“I’ve got some brisket in the fridge I can warm up for you,” her mother said, and Maria thanked her and went to put her bag in her old room, which contained, aside from the single, sloping twin bed, an ironing board and a sewing machine covering the desk where she had once written term papers. As she sat down on the bed she heard faint music that she’d not listened to in years but that she had once been so proud of having “discovered,” since it wasn’t something her friends were listening to and they did not play it on the local radio. Jeff Buckley, the Breeders, Catherine Wheel. “Whatever happened to Mazzy Star?” the woman with the single suitcase said aloud to the girl who used to live in this bedroom.
EVEN THE SWEET DESERT air could not keep Marcus from feeling that he ought to call Annie and confess. Such guilt brought on a rare but familiar rise of what he had come over the years to call the black tide. Without warning was he subject to its waters. At least this time he was alone, for when he was swamped, words were useless; the effort to construct a sentence was like digging stumps set in concrete slab. Especially elusive were verbs, their implied action and motion so hopelessly out of range that he sometimes felt exhausted by the presumably passive to be. I am, I was, we were: the subtlest proclamation of existence sounded hyperbolic.
The coming tide drove him to turn on the radio in search of pedal steel, the lyric twang of which had been known to turn the tide from tsunami to seep. The local NPR affiliate was the only clear signal he could find. Marcus was surprised, then ashamed for thinking that no one within two hundred miles would care for public radio.
To the west the moon lit a sawtooth ridge as a raspy-voiced bluesman on the radio sang of walking down the street and seeing a lady so fine he described her as “a lump of Lord have mercy.” Here was the heart talking if ever the heart did talk. He turned the radio off and concentrated on the blinking of lights in the distance. Then a town appeared, which a city-limit sign confirmed was about the size of Silt, nearest hamlet to the flytrap farm.
In the compact business district he found a faded three-story hotel.
“What brings you to Pinto Canyon, Texas?” asked the man behind the counter when Marcus handed over his North Carolina driver’s license with his credit card. The clerk was tall and thin, with spotted skin and ears translucent in the overlit lobby. His was the first accent Marcus had heard since arriving in Texas, though he’d been in the state for only a day and the only words he had exchanged had to do with whether he would be paying with cash or credit and where the room was located. For this reason the man behind the desk came at him sideways with his question.
“Ran out of gas going east, north, south, or west.”
The man studied Marcus for longer than Marcus was comfortable with.
“Well, there’s a gas station right across the street,” he said. “That’s not the only one we got, either. I believe you might’ve passed two or three to get here off the highway.”
Blood flooded the capillaries in Marcus’s face.
“I was just kidding,” he said. “I read that in an interview once. With the film director John Waters? Someone asked him why anyone would live in Baltimore and that was his answer: ‘Run out of gas going east, north, south, or west.’ ”
“John Waters,” said the man. He was no longer looking at Marcus but over his head. This did not make Marcus feel any less uncomfortable or keep his cheeks from reddening. The man said “John Waters” again, as if he was someone who had moved away from this town years back and he was trying to place him. Marcus swallowed. His first exchange with a human not routine or impersonal in days, and what was he supposed to say now? “You know, Pink Flamingos? That movie with the three-hundred-pound transvestite named Divine?”
“My favorite movie is Cat Ballou,” said the man. “I don’t know who directed it, though. I have no idea.”
“Lee Marvin, right? And Jane Fonda?”
“Before she went all Hanoi on us.”
“Is that the one where Lee Marvin tries to ride a drunk horse?”
“Yep. He’s my favorite actor.”
“Lee Marvin?”
“Naw, the horse.”
The laugh they shared might have been at Marcus’s expense, but he was so grateful to the man for not making him feel as if he had lost the ability to talk to another person that he put down sixty-five bucks on a two-room kitchenette overlooking the Fina station and a train yard. The furnishings befit a county drinking shack: A listing La-Z-Boy, the sort of couch found on the front porch of communal houses in college towns. On the wall above the bed, a horse’s head made from dried macaroni, half the pieces of which appeared nibbled.
Later, when Marcus went down to his car for a bottle of wine, a couple in their seventies was performing in a restaurant to a half-dozen ranchers drinking bottles of Shiner and Bud. He stopped to listen. They played a Don Gibson tune and then some Freddy Fender and the lady plucked her bass mechanically and did not add much at all until suddenly she started a song in Spanish so high and lovely it was like river carving canyon from rock. “Lo siento” was the only phrase he could understand, and as he stood alone on the landing his eyes grew wet, touched off by the brittle Spanish of this woman who, to look at her, had long since come to terms with the world and her place in it. “It is what it is,” he had heard people say, usually about some situation they lacked the energy to try and change. Marcus had always winced at the phrase, which struck him, improbably and simultaneously, as both obvious and incorrect. What else could it be besides what it is? he wanted to counter on the one hand, yet on the other—what he really believed, what he needed to believe—was that it was what it wasn’t. In that sliver of discrepancy between is and is not lay the most succulent meat, the tender flesh upside the bone. He felt, without allowing himself to think, the presence of that flesh in this place of wind and rock and dust.
MARIA’S MOTHER STOOD AT the kitchen counter, her arms crossed, a dish towel slung over her shoulder as she watched Maria eat. She claimed she’d eaten on her way to El Paso but Maria did not believe her. Her mother had always been thin but now the only extra weight on her was the slightest sag of wrinkly skin around her elbows and beneath her chin.
“I’ve been working as a chef for the last five years,” said Maria, taking her seat at the table, a plate of brisket and warmed-up beans and a puddle of slaw in front of her.
“That’s what you put in one of your letters. What kind of place is it where you work now?”
“It’s called Beverly’s Bistro. My friend Beverly owns it.”
“Well, what sort of food do y’all cook?”
“It’s pretty eclectic,” said Maria, and she then immediately wanted to take the word back, since even if her mother knew what it meant she might take it as a slur, given her diet, which varied only in that some days it went from unhealthy to unhealthier.
“I mean, the menu changes every night,” said Maria. “Depends on what’s fresh.”
“Sounds like too much work to me. Seems like most people would come back in looking for what they had the last time. That’s the way I run my business, anyway. I have a lot of people come back because they know nothing’s changed.”
“Well, we do have some staples,” said Maria. “Mostly appetizers. Anyway, I’d love to cook for you while I’m here. I know you probably don’t care to spend what little time you have in the kitchen.”
“Either I pick something up on the way home or I just open cans and pour them into pots,” her mother said, “It’s nothing to care about one way or the other. Something wrong with brisket?”
“Not at all,” Maria lied. “I love the sauce.”
Her mother stood at the counter still, watching her make her way through the slab of beef. Maria was used to eating alone and reading magazines while she ate. To eat without reading made her feel as if she was seated at the table topless.
“Did you ever think of moving?” said Maria, mostly to divert her mother’s attention.
Her mother stared at her as if
she were translating, with difficulty, her question into some language she could understand.
“After Dad died, I mean,” said Maria.
“Move where? Why?”
Her mother and father had bought their turn-of-the-century adobe from her father’s uncle in the late sixties. It was two miles from town, and the land surrounding it still belonged to her cousin, who ran a couple of dozen head of cattle in the pastures behind it. The walls were thick and pocked and Maria liked to lie on the floor and put her bare feet on them in the summer when no one was home. She would carry the chalky odor of stucco to bed with her, wake with it scenting her sheets.
Minutes of deep silence. She was used to it from years of living mostly alone, but here at home with her mother it made her fearful that something was not being said. And so she said, “Do you ever run into Randy’s mother?”
“Some,” her mother said after a pause.
Randy’s mother had been born again before her son’s death, and after learning why he took his life, she became not only more fervently devoted to her beliefs but vicious in her vilification of that slut who killed her son and grandchild. Randy’s mother enlisted her entire church to help spread hate. God’s Rodeo, the church was called; Randy loved to make fun of it. “Yippee-yi-yo, praise be, pardner,” he used to half yodel whenever they drove past it. He hated going there, found it gimmicky and absurd with its jowly pastor—some claimed a former drug dealer from Wichita Falls who had come to Terlingua on the lam—delivering the word in tight Wranglers and pointy-toed, alligator-skin Luccheses.
“Does she speak to you?”
“She doesn’t have anything to say to me that I care to hear come out of her mouth.”
Maria forced herself to chew. She drank some water. “So she still blames me?”
“She’s mourning still. Might seem like to us she’s mourning the wrong way? But I guess there’s just a way. No right or wrong to it. Whatever works until it don’t, and then there’s something else gets you along.”
For two weeks after Randy’s funeral, which her father did not allow Maria to attend, she had lain in bed and cried. Her mother tended to her wordlessly. She brought her soup and set it on a tray table by the bed and that was as close as she got. Maria could not ask anyone for anything, ever again, much less ask her mother to lie next to her and hold her and wipe wet bangs from her forehead. But it wasn’t as if she expected her mother to say, Baby, it gets better. Never in her life had her mother said something so banal. She was not an educated woman but her sense of the world was as hewn as a fence post. It did not extend to comforting people, even her daughter, even, Maria suspected, Ray, who loved her enough to leave her a motel.
The guidance counselor from school had called finally and explained that if Maria missed any more days they could not by law allow her to continue with the class she had been with since kindergarten. Through the closed door, Maria heard her mother say, “So she’ll just have to get held back, won’t she? If that’s what y’all are calling it instead of fail.”
And now, hearing her mother talk of mourning, the lone way through it, no rightness or wrongness to it, she blinked and swallowed.
Her mother came and took her plate and scraped it and washed it and put it away.
“I just couldn’t . . . ,” Maria said. “I just could not ever . . .” But when her mother did not turn around from the sink, she said, “I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go to bed.”
In the morning Maria found her mother drinking coffee, dressed in her work clothes, which were no different from anything else she wore: a sweatshirt and jeans.
“I figured you’d want to see the motel?”
“Just let me get ready.”
“You look fine. This is Pinto Canyon. No need for makeup.”
“I hardly ever wear makeup,” said Maria.
“You used to.”
“Can I brush my teeth, Mom?”
Her mother turned away, filled the teakettle, watered a plant. Maria realized that this was the first time she had called her mother “Mom.” Or anything at all. But while she was brushing her teeth, she realized that this was the first time her mother had referred to Maria’s past, to how she was before. Did she wish she’d caught herself ? She couldn’t imagine her mother feeling guilty about such a slip. What she could imagine was saying to her mother, It’s okay, we can talk about stuff that happened before Randy died, and her mother saying to her, Well, I don’t know about any of that, I was just saying you did used to put on makeup, I threw out nearly a whole box of stuff after you’d been gone for years and we never heard from you.
But on the way to the motel, her mother spoke only of the motel. On the tour, Maria recognized two of the girls hired to clean rooms—Consuela Navarette and Luisa Jaquez—from high school. Had she not been held back she’d have graduated with them. As she chatted awkwardly with them and her mother, her mind got stuck on the phrase held back. Was that how she’d lived her life since that day she left? While her mother was at work, Maria had packed a suitcase and called a friend she knew she could trust to drive her to the train station. She took Amtrak first to Las Cruces and then, after a few weeks’ work at a Dairy Queen and truly terrifying nights at the Desert Treasure Inn, a Greyhound to San Luis Obispo, chosen for its name. She liked the familiarity of Spanish, though she spoke it badly because her father had been paddled in grade school for not speaking English and therefore was not inclined to speak it to his Anglo wife and children.
She had left a note of apology for her parents but she did not say where she was going because she had no idea. Her parents were better off with her gone, which was one reason she had not returned for so long, even for her father’s funeral—not out of spite but in deference to the suffering she had caused him, which she believed to be so deep that attending his funeral would have gone beyond hypocritical into just plain mean.
“I need to run check on that clerk I hired last week,” said Maria’s mother. “If I don’t stay on him, he’ll keep somebody on hold for five minutes and lose a room.”
The way Consuela and Luisa turned warmer and more relaxed in her mother’s absence confirmed what Maria suspected: that her mother was a harsh and humorless boss.
“Girl, you are so thin,” said Luisa, reaching out to touch her just above her hip in a way so guileless that Maria wanted to hug her.
“You take after your mother,” said Consuela, which made Maria anxious until she realized they envied her mother’s metabolism.
They talked a few minutes more, of things that happened so long ago they appeared to flicker in memory as if on a grainy newsreel. At the sight of her mother coming along carrying a stack of clean towels, the girls excused themselves and disappeared into the open room. Maria waited outside while her mother delivered instructions on which rooms needed cleaning.
“I didn’t realize you knew them,” her mother said on the way to her office.
“We were in the same class.”
“I guess what I ought to say is I did not realize they knew you. They never mentioned you to me.”
Why would they? Her mother’s way with them did not encourage the sharing of personal information. Plus, everyone in this town knew what had happened, particularly those who were in the same class as she and Randy. Why would they risk bringing it up? Her mother’s cluelessness was unlike her, but Maria held her tongue and accompanied her mother on the tour of the motel, which seemed cleaner than she remembered it, though no less worn. On the tour, her mother mentioned Ray only in the context of repairs or additions or the lack thereof. Maria tried to remember what he looked like. She’d met him only a few times over the years because usually when her mother was at work, Ray was at home, as he had worked the night shift before her mother switched over. Maria had been surprised to see that he was white, though she wasn’t at all sure why; just because her father was Hispanic did not mean that her mother preferred only Hispanics. She’d suspected there was something between Ray and her mother before she’d l
eft home, but only in that vague way in which a suspicion crosses your mind like a cloud over a mountain, temporarily darkening it. Ray was not only white but terribly white, the sort of white person whose skin takes on the glow of fluorescent lights from too much time under their flickering buzz. She had no idea where the man was from, but she suspected he was not from around here, or even Texas, and she wondered why, given his pallor, he would choose to live in a place so close to the sun.
They had come to the restaurant. In high school it had been called Johnny Garcia’s. She had come here after games for burritos. Now it was empty, its doors padlocked. Her mother searched her key chain and unlocked the door and led them inside. Dust coated the counters. In the deep triple sink was a pile of broken dishes, and a few novena candles were still set out on the tabletops.
“Johnny Garcia died about seven years ago. His son wanted to take over the business, but Ray said no. Funniest thing, toward the end of his life, Ray got this thing about Mexicans. All the years I knew him he never had an unkind word to say about any of them, but when he got sick it affected his brain, I guess, and overnight he was convinced he was being trailed by members of the cartel and that they were going to take him across to Ojinaga and assassinate him, which is how I knew he was sick in the first place.”
All I Have in This World Page 4
