As she passed through the gate, she called for Magpie, who ambled toward her from under an elm tree. “Hey, big girl,” she said as she squatted down to give her a hug. “How’s dogworld?” Magpie rolled over so Margaret could more easily reach her underside, and Margaret vigorously petted her for a good minute and then said, “Let’s go inside and rest up for a long walk when the sun goes down.”
On the way in, she found herself singing the words to “Greensleeves,” which she couldn’t even remember learning. “Alas, my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off discourteously,” she sang to the accompaniment of the music from the truck which still hadn’t moved, though the crowd of children had diminished to just a few stragglers. “. . . For I have loved you well and long, delighting in your company.”
That is a very sad song, she thought, as she flopped down on the couch and stretched out. She felt depressed just singing it, perhaps because of the little scene she’d just witnessed between Rico and Rosalita, perhaps because discourtesy weasled its way into all love relationships sooner or later, perhaps because there was always somebody who had loved somebody else, delighted in his or her company, and then got shafted.
Aside from Nick, with whom love had repeatedly blossomed, burst forth like a tropical flower which, despite its beauty, had never been picked, Margaret had experienced true love—the kind seen in movies, twisted with passion and drama, thirst and hunger—only once. And truthfully, when she looked back, which she tried not to do very often, she felt lucky she’d gotten as far as she had with it, given her lack of preparedness for the black chasm of fear that had cracked open inside her, right along with her heart. This man’s name was Harold, and he was a musician, a saxophone player whom she’d met in the Stereophonic Lounge when he came to hear a ragtag blues band that had, shortly afterward, received a lucrative recording contract and vanished forever from the local venues.
He was twenty-seven, two years older than she was, when he sidled up to the bar and ordered a Slow Comfortable Screw, a drink that gained its popularity mainly, she assumed, because people liked to ask for it. It made them feel lawless, which was helpful on a night out in a bar. She worked the bottles like the pro she was, using her stainless steel shaker to mix the ingredients right in front of him. The sloe gin, the Southern Comfort, vodka, and orange juice—it looked like a recipe for trouble as she poured it over the ice and shook it with a suggestion, perhaps, in the shaking, of a hand job just for him. Then she drained it into the glass she had already placed on the coaster, filling it to the brim without even one spare drop left over.
“Hope it’s slow enough for you,” she cooed, as she raised her eyes to his and held them there. For some reason, no doubt associated with the lighting, her eyes looked greener in the dark bar than anywhere else.
“Oh, no,” he sighed, as he gazed into them and simultaneously slid a ten dollar bill across the bar, “I had hoped for something more original from you.”
“Then you should have started with something more original,” she replied, with a little glance toward the drink. “I base my badinage on the line that’s fed me.”
“Badinage?” he said.
“Look it up. Get back to me,” she replied with a sexy little smile in her eyes. Margaret herself had only learned that word a few days before when she read it in a trashy novel that someone had left on the seat in the coffee shop where she frequently had breakfast. When she had read it, she’d thought it referred to some S&M practice. That didn’t fit the context of the story, so she had consulted the dictionary.
“Oh, I know what it means. But I haven’t heard it used in a sentence since the last Merchant-Ivory film.”
Now she smiled. “Please pass the badinage,” she said, and he replied in an assumed British accent, “Sorry, darling, we seem to have run out,” and the
n they both laughed. That was how they started, a combination of sexual innuendo and merriment, all mixed in with an unusual vocabulary word. Three years later, it ended rather differently.
But those three years! Margaret had felt herself falling through space toward him, right then at the very beginning, and had surreptitiously reached for the edge of the rinsing sink under the bar to steady herself. As for Harold, he had fallen in love with her from the back, before she’d even turned around from the other end of the long bar and noticed him waiting there. Her black hair, which brushed the waistband of her jeans like a curtain that had been pulled closed for privacy, had not prepared him for such pale skin or those eyes which seemed to have the history of Ireland in them. And when she’d moved toward him, her hips had swayed from side to side like a model on a runway ramp in Milan, and Harold got it, what happens when women lead so subtly with their hips. So ordering the Slow Comfortable Screw was truly a wish in search of fulfillment, though it should be said that it was also his favorite drink at the time.
When he had turned on his barstool away from the bar and toward the music, Margaret had studied him carefully in profile. He was olive-skinned and thin with wild curls that spiraled off his head in shades of burnt sienna. He wore a black V-neck sweater, well-fitted, and a complicated watch that looked as if it had better things to do than tell time. He drank slowly, putting away just two drinks over the course of the three hours he spent at the bar. When the band packed up and left and he remained, she knew why.
He waited while she cashed out, and then they went around the corner to a basement after-hours club that she knew about, where they huddled into a back booth and confided secrets as if they were both going to be hung at dawn and just wanted someone, anyone, to know who they had been. This was unusual for Margaret, who, perhaps after watching sloppy drunks spill their stories for years and thinking it was actually quite pathetic, aspired to and practiced self-containment. But there was a warmth in Harold, a quietness and stability, that drew her out, drew her to him, even though they had no reason to think they might fit together. Harold had the pedigree—the degree from Princeton and the parents in the big apartment on Fifth Avenue. He had the trust fund, annual ski vacations in Gstaad, and intense parental expectations, which he was not currently fulfilling as an itinerant saxophone player.
