Ma squeezed the fat on my neck.
You all make it back eventually, she said.
And we stayed that way for hours. Sitting and breathing our air. At some point, Ma told me I should probably get to bed.
And I should too, she said, but she sounded less sure.
Back in our room, Javi smoked with the window open. The breeze was the first one we’d gotten all summer. I had already tossed my shirt, and rolled onto the mattress. I willed my eyes to sleep when he sat on my head. He grinded his knuckles into my chest.
So, he said, what’d she look like?
I shut my eyes a little tighter. I asked who he meant. He sighed, like what he wanted to do was break my legs.
You know, he said. The slut.
I blinked against his thigh. My brother was getting older. Had hair creeping up his cheeks and down the sides of his ankles. A few months later, one of his girls would end up pregnant, and I’d only find out after she came around looking for him. Of course she wouldn’t keep it, and he’d sulk through the house for weeks, but after that Javi was back to fucking whoever whenever.
She was beautiful, I said.
Yeah?
A real belleza. Just like you said.
No shit, said Javi. No fucking wonder.
White? he asked.
Like you said.
And her tits, said Javi. They were huge, right?
Right.
Fuck, said Javi. No wonder.
He sat on the mattress, kneading my shoulder, lost in thought. I could smell the smoke on his shirt. I tried keeping it in my lungs, but I couldn’t do it. The air slipped out just like everything else.
Then Javi stood up. Grabbed his cigarettes by the window. Once he’d pulled one for himself, he waved the box at me.
I shook my head.
Pussy, he said.
10.
After we left the woman’s house we didn’t say much of anything, but I would not see her again and my father would not go back. I don’t know where the fuck she went.
We made it out of the Heights but we didn’t take the highway. My father inched the car from block to block, running every other stop sign. We drove by the bayou on White Oak and over the bridge on Westheimer, and halfway down the East End overpass I noticed he’d been staring at me.
Qué, I said.
No importa.
No. Tell me.
I knew he might smack me for talking smart. He’d turn it into a lecture on respect, or minding the ones that brought you into the world.
But he didn’t do any of that. He kept his eyes on the road.
Then he let out a low whistle.
It doesn’t matter, he said. Está bien.
Just remember that, he said. Either way, it’s all right.
And I didn’t know what that meant. And I didn’t ask him either.
We took the feeder down to Wayland. We slammed the car doors in front of the house. The porch lights had been dimmed, but you could still smell the oil from the stove.
Está bien, he said, and then one more time, and then we opened the door, and we were home.
SHEPHERD
Gloria blew through our lives on a Wednesday, and our mother told us to treat her like pottery, to not ask questions, to creep around the house like ants before their queen. Our mother, who returned grape bunches over single sourings; who’d shipped my sister, Nikki, to Tech with a knife in her pillowcase; who’d slipped into this country, this home, her life, on the whim of a fortune-teller, from the eastern coast of Port Antonio, after she’d told her, peasant to peasant, that good things came to women who looked to the shore. This premonition cost her four American dollars, and if you asked my mother now you’d think she was still pissed off about it. So Gloria (thought my mother) was following a manifest destiny, universal to her people (our people), ubiquitous to her heritage (my heritage)—although she may not have said this in so many words, or even at all, if I’m honest.
* * *
• • •
We’d heard about our cousin. It was the usual family circus. We knew she was coming from Kingston, after bouncing from Mandeville to Ochi to Portmore. She’d fled to South Beach, I think, after the island became inhospitable, back when the last thing you could hope for in Miami was hospitality. She’d been a student in Jamaica, once, and then a mother, briefly, and then (most scandalously) a prostitute, one of those women who open their legs for soursop (my mother’s words again). We heard she’d had a baby on the island, a little boy named Dylan, and they’d had to cut him out, which island doctors are loath to do; but then the baby died, from sepsis, or pneumonia, one of those things that occasionally happens to babies in some countries but never in others; and this, above all, was why she’d left the Caribbean for Miami, looking for work, and why she was now coming to see us in Houston; for a change of scenery, some time away, a chance to slow things down.
* * *
• • •
Our family moved, again, after my father landed the promotion. He recruited for an oil mogul downtown, and the mogul had finally struck oil. Our new place sat on Shepherd and Willowick, in the middle of River Oaks, Houston’s oasis for new money, but the only differences I could pick out were the paint, the veranda, the sofas choked in shrink-wrap. Which my mother said made me ungrateful. Which she called another reason to welcome Gloria (the beloved) home—as a woman who’d been through It, someone who appreciated a rough time.
Nikki said that’s all Jamaica was: a rough time. Four months at Texas Tech had made my sister sharp. Now she smoked kush with the windows open; she’d read Les Fleurs du Mal unabridged; she wore tight red pants and Sonic Youth tees, but never around our mother and always after dark. She fucked whiteboys from the corner store and left them in her bed. I caught one from my high school, once, checking his phone while lying on the comforter, and when he finally saw me peeking I did my best to look indifferent.
You wouldn’t know a rough time if it pissed on you, said my mother, nodding toward our father, who raised an empty Shiner as he nodded toward the television. He’d been to Jamaica twice. Lanky, and graying, still broad-shouldered, even then, the second time around he made it back to the States with a wife.
Grow up and have babies, Chris, said my mother. Then you’ll see.
Let one of them quit on you, she said. Then you’ll see.
And she looked to me for confirmation, which I gave.
* * *
• • •
In the airport, Gloria’s dress glowed a shade of margarita. Her sandals smacked. You could see the tops of her ankles as she hovered toward baggage claim. She hugged the aunt she’d heard so much about, slid into the arms of her handsome American uncle. Nikki had opted out of the airport, promising a meal when we made it back home—but, really, I knew she was roasting a bowl, yakking on the phone with one of her tricks around the block.
When Gloria reached me, she bent to squeeze my ears.
And your name is, she said, in patois thick enough to knock on.
I’d never in my life seen an actual whore (according to Nikki), a night worker (my father), or a calf in the wilderness (who else), so I looked her in the eyes for the thing that made it so; but all I saw was just some lady.
Long hair. Tall heels. Ma said she was in her thirties, but I couldn’t believe it, her skin was too smooth.
I told Gloria my name was Chris and she was pretty, and she smiled like mandolins ringing.
* * *
• • •
Now that I’ve rolled around and had some lovers I can tell you a secret: the difference between people with the wildness in them, and people like us, is you usually can’t tell until it’s past too late. It’s just too much a hidden part of them. Days and months and years’ll pass before a person reveals themselves—and then all of a sudden they’ve fucked the postman, or left the gas
on, or stuck their hands in your child’s pants.
* * *
• • •
Nikki met us at the door. My mother told her to fetch the bags. One thing my sister hadn’t forgotten in Lubbock was the kitchen—how to bring a grouper back to life on the stove—and we smelled the ocean from the driveway, and we moved a little quicker for it. She nodded at Gloria on her way out, and it was a look I’d grown acquainted with: I Will Tolerate You Out of Necessity, and Not a Second Longer Than Required. But what Gloria did was grab her wrist.
She looked her in the nose.
You have, said Gloria, the most beautiful eyes.
It was the first time in years that I’d heard Nikki stammer. She thanked her cousin. She said she was tired. There’d been loads to cook, a house to clean, preparations to make, et cetera, but even if we couldn’t smell her stash from the driveway, I saw it in the curve of Gloria’s lips.
Funny, said Gloria. Must be rough being a student.
When she finally let her go, my sister actually exhaled.
* * *
• • •
We ate at the table. The kitchen, like the rest of the house, was what our father called a “work in progress,” with the walls all moon yellow and spice pink and lime green, weighed down by Matisse and Tintoretto and El Greco prints. Paintings were my parents’ thing—a new one materialized every few months.
Gloria stopped in front of the Greco—the one where Christ’s holding the cross, eyes peeled back like he’s taking a piss—and when she asked my father if he’d seen the original, he stared, for a solid second, waiting for the punch line.
It didn’t come.
He said he hadn’t.
It’s beautiful, said Gloria, almost as pretty as the Ugolino da Siena.
His eyes were still bugging when my mother reached the table; and Gloria lit up. She said the one thing she hadn’t expected from Nikki was a plateful of plantain. My mother couldn’t have glowed any brighter, because we’d been eating the damn dish my whole life, it was one of her childhood staples, she’d forced Nikki to learn the recipe back when my sister still gave a shit and not one of us had ever spoken in favor of it (if anything, it made us sick).
Yes, she said, smiling. We were away from the island in body, but never in heart. Certainly not for dinner.
Gloria nodded, and my father smirked, and Nikki glowered from her corner of the table.
She asked to be excused. Our mother laughed a single Ha.
Rudeness, she said, the girl leaves for school like a princess and comes back a pig; and Nikki barked at that, she said it wasn’t like she was the only one; and it was almost the start of another Household Uprising, until Gloria coughed, and smiled, and explained that she, too, had been Punk.
Besides, said Gloria, life is long. Let your daughter live while she can.
Standing slowly, my cousin gripped the table, for support, and then, apropos of nothing, or maybe in rebellion of it, Gloria, mouth full of grouper, kissed my father on his lips.
* * *
• • •
I remember my father puckering.
And I remember my mother’s face.
And Gloria waved to the rest of us, starting her long limp upstairs.
And we sat unspeaking, with the refrigerator’s hum in the foreground, until Nikki reared back, slowly, and laughed.
* * *
• • •
Gloria grew up in Kingston, and lived there until she couldn’t, until it became something like a war zone, before it turned into what it is now. Her parents passed for intellectuals on the island—teaching literature at UWI—and my cousin grew up on wood floors, with Ravel and Mahler conducting the apartment. She took her first steps on paperbacks lining the rugs—on the face of Javier Marías, on the back of Derek Walcott—and even as Jamaica’s knees began to buckle, under narcotics, under voodoo politics, and the sidewalks began to choke with the homeless, the drugged, and the cracked out, her parents held her close, filled her ears with what comfort they could. She grew up loved. She never forgot that.
But, eventually, her folks got caught up too. Slowly at first. And then all of a sudden. The money for the coke came from money for their clothes, and then the money for their bills, and then the money for their apartment.
Later on, Gloria told me she hadn’t been upset but even strolling down the corner for books became a burden, a needless risk. Kingston had begun to swallow itself. She was risking her life for poems. And she felt herself sinking, whether or not she was in the house, parents prone on the floor, noses crusty from yesterday’s binge.
Even still, they had to eat. So Gloria became the breadwinner. She was fifteen, with nothing like a marketable skill, but there are always ways to make some bank in the Caribbean if you’re young and beautiful and willing.
She knew some girls who worked the resorts. They knew some girls who weren’t opposed to another player.
Gloria started working the cruise ports. Businessmen and bachelors and newlyweds, mostly, but occasionally she’d find herself an islander, a big man with a little extra cash, and these were the ones she passed on to the next girl, because they reminded her of something she didn’t want to think about. But, despite everything, she found time to read—she spent some of the money she was saving for a lifeline on books. She hit the resorts; she discovered Milton; she worked the coast; she discovered Rimbaud; she bought some heels; she discovered Babel; she took care of her skin; she discovered Rumi; she tried not to catch the clap; she discovered Borges; she caught the clap; she discovered Allende; she waited it out; she discovered Plath; she tried not to catch anything else. There’d been a baby named Dylan, she’d named him after the poet; but one day Dylan died, and of course she couldn’t find the father. She couldn’t even have guessed what he looked like.
* * *
• • •
Our mother didn’t retaliate after the kiss. This confused me. It disrupted a logical sequence of events. I remember when she spat on the grocer in Sharpstown, because he’d refused to accept an expired coupon for bananas. I remember when my father failed to replace the bedroom’s air filters, and she’d stuffed them in herself, and he’d had to phone a repairman. I remember when Nikki first left for college, after the crying and the hugging and the promise of weekly visits; and how, after she hadn’t called, for the second Sunday in a row, my mother rode the nine-hour bus to Lubbock to ask what, specifically, was the problem. But on that evening, and every other night for the next few months, all she did was grin.
Gloria’s still smelling the sand, she said.
I was wild when I was her age too, she said.
All it takes is a little time, she said; but my father stayed out of Gloria’s way—he’d shiver a little when she slipped into the room.
* * *
• • •
But Gloria’s presence wasn’t a burden. My cousin was supposed to be kicking her feet up—that was the point of her stay. And since she didn’t ask for much at all, sometimes I even forgot about her. She slept in the guest room, although my mattress was what she’d been promised, but she never called me out on it. Gloria said it didn’t matter. She could fit just about anywhere. And Nikki didn’t doubt it; she said that vermin would always adapt.
In fact, Gloria said, I should sleep at the foot of her bed, or I should at least bring in a sleeping bag, that she wouldn’t mind the company.
My father was skeptical. He simply frowned when she suggested this. But my mother called it a Good Idea: I could act as a runner, could keep Gloria off her feet.
So I shook the cobwebs off some blankets from the attic, and after my first night on the floor Gloria told me she didn’t need a runner, or assistance, or whatever, because she just wanted company. She needed someone else to talk to, it made her think less of her son.
* * *
• • •
; Going into the summer, I’d had my own plans: we’d entered that part of July where the days begin to swallow themselves. The houses in our neighborhood fit together like box tops, with their pastel reds and blues and whites, and I rode bikes with Anwar Baz and Jeff Tan and Kyle Okri, blazing past porch stoops manned by the daughters we deified. Every once in a while, one of us got bold, asking if they had any ice water inside. We’d already talked about making it past the porch. What we’d do if they let us in, if they asked us to pull it out. This was the summer we were going to get laid, to touch and to suck and to fuck, if they let us. Eventually Anwar snagged some condoms from his brother, but of course we had nowhere to put them. We tried our hand at a dime of weed (courtesy of Jeff’s older sisters downtown) but I spent that evening lost inside of myself, marveling at all of the space in my head no one had taken the time to tell me about.
* * *
• • •
With my father negotiating vendors downtown, and my mother scouring the foreclosures for bargains, we mostly had the house to ourselves. Nikki and Gloria struck up a truce: if one shared her books, then the other would shut her mouth. Nikki holed up in her room with Bobby from the supermarket, and Rafa from the gas station, and Jacob from the pool. And despite clear instructions from her island doctor to stay in one place, to stop moving so goddam much, Gloria found ways to get out and about, from the porch, to the living room, to the sidewalks lining the cul-de-sac. No one knew she was gone until she finally came back.
* * *
• • •
Some days Gloria told me stories. She told me about the red-light district in Kingston. About the palms in Ocho Rios, which bent inwards like arches. About how roads sank in the hill country, how she’d found jewelry in the mud. She told me about trips to London, to São Paulo, to New York, and how the World Trade Center memorial had made her feel mortal, like she didn’t matter at all. She told me about beaches in Antigua where babies drank the water. About the seagulls in Haiti, how she’d fed them, how they’d thanked her.
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