Rust

by Julie Mars

  Yet they never married, which was shameful, at least according to their families. It was Rosalita who said no, who had witnessed too much behind the closed doors of her own parents’ marriage to believe in it. “I want to stay with you because of love,” she insisted, “not because of a piece of paper.” Here she would hold up her hand with her thumb and pointer finger touching as if there were a piece of paper between them. And sometimes she would add, “and if I have to leave, ever, I want to be free to go.” To Rico, it didn’t matter, though for many years every time they attended the wedding of a friend, he was filled with longing and proposed again, but Rosalita only smiled and said, “We don’t need the piece of paper, Rico. We don’t.” Now he knew, though he hadn’t until a few days ago, that a time had come when Rosalita had thought of leaving, but by then she did not feel free to go, paper or not.

  Ana was wrapping up her psychology lecture when Rico finally tuned back in. The correct answer, he ascertained, to her multiple choice question was c) chronic depression. He nodded his head as if he finally understood, as if he had been listening intently with the others, but his eyes were on Rosalita. Had she been depressed for the past four years? Had she been living with regret, perhaps wishing she had run off with whatever man it was that arrived in her life and threw her off balance so completely that she had not been able to find her way back to Rico, whom she’d been with for close to two decades? Was he in the same predicament now? Heading for depression? Or had he just woken up from it?

  Dinner progressed as it always did: with laughter and conversation and plenty of good food. Maribel, as always, had complaints about the manager at PetSmart, who, according to her, didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Lucy had a date coming up on Saturday night with a Mexicano who played the trumpet in a mariachi band. Ana would babysit for Jessica, provided Lucy swore to be home before Jessica started screaming to get up at five in the morning. Speaking of morning, Elena pleaded with Rico to sneak over and strangle the rooster who lived on the other side of the fence from her casita, the one who started crowing at four and never shut up until ten in the morning. Rosalita was quiet, but that was not new. Mainly, she asked who was ready for more arroz con pollo or who needed another drink. As always, she added food to Rico’s plate without asking him. As always, she pretended to be surprised when the girls offered to do the clean up. “I wouldn’t mind putting my feet up,” she said, as she always did, and then she went into the living room and flicked on the television for the seven o’clock news.

  Tonight, Rico followed her, leaving Maribel to walk Elena back to her casita.

  “Rosalita, let’s take a little drive,” he said. “Or how about a walk by the river?”

  She glanced up from the TV screen. “Why?” she said.

  “So we can talk,” Rico said.

  “I don’t feel like talking,” she said. “I don’t want to hear where you’ve been or what you’ve been doing.”

  Rico sat down at the opposite end of the couch. “It’s not what you think,” he said. “At least, not yet.”

  She looked at him now, and to Rico, she looked tired. “Were you with her last night?”

  “For a while. We took a walk, that’s all.”

  “It must have been a long walk.”

  “Afterward I went to Fernando’s grave,” Rico said. “I climbed over the wall of the cemetery.”

  Rosalita studied him. “Why?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I was talking about him to Margaret, and later I just ended up there.” Even saying the name Margaret out loud felt risky, and he realized with surprise that he was suddenly nervous about talking to Rosalita, the woman he had talked to every day for twenty-three years.

  “What do you want from me, Rico?” she said.

  He hesitated. “You could ask me if I’m okay,” he finally said.

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She moved toward him then. He put his arm around her shoulder the way he had always done, before those four years when it became clear that she didn’t want him to touch her anymore.

  “Well, look at this! Young love!” said Lucy as she came into the living room with Jessica on her hip. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “No,” said Rosalita.

  “Good,” replied Lucy, dropping her daughter into her mother’s lap. “Sit with Grandma, mi amor, until Mommy finishes the dishes.” Lucy turned around and vanished into the kitchen.

  Rico had to laugh. Maybe that was family life in a nutshell. The walls could be collapsing, but until everyone was buried up to their necks in the rubble, life went on as usual. They had a granddaughter, a two-year-old who needed to be amused for a few minutes. Everything else was on the back burner. Jessica squirmed around and finally crawled onto Rico’s lap.

  “Up, up,” she said, and Rico obliged, lifting her high above his head and pretending to drop her, which brought on great gales of laughter. Rosalita took the opportunity to move away from him, back to the other end of the sofa. She turned her attention to the evening news and seemed unreachable. Rico had expected fury from her, wrath, vicious words, and ultimatums, but her new silence felt full to the point of bursting, like a volcano or a pot of boiling water with its top on too tight.

  Rico glanced at his wife again. Maybe she’d been waiting for this—a chance to get away without the guilt of having caused the breakup. But then he thought of the way she’d been in bed the last few nights, uninhibited and free in his arms, and a plot to escape seemed rather unlikely.

  He did not know his own wife anymore, he thought to himself as he threw Jessica up in the air again and again. And to be truthful, he didn’t know himself either.

  1990

  VINCENT HAS no idea there is enough left inside of him to feel so terrible. He thought he had bottomed out long ago, reached the point at which nothing really matters anymore. He is deeply shocked by this new wave of devastation. He has spent his whole life believing there is always something better, and now he knows that there is always something worse.

  And this is it.

  Regina dead.

  Fourteen years.

  Dead at twenty-six.

  Vincent wanders the streets with no destination. He wishes he had money for alcohol or drugs, but there is nothing to dim the pain. No way to wipe it out except to feel it. Go through it.

  He loses weight. More weight. One day he sees his reflection in a window and he thinks he looks like an old man. On that same day, he sees a beautiful young woman, a Hindu woman with long black hair that she has temporarily set free of its braid.

  Her hair reminds him of Regina’s.

  It reminds him of Margaret’s.

  His daughter is twenty-two years old. Older than this Hindu woman whom he watches as she rebraids her hair and places a rubber band at the end.

  It has not occurred to him that he could somehow get himself back to the United States, but now he decides to try. He still has a daughter.

  He gets up from the steps of a statue in a local park that has become his home. He begins to walk.

  He will walk all the way to Bombay if he has to. He will find the American embassy. He will manage it somehow.

  He’s going home.

  ONCE LUCY had collected her daughter, taken her into the bathroom for a nice warm bath, Rico let himself out into the evening air, which had cooled considerably. The night was very dark, with just a tiny crescent of moon in the sky and his own outdoor lights turned off for the moment. He could vaguely hear the sound of the television set. He didn’t want to compare Margaret and Rosalita. It did not seem productive or fair, and yet he could not help but recall Margaret’s words when he told her about visiting his brother’s grave. “That’s big,” she had said. Rosalita, on the other hand, had just asked a technical question: “Why?” Between the two, he found his comfort in Margaret’s reaction, though he wasn’t even sure why he needed a reaction or why he wanted to tell the story.

  He walked back to his
mother’s casita and went in. “Hola Elena, mi madre,” he called as he always did.

  “In here,” she responded from the living room, as if he could not figure that out.

  When he entered, Elena did a very uncharacteristic thing—she turned off the television. “I’ve already seen this one. It’s a repeat,” she said, as if she had to explain. She looked at him closely, though he knew she could not see his face. “How are you today, mi hijo?” she asked.

  “Fine,” he said, as if he was learning from Rosalita how to avoid a question.

  “Fine?”

  “Well . . .” He hesitated for a few seconds. “Not too bad.”

  Elena laughed. “That’s more like it,” she said. “Have some tea. There’s hot water on the stove.”

  Rico got up and poured himself a cup. Tonight, he added two spoonfuls of honey instead of milk.

  With all the family drama in the air, with Rosalita having taken Elena into her confidence just last night and Rico’s anger because of it, with the dinner they’d all just sat through as if none of that had happened, Rico had no idea where to begin. But he knew he needed to talk to his mother about at least some parts of this whole complicated mess. But no words came, so he just sat there and sipped his tea, and so did Elena. It was easy to sit in silence with his mother.

  After a while she asked, “Have you talked with Rosalita?”

  “She doesn’t want to talk,” said Rico.

  “How about yell?” Elena asked, and they both chuckled.

  “No. I asked her to take a ride with me, and she said no. I don’t know what else to do.” He put his tea down on the tile table. “I can’t figure her out. Maybe she wants it to end between us. Maybe this is her way of making sure that happens.”

  “Maybe,” Elena agreed, thoughtfully, “but the way she was crying her heart out last night over here, I don’t think so.”

  “She was crying her heart out?” It took him a few seconds to absorb this. “She’s playing it cool with me.”

  “Maybe she’s showing you how she feels in other ways.”

  Rico thought of Rosalita climbing on top of him that morning, of the way she flung her prim summer nightgown to the far corner of the room and began to slowly rock. He thought of the way she had slid across the couch just a half hour ago to press her body right next to his, how it took some pressure off him somehow.

  “I guess so,” he said, but his voice, even in his own ears, lacked certainty.

  “This gringa woman—”

  “Her name is Margaret,” Rico cut in.

  “Tell me what it is about Margaret that has you so captured,” Elena said.

  Rico looked at his mother. There was nothing in her tone that hinted to him of a setup, a seemingly innocent display of interest that would soon turn against the gringa home wrecker. And the simple truth was, he wanted to talk about Margaret in the way that people do when they are intoxicated with possibility. But where should he start? With the way the sunlight caught in her eyes so they seemed to spin like green pinwheels? With the fact that she was a bookworm, who had found him in a library book he had not even told her about? With the adorable way, he thought in retrospect, that she had hinted when they’d first met that she was an ex-NYPD policewoman out for a walk with an ex-NYPD police dog?

  “She’s an artist. She wants to learn to weld,” he said instead. “She has all these pieces of crap lying around that she drags home from the junkyard, and she wants to weld them into sculptures. She asked me to teach her, and I said yes.”

  Elena lifted her tea cup to her lips and blew on it even though Rico was sure it was just lukewarm. One thing he liked about his mother was that she had the capacity to wait, to let things unfold in their own time.

  “She was abandoned by her parents,” he suddenly said. “They went to India and never came back. So she was raised by her grandfather in New York City. But he died, and now she doesn’t have anybody. Nobody. Except her dog.” Rico felt good talking about Margaret, and he wanted to construct a clear picture of her for his mother, one that would create the magic he felt when he was around her. So far, he was just providing the facts and that was not enough, so he added, “She makes me feel good, Elena. She asks me questions and before you know it, I’m doing something crazy like climbing over the cemetery wall to visit Fernando’s grave and—”

  Elena put her cup on the table. “What?” she said, “¿Qué dices, Rico?”

  Rico realized then, in that moment when she was so startled, that he had not yet mentioned his visit to the cemetery to his mother.

  “You never visit your brother’s grave,” Elena said.

  “Well, I went,” Rico said. “I told Margaret about him, and after I left here last night, I just drove around and ended up there.”

  Elena began to cry. Tears washed through her hazy blind eyes and ran down her cheeks. “At last,” she said. “Gracias a Dios.”

  Now Rico was startled. This was not a reaction he was prepared for. He hated to see any woman cry, most of all his mother.

  “Now I can die in peace,” she said, barely able to get the words out, “knowing you forgive Fernando.”

  “We were talking about Margaret,” Rico said, his voice rising sharply. “We were talking about me for a change.” It bothered him when his mother carried on about Fernando. It had gotten old, hearing the same story as they drove home from church week after week. “Besides, I didn’t say I forgave him. I just went to his grave.” He knew now that he would not tell her how he had fallen apart there, how he had remembered his boyhood hero with a strong feeling of love in his heart. And why not? Because here he was in a crisis of his own, a real one, and his mother was more concerned about Fernando, who was dead and gone for twenty-five years. That said it all. He stood up.

  “Rico,” Elena said, “please, wait, mi hijo, just for a second. You need to understand something. Nobody loved Fernando, nobody but me. Even your father gave up on him. Did you know I had to beg him to go to his own son’s burial? I had to threaten to leave him if he wouldn’t get in that car with me that day. I knew you were glad he was gone too, and I can’t blame you, all the beatings you took. But all these years . . . all these years I’ve been waiting for some sign that somebody somewhere cared, and now you gave it to me.”

  Rico longed to walk out the door into the night where he could be alone, but he could not turn away from his mother.

  “You don’t understand, mi Rico, because everyone loves you—Rosalita, the girls, me, your father. Even this woman Margaret, she probably loves you too, and maybe you love her. But Fernando never had that.”

  “He was a sick bastard, mamacita,” Rico said. His voice was vicious, but he addressed her the way he had in the old days, long ago. “He was cruel.”

  “I know he was,” Elena whispered. “I know.” She raised her eyes to Rico’s face. “But you visited his grave,” she said. And seeing her like that, Rico moved to put his arms around her. He held her so closely he could feel her ribs beneath his hands through her old bathrobe, and he thought, pobrecita, she has suffered so much.

  “I cried,” Rico whispered into her ear. “I cried for him, mamacita.”

  MARGARET CLIMBED into her bed that night and stretched her arms and legs. She felt calm and quiet, full and empty, like a five-pointed star resting comfortably on the blue-black nothingness of the universe. Moments like this one, in which she was relaxed and carefree and present, were rare for Margaret, though she noticed that they were arriving more frequently since she’d landed in her little adobe house by the Rio. Maybe in some mystical manner the coyote she saw on her morning walks was bringing them to her, she thought. Maybe she had found her place at last.

  She was drowsy, a state she liked to linger in as long as possible. Falling slowly asleep was like falling apart, she thought. It took you somewhere new, into the big black void where, night by night, something replenished you enough to get you going again in the morning. Stretched out in that borderland of sleep, so comfortable in
her bed with Magpie breathing loudly at her feet, Margaret began to dream of great chunks and rolls of metal, all waiting for her to come claim them.

  Her whole art life had been about paper and pencils, canvas and oil paint; it had been about flat, portable, and indoors. But now, mysteriously, she required industrial strength equipment, tanks of explosives, protective leather clothing, helmets, goggles, and temperatures so high that even the sound of the numbers scared her. Suddenly it was about outdoors and permanence, about standing still in the elements and slowly rusting.

  Margaret awoke to the morning light and the sounds of the monkeys from the zoo. She loved the way their whoop-whoop-whoops permeated the neighborhood, made it seem, if you closed your eyes, like some jungle outpost. She had not set foot in a zoo since she’d gone to the big one in the Bronx on a class trip in the seventh grade. The caged animals there made her nervous and sad, and she refused to go back. Here, though, with the seals barking all day long and the monkeys calling out in their loud voices, the zoo seemed like it might be a friendly place, and she thought perhaps she should go for a visit instead of heading to Roadrunner Courier Service to ask about a job.

  “It’s obviously a classic case of avoidance, wouldn’t you say?” she said to Magpie, who had raised her head from the bed when Margaret had first stirred. Magpie, as always, looked interested. She was an intelligent dog who understood English, Margaret was convinced, even difficult vocabulary words. “So what should I do, Mag? Fuck off all day at the zoo or try to get a job? Don’t answer me yet. Let’s think about it over coffee.”

  Margaret climbed out of bed and went into the kitchen, where she ground fresh coffee beans and filled her pot with water. Then she let Magpie out and watched her make her morning circuit to the four corners of the yard, like a conscientious security guard might. She was imagining replacing the chain-link fence with a wooden one, or better yet, an adobe wall—one with an old gate and vines with an abundance of colorful flowers spilling over the top. It was just a little house, and it needed work. Maybe the owners, a couple in their late fifties who had long since abandoned this neighborhood for what they called “the Heights,” might be willing to sell it to her. Not that she had the money.