The Juliet Stories

by Carrie Snyder

  The afternoon wants them. Emmanuel is a troublesome pet cajoled and soothed by bribery. The coins are enough for crackers and crema at a little tienda behind their house, not the one with the jam. At almost every house something is for sale: tortillas, or beer, or eggs. The woman at the window peels a ripe mango and passes the pit through the window for Emmanuel to suck on. It is shady in this yard, comfortable with the murmuring cluck of hens, and Juliet and Keith squat on their heels and squeeze the sweet, salty crema onto damp white crackers.

  “I hate school,” says Juliet.

  Keith doesn’t have to say anything.

  “They stole my green barrettes,” she says. “At least, I think so. Maybe I lost them. Maybe they fell under the benches or something. I don’t know.”

  Keith says, “I’m thirsty.”

  They crave shaved ice drizzled with syrup, sold from the dripping wooden cart that is often at the park. They debate, on their way, the best flavour and the likelihood of finding the cart, and they are almost there before they realize something is missing: Emmanuel. It is too awful to consider him forgotten in the shaded yard, sucking on a mango pit, tended by hens. Juliet blames Keith, who knows their mother will blame Juliet, who is the next thing to hysterical when they are found, as they run down the street, by some children, one of whom holds Emmanuel in her arms. He isn’t crying or scared or sad. The girl hops him on her hip; she is lean, her skirt dark, hair carefully brushed; no taller than Juliet, but older. Breasts under her white blouse.

  “Pobrecito,” she coos to Emmanuel, continuing to cradle him as they walk together. “Gordito. Papacito. Muñequito.”

  She knows them, but they don’t recognize her until she steps into context, through the Roots of Justice guesthouse gate and around the back to the kitchen, where the cook greets them with an energy that could be mistaken for anger. The girl is the cook’s daughter; the anger, fierce kindness fired by exhaustion.

  Out, out, out, the cook whisks the children away from the tiny, sweltering kitchen into the yard. But in a moment she carries out three tall plastic cups filled with sweet, watery milk flavoured with cocoa and thickened with pounded corn — tiste. The plastic is rubbery and pliant between the teeth. The corn sifts like sediment to the bottom and whirls amongst melting ice cubes: sand and rocks. Juliet and Keith sit on cement blocks in the damp yard, and the cook’s daughter, whose name they now know is Marta, sits on her heels and shares her drink with Emmanuel. Neighbourhood children wait outside the gate, but as the skies darken they begin to drift.

  The rainy season is upon them, humidity standing amongst thick greens and fat fruits, clouds filling up with warm rain that wants to pour before suppertime, washing the world briefly clean again: the blessed moment before wet turns to steam.

  The cook says that the Friesen children must go home too. The guesthouse is empty now, but soon it will be full of Americans, a new delegation arriving to stay. Her daughter Marta needs to help: Food for many tonight! Juliet understands by inclination, by tilting her head and listening without her ears, but Keith understands every word and replies in Spanish. Thank you for the bebidas.

  Something special for your supper, the cook promises. That means the Friesen children will eat at the guesthouse tonight, and not in a restaurant or around their own kitchen table, where sometimes they share meals with their mother and their father, though more often, lately, with their mother only.

  ———

  Gloria is glad to get out of the house. She makes Juliet and Keith wash their faces and she scrubs Emmanuel’s until he howls (Juliet thinks there is some correlation between howling and cleanliness, some invisible rule that her mother follows: only through misery shalt thou be made clean). Gloria herself is wearing lipstick and mascara. Juliet watches her in the bathroom mirror.

  “There,” says Gloria to her reflection, and smacks her lips together.

  The rain has stopped and the air sticks to the skin. Gloria hustles the children down the sidewalk to the guesthouse, only to find they’ve arrived early. Supper is not ready. The guesthouse has not expanded to accept the fourteen newcomers and their oversized luggage; it has contracted, and the atmosphere tingles with nerves and confusion and mile-long questions.

  Grown-ups crowd the porch, clutching plastic cups of water or — for the braver among them — of tiste.

  Juliet swims like a fish into the volunteers’ bedroom: empty. She climbs up to Charlotte’s bunk and sits on the mattress in the dark. Snooping. If she were caught, that’s what it would be called. She sniffs the candles, digs her forearms into the pillow and bumps against the little black book. Her fingers travel inside its pages, exposing pencilled naked bodies in parts and whole, carefully drawn bones and muscles, and scattered words that come apart at the seams: What if freedom calls for anger and not love? Transpose your life. Sunday drive. Here is the skyline; here is the shore; my body and yours, nothing more. Don’t think, create.

  Juliet startles as someone bumps into the room in error. Blinking up at her from the doorway: “Is this the bathroom?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  Perhaps the person cannot see that Juliet is a child; perhaps her eyes have not adjusted to the dim. The woman looks half-blind behind owlish glasses, and terrified, as if a bomb might fall from the sky upon her head at any moment. She is waiting for Juliet to give her some direction. She is one of the fourteen newcomers: protestors from Ohio, all of them milling about, stumbling over backpacks and guitar cases, and quite shocked to discover only one toilet in the house.

  DO NOT FLUSH TOILET PAPER, reads the sign on the wall, but someone will, guaranteed.

  “It’s by the kitchen,” Juliet says at last.

  “Thank you, dear.”

  Backing down the metal ladder, Juliet leans and places her face upon the pillow, brushing it lightly with her nose. She inhales Charlotte.

  She finds Keith on the porch, where he is alone — temporarily. Certain delegates make a beeline for children; others are oblivious to their existence. All possess a similar look upon entering their new tropical reality, regardless of sex or age: dazed, sweat beading above upper lips, swamped armpits, furry legs, socks with sandals, insistent bellies beneath green T-shirts.

  Now one approaches and bends to asks the usual questions, which the children consider scarcely worthy of reply. How old are you? Do you go to school? Do you speak Spanish?

  Juliet fakes a Nicaraguan accent; she has practised while gazing into the bathroom mirror at home. Keith doesn’t need to fake anything: his Spanish is streetwise and quick and impresses the man, whom the children nickname Old Yeller, after his teeth.

  Few of the delegates speak Spanish. They are in the country for only two weeks, reliant on translators, on Bram and the other volunteers, their visas approved by the Sandinista government. They will be driven to the countryside, to the edges of the war zone, where they will mill about on co-opera­tive farms and at health clinics, much as they do now.

  It is time to eat at last.

  Everyone gathers in the main room around tables pushed together and draped in plastic. Bram blesses the meal with a brevity that reminds everyone that children are present. The cook takes her cue and produces, with a flourish, a feast sourced by ingenious means: one whole fish for each guest, cleaned and roasted with head intact, served on a plastic plate with a single ring of fried onion decorating its browned and crusty upward-staring side.

  But the tallest, skinniest, palest pair of people Juliet and Keith have ever seen recoil in horror: they are vegans. The Ghost Twins. (Even after they are revealed to be husband and wife, Juliet and Keith think of them as a weirdly fused brother and sister.)

  In a flash, Marta, the cook’s daughter, removes the offending offering. “We don’t want to make a fuss,” the Ghost Twins say, “but there is such a thing as cross-contamination. What are the beans fr
ied in? Is there butter on the vegetables?”

  Bram assures them that all is well and unbuttered, but he may or may not be telling the truth. This is not the kind of disturbance that troubles him.

  Gloria says, “The cabbage salad is dressed with lemon and salt. You must try it.”

  The Ghost Twins are a threat only to themselves. They cannot spoil the air of celebration that attends this occasion.

  After the meal, Gloria tunes a guitar and suggestions are called out, voices join in. Emmanuel drums on his plate with his spoon. When finally he dissolves, he is plucked up by Charlotte and danced onto the porch, where the liquid air stands still.

  The heat in the room expands: everyone wears it. Bare bulbs swing drunkenly, tossing wild shadows onto bright turquoise walls.

  Juliet and Keith and Emmanuel are rarities in a closed world. How easily Juliet has adapted to the dangers and privileges: sneaking under the drifting blue haze of cigarette smoke, picking her way through the forest of adult limbs, catching scenes like pictures unfolded, words snagged, bedtime avoided. She steps off the porch beyond the ring of light. Against her shoulder blades the rough concrete wall is cool. The night breathes, alive — there — she can hear its breath: a soft moan like a knife carving a cut between her ribs. Juliet scans the darkness, traces a three-headed figure entangled beside chain-link fencing, bodies connected, swaying in unison. In this light, at this hour, in this place, she believes she is seeing a mythical creature, a figure of magic.

  The screen door at the back of the house bangs open, shedding a gash of light: Marta tosses a pan of dirty water at the bushes. The screen door slams shut. Juliet kneels and finds against her toe a perfectly smooth mango; its thick skin gives way under her thumb, holding the shape of her print.

  “Hey, you.” Charlotte stops, barefoot in the shadows. “What have you found?” Emmanuel holds two fists of her dark hair. Juliet turns, but no one stands beside the fence. Charlotte waits patiently for her reply.

  “I found a mango,” says Juliet.

  “Anything else?”

  Juliet holds it out. “I hate school.”

  “Do you?” Charlotte lifts the mango to her nose and inhales the scent of ripeness and sweetness before returning it to Juliet’s open palm. The fruit’s skin opens along a hairline crack, leaking sticky juice.

  “Someone stole my green barrettes today.”

  “That’s not right,” says Charlotte.

  “I know. But I don’t care. Not really.”

  Charlotte’s free hand rises to Juliet’s head, fingers stroking hair and scalp, pulling from Juliet a shiver of pleasure so fine it is a thread of pure gold drawing up her spine.

  “There she is — there you are. Your mother’s looking for you. Time to go home.” Bram materializes out of blackness and looks down at Juliet. He takes Emmanuel, who won’t let go of Charlotte’s hair. The three of them are stuck together as if tied with rope. Bram and Charlotte laugh.

  “Let me keep him,” says Charlotte. “He’ll be mine.”

  Juliet can hear her mother through an open window. She does not sound like a woman who is looking for her children. She is playing and singing, and she would play and sing until dawn, given an audience.

  Inside, Keith guzzles a glass of milk by the kitchen door, watched by the cook, who pets his black hair. Marta beckons Juliet into the kitchen: she has a puppy, almost newborn, and she lets Juliet press it, trembling and frightened, against her heart, tiny black nose cold under her chin, teeth like needles in her skin.

  The pieces of the night fall where they may. If a child is clever, loose in a forest of grown-ups, she won’t draw attention to herself. She will be forgotten, which is not the same thing as being neglected. It’s like going invisible, by choice, like hiding in the underbrush to spy, to explore, to play — untroubled.

  “Do we have to go to school?”

  “Yes, or you can never stay up that late again. Ever.”

  “I hate school.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “Where are those green barrettes? Your hair is a mess.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Juliet!”

  “What? I don’t, and it’s my hair. Why should you care?”

  “I have to care. It’s my job. I’m your mother.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “It is. How about that: I don’t care either. My head is splitting and Emmanuel was up nursing half the night and your father’s leaving tomorrow for the campo with the delegation and I really and truly don’t care about your hair. How about that.”

  Oh.

  There is something worse to be found, in handwriting, in the office. Here is Juliet, reading about — words, words — torture. She cannot take it in. Forced to swallow his own tongue, cut out of his own head. And worse. The children are watching, the fields are on fire, the animals are screaming from a shed where they have been shut up and set alight, and the bayonet digs into the mother’s belly and pulls out a baby. Tossed to the dogs. The children are watching. The children are forced at gunpoint to watch.

  She cannot take it in, but she cannot take it out.

  Strange, she can’t guess how the pictures will flicker silently inside, against, and around her, always, nor how she will hold them in her hands — not the way a memory is held of an individual loved and lost, but held lightly between the fingers like playing cards from a deck, dealt for an unknown game.

  She can’t love the people in the pictures; she does not know them. She can hate and fear the men with their bayonets. She can pity the tortured. But she cannot love. It is too painful to throw love like a rescue line to humans doomed to suffer, already dead and gone. She will remember forever, and yet never well enough, never with the particularity of love: these people whom her parents have come to save from suffering, who continue to be killed, whose killing will not end the suffering of others, whose torture and murder fall like drops of rain and vanish in the punishing sun.

  Words. They scrape along her skin, enter, and the wound heals instantly. She appears unhurt. She does not suffer nightmares or wake in a cold sweat or fear for her life, because she does not believe it could happen to her.

  That keeps her safe: belief that she is different, her family unique, marked out for protection by their skin colour and their citizenship and, yes, by their goodness, their rightness. So much of what she believes is wrong, but if it is never proven to be wrong, how will she ever know?

  She hears her mother and Charlotte on the porch, talking, in disagreement, and she smoothes the loose sheet of paper, its story, its murdered and tortured, face down on the desktop.

  Charlotte says, “All I’m asking is to get out into the campo, away from Managua. To do something that matters!”

  Gloria says, “I trust Bram’s judgement.”

  “You could put in a good word for me — please, say something to him,” says Charlotte.

  “I could not,” says Gloria. “If he doesn’t think you should be in the campo, then you shouldn’t be in the campo.”

  “I didn’t volunteer to hang around an office all day.”

  Silence.

  Charlotte: “Aren’t you bored, stuck in the house? With the kids? Left behind? Don’t you find it all very sexist? Misogynistic?”

  Snort. “Charlotte, ask yourself, why do you want to go so badly?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Charlotte, I’ve been watching you. I’m warning you to be careful. That’s all: be careful. Take care. You are the one who will get hurt.”

  Pause. Juliet sits down hard in the desk chair. It squeaks. She hears her mother walking towards her.

  “Juliet, you are not supposed to be in here. Move it. Out.”

  “You’re wrong,” says Charlotte, following. “Abou
t everything.”

  “Oh God, that’s shit. Watch where you step.” Gloria bends just outside the office door and with a leaf scoops a curl of toddler poop off the porch tiles and tosses it under the front coconut palm. “Well, I hope I am,” she says to Charlotte. “That would be nice for a change.” And then she goes looking for Emmanuel, to wipe him clean.

  Juliet feels an overwhelming urge: she wants to touch Charlotte, the edge of her skirt, the back of her hand, the feathery hairs on her arm. She slides closer, but is too shy.

  “I don’t want you to go to the campo,” Juliet whispers.

  Charlotte turns and gazes with eyes that see shape and form and shadow, but not Juliet. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning,” she says.

  The protestors from Ohio are leaving for the campo in the morning. For their send-off meal they will feast outdoors. Juliet, Keith, and Emmanuel walk with their mother to the field at the end of their street, which belongs to nobody. Littered grass is stamped flat under all these feet, and blankets are spread on muddy ground. The afternoon rains have come and gone. The cook stirs a giant pot of indio viejo, a traditional stew of cornmeal cooked over a fire, flecked with beef and tomatoes and seasoned with mint and bitter oranges.

  It is growing dark, as it does here, early. Gloria points to the belt of Orion, faint and clear against the steady sky.

  “What’s that hanging from his belt?”

  Gloria says it’s a knife. A hunting knife.

  Bram’s head and shoulders loom above the crowd. He is going to the campo too, and he seems removed from them, as if he has already left behind his family, and they him, as if they need no further goodbye. Juliet eats where she drops, close to Charlotte, who notices and wraps an arm around her, draws her into a circle of grown-up talk.

  Marta walks among the group, gathering plates and utensils in a large plastic bin. The puppy stumbles behind, nipping at her heels.