Night at the Fiestas: Stories

by Kirstin Valdez Quade

  Likely, Monica thought, Cordelia would grow to resent this trait in her sister, this assumption that her needs would be met, that the world had a place for her. But for now, Cordelia nestled around Beatrice, her body curved protectively. To keep her from the cold, or from Monica? If Monica wasn’t careful, the two of them would grow ever closer, in league against her.

  After lunch—tomato soup that chilled almost as soon as it touched the bowls—Beatrice fell into a fierce sleep: fists balled up tight, brow pinched, her red cheeks splotched and tear-streaked.

  “I hope she doesn’t freeze,” said Cordelia.

  “Just a few more hours, then Elliot will fix the heater.”

  “What if he doesn’t know how?”

  “He probably will. And if not we’ll drive to buy a new one.”

  Bleakly, Cordelia said, “You love him more than you love us.”

  Monica put her arm around the girl, gave a gentle shake. They’d been down this road before. “That’s silly. I love you differently. You two are my precious daughters.”

  Cordelia was stiff and muffled under her arm. She was looking at her sleeping sister. “But you love him more than you love me.”

  “Want me to read to you?” Monica tapped her Riverside Shakespeare, which she had planned to study cover to cover months ago and still hadn’t touched, except to read aloud, at Cordelia’s insistence, scenes featuring her namesake. Now Cordelia just shook her head.

  “I have an idea,” Monica said. “We can play dress-up!” Actually, it was an idiotic idea—it was far too cold to be changing in and out of clothes.

  “Fine,” said Cordelia, listless.

  Monica dropped down from the loft and began rummaging in the tiny particleboard closet, while Cordelia peered over the bunk. There wasn’t much worth dressing up in. Some scarves: heavy, knitted, utilitarian. A cotton skirt. Elliot’s felt Indiana Jones hat, brim stained with dirt and sweat. Monica didn’t even like to touch it.

  She reached for her dress. It was in its dry-cleaning plastic, hadn’t been worn in years, not since Monica had left Cordelia with her mother and gone with her first husband to one of his parents’ gallery openings in Los Angeles. Black, elegant, heavy with beadwork. Silk embroidery ringed the hem and climbed the length of the dress to the deep neckline. She remembered her mother-in-law handing her the box, the shock of being given a gift so absolutely perfect, as though the woman had been a fairy godmother, able to gauge her aspirations along with her size. And the attention: that night, the gallery lights glinting off the beads, Monica had felt as though she were as essential to this evening as the artist, and it seemed the dress itself had had the power to transform her.

  “Do you like it?” Monica held it against her body, rocked her hips so the skirt swung.

  Cordelia shrugged.

  Monica was surprised at her disappointment. She’d imagined Cordelia reaching out to touch the hem with a single reverent finger.

  “Your dad’s parents bought this for me when you were a baby.”

  Cordelia’s face was shuttered, as it always was when her father was mentioned, as if, knowing how little interest he had in her, she’d decided to show none in him. “It’s ugly,” she said finally.

  “Oh, come on. It’s not ugly. It cost over three hundred dollars.”

  The dress was the most expensive item Monica owned—except for her car, which had been her father’s before he died. God knows why she’d brought the dress when the rest of her belongings went to her mother’s basement. Did Monica think there would be any place within three hundred miles where a dress like this would be appropriate? Did she think Elliot was that kind of man?

  “Want to try it on?” She slipped it off the hanger. “We can pin the straps.”

  “No,” said Cordelia, her cheek pressed into her forearm. “You put it on.”

  Monica slid out of her down vest, peeled off the two sweaters and her jeans and her long underwear. She unhooked the heavy white nursing bra and slid the thick straps off her shoulders, pulled off her wool socks. She stood naked before the narrow mirror that hung on the closet door. The skin at her belly was still loose and puckered from Beatrice, her legs purplish and hairy. Her swollen breasts hung heavy, and despite the temperature, her nipples barely tightened.

  “Well?” said Cordelia. “What are you waiting for?”

  “Yes, yes.” Monica slipped the dress over her head. The silk was so cold against her skin that she gasped, laughing, and her goosebumps rippled through the light fabric. “Last time I wore this it was ninety degrees in L.A.!” Monica’s smile faded as she caught her reflection—the ridges of belly and hip under the fabric, her face, broad and splotchy hovering above—and she couldn’t help feeling as though she’d done some violence to the dress by letting herself get like this.

  “What did I wear that day?”

  “It was just me and your dad.”

  Cordelia rolled away. “You look ugly.”

  Hurt flashed through Monica, then fury. This child, seven years old, wanted to wound her and knew exactly how. In a minute Cordelia was paging sulkily through a book.

  Monica was beautiful—men were always telling her so—and at one time it had seemed only right that she should wear clothes like this. After all, Monica had at seventeen been proposed to in the waiting room of her dentist’s office by a wealthy Frenchman who was visiting Santa Fe. “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever saw,” he told her, and Monica had believed him. He’d waited for her to have her teeth cleaned, and she’d allowed him to take her to dinner at a restaurant on Canyon Road, a restaurant so expensive there were no prices on the menu. Her whole life in Santa Fe, and she’d never even known this restaurant existed. “This is French,” he explained, and ordered escargot and old wine, pâté de lapin and roast duck avec sauce Roquefort, gratinée de Coquille St. Jacques. He insisted she try it all, kept passing his full fork across the table to her. “Beautiful women should eat beautiful food,” he said, and she’d agreed. At the end of the night he drove her back to her mother’s house and seemed resigned when she told him she couldn’t marry him because she had to finish high school. She’d thought then that’s what her future was: opportunity after opportunity unspooling around her.

  Monica had therefore been ready two years later when she began dating the man who would be her first husband, ready to exchange college and literature for proximity to wealth, ready to stand smiling with a glass of wine in his parents’ galleries and to be kissed by old men who were influential in the art world. How embarrassed she’d been by her mother, with her faulty grammar and fake Anglicized name, her eagerness around his family, her transparent admiration of their money.

  But Peter had liked her mother’s accent, had liked explaining things to Monica. “My little conquistador,” he called her. “My little Mexican.” Peter felt he’d discovered Monica, plucked her out of a provincial existence, just as he’d begun to discover and show outsider artists: an autistic man who built intricate scale models of his neighborhood out of toothpicks and plaster, an elderly woman who made elaborate cut-paper crowd scenes with an X-ACTO knife, a soybean farmer who painted large canvases of sloppy, expressive horses. Always seeking in people overlooked value that he could commodify.

  Monica hadn’t, however, anticipated the pleasure he got in humiliating her—laughing at her in public for working her way through the classics or for not knowing framed Monet prints were tacky or for pretending to taste the difference in wine. Once, passing her as she read War and Peace, Peter yanked the book from her hands and snapped it shut. “You think reading Tolstoy means you’re smart. But it just means you’re literate.” She hadn’t been prepared for her own screaming rage, or an existence, which, even in the house his parents bought them with real art on the walls, still seemed cramped and insignificant. And above all she hadn’t been prepared for pregnancy: Cordelia, a curled exacting weight in her womb, anchoring her in the life she’d chosen.

  Monica looked up at the back of her daug
hter’s dark, disapproving head on the crumpled pillow.

  Well, hadn’t Monica done her best to undo all that? It hadn’t been easy to leave Peter, and it certainly hadn’t been easy dating with a child. Regardless of how pretty you might be, add a kid to the mix and your value plunged. Surely she deserved some credit. She was lucky: Elliot Rios was brilliant, attractive, a good person. And most important, he was good to Cordelia. He’d bought her a globe for her birthday, let her wear his hand lens around her neck so she could inspect rocks and dirt. He’d made her a geology kit in a canvas sample bag with her name on the label. It contained sample bags, a Sharpie, a bottle of weak acid to test for calcite, and a roll of pH paper. Before she or anyone else drank anything, Cordelia determined its pH: Folgers coffee, milk, apple juice. “Really yellow,” she’d announce before quaffing her juice with gusto. “Pure acid.” Cordelia might take Elliot’s kindness to her for granted, but Monica didn’t have that luxury.

  They’d had idyllic evenings together, evenings Monica could never have imagined when she was seventeen: the four of them clustered around the hissing Coleman lantern with its glowing green mantle, Beatrice nursing, Cordelia absorbed in her workbooks, filling in boxes and pasting stickers. Elliot would tell Monica about the things he’d found in the desert: a concrete Jesus in a gulch fifty miles from the nearest settlement, a fossilized camel jaw, pieces of a crashed World War II fighter plane. And she would tell him about the old man at the Lucky Token who’d called her a sight for sore eyes, or how Cordelia had made a name for herself at school for knowing to use a hyphen when she could not fit the word into the end of the line.

  Certainly these were pleasures her mother would never understand with her cheap ideas about success and her determined pursuit of gaiety. Monica’s mother: hell-bent on having the things that were unimaginable in the ranching town where she’d grown up, liquor cabinets and televisions and shag carpeting. Monica couldn’t leave that desperation behind fast enough.

  Tonight, Monica decided, they’d all sleep in the foldout bed together, the whole family, warm and close. She longed for Elliot so deeply her throat ached.

  “When you grow out of it, can I have your dress?” Cordelia’s voice was gruff, her head still turned away.

  “Sure,” said Monica, feeling as though she’d won an argument. “But I don’t intend to grow out of it.”

  AT FIRST MONICA THOUGHT the knocking was the wind, and then with a surge of fear, the NASA engineer, come to get her. She felt naked in the dress and pulled on her vest.

  “Who could it be?” she asked Cordelia theatrically, heart pounding. She glanced at the knife drawer.

  On the step stood a little girl. She was wearing a purple coat fringed with dingy fake fur on the hood; the hood was down and the coat unzipped, and in her hand she carried a smudged pink backpack. This was Amanda, from across the way, and Monica smiled with relief, remembering the pale watching face and her own absurd fear.

  Monica knew Amanda from the schoolbus stop, where (while Cordelia fussed over Beatrice, sneaking looks at the older kids) Amanda’s big brother whipped at the ground—and Amanda—with a dangerous length of rope. She lived crammed in with her enormous relatives: parents, grandmother, uncle, brother. Amanda alone was thin, skinny, really. She reminded Monica of the baby orangutan at the Albuquerque zoo, startled-looking and wiry, bounding over her parents, who sat slumped and shapeless on the bare concrete floor.

  “Amanda. Hi. What can I do for you?”

  Amanda looked past Monica, as if waiting for the person she really wanted. Or maybe she was simply curious about how they lived. Wouldn’t Monica like a peek into Amanda’s trailer?—provided, of course, she wouldn’t have to interact with anyone. But to walk around, inspect their things, judge—of course she’d like that.

  Monica stepped aside to let the girl in from the wind, and, when Amanda entered without hesitation, reminded herself to warn Cordelia never to set foot in anyone’s home alone, ever.

  Amanda surveyed the trailer: the Riverside Shakespeare, Beatrice’s wipes and diapers on the table, Beatrice herself, who’d wakened and stopped mawing her fist to greet Amanda with a pleasured gurgle.

  Amanda looked Monica over. “Why are you wearing that?”

  “It’s my mom’s best dress,” Cordelia said, clambering down from the loft. “It cost over three hundred dollars.”

  Amanda frowned. “What’s she doing here?” she asked Monica.

  “I missed the bus,” said Cordelia. She had brightened at the arrival of the older girl. “And Elliot took our car. Are you here to play?”

  Amanda didn’t answer, just looked with discontent at her backpack.

  “Is everything okay, Amanda?” Monica asked. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  Amanda straightened her shirt carefully under her coat, shrugged her skinny shoulders. “Why isn’t she in school?”

  Though Amanda was only nine, there was something teenagerish about her, something disturbing and sexual. She wore her sleek dark hair parted on the side, and it slipped off her shoulders and down her back. The white tips of her rather large ears poked though the silky curtain. In October, when it was still hot during the day, Monica had seen her in a bikini, spreading a towel on the hard-packed dirt to sunbathe. Another day, Amanda tucked the hem of her shirt into the neck and pulled it down so that it resembled a bra. Monica had watched over the edge of her book as the girl walked the length of the park, sashaying past the adults. Who knew what went on in that trailer?

  Now Amanda bit her lip, looked around critically, then set her backpack on the bench seat and scooted in. She folded her hands on the table.

  “Are you sick, honey? If you’re sick, you should probably be home in bed.”

  When Amanda didn’t answer, Monica abandoned the role of concerned, motherly neighbor. She sat at the table opposite her, pulled Beatrice to her lap, and waited. Cordelia sat beside Monica and folded her own hands, mirroring the older girl.

  Amanda frowned at the baby. “She’s got boogers all over her face,” she said, then seemed to lose interest. “Where’s all your stuff? Don’t you even got a TV?”

  “No,” said Monica, the same hint of pride in her voice she always had when asked this. “We don’t watch TV.” Stupid, showing off to a nine-year-old.

  “You don’t got heat either?”

  “Well,” Monica laughed. “Usually we have heat.”

  “It’s broken.” Cordelia shot an accusing glance at Monica. “And anyway,” she told Amanda, placing a protective hand on Beatrice’s forearm, “that’s not boogers. She’s just chapped.”

  Amanda pointed to the cardboard box that held Elliot’s soil samples, each tied and carefully labeled. “What’s that stuff?”

  “My husband’s samples. He’s a geologist, which means he studies rocks. Geo means rock in Greek.”

  To that teachable moment, Amanda made no reply.

  Several times over the months, they’d heard Amanda’s mother yelling at her children from across the lot. “You get back here this minute or I don’t want to see your face ’til you’re twenty-one!” She’d shout breathlessly, bracing herself with a hand in the doorway, as if even standing were an enormous effort, and Monica and Elliot would laugh. Elliot did a strangely accurate impression of Amanda’s mother, but made her seem both crazier and shriller than she was.

  Funny, only now did Monica feel ashamed, mocking the woman’s impotence, mocking the despair and futility that would lead to such a pointless threat.

  “Can I get you anything?” She would have liked to offer the girl cookies and milk, but they’d just used the last of the milk and never had cookies.

  Amanda scratched the back of her hand with a dirty nail, leaving dry tracks in the skin. “I thought maybe you’d want to buy something from me,” she said finally.

  “Buy something?”

  “Is it expensive?” asked Cordelia.

  Beatrice patted Monica’s chest, ready to nurse.

  Amanda indicated her
backpack, distracted by the sight of Monica’s breast as Monica maneuvered it out from the neck of the dress and into Beatrice’s waiting mouth.

  “What are you selling? Cookies? Magazines?” Amanda was still looking at her, and Monica suddenly felt very aware of the sensation of Beatrice’s mouth pulling on her nipple. “So,” she said. “Let’s see what you have.”

  Amanda pulled her gaze away and unzipped her backpack. She arranged her wares on the table: a porcelain figurine of a milkmaid with a pail in her one remaining hand, a slack-needled odometer with loose wires, a worn pornographic magazine without a cover, a quarter-full bottle of shampoo. She turned the odometer slightly, to better display its virtues. “A dollar each. Except this”—she indicated the magazine—“is three dollars.”

  “Let me see that,” said Cordelia, reaching for the magazine with its confusing fleshy close-ups.

  Monica pushed it away. “It’s inappropriate,” she said, and Cordelia slumped, glowering.

  Beatrice released Monica’s nipple with a pop and strained toward the objects.

  “Amanda, where did you get these things? Do they belong to you?”

  Amanda scowled. “Yes,” she said defensively, then added, “Duh.”

  Monica pictured the scenario: Amanda picking them from the park’s dumpster, or, more likely, selecting them from the objects in her own home, turning them in her hands, evaluating them, stepping around calves and overstuffed shoes, while her family sat oblivious, watching television. “Why are you selling them?”

  “Why are you here?” Amanda countered. “At Shady Lanes.”

  “For my husband’s work.” Monica gestured again at the box of samples. The real question, Monica thought, was what Amanda needed the money for. Candy? Cigarettes? Maybe she was saving up for her escape. Maybe she simply wanted to have the money, to know she could make choices.

  “Elliot’s getting his Ph.D.,” said Cordelia self-importantly. “In Santa Fe I lived one block from a swimming pool. We’re going back there.” She turned to Monica. “Aren’t we going back there?”