by Daniel Klein
During one of those dumpster breaks, a new boy named Pato reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a brownish pellet that he proceeded to stuff into the end of his unfiltered Camel. Another of the boys, a favorite of Lila’s named Alarico, spoke to him angrily, gesturing with his head toward Lila, but Pato just shrugged and lit up. Lila recognized the aroma of marijuana. One of her classmates regularly sucks on a joint she keeps hidden under a rock in the copse of spruce trees across the street from the high school. Lila joined her once, but the drug seemed to make the rest of that school day even more agonizing than usual. So when Pato offered the burning cigarette to her, she politely declined.
But Pato’s weed was potent, and when he teasingly blew a dense cloud of its smoke in her face, Lila sniffed at it playfully. She was back inside, waiting on an elderly Boston couple, when she suddenly became exhilarated by the fragrance of the seaweed in the miso soup she was setting on the table. She had never before grasped that saltiness could be a smell as well as a taste. Even more than the exotic faces and languages and décor of Nakota, this smell transported her.
It took Lila only a moment to realize she was stoned and that thought terrified her. Not because she believed it was morally wrong, and definitely not because of the way it made her feel—unlike that time at school, this high was light and delicious like, well, like miso soup. No, what terrified Lila was that the drug could make her screw up her job; and if Lila lost her job, she was sure she would fall into a deep and inescapable depression. There was nothing to do but force herself to stay sharply focused on her tasks, and that Lila did far more effortlessly than she had expected. In less than an hour, she felt so confident in her self-control that now and then she would indulge that light, delicious feeling, inhaling the scented steam that rose off a plate of ohitashi and joking with a table of college boys who wanted to know her name. That night was even more transcendental than her usual Nakota hallucination. What is more, at the end of the night, Lila could tell just by the weight of her pocket that her tips were much bigger than usual.
She took a puff with Pato the next time. Just a single puff, and a slight one at that. She wanted to float, not to soar, and one little puff was just enough to put her where she wanted to be. Those nights at Nakota are the only times Lila ever smokes pot. They are the only times she ever wants to.
It is the second Saturday after Labor Day, so business at Nakota is sluggish, as it will remain until mid-October when the leaf-peepers come to town. On slow nights, Lila tries especially hard to make herself useful in the kitchen, stripping soy beans, rinsing trays, hauling garbage bags to the dumpster. Although her boss, Ichiro, has never hinted that he might lay her off during these fallow periods, she does not want the idea to even occur to him. After a quick dumpster break, she is tamping down garbage in a plastic bag when Takaaki comes through the kitchen’s swinging door and tells Lila that she has customers at Table Five.
So Lila is freshly high as she steps into the dining room and, menus in hand, saunters toward Table Five. It is occupied by regular patrons, Mr. and Mrs. Dowd, but this time they have two kids with them, a teenage boy and girl, presumably their children. The man has an office in the Melville Block above her mom’s store where he does some kind of stock trading that Grandpa disapproves of; Wendell says there is something basically corrupt about making money with money. And the woman belongs to mom’s drama club. But Lila does not know anything about the boy and girl except that neither goes to Grandville High. The boy, who looks to be fifteen or sixteen, has a sour expression on his baby-fat face that makes Lila guess he goes to private school. The girl looks a year or so younger. She is freckled and pretty and both impudent and nervous-looking. Lila smiles at her.
“Oh, good,” Mrs. Dowd says. “We hoped we’d get you, Lila.”
“Hello,” Lila says cheerfully, handing out the menus. “We’ve got a couple of specials tonight. For donburi, we have unagi don—that’s broiled eel on rice. And for an entrée we have beef negimaki—that’s basically a teriyaki dish with scallions.”
Customers always give Lila their full attention when she makes these recitations. In her first months at Nakota, Lila’s self-consciousness made this the most trying part of the job. For the life of her, Lila cannot imagine what possible pleasure her mother and the rest of the Grandville Players take in being under a spotlight in front of an audience. People’s expectant gazes obliterate any feelings Lila has of her own. But in time, Lila found that conscientiously pronouncing the Japanese food names helps divert her self-consciousness. And later, the puffs with Pato have made these performances even easier. Franny sometimes says that acting in a play gives her a high; for her daughter, cause and effect are reversed—getting high gives her the talent to perform.
Lila notices that the Dowd boy smirks when she intones, ‘unagi don,’ as if he is a critic who finds her presentation lacking. Lila knows that people from New York City pride themselves on their biting critiques of just about everything. Wendell says it comes from living in a crowded environment; they are always trying to tear things down to get some breathing room. Nonetheless, the boy’s sneer gets to her. She imagines tipping a bowl of unagi don onto his fat face.
“You sure do look a lot like your mother,” Mr. Dowd is saying. His eyes have lingered on her face longer than the others and there is an adolescent eagerness in his expression that makes Lila doubly irritated.
“That’s weird,” Lila replies. “Because I’m adopted.”
All four occupants of Table Five look embarrassed, which is exactly the reaction Lila was hoping for, albeit unconsciously. Of course, one thing about being high on Pato’s pot is that the barrier between the conscious and the unconscious is porous at best, and that instantly alarms Lila. Did she get too high this time? Go too far? Could the Dowds tell she was stoned?
Everybody in Grandville knows that Lila is not adopted, even if her father—a man her mother fell in love with in college—has never made an appearance here. Occasionally, Lila likes to think this makes her half adopted, but there is no doubt that she is Franny’s daughter, and Lila does, indeed, look very much like her mother.
The Dowd girl looks disdainfully at her father, then apprehensively at Lila. There is a fierceness in the girl’s eyes, yet there is something almost maternal there too, like a creature that would kill to protect its young. She starts to stammer, “You . . . people say . . . you know, that when you live together, you . . . you start to look alike.”
As the girl stumbles through her little piece, her brother simpers. He seems about to add some choice words of his own—possibly about how dogs come to resemble their masters—when his sister’s face suddenly clenches. The girl is livid, embarrassed, on the brink of tears, and Lila wants to save her. She knows the best way to do this would be to confess she was just joking about being adopted, but she cannot bring herself to do that. She could not bear to give the boy even an ounce more satisfaction to add to his overflowing well of self-satisfaction. So instead Lila leans forward and very quickly plants a kiss on the top of the girl’s head, then straightens up and says, “I’ll give you all a few minutes to make up your minds.”
Gliding back into the kitchen, Lila feels glorious. Although she never thinks in such terms, she feels the way an actress does when she pulls off a difficult scene with total mastery. She has left her audience stunned, breathless, completely in the thrall of her fantasy. When she returns in a few minutes to take their orders, and later to serve them, the Dowds are subdued and awkward. They seem defeated. Mr. Dowd leaves Lila a twenty-five percent tip.
* * *
Tonight, Wendell projected Monsoon Wedding for the third and fourth times, rarely taking his eyes off the screen below. He never even cracked the book he brought with him. The colors in the film bewitched him—saffron saris and lime-green scarves, a gilded carpet, a rainbow of spice mounds in a street stall. This is the way he tours the world and it is sufficient for him.
He was surprised when the programmer in Lond
on complied with his request for this film. Wendell does not make such requests often for fear of being too visible to his overseas employers, but now and then when he sends in his monthly balance sheet, he attaches a note pointing out that the audience at the Phoenix is changing, that the occasional foreign or independent film brings in as much revenue as the Hollywood blockbusters. He was right about Monsoon Wedding; tonight he filled a decent amount of seats for both showings.
The part of the film’s story that most interests Wendell is the way an arranged marriage works out so well for the sophisticated Indian couple. He finds something consoling in the idea of a calculated match of a man and a woman. Even though it is over thirty years since Beatrice left him, Wendell still harbors a deep distrust of the heart’s reliability.
After locking up the projection booth and retrieving empty boxes of Junior Mints, Milk Duds, and Gummi Worms from the balcony floor, he heads downstairs to police the floor of the mezzanine, Binx trotting beside him. It is down here where he sees Esther, the hazel-eyed redhead from the food co-op, lingering at the lobby door.
“I don’t want to go outside,” she says, smiling at him. “I’m afraid of losing the colors.”
Wendell nods. “Saffron,” he says. “My kingdom for a saffron robe.”
They look at each other silently, both of them relishing the unhurriedness of this act and the ease with which they understand one another that made it possible.
“Well,” Esther says finally. “I guess I’ll just squint all the way home.”
“Do you live nearby?”
“On Board Street. We have a two-room apartment.”
Wendell is just about to offer to walk Esther back to her apartment when he remembers that Lila is waiting for him to pick her up at the Nakota. Again, he and Esther simply smile at each other.
“Is that what you do up there? Read?” Esther asks after a moment, gesturing with her head to the book in Wendell’s hand. It is the copy of New England’s African-American Heritage that he got through inter-library loan after he could not turn up anything about a black family named deVries on the Grandville Historical Society’s bookshelf.
“Sometimes, but not tonight,” Wendell answers. Binx has dashed down and back a side aisle, reminding Wendell that he has not finished his clean-up job. “The colors were too distracting.”
“Goodnight.”
“Yes, goodnight.”
Wendell is late picking up Lila tonight. As he turns his red pickup truck into Nakota’s parking lot, he sees his granddaughter bent down to the open window of a Grandville police cruiser at the rear of the restaurant. The driver is Flip Morris. He is easy to identify from any angle because of his spiky crew cut and horseshoe moustache. He is Archie Morris’s son, which can be the only possible reason he got a job in the police department. Wendell applies his brakes slowly, then lets the engine idle as, still unseen by the two, he watches them. Lila is so long-legged that leaning over to talk face-to-face with Flip, her buttocks are higher than her head. That is clearly why Flip keeps cocking his head from one side to the other; he is looking past Lila’s face at the animated shifts and sways of her hips. Wendell hits his horn. Lila glances back at him, then says a few more words to Flip before strolling leisurely to the truck.
“Just in time,” she says, leaning back in her seat.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“Flip was going to give me a lift.”
“Then I’m real glad I made it.” Wendell peers at the cruiser. Flip Morris is examining himself in his side-view mirror while lighting up a cigarette. By God, the idiot even leers at his own reflection. Wendell presses down on the accelerator and lets out the clutch too quickly, making his truck lurch onto the highway.
“He’s perfectly harmless, Pops,” Lila says, looking at her grandfather.
“For an asshole,” Wendell replies.
Usually on Saturday nights, Wendell drops off Lila at home and then heads back into town where he ties Binx to a tree in front of the Railroad Car. Inside, Maggie Bello will be sitting at the far end of the bar, pacing her bourbon and water intake until his arrival. But this Saturday night Wendell decides that he would rather read a bit and then turn in early with only his dog.
CHAPTER FOUR
There are close to half a million towns and villages in the world that are the size of Grandville, and surely it is an accident of the highest order to happen to be living in one of these towns at one particular interval of history. It is as random a conjunction of time and space as, say, the sudden bolt of lightning that split the cross atop the onion tower of St. Joseph’s Parish Church in Triesenberg, Liechtenstein, in the summer of 1937; or the poppy seed that germinated from a four-hour-old pile of donkey dung early this morning on the Pondicherry Road in Krishnagiri, India. Or, say, the swaying palm tree that will fail to deflect a bullet’s trajectory when it spirals toward the forehead of a young Hispanic recruit from Grandville, Massachusetts, the winter after next in Samarra, Iraq; or the rock that at this moment shields a child from a bullet in Puerto Alvira, Colombia.
Yet the citizens of each one of these towns feel an inherent belongingness, as if we absolutely fit in this place at this time. To us, it seems as basic to who we are as the genetic blueprint that has molded our bodies and faces.
* * *
Marcella Mondragon recognized the boy who beat her husband, Nicomedes, to death outside their home in the town of Puerto Alvira, Colombia. His name was Pedro and he once had been a classmate of her son, Hector, at the village school. In fact, Pedro had come home with Hector several times, and the two boys had played kickball in the sugarcane field where Hector’s father worked across from their house. That, of course, was before Pedro joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. It was as a revolutionary guerrilla that he murdered Hector’s father.
After the murder, one of Pedro’s comrades declared that the rest of the family had one day to get out of Puerto Alvira or they would suffer the same fate as Nicomedes. Marcella worked fast. She packed only possessions she thought she could sell—her confirmation necklace and Nicomedes’s musical instruments—two tiples and a cuatro, both of them guitar-like instruments with which her husband had accompanied himself when he sang after supper. Marcella and Hector assembled the family—Nicomedes’s and Marcella’s parents, and Marcella’s three young daughters—and the nine of them set off by foot to Mapiripan. Toward the end of their trek, Hector was carrying his paternal grandfather on his back while Marcella alternated between carrying her youngest daughter, Maria, and her next youngest, Tati.
In Mapiripán, Marcella could not find any buyers for her necklace—a jeweler informed her that the crucifix was made of brass, not gold—but at a music shop near the bus station she was able to sell Nicomedes’s instruments, eight thousand pesos apiece for the tiples, and five thousand for the cuatro—a total of a little less than six American dollars, enough to buy only seven one-way bus tickets to Bogotá, where there were no insurgents and it was said there was work for everyone. As the eldest—sixty-one and sixty-two—Nicomedes’s mother and father volunteered to be the two who stayed behind, and they did. It was not until the midnight bus rumbled out of the bus station and onto the streets of Mapiripán that Marcella cried, as much for what faced them as for what they had left behind.
On the bus trip, Hector fell into conversation with an old woman from the south who had relocated to Bogotá two years earlier. She told him there were only two sections of the city where he and his family could find a place to live, Ciudad Bolivar, in the inner city, or Soacha, a shantytown on the edge of the city. Both were for desechables, she said, using Bogotá slang for ‘disposables.’ She, herself, preferred Soacha because there were fewer prostitutes there.
This, then, was the full extent of Marcella and Hector’s knowledge about housing in Bogotá when they arrived in that city late in the morning with eight hundred pesos in their possession.
The seven of them went house hunting. Allowing for a short stop at a stree
t stand to buy and share a loaf of bread (three hundred pesos), it took a full hour to walk to Ciudad Bolivar, the closer of their two options. Marcella was a farmer’s daughter and a farmer’s widow who had only visited one city in her life, Mapiripan. She had seen photographs of Bogotá, even of foreign cities like Buenos Aires, Rio, and New York City, but she had never smelled a city before. After a lifetime of inhaling the cane-scented mountain air of Puerto Alvira, the stench of Ciudad Bolivar filled her with a despair deeper than any she had felt since their journey began.
It took three hours to find their way from Ciudad Bolivar to Soacha. At first sight, it looked like a garbage fill—empty cans, upended broken chairs and tables, banana peels and granadilla husks, piles of excrement feeding swarms of flies and mosquitoes. But as the family came closer, they saw the corrugated tin roofs of mud-brick shacks that joined one another wall to wall, zigzagging along one side of a hill. At the moment they approached Soacha, the wind current was blowing north to south, bringing with it notes of cherrywood and lemon from the Loaya Herrera. That current shifted in less than an hour, the new wind carrying the full fetor of the shantytown, but by that time Marcella and her son had claimed a nine-foot square of land at the end of the bottom-most row of shacks.
Like any isolated village or neighborhood, Soacha had developed a social system of its own, complete with chiefs and rules of conduct. No one from the city government, police or military, ventured out to Soacha, so there was no limit on the self-appointed rulers’ authority. Yet the scarcity of basic goods—water, food, and building materials—was so great that in itself it restricted these overlords’ power. There was little to seize except labor and flesh.
One of the chiefs was named Rico. He was also from the South and only a couple of years older than Hector. The scars on his powerful neck and face, proof that he had escaped from a Revolutionary Army assault, were his insignia. He approached the family as they stood in a loose circle around their newly-claimed plot.
