She ties a blue ribbon around the roofless cabin and waits for it to dry.
“Are you going away for the holiday?” Maria Jose asks, leaning toward Charlene and dipping her sleeve in her bowl of soup. If it were Tina, she would at least sigh, and Roberta might get mad and even stomp out of the lunchroom, but Maria Jose just laughs. Charlene leans over the table to pass her a napkin.
“Thank you so much. I’m so clumsy,” she says, blotting at the stain. Actually Maria Jose is the most graceful person in the office. She glides between the cubicles, skirt softly swishing, and, on her, dunking a sleeve in a bowl of soup is like a curtsy.
“I’m not doing much,” Charlene says. “What about you?”
“My aunts and cousins are coming from home. Christmas is really important in El Salvador, and I don’t think I’ll be able to give them what they’re used to.” Maria Jose frowns a little and goes back to spooning the soup into her mouth.
Charlene pictures herself knocking on Maria Jose’s door on Christmas Eve with a wagon of Salvadorean food in casserole dishes, multiple courses and meals perfectly prepared. “Everything’s ready, just heat and serve,” Charlene says graciously. Maria Jose wells up and reaches out to hug her. “This is so perfect. Please come in. Stay with us.” Charlene nods, and Maria Jose brings the wagon into the house, the silver in her hair glinting in the light from the foyer.
Since she pulled Jerry’s name out of Maria Jose’s bowl of paper, Charlene has been mulling over how to handle the Jerry element of the Christmas exchange. She likes Jerry, mostly because of the shell-shocked expression he usually wears at lunchtime. She doesn’t want him to be without a present, but the pretzel cabin can only be for Maria Jose. There is, of course, the uncomfortable thought that Maria Jose is going to get two presents: the pretzel cabin and something from the person who actually drew her name. There is no real way around this—even if Charlene manages to remove the other offending present without being noticed, the person who got Maria Jose’s name is going to know something’s up. So Charlene has decided that Maria Jose will just get two presents, and everyone will think it’s a little mistake, and only Charlene and maybe Maria Jose will know what’s true.
The mega-bookstore seems a good place to get Jerry’s present. Once Charlene walked by his cubicle and saw him reading a book under his keyboard tray. Sometimes he leaves the lunchroom early, a book under his arm. She is never close enough to Jerry to see the title of what he’s reading, so she walks up and down the aisles of the huge store, hoping something will jump out at her.
Wandering into the cookbook section, Charlene forgets all about Jerry and his present. There is a section on Latin American cuisine, and two books just on Salvadorean food. She pours over the pictures of pupusas and imagines slapping the tortillas between her palms over a hot grill while Maria Jose takes orders and charms the customers. At night—sweat drying on the back of their necks, tired down to the bone—they lock up the shop and walk home down the dirt road, back to their little house with the stream out back.
On her way up to pay for the cookbooks, Charlene passes a display of day planners and picks one up in maroon. That’s the right present for Jerry—it’s useful without saying much. She doesn’t want to give him anything too intimate.
The roof takes hours, but it is soothing work. Charlene hums “Feliz Navidad” to herself as she carefully glues each pretzel stick to the gingerbread roof. Slowly the lines of pretzels begin to look like logs, and Charlene is pleased. She pauses to wipe off her fingertips, sticky with icing and pretzel dust.
The end of the pretzel cabin project is in sight. Charlene doesn’t need the index cards anymore; she knows where to go from here. But first, she needs to finish this part, her favourite part: lining up the pretzel logs, side by side, watching the roof grow into something. Imagining Maria Jose leaning down to admire the perfectly aligned pretzel logs and reaching out to run her finger along the tip of the roof.
It never snows in El Salvador. Charlene makes the lawn out of green candies, mixing up the different kinds, Skittles beside jelly beans, for artistic effect. She stretches and admires her work. The lawn and roof look perfect. She glues a little plastic dog out front and behind him leaves a few melted chocolate chips, for realism. She traces the shapes of windows and uses sticks of gum for shutters. She mixes up different colours of icing and pipes on window boxes full of flowers. Finally, she melts the blue Jolly Ranchers in a saucepan on the stove, stirring until the hard squares are liquid and the pot smells like sky. Out back, behind the cabin, she spreads the blue goo into a stream that trickles to the edge of the tinfoil base. Charlene imagines it leading to the next cabin and the one after that, all of them connected by the thin, sweet stream.
When she finishes the back lawn, adding green banks alongside the candy stream, it is early in the morning. She pipes icing into an M and a J on one corner of the tinfoil base. Then she wraps Jerry’s day planner in green tissue paper and attaches his name to the top. There is just enough time for the last of the details to dry completely while Charlene gets ready for work and the Christmas exchange and Maria Jose.
She takes a taxi to work to keep the pretzel cabin safe. The taxi driver glances back when she opens the door and gently slides the cabin over to its own seat before getting in and giving him the address of her office.
“Nice house. You make that?” he says, looking at her in the mirror.
Charlene nods and is glad when he doesn’t say anything else, only looks over his shoulder and pulls out into the traffic. The darkness is just beginning to lift, the sky shifting to grey, backlit with shades of pink.
As planned, Charlene is the first to arrive at the office. She flicks on the light switch with her elbow and carries the pretzel cabin past the other empty cubicles to her own. Putting the cabin behind a stack of files where it will not be seen by Roberta or Tina or anyone else, she lines up her pens and wonders how she is going to manage to wait until lunchtime.
All morning people have been going in and out of the lunchroom. Charlene is waiting for the right moment to carry the pretzel cabin to the table of presents without being noticed. While she waits, she keeps peering over the pile of files to check on the cabin. Somehow not even one log has fallen off the roof, a real danger according to the internet. She hears Maria Jose’s laugh, and the greyhounds do their flips inside her. She looks to see where the laugh is coming from. Maria Jose and Jerry are standing near the door of the lunchroom. Their heads are close together, and their voices are too quiet to hear, but Charlene watches Jerry’s lips say thank you.
He has tissue paper in one hand, and a snow globe is sitting on top of it. He shakes it, and the flakes swirl around. When they settle, Charlene can see a little house inside the snow globe. A cabin.
Cyanide Necklace
During the war, my grandfather had to wear a cyanide necklace. He was a wireless operator and had all of this information in his head that he couldn’t let the Germans get a hold of, no matter what. He was told to swallow the cyanide pill around his neck if he was ever captured.
Once, he saw his friend decapitated by a trip wire, his head sliced clean off, right at the neck. He wrote letters home from Holland but not about decapitations and cyanide necklaces. The army wouldn’t have let that kind of letter get out, and he didn’t want to worry his mother.
What Vern Did
The whole trip had been a bust, anyway, Vern decided as he stood in the aisle of the airplane waiting for people to move towards the exit.
Vern’s prostate had been acting up this time, and between that and his upset stomach (probably from that shrimp off the buffet the second night), he seemed to have spent most of his time looking for a bathroom. As much as he loved Cuba, the toilets were garbage. Half the time no toilet paper at all, or paper so thin you could see your hand through it.
Usually Vern enjoyed these trips. He’d been going two or three times a year since retirement, and he looked forward to it every time. Even went to the tanning
beds beforehand so he wouldn’t look like a marshmallow with Q-tips for legs strolling down the beach.
Sometimes he got a girl, but with his body acting up this time, he didn’t want to risk it. It was starting to look like things were about done in that department. Last time, the girl he got had to be at least fifty, and she moved like it, too. Not that he was one to talk, obviously, but the last thing he wanted was pussy that made him feel old.
He was glad his ex-wives weren’t around to see this development. Lorraine especially would have a field day.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t loved Lorraine. Gemma and Aurelia too. He’d loved them all, but that was a separate thing. The girls were like dessert. You didn’t need dessert with every meal, but when you did want it, more roast beef or an extra plate of salad wasn’t going to cut it.
The first time Lorraine caught him, she had gone out to the car after he came home from work. Vern thought she was just getting something out of the garage until he heard the door of the sedan slam. Maurice, Lorraine’s orange cat, jumped and fled upstairs.
“It smells like cigarettes in the car,” Lorraine said from the doorway. She was blocking the exit.
“That was me. Sorry, honey.”
“Huh.”
Lorraine’s short hair was sticking up in all directions. Her lips were pinched tight, and her eyebrows went up.
“That’s interesting. Because I can also smell that same perfume your sister used to wear. Before she died.” Lorraine was almost whispering.
Vern thought fast. Nostalgia? But Lorraine’s features were getting squinty and pointy, and when she stomped out, her footsteps thunked like dropped bricks.
Now Aurelia, she was always making a big deal out of little things. If he forgot to lock the sliding door before bed, she acted like it was the Cuban Missile Crisis. If he dared to work late, they’d be locked in a standoff, the house in a vice of sexless silence—which didn’t help things, obviously. She was a knockout, though, that Aurelia. Black curls down to her tits. Before they were married, when he was still with Lorraine, she’d come out of the bathroom at the Travelodge, and just looking at her got him hard.
Gemma wasn’t the bombshell Aurelia was, but she was the one that stuck in his teeth a bit. She wanted kids but stayed with him when he refused to get his vasectomy reversed. In return, he pretended to listen to her adoption talk until it petered out after a year or so of his “We can talk about it”s and “Let me sleep on it some more”s.
Gemma never nagged him to get home earlier, and she gave this small, sexy gasp when she came. She was a little thicker than most of the other girls, and when she was tired or concentrating, one of her eyes wandered. It was hard not to think of a cat’s-eye marble rolling around on her face.
Even Gemma had her limit, though. Took Vern a few years to figure out what it was—turns out coming home to two girls in the house, that was her limit. And that was the end of things with Gemma.
The line wasn’t moving, and Vern had to piss. Aurelia would definitely have made a scene by now, if she’d been here. First just sighing loudly as if she could blow the line forward with one big breath. When that didn’t work, she’d start complaining to him, loudly, about this terrible airline and its lazy staff and how she was going to get a new travel agent as soon as they got out of here. Then, finally, she’d start calling out something like, “Who is the manager here?” until the pilot came out and threw bags of pretzels at her until she shut up or, more likely, started throwing them back at him and swearing in Portuguese. Vern smiled.
The girl next to him was a curvy thing with blue toenails. She was in a middle seat, and her husband was beside the window, staring out at the snow blowing across the tarmac. The aisle seat was empty. The girl waggled her leg. Vern was still in his sandals, too, always changed them in the airport at the very last minute, holding on to the trip like a handful of sand falling through his fingers. The polish on the girl’s big toe was chipped away, nearly gone like she’d been picking at it.
Vern shifted his feet. Somebody was pressing a can of soup against his bladder. The curvy girl nuzzled her husband’s shoulder like she could have been wiping her nose on his sleeve, but she probably wasn’t. The husband kept looking outside and patted her knee. The girl pulled out the inflight magazine and flipped through it too quickly to be reading anything. Aurelia used to flip through magazines like that when she was about to explode—since then he had always associated the sound of those perfumey, glossy pages rubbing together with a woman’s rage. This trip, he’d been glad to see so many girls on the beach with those computer books, the ones that lit up white. Seeing a girl looking at a screen like that didn’t remind him of anything.
With Lorraine, he wouldn’t have been in this line at all. Maurice hated flying, she said, so she never went anywhere even when Vern invited her. Which he did from time to time, especially at the beginning. It wouldn’t have been very hard to get her sister to sit with the cat. The first few times, Vern suggested that, but she just shrugged and didn’t call her sister and pretty soon he stopped asking. After Lorraine left, Vern kept finding orange hairs everywhere, for months—in a teacup, on a suit he never wore, in his shaving cream. Like Maurice was getting the last word.
The curvy girl had a long black dress on. When she bent down to get something out of her purse, he could see the tops of her white tits where the tan stopped. She straightened up and leaned against the husband and reached her hand into his lap. As Vern watched, she rubbed him, slowly, looking out the window too. But the husband just sighed and shifted in his seat, took her hand out of his lap and put it back in her own. Vern looked away.
“But I like you curvy,” Vern had said through the bathroom door. Gemma was being uncharacteristically dramatic.
“No you don’t. Just leave me alone.”
The truth was Gemma was more thick than curvy, but “I like you thick” didn’t sound good in his head, and he had a feeling that wouldn’t help the situation any. Eventually he just left her there and went to the Christmas party alone.
By the time he got there, everybody was kind of drunk. Asha and Jane were moving around the empty dance floor in dirty bare feet. Jane had this long dress on that she lifted up when she twirled, her elbows sticking out in points. She danced over to Vern and pulled him over to Asha, who took his hand too, and Vern hated dancing but stayed anyway.
Later he came out of the bathroom, and Jane was waiting for him. Her face was red, and her eyes were wet and glassy, but she was sexy, standing there with one elbow sticking out, handful of fabric in her fist, showing him that tanned, tight calf. He pulled her out of the light. There was too much cloth to get through, so he touched her through the dress, swirling his fingers over her clit until she came. She moaned into his mouth and reached for him.
When he got home from the party, the bathroom was dark and empty. Gemma was asleep. Vern washed his hands again to get the last bit of Jane off him. When he got into bed, Gemma sighed in her sleep and turned toward him.
Vern stuck his head out to the side to see what was happening, but nobody was moving. They were all just standing there, holding bags. Sighing and muttering and blocking his way out. The bathroom was way at the back of the plane, and there was no way he was going to be able to get back there now. The curvy girl was back at the magazine, whipping through the pages. Vern’s bladder ached. He was old, sure, but not old enough for pissing himself to be okay.
He took a step to the left and unzipped. A whoosh of relief. The piss hit the back of the aisle seat’s tray table and dripped down into the pocket. He stared straight ahead so he couldn’t see if he was accidentally splashing the curvy girl’s foot with its picked-away polish. He hoped not. He wouldn’t have minded hitting the magazine, but it was well out of range of the dribble of piss.
The girl looked over at him just as he was zipping up. She glanced from his crotch to his face, and her eyes flickered surprise and something else he’d never seen on a woman’s face before, something he
couldn’t put his finger on. She leaned over and whispered to her husband. Vern stared ahead, at the back of the man standing ahead of him, and pretended nothing had happened. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the husband lean over the girl and check out the back of the seat.
“No way,” he said.
“Can’t you see it?” she hissed.
“Yeah, there’s definitely something dripping there. We should tell someone.”
“No,” the curvy girl whispered. “I don’t want to embarrass him. He’s an old man.”
And Vern knew that what he had seen in the girl’s face was worse than the fury he saw when Aurelia threw him out, worse than that look Lorraine got, all squinty and pointy. Worse than Gemma’s face when she realized he was never going to have a kid with her. That look was worse even than pissing himself on an airplane, and it was something he didn’t want to see, not ever again.
Dispatched
When we heard the call come over the radio, we thought the dispatcher must have been joking. I wanted to skip the call in case it really was a joke and then we would all look like idiots. But Reyes is a by-the-book kind of guy, so he flipped on the lights and then the siren and off we went.
We arrived at the scene of the disturbance just after 1:00 a.m. I tried to see in the windows while Reyes knocked on the door and called, “Hello? Police!” I couldn’t see anything inside but a bit of light from a lamp in the corner. Reyes knocked again, and the door opened, and the couple came out on the porch.
The Colours of Birds Page 4
