Snap-snap, her fingers say to Juliet, who rabbits herself hunched and blinking.
“Come here!” Bianca rubs together the fingers of one hand to indicate money. “Dinero, dinero,” she points, and Juliet, confused, obedient, allows herself to be propelled to the cupboard beside the sink, to open the peeling door, to discover, in a plastic glass, a rolled handful of American dollar bills.
Bianca claps: “Now. Quickly. Hurry.”
Juliet upends the glass and holds in her palm the slick, greasy-feeling fortune.
Bianca calls to Gloria: “We’ll be back.” Or: “Don’t worry.” Or: “You’ll never see your daughter ever again.”
There is no time for Help! as the apartment door slams behind them.
Bianca clamps Juliet’s wrist, drags her through the seminary’s gates; no one questions this. They scurry the busy, dusty street, and already Juliet, squinting under the steadfast sun, is lost. They veer into a dim and crumbling tienda. The woman behind the store counter grins as Bianca produces Juliet with a flourish. The women’s hands flag the air expressively, they are emphatic, their lips pucker and purse: ¡Ahh, sí, sí, sí, que no, aye que lástima!
Juliet could cry.
From darkness behind the counter, the woman produces a chicken. Plucked and pimpled, it is mercifully headless, but Juliet recoils. Bianca taps the hand in which the dollars are clasped, unfolds and counts bills, licking her thumb: mostly ones and fives. A bag of rice, half-filled, is thrown onto the counter, a jug of dark cooking oil, salt, sugar, eggs. The women argue back and forth, but in the end Bianca insists on only the chicken. She pays and returns the change to Juliet, who doesn’t trust her, and who cannot refuse the still body, placed into her arms like a brand-new baby wrapped in plastic, smelling of something disturbing and recognizable, almost human: faint rot, flesh.
Everything is a peripheral blur as Juliet chases Bianca’s smudged heels in pitted flip-flops along the rutted road, through a break in a knocked-down wall, into a tiny courtyard where four small children, partially clothed, play in dust beneath a laden clothesline. Juliet feels her lungs expanding, contracting. The building is four storeys tall, its face entirely ripped off, each floor and its contents — flapping sheets and cooking fires — visible from below.
Emmanuel’s diapers swing on the line overhead. Beside the diapers hang her mother’s red blouse and a pair of shorts Juliet recognizes as belonging to herself, though all are so removed, flapping in this location, that she feels no attachment.
A thought bursts, collapses: She imagines herself pinned to the clothesline.
Bianca unbuttons her dress and grabs the smallest child, who feeds and squirms, craning his neck to examine this pale stranger. Juliet is obvious, and reduced. She hides behind herself because she is both naked and disguised in broad daylight; she is only what she appears to be, all surface.
Bianca is shouting names: her children’s, which she wants Juliet to repeat. An old woman materializes with displeasure from the building’s bowels, like a dried-apple doll brought to life. For no apparent reason she slaps one of the children, and the little boy stops his howl with his thumb. For this he is slapped again.
“Mi madre,” says Bianca. The woman offers Juliet a triangular pastry. “Pico, pico,” she repeats. Juliet will cry now. She will cry.
“Psst . . .” With her free hand Bianca snatches a frayed cloth off the line and the old woman wraps several pastries, then balances the package atop Juliet’s chicken. Juliet’s chin holds everything in place, and she is helpless as the old woman draws money from her fingers.
Bianca pulls the baby off her breast, still sucking. He screams, but not for long; maybe he expects a smack. He cannot crawl, but sits on his bottom and tugs his penis.
Pico. It is a sweet glazed bread, filled with soft cheese. Nothing could taste finer, no dough could be more tender, melting on Juliet’s tongue. Over the blue gas flame, a pot of salted water and one whole chicken boils and bubbles and fills the sweltering rooms with the smell of a far-off home — in another country, where this is winter’s comfort food. Bianca is satisfied, and gone. She is gone.
Gloria swallows four tablespoons of hot soup; she does not ask where it has come from, and Juliet does not think to tell. Keith drinks two bowls. Juliet tears both drumsticks off the carcass, with some effort and spilled broth and flaring flame. The sigh of gas hissing and alight accompanies their sleep. Around midnight the tank runs empty; for the first night in a while, the apartment quiets.
By morning, the pico has staled. Emmanuel will not be content to lie beside his mother for even one minute more, and Juliet trails behind as senseless instinct toddles him towards electrical outlets and dangling cords and open windows and exposed fan blades.
Bianca doesn’t come. The thought occurs to Juliet while she wearily gnaws a cold chicken bone, but Emmanuel, neglected, tumbles down the steps into the main room, and Juliet doesn’t think of it again.
He bounces upright and stares at her, chin smeared in blood.
“Mom!!!” yells Juliet, clutching him, trying. Wet washcloth. There is no ice. Cold water.
“Goddammit,” cries Gloria. Spots of blood dribble to the floor, down Emmanuel’s bare chest, onto Gloria’s sheets and her greying T-shirt and Juliet’s shoulder. “Nobody else is allowed to say that.”
“Then why are you?”
It’s just a split lip, but Juliet is to blame and she hates being to blame.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” says Gloria, prone. She is weak, but that does not stop her from being withering.
“I miss Laci.” Juliet feels her lips tremble. It is the closest she can come to saying: I want to go home. Laci, her best friend in Indiana, loved playing with Emmanuel, cradling and swaddling him like a living doll, and Emmanuel adored her right back.
But his feelings towards Juliet are ambivalent. When she tries to entertain him in their sweltering rooms, he fights and fusses. He snaps her crayons in half and rips up drawings for the fun of it, and he can’t drink anything out of a cup without spilling.
There goes the rest of the day.
It is dusk when Bram arrives. He appears out of the half-light: they’d forgotten him. He is jaunty from his journey, slap-happy, brimming with jokes and camaraderie and dust blown through open windows, sights unimaginable. He walks into this forlorn place a foreigner in a distant land, and just as unwelcome.
“Fix this mess!” croaks Gloria from the bedroom, and Juliet hates her. Hasn’t she, Juliet, tried? Hasn’t she done her best? And all her mother sees is a mess. Ambushed, Juliet becomes a furious projectile: she runs roaring around the table, bashes a chair and knocks it down, sprints past her father and out of the apartment, leaving behind an echo of confusion.
“Juliet?”
She pants in the wide-open courtyard. In crashing darkness she searches for the fort she and Keith have built out of fallen palm leaves against the chain-link fence. In luminous darkness she destroys it, and feels much better. Peaceful. Stars prick the night sky. The city’s lights pale by comparison, yellowed, stinking of diesel fuel.
“Juliet?”
She squats under a bare tree and watches him standing in the seminary hallway staring out. Her father is nothing but shadow, cut from a piece of purple construction paper. He can’t see her.
“I know you’re out here,” he says. “Juliet, let’s not give your mom more to worry about.”
Silence.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Juliet slinks beneath shadows until she’s close enough to yell, “Boo!”
Bram doesn’t twitch. Juliet wants something on his face that he won’t show her: fear, apology, relief, anger?
“I know it’s been tough.” He squeezes her shoulder. They climb the stairs to the apartment. “But I’m home now.” They open the apartment
door to discover — Emmanuel peeing in the corner of the main room, Keith propped in a chair, idly observing.
“This is not okay,” says Bram. He does not raise his voice. He lowers and softens it, making of it a gloved fist of disappointment. “I left you in charge, Keith. I expect better.”
Keith freezes, Emmanuel dribbles, and from the bedroom Gloria yells, “Leave them alone, coming in here like a big bully . . .”
Calmly, Bram spanks Emmanuel, one whack on bare speckled bottom, as if he hasn’t even noticed the fat lip or the pox. He would do the same to Keith, but there isn’t time: Gloria propels herself through shrieking beads towards Bram’s throat.
“If you ever ever ever —” she cries, but Bram holds Emmanuel out to her.
“Stop yourself, Gloria,” he says.
Juliet doesn’t know if her mother would actually hit her father. She has seen Gloria pitch at him half a loaf of unsliced homemade bread, across the dinner table, an act not meant to be funny that instantly became a family joke; but Juliet cannot make this into a joke. It won’t fit. Like Keith, Juliet is nothing but eyes, watching her mother yank Emmanuel from her father’s grasp, watching her squeeze Emmanuel fiercely until he squeals in protest. He’s already forgotten the spank; bewildered, he beats Gloria’s shoulder, kicks her soft belly.
Holding him, she passes through the beads, a mama bear entering unnavigable black forest. The beads sway and whisper, sway and swing, and, finally, hang silent too.
“Your mother —” begins Bram, but he takes one step backwards and splashes into the puddle of urine, and this is the moment that recasts the tumbling moments that came before, this is their rescue and delivery. Bram pretends to skid, threatens to slip and fall, arms comically spinning, until Juliet and Keith are goaded to laughter, and even Gloria drags herself out for a look and a snort.
“All better?” says Bram.
“You always think so.” Gloria crawls back to bed.
“It always is.”
Juliet is down to the last book in the pile from the Canadian boys — about a hunting dog — and she has not forgotten the library.
“Maybe today —” she says as her mother collapses into a chair on the other side of the table, but the door bangs open, and Juliet is first to see Bianca. The blouse hangs loose on her narrow shoulders, but red is the colour Bianca is meant to be wearing, red like painted lips, like candy; she radiates vigour and health.
Gloria, too weak for coffee after a cold morning shower, turns and gasps. “My blouse,” she says in English.
Bianca, bustling, chatting, filling the sink with water, cannot understand, and has no warning.
“My blouse, my blouse.” Scarred with dried pocks, thin and pale, Gloria is a record player skipping, her voice rising with her body. Her fury flowers. It blooms, explodes. Petals scatter.
Bianca pauses, cocks her head to listen.
“Mine.” Gloria points. Fury cannot calm itself to be translated. “That’s mine. You stole it. Thief!”
“Mom!” Juliet runs around the table.
“And our diapers,” says Gloria. “Where are my baby’s diapers?”
“Mom.” Juliet tugs her mother’s arm. Keith stares at his plate and Emmanuel chuckles, but Bianca only dries her hands on her skirt, puzzled.
“Get out! You’re not welcome here. Out!”
“Please?” whispers Juliet.
“She’s taken advantage of us, Juliet. You don’t understand. You stay out of it.”
In this blouse Bianca is fearless, if ever she were anything but. She dries her hands again, lifts the bucket and the mop, though she does not shut the door behind her. Juliet wishes to run after her and explain, but there is nothing to be untangled by explanation, nor are Juliet’s silent pleas addressed to Bianca. Bianca is a thief, this is true. The diapers are gone, this is true. But Bianca’s baby will get to wear them; but you should see her house, Mom; but she made you soup. You got better.
Gloria grips the back of a chair, the eloquently carved wood under her fingers dark with vines. She is thinking, hard. She goes to the cupboard and swings the door.
“The dollars,” she says.
Juliet opens her mouth, closes it.
“She stole the dollars too.”
Juliet studies the unmopped tiles, identifies a print that matches her own foot. She is trying to remember what happened to the leftover bills. Were there any? Stealthily she feels in the pockets of her shorts, the same pair she’s worn for days, and removes her hand as if it’s touched fire.
She licks her lips.
“It wasn’t much,” says Gloria. Petals sink to earth. Stillness settles in the breezeless room. “It wasn’t much, but I should have known better. I’ll speak to the director.”
“Mom?”
“Not right now, Juliet. I need to think.”
Juliet senses a deeply sad ending, one she feels unable to bear, yet craves. She begins weeping while there is still hope, and staunches her tears with pages of the book.
“What on earth?” says Gloria with irritation, not interest. She claps Emmanuel to her hip; she’s made her decision, and while she’s out, Juliet must be in charge of Keith.
“I’m in charge of me!” Keith yells from the bedroom, but Gloria is gone.
Juliet runs to the cupboard and stuffs the roll of bills into the plastic cup. It takes only a few seconds and she thinks, There, as if everything has been put right again, and for a flash it seems so. She returns to the book, picks it up, but an empty restlessness chokes her at the hollow of her neck, where she wants to swallow but cannot. The sensation unspins itself like a cape whirling around her body, envelops her; thins the words on the page, wrings from her the ability to feel.
When she’s older she’ll know the word for it: desolation.
She lays the book on the table, pages spread, cracking the spine.
Gloria charges back into the apartment. Confrontation has had a medicinal effect, flushing her skin with colour, thickening her hair, plumping her lips.
“Done,” she says, setting Emmanuel on the floor. She goes to the cupboard for a glass and continues, swishing open the rotted door, “The director has promised me swift action. I actually feel bilingual today. I felt like I could really and honestly speak Spanish. I wish your father had been there to see —”
In her hand is the cup with the wad of American dollar bills. She tips it and the money falls onto the counter. “But . . .” She cannot believe what she is seeing, and spreads the money flat, counts it.
“Six dollars missing . . . but . . .”
Juliet blinks.
“But I didn’t see it before? But it wasn’t there? She took it. She took it, didn’t she? She took it.”
Gloria turns to ask Juliet, but only because Juliet is there to ask, not because Gloria expects an answer.
“He’s going to fire her,” Gloria says, almost to herself.
“But then,” she says after a moment, “she did take the blouse. And the diapers.”
Emmanuel yanks on the beads hung across the bedroom door, and in his hands, in one smooth movement, they come apart. Their hanging patterns disintegrate and pour like tropical rain on the floor, each jewelled ball landing with a tinkle, a splash, rolling the tiles to the far corners of the room, under the apartment door, down the stairs, beyond.
It is the sound of calamity, and then of quiet. It is the sound of that which cannot be unsaid, or undone; and the silence afterwards, the immediacy of what seems not so terrible after all.
“Let’s go to the library,” offers Gloria.
“Now? Today?” Juliet is incredulous.
“Why not?” With her bare foot, Gloria kicks aside a scramble of beads.
After all this time, it isn’t far.
They cross one anarchic street, t
rudge past a low concrete wall painted with martyrs of the revolution. Hats, bandanas, fields, faces, babies, guns; primary colours. Or perhaps these are revolution’s children. Gloria isn’t certain. She reads the slogans several times but cannot promise that her translation is correct.
“There?” Juliet points to a lone square building, like a child’s block, painted bright yellow with windows all along one side.
Gloria’s body sags under Emmanuel’s weight, and Keith trails behind in silent misery. It is not far, but suddenly it seems they will never arrive. Midday heat streaks down upon them; their hair will catch fire.
They wade through a bare field with grass burnt dead from the sun.
Behind its heavy door, the library is quiet. Its shelves are half-filled; you might say, mostly empty. Juliet kneels and selects a picture book, opens it. Disappointment crests and buries her. She can’t read this book. She can’t read any of the books in this library. It is like staggering through a desert towards what looks like a pool of clean, clear water and discovering as you kneel to drink that cupped in your hands is sand, that you are washing your face in a pool of sand.
“Mom?” she whispers.
“Yes?”
“It’s in Spanish!”
Gloria huffs a small laugh; she knew it all along.
They could walk home the way they came, but Gloria is lost in the jumbled world and today she trusts no one. They cross a different field and another street, dodging cars whose drivers — men — honk and call to Gloria. She doesn’t exactly ignore them; she mutters her disgust as they escape into a neighbourhood that resembles a war zone, pitted and scarred.
It is Gloria who sees the diapers flapping from the clothesline. White, thick, triple-padded, absorbent, superior, American-made cloth diapers. She stops in the street.
“Could it be?” she asks, and in confirmation, Bianca steps out of the hole in her wall before them, holding her baby. He is peppered with pocks.
The Juliet Stories Page 4
