Sitting on her bed, chin in hand, she thought of how Chacho, when he talked most seriously to her, would lie on his elbow and pluck at whatever was beneath him—grass, reed matting, sand. He had long black lashes. His eyes were soft; if she touched them, they would feel like the bodies of bees. Beauty in her life, Deirdre reminded herself, was a sign of favor, and Chacho was beautiful.
Deirdre woke at four in the morning to go to the bathroom. The kitchen light was on. Her father’s armchair was empty, so he was spending the night in the master bedroom. Her mother, naked except for a black lace bra, an old birthday gift from her father, stood by the kitchen sink. Deirdre retreated into the shadow of the living room. She hadn’t seen her mother naked that she could remember. Her mother reached for the cutting board and laid it on the counter. She turned, passed from Deirdre’s view. The refrigerator door opened, shut. Her mother brought bread, a head of lettuce, mayonnaise, and luncheon meat to the counter. She spread mayonnaise on the bread. Her belly and buttocks were round and white, too soft, even baggy. Afraid, feeling unbearable tenderness, Deirdre ran into the kitchen. Her mother shrieked. On her knees, Deirdre embraced those soft parts of her mother, pressed her face against them, the fluff of pubic hair.
“How can you let him have this?” she said. “How can you give it to him?”
Her mother, frozen, holding the knife and a slice of ham, stared at her. Then her eyes, as large and clear as Deirdre’s, but blue, shifted vaguely around the room. She stepped free and returned wearing a robe.
“Go to bed,” she said. Deirdre stood, wanting to resist, but the robe stymied her. She could think of nothing to say.
To help herself sleep, Deirdre remembered wrestling Chacho’s sisters in the pond. The girls clambered over her back, and she toppled forward. Chacho’s arm shot around her waist, breaking the fall, and the tower of people collapsed on Papa and Mama on the bank. For a moment, the children squirming over her, Papa grunting underneath, Deirdre hadn’t wanted to move, to leave the warm, wet flesh against her skin. The tangle rolled over on itself. The girls yipped. “Yaaah,” said Chacho. “Ou ou ou,” Papa said, punching and prodding the mass of flesh as if molding a great ball of dough. Smelling again their moist, common scent, Deirdre drowsed.
Friday there were no letters. Deirdre went to bed early and slept until Saturday noon.
It was time to check the mail. Her father waved. Cheerleaders were kicking long diagonals across the TV screen, the tips of their feet disappearing beyond the edge of the small picture tube.
Outside, a kite, rising on the unseasonably warm breeze, showed red against a fat bank of clouds. A packet from the Philippines lay in the mailbox. Deirdre slit the envelope with her fingernail and unfolded Chacho’s note. He apologized for the delay. Papa had forgotten to send in the film, and then processing had taken longer than anyone could have imagined. He apologized for not having written. He was engaged to be married. The girl was a Christian Chinese, daughter of a grocer with connections to a department store chain in Manila. Chacho had never spoken to her. Papa and Mama were very enthusiastic, and he must obey their wishes. It was difficult for him to tell her this. He would write more later. He closed “Iniigib kita”—I love you.
The kite dipped in the pale sky. The bright winter sun seemed to have leached color from everything—house, trees, the bicycle on the lawn. Deirdre refolded the note and with great care tried to put it in her shirt pocket. The shirt had no pockets. Deirdre let herself into the house. She saw her father’s bladelike face, small ears tight against his crew cut, the shriveled, twisted feet, and hatred clenched her stomach. She locked the bathroom door behind her, feeling enclosed in hatred like a vault. Sitting on the edge of the tub, she scraped her father’s razor across her wrists until blood dripped onto the white porcelain. Then she began to cry. Running the bathwater to hide the sound, she staunched the blood with a washcloth. The wounds were only shallow scratches.
She called Curtis. He was covering a basketball invitational in Phoenix, because the sports editor was sick, he said, and of course she could come.
Wearing a long-sleeved blouse with frilled cuffs over the Band-Aids, Deirdre sat against the door in Curtis’s front seat. Curtis smoked a joint, seeds sizzling and popping as they chugged along the freeway in his ‘51 Plymouth. The night before, he’d taken speed and lain awake reconstructing every minute he’d spent with Gloria. For an hour and a half he delivered the history to Deirdre, jerking the steering wheel back and forth in time to the music, cursing cars that passed them—“Dog’s ass. Carnal intimate of rats.”
Deirdre refused the puffs he offered. Watching his face, the most expressive, she realized, that she’d ever seen, she made a fascinating discovery. There was a wonderful beauty in the harshness of that face. Deirdre felt odd. Each moment was fragile, elongated. She couldn’t remember where she lived, the number of her house, or what it looked like. The desert outside her window was unfamiliar. She couldn’t judge if it were pretty or drab.
A swerve of the car threw his cigarettes on the floor. When she bent to retrieve them, he asked what was in her pocket.
“My photos.” Deirdre broke the seal on the envelope and removed the prints. They were stiff colored artifacts in her hand. Chacho cutting green peppers into likenesses of the family, Papa with his cigar and big ears, Mama’s bun and wide skirt, Chacho’s floppy pandanus hat, Deirdre’s backpack like a hump. Deirdre and Chacho reciting his Pilipino translation of “On Friendship,” their mouths open exactly the same width on the same word. The sisters catching a frog. Chacho and Deirdre, late for Mass, running down a pink dirt path overhung with gray-green foliage, feet barely blurred. Each held the other’s hat in place, his hand on her white lace chapel cap, her hand on his pandanus.
Deirdre tossed the photos on the seat. “You can look at them later,” she said.
Curtis glanced at her, said nothing, and lit a joint.
Early for the game, they drove down a broad, shady boulevard. Above the treetops, a violent pink and orange sunset flamed the glass of a double-decker mall, the Phoenix smog curling like smoke.
Curtis needed more cigarettes. A series of turns took them into a black ghetto. Children popped wheelies on their bikes. People talked in doorways. The buildings were dingy and decayed. A tattered billboard showed an airplane flying into a glass of beer. Lying against the brick wall of a lounge, a man threw a tennis ball in the air, catching it without changing the position of his hands.
“Brrr, this is sad,” Curtis said. “I shouldn’t feel good in a place like this, but I do. Isn’t that terrible? But Gloria and I were so close when we were sad. When she was depressed, she’d call, and we’d want so much to be together, but it would be too late at night and we couldn’t. It was a sweet thing. I love her so much,” he said, banging his hands on the steering wheel. “That’s why I wanted to touch her. It would have been enough to feel the skin of her back. I always wondered if she has a nice back. That’s important to me.”
“I’m sure she does,” Deirdre said. “Gloria has lovely bones.”
“What’s wrong with me? Six months, and then the first time she meets this Canadian horse mugger—I hate Canada. I read the hockey box scores every day to see the Canadiens lose. I want them to lose every one of their games.”
“It makes me angry that Gloria treated you so badly. She needs a good kick.” Deirdre’s voice rose. She was trembling.
Curtis looked at her again. “Do you want a drink? We could have someone buy us a bottle.”
Deirdre shook her head.
The gym was like an old hangar of yellow wood. Deirdre studied the rows of bleachers. Their existence seemed arbitrary. She might look away and back, she thought, and half would be gone. It was all a matter of pure chance. The buttocks of the players looked like sea sponges. Deirdre was unaware of the action until midway through the fourth quarter when, their team ahead by twenty points, Curtis lit a cigarette.
“Idiot,” she said. “Do you want to get thrown out?
” She crushed it on his bootsole.
Only when they were on the freeway home did Deirdre remember, “Chacho is getting married.”
“No,” Curtis said. “I don’t believe it. Oh, honey.” He squeezed her arm tightly.
“We said we were never going to get married. Everly-Neverly Brothers never.” Though she’d drunk nothing, her tense jaw pulled her face lopsided. Bare sticks of growth flashed by in the headlights. The vastness and emptiness of the desert sky, with its dull distant stars, terrified her. “He doesn’t know her. He doesn’t like her.”
“Chacho must be miserable. He’d do anything to see you before it happens.”
“I think I’m going to put my head in your lap,” Deirdre said. She lay on her back, knees huddled against the seat. Curtis fingered her hair and stroked her cheek.
After a few miles, she unhooked her bra and put Curtis’s hand inside her blouse. The weight of his hand made her feel the motion of her breast, vibrating with the hum of the engine. She felt the car decelerate and stop, the engine dieseling. She opened her blouse to Curtis and looked at him. He gazed at her without blinking. He was barely smiling, but the corners of his black-rimmed eyes turned down and his forehead was deeply lined. Covering her breasts with his hands, he bent to kiss her.
Deirdre averted her face. “None of that,” she said. “Go ahead. A gift.” Muscle knotted her jaw. Her teeth were clenched. She unfastened the buttons of her jeans and arched her back to strip herself. She heard part of Curtis bang against the steering wheel as he lowered himself onto her. It wasn’t their bodies touching, Deirdre thought, but only a bridge from her to him.
Curtis’s boots scuffed against the door. Occasional passing headlights swept across the interior of the car. Deirdre tried to hear Chacho’s voice speaking of the sexual juices’ ascent up the spine, their opening like a flower in the head, tried to see his hands illustrating the expansion of energy. But instead all she could see was a woman, not herself, yet leaving her body, racing into the glare of traffic. Holding her long, white, ugly breasts in her hands, the woman thrust them into the headlights, against windows of the passing cars. Metal grazed her. Headlights bore down on her. She lunged and dodged among the cars while the traffic broadened, a half dozen lanes wide, a dozen, a river of yellow lights. Now she was struck, broken on a hood, tossed to a roof, thudding from fender to door to bumper to windshield, flung from lane to lane. Deirdre’s heart slammed against her chest and her breath tore in her lungs.
“It’s O.K.,” Curtis was saying. She was lying on the floor. His arms were under her, lifting her towards him. “Take it easy. You jerked right off the seat, that’s all. We were already done. I got out in time.”
Deirdre’s naked body felt gray and dead in a film of moisture. To herself she smelled like the clots of dust in a vacuum cleaner.
“You look so wonderful,” Curtis said. His face was smooth, lines at last relaxed. He kissed her breasts and draped her clothing over her. She allowed him to kiss her lips.
Driving home, Curtis said, “I have a vision of the Philippines.” He described a long sweep of beach, ocean a blinding blue, thatched huts, and hundreds of brown people making love. Like bundles of driftwood, they were strewn along the sand, receding into the distance until they were only dots.
Deirdre’s mind was blank, and so she saw only Curtis’s couples, arranged symmetrically like a pattern for giftwrap, rolling by on an endless sheet.
Curtis walked her to the porch, pressing her hand. As she opened the door, a streak, a yellow ribbon of clashing noise and light, entered with her, but it faded. The living room was dark. Looking toward her father’s chair, she saw that he had slipped to the floor. Suddenly she wanted everything to be different, that he would be healthy again, that she could even remember him healthy. But her memory of that time was always vacant. She lifted him by his armpits and set his stiff back into the hollow left by his years of sitting. He batted at her weakly.
In her room, Deirdre concentrated on the image of Curtis’s wondering face, a new emblem. She couldn’t lie down. Instead she found she must sit upright, knees drawn to her chest, while the yellow river of noise and light roared around her bed until morning.
IN A LANDSCAPE ANIMALS SHRINK TO NOTHING
“Mouth gaping! Eyes bulging! Out of the water, burned, eaten up.” Boehm spread the foil and jabbed the crisp skin of the snapper with a fork. “That’s how I feel when I look at you.”
Olivia, shucking corn, said nothing. Hunched, her small breasts in her bikini top drooping with a weight Boehm could almost feel in his palm, she ripped the fine blonde tassels that reminded Boehm of her own hair, and dropped them into a hole in the sand. Her concentration, teeth nibbling the curve of her underlip, made Boehm nervous. She would be thinking of her bare new apartment, her choices in decor, of the last truckload of boxes stacked in their living room.
Boehm clenched his eyes shut as if in pain, mushing the snapper with his fork, whipping the flesh like meringue. The fish’s elegant shape was destroyed.
Keeping the smashed pulpy section for himself, Boehm served the fish. He reclined his beach chair and swigged from the mezcal bottle. Olivia had stopped drinking hours before because soon she would be taking her sleeping pills for bed. They were stupefyingly potent, illegal, and since her announcement that she was leaving Boehm she’d been unable to sleep without them.
“Even with that corn you’ve got a system,” Boehm said. “You do three ears in the time it would take me to do one. You’re so intelligent. It’s never bothered me that you’re more intelligent than I am. I’ve learned from you.”
“I don’t accept that from you. You’re a bright man, Steve.” Olivia squatted, her back to Boehm, setting corn in the coals.
Bahia Umichehueve was blue, curved like a lens. Two islands, bristling with huge, weird cardon cacti and glazed with pelican guano, lay at the exact center. From time to time the surface of the water was broken by flying fish. Boehm was reminded of a map in a childhood favorite, The Golden Book of Great Explorers, showing the cobalt blue ocean surrounded by crudely drawn lumps for mountains, and in the foreground, gamboling fish with human faces.
The beach, which Boehm remembered five or six years before teeming with drunken, near-naked American students and slow-walking, embarrassed American fatties, was virtually empty. A cleaning detail of village children was at work. Beside Boehm a family from Guadalajara, the only other guests at the hotel, read newspapers and magazines. The parents and their three children were dressed in enveloping bathing attire made of a nubbed, rubbery material. The children had insisted on taking their yearly vacation in Las Playas, the man had explained, though the area was ruined. The climate was fine and the water a delightful warm temperature, like mineral baths. Boehm had nodded, as if understanding that the area was ruined, and why.
The children dashed into the mild surf. Watching them spin and collide on their red and yellow plastic rafts, Olivia said, “They have such beautiful, perfect little bodies.” Squinting into the setting sun, parted lips exposing her chipped front tooth, she wore what Boehm called her bruised, sensuous look. The sunset colored her deep rose. Boehm drank from the bottle and kissed her, letting the mezcal flow from his mouth into hers. The slow kiss, mezcal dribbling down their chins, was like “two loving amoebas ingesting each other,” he told Olivia.
“What an alarmingly rapacious image,” she said, drawing back.
“For days,” Boehm said, “I’ve felt as if a root boll were expanding in my head, bursting through my skull.”
“Please, Steve,” Olivia said. She trotted into the water.
In front of the thatched beachside restaurants the local children were raking the sand. They wore baggy white pants and T-shirts stamped in black letters SANEAMIENTO—sanitation—across the back, or no shirts at all. Floppy hats shadowed their faces. Listlessly they walked backward, dragging the rakes one-armed in straight paths that left as much trash as they gathered. The neat rows of bottles, wadded paper, sq
uashed cups, and fruit rinds looked like a cultivated crop. The children scooped heaps of garbage in their arms and, without aiming, hurled the debris at a rusted oil drum, where it rattled down the outside and lay in a ring around the base.
“The place does have an odd feel this year,” Boehm said to the man from Guadalajara.
“Yes, with only the children left behind.”
“Where are the others?”
Las Playas had gone elsewhere to find work that summer, the man said. The oil accident—an American tanker bound for Long Beach—had destroyed most of the shrimp harvest in the spring. The fish catch was nonexistent. “And your tourism—I understand. Our inflation and your recession. The hotel people are unhappy. And now, of course, it’s too hot for Americans.” He clasped his hands and stretched, sighing.
One of the Guadalajara children was gravely offering Olivia his raft. Boehm watched as Olivia, not a swimmer, paddled laboriously in wide circles, straddling the raft with her slim, blonde legs.
Boehm sat up in the night, heart racing, the rush of adrenaline making him see weak white flashes in the dark. Beside him Olivia’s breathing was deep and measured, the intervals between breaths interminably long. He pulled on his clothes and let himself into the hall. The hotel lobby was brightly lit. A tiny woman in an electric blue dress, elaborately coiffed hair rising a foot above her head and three artificial moles on her cheek, sat playing solitaire.
“Hey, tall-y. Tall man. Help me win.”
As Boehm approached her she recrossed her legs and he saw she wasn’t wearing underpants.
“Christ help me find the three of clubs,” she said in a high, tinny voice.
Boehm stood behind her, looking at the cards. They were laid out in an unfamiliar pattern like the whorls of a shell.
“Lonely?” she said. Her upturned face was soft, unlined, the bones miniature. Boehm realized she was not yet a teenager.
“Come to my room,” he said, not knowing why, except his heart had calmed, and the buzzing, burning sensation of his nerves had subsided. He led her down the hall. In the hotel room he switched on the dim lamp and drew down the sheet. Olivia lay on her stomach, one knee bent, cheek resting on her outstretched arm. Stray wisps of hair fluttered with her breath. Her body was amber and white.
All My Relations Page 12
