The thin cry of the child roused her, and she looked down at it on the sand between her legs. Moonlight frosted the soft fuzz of its head. Its eyes were tightly closed, and its mouth sought from side to side. She lifted it and wiped away sand and blood, then severed the cord with her teeth. She brushed its face free of the caul that clung to it like a frond of gray kelp. She put the child against her breast, but there was no milk in her yet. She let it suck the dry teat, feeling the strangeness. It closed a tiny fist over her fingers and opened dark eyes to gaze at her. She felt as if she were drowning.
At last the child was satisfied, its eyes closed, its mouth went slack with sleep. She stood up, cradling it in one arm, the other holding the rock, for her legs were as weak as seaweed, and looked out over the ocean.
The Old Ones lay half in and half out of the surf in the shelter of the rock, watching her. Starlight slipped like a mantle over their white arms and crowned their heads, turning their hair to silver flame. They did not move and neither did she. Just beyond the ring of waiting Old Ones, a dolphin leaped, the light radiant on its back.
She stumbled forward over the sand, and at once the Old Ones yearned toward her, hands outstretched in their eagerness for the life which they could not produce alone. She looked down at the infant asleep in her arms, a child that had been given to her to bear but was not hers to keep. She brushed the tip of its moon-washed head with her lips, disengaging the tiny fingers clasped about her own. Then she held it out to them. The moon glinted on the child’s naked body, drawing a line of light from the small head, down the arms, over the little chest, to the gentle curve of the tail.
At that, they sighed, a sound like surf hissing over a multitude of small stones. One of the Old Ones, silver hair streaming over her full breasts, took the child from the woman and cradled it. For a moment none of them stirred. Then as if at some signal only they heard, they turned and darted out to sea in a flurry of white arms and scaly tails. But the one that carried the child held it aloft for her to see for the last time before they disappeared under the waves.
“Madre de Dios!” Manuel’s voice said behind her. “What have you done, Maria?”
She turned and saw him cross himself against the horror. She stepped back from the revulsion on his face, clasping trembling arms over her slack belly.
“You have killed the child!”
She turned her back on him at that. Westward, a dark shape rose out of the water, blocking the moon, and she thought of the soft face of her firstborn. Regret stabbed sharply through her. She floundered through the surf toward the dolphin.
“No, Maria, no! You must stay! It was I who let Rex go so that you would stay here with me!”
Urgently she flailed at the man’s arms that pinned her, imprisoning her in his world. Strained toward the dolphin, Manuel only locked her tighter. Now she saw other dolphins attending the first. But he was larger and stronger than any of them, a primeval spirit who mocked the mission fathers and their painted images. She yearned to go with him until she thought her heart would burst. The man and the woman struggled silently at the edge of the sea while the stars flared overhead and the moon’s path beckoned.
“Perhaps it was well-done,” Manuel said at last, panting with the effort of holding her. “The child was not healthy. Even I could see there was something not right”
Far offshore, the dolphin reared up hugely out of the waves, balancing himself on his tail in a blaze of light. She cried out in desperation, and Manuel clapped a hand over her mouth to silence her.
“The police, Maria! What would they think?”
Then the dolphin sank beneath the waves, the others with him, and the child was gone. She leaned against Manuel’s shoulder and wept.
“Come home with me, Maria,” he said. “I shall give you fine babies, if that is what you want.”
The sea was up to her armpits.
So long ago now, she thought, yet the pain still stung like salt water on an open wound. Tears filled her eyes as she remembered how Manuel had crushed her to him that night, banishing the secrets of the sea and anchoring her to the land. The dolphin was gone, the marine park itself was gone now, and California had settled into years of drought and loss. Or was it only she who had sinned and lost? She did not know. Something fierce and awful had gone out of the world and left behind this terrible gaping sadness. She felt as if she knew the answer but was afraid to speak it.
Her skin shriveled from the water’s icy touch like the fingers of death. Then she opened her eyes and found his face a hand’s breadth away.
“It is the night, mamacita. I, too, remember,” he said. “But you have never been so far out before!”
He gripped her shoulders and turned her toward the shore, supporting her when she would have stumbled and fallen beneath the waves. The worn blanket he had brought, the same one he carried to her every year like an absolution, lay folded in its usual place on the beach. He wrapped her in it, ignoring his own wet clothes, then led her up the path to the road where the battered sedan stood with its plastic Virgin and Child on the dashboard.
At the top of the cliff she stopped and looked back at the sea. He waited patiently beside her, slowly, grudgingly with the passage of the years accepting there were mysteries he would never understand. The moon was high overhead, but the white path burned between the worlds. Far out on the ocean, a speck moved, a brief flash of fin or tail, and was gone again.
The door’s rusted hinges protested as Manuel opened it. The toddler gazed drowsily up at her from the backseat, thumb against his lips, the baby wakeful beside him. Their mouths moved, innocent as birds, their urgent hunger ready to consume her, like the baby pelicans in the fable the good fathers told that sucked the blood from their starving mother.
She hesitated, thinking of her firstborn, seaborn child, but her eyes were caught by the infant god on the dashboard. He was smiling.
“A woman does not thrive in this world, Conception,” her abuela had said, in the shadow of the mission wall at dusk. “She endures in the cracks between past and present, church and village, sea and land, this world and the other.” She had been eight years old and had not understood the old woman’s words.
Manuel said softly, “I am trying to make it better. But I am a man, not an angel! Is this so hard to accept?”
She knew he spoke the truth.
“And you are my woman.” He patted her stomach, settling her into the car beside him. “We will go home now, Maria Conception.”
She sagged against the seat, shivering with cold, thinking of men whose promises were worth nothing because they had nothing, of gods who made promises they could not keep, and of that which never made promises but took what it needed at will.
And she thought of the strength a woman must find to endure against them all.
A Game of Cards
Lisa Goldstein
It all looks so civilized. A dinner party in the film community, attended by civilized, cultivated people, served by a dark-haired woman who might well be a refugee from the Third World. Family problems, problems with work, relaxation with a game of cards.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Only the eyes, flicking from face to face, counting up the betrayals. And the refugee, hoping to survive for another day.
“A Game of Cards” frankly reminds me of the game “Get the Guests” in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The question is, however, who gets them?
The doorbell rang at seven. Rozal looked through the peephole and saw two guests framed as in a picture, a woman with short brown hair and a tall gangly man carrying a bottle of wine. Helen and Keith— they’d been at the house before. Rozal opened the door.
“Beautiful house,” Helen said, coming in and slipping off her coat. Rozal nodded, not sure how to take this. Of course they knew the house belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Hobart.
She hung the coats in the closet; they had a faint perfume scent, and the smell that water brings out in wool. Was it raining, then? In
the bustle that surrounded the preparations for dinner, Rozal had not been able to go outside all day.
Helen paused at the framed mirror in the entryway and patted her hair. Keith scowled and grinned at his reflection, as if resigned to what he saw. The bottle of wine hung from his hand as though attached to it; he seemed to have forgotten it was there. Rozal watched as they made their way through the thick off-white carpet in the living room, leaving footprints as they went. The carpet had been vacuumed just minutes before the party, and would have to be vacuumed again tomorrow.
She couldn’t resist a quick glance in the mirror herself. Most Americans took her for older than her twenty-four years, but then most Americans looked far younger than their actual age. Her hair and eyes were brown and her complexion dark; they had called her skin “olive” at the immigration office, and she had looked the word up as soon as she got home, but she’d been none the wiser. She smiled at the reflection; she had not looked so healthy, so plump, in many years.
The doorbell rang, and she hurried to answer it. A young blond woman stood on the doorstep, Carol, another frequent visitor to the house. As soon as Rozal hung up her coat, she heard the bell again. This time when she opened the door, she saw a good-looking dark young man, balancing on the balls of his feet in impatience. He had an amused, quizzical expression, as if he had put on a face to greet Mrs. Hobart.
Rozal had never seen him in the house before, but she recognized him immediately from the movies she watched on her days off. He looked shorter than she would have expected. He said something to her in Spanish, but she smiled and shook her head: no, she was not Spanish.
Mrs. Hobart had seated Keith and Helen and Carol on the sectional couch, and now rose to greet the new arrival. “Steve!” she said. “So glad you could make it.”
“Drinks!” Mr. Hobart said, coming into the living room and clapping his hands. Carol called for something Rozal didn’t catch. Keith stood to hand over his bottle of wine, and Mr. Hobart pretended to be angry at him; somehow it had been both right and wrong for Keith to bring the wine.
At a signal from Mrs. Hobart, Rozal hurried through the dining room to the kitchen for the appetizers. The kitchen was at least ten degrees hotter than the living room: both ovens were on, and the cook had set a teakettle on the stove for tea. Rozal nodded to the cook, who sat on a high stool near the stove and fanned herself with a magazine, but the other woman seemed not to notice her. There was some question of status between her and the cook that Rozal did not quite understand.
Rozal took the tray of appetizers out of the refrigerator and went back to the living room. The party had already divided itself into groups: Mrs. Hobart was deep in conversation with Steve, waving her cigarette smoke away from his face, and Keith and Helen sat a little uncomfortably on the couch next to Carol. “And what do you do?” Keith asked. His face was too long, and his jaw and forehead protruded a little.
“Keith!” Helen said, and leaned to whisper something in his ear. Rozal offered them an appetizer, trying not to look amused. She had seen Carol come up to the house and talk to Mr. Hobart; money and small plastic bags were exchanged. “I thought she had something to do with video,” Keith said, unrepentant. Carol laughed, and after a while Helen joined in.
Rozal returned to the kitchen for more appetizers. As she passed the wet bar that divided the kitchen from the dining room, she heard a voice raised in anger, and she glanced around quickly. In the three months she had been with the Hobarts, she had learned that though they rarely became angry, it was best to pay attention when they did. But the shouting she heard was not directed at her. Mr. Hobart sat at the bar, speaking to someone on the phone.
“I just want to know where he is,” Mr. Hobart said. “No, he isn’t here—that’s why I called you. Well, how the hell should I know where he is?”
Rozal hurried back to the living room and began to pass around the appetizers. “Thank you, Rozal,” Mrs. Hobart said. The shouting from the bar grew louder; surely everyone in the living room could hear it by now. Mrs. Hobart raised her voice to cover it.
“No, she isn’t Hispanic,” she said. She laughed a little, but Rozal could see that she was getting worried. She glanced at her watch. “Why don’t you ask her yourself? Rozal, Steve wants to know where you’re from. Do you understand?”
“From Amaz,” Rozal said.
“Amaz?” Steve asked. “Where’s that?”
“Oh, you must have seen it on the news,” Mrs. Hobart said. “There was a coup and then a countercoup—no one’s really sure who’s running the country now. It was horrible. But Rozal managed to get out—she was one of the lucky ones.”
“Yes,” Rozal said. She had found a pack of cards somewhere on the long terrible road to the United States, and they had told her what Mrs. Hobart was saying now, that she would be fortunate, she would reach her destination. “Great abundance,” the cards had said, and she had certainly come to the land of abundance, a place where even the candy bars were encased in silver.
The doorbell rang, and she set down the tray of appetizers and went to answer it. Peter Hobart, Mr. and Mrs. Hobart’s son, stood in the doorway. By the streetlight behind him Rozal could see the rain she had sensed all day, coming down now in a black sheet like a slab of stone. She looked for Peter’s wife, but did not see her anywhere.
“John!” Mrs. Hobart called. “John, he’s here.”
Peter took off his leather jacket, revealing a ponytail that fell nearly to his waist, and handed the jacket to Rozal. It shone like silk from the rain. Mr. Hobart came into the entryway as she was putting it away. “Finally,” he said. “Don’t you think you’re taking the concept of fashionably late a little too far?”
“He wants to shout at me but he doesn’t dare,” Peter said to Rozal. “Not with all these people here.”
Rozal smiled at him, not too wide a smile because her first loyalty, after all, was to her employers. Still, she couldn’t help but like Peter; over the months she had discovered that most people did.
“We can start eating now,” Mr. Hobart said, going into the living room. “My son has decided to grace us with his presence.”
“Kill the fatted calf,” Peter said. He did not follow his father but remained behind to whisper to Rozal. “I’ve got something for you, Rosie my love. You’ll like it.”
Rozal closed the door to the closet, pleased. She remembered the loud dissatisfied tourists she had seen in Amaz, traveling in groups like fat geese, and she thought how lucky she was to be here, in this house, working for people as kind as the Hobarts. She had never heard that employers gave gifts to their servants. What could Peter possibly have for her? The pocket of his jacket had felt heavy.
The guests moved in an undisciplined group toward the dining room. “I’m sure everyone needs their drinks refreshed,” Mr. Hobart asked, going behind the bar. “I would have asked before, but I was busy trying to find my son.”
“Were you?” Peter asked. He sat at one of the two remaining places at the table; the other was probably for his wife. “There was no reason to bother Debbie— you know I always turn up sooner or later.”
Rozal went to the kitchen and began ladling the soup. “Does Mr. Hobart hate his son?” she asked the cook.
The other woman looked at her so oddly that for a moment Rozal thought she had gotten a word wrong, and she went over what she had said in her mind. Then the cook said, “It’s none of our business what they get up to. My job is to cook the food, and yours is to serve it, and that’s all we have to know.” Chastised, Rozal took the first bowls of soup out to the dining room.
“Looks wonderful,” Keith said. “Is this Amaz cuisine? Amazian cuisine?”
There was silence for a moment; Keith had made another social error by not knowing that the Hobarts had a cook in addition to a maid. Rozal began to like him. “I’m sure Amaz cuisine would be wonderful,” Mrs. Hobart said graciously. “We’re stuck with plain old American tonight, I’m afraid. Does anyone object to lamb?”
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Rozal went back to the kitchen for more soup. She had never heard of Amaz cuisine; since the drought and the disruptions on the farms, most people had had enough to do just finding food to eat. A friend of hers, a man who had come to America with her, had opened a restaurant in the refugee neighborhood near downtown. He’d told her that no one here really knew what people ate in Amaz; he could serve anything he liked.
The talk at the table grew boisterous. Rozal knew that Mr. and Mrs. Hobart were in something called the “entertainment industry,” and the idea of a business formed solely to entertain greatly appealed to her. But she could barely understand anything the guests said, with their talk of points and box office and percentages.
Steve began to talk about a movie he’d seen lately. Carol, seated next to him, was watching him intently. Keith tried to say something but Steve interrupted him, his voice growing angrier and louder. “You’ve got to look at the numbers!” Mr. Hobart said, pitching his voice to drown out everyone else’s. “Look at the numbers!” Rozal wondered what numbers Mr. Hobart meant. She didn’t think she could ask anyone; certainly the cook wouldn’t know.
At last the meal ended, and Rozal went to the kitchen to prepare the tray of coffee cups. Loud laughter came from the pantry; Rozal looked through the doorway and saw Carol and Mrs. Hobart standing there. “He’s gorgeous!” Carol said. “Wrap him up— I’ll take him home! Did you invite him for me?”
“Of course I did.” Mrs. Hobart waved the smoke from her cigarette away from her face. “You were complaining for so long about never meeting any good men that I thought it was our duty to find you one. Go in there and be charming.”
“What’s wrong with him? Is he married?”
“Never been married, as far as I know.”
“What does that mean? Is he afraid of commitment? Oh, no—I bet he’s gay!”
Sisters in Fantasy Page 14
