“Here,” he said, lifting the strap of her swimming bag. “Take a load off. Makes dancing more fun.”
“No,” said Frances, jerking back, ready to claw and scream and bite if need be. Then she smiled. “I’m fine, thank you.” He slid his arm around her waist, and Frances felt a glorious sensation of free fall.
Nancy appeared at her elbow. “Who’s your friend, France?” She stuck her hand out, mock formal. “Nancy. Frances’s cousin.” Nancy stumbled over the s’s and tried again more deliberately. “Frances’s.” She was drunker than Frances had thought.
The painter released Frances to shake her cousin’s hand. “Charmed,” he said and brought it to his lips.
“So you’re the painter. Frances said you were incredible.”
He grinned at Frances, a wide, knowing grin. “I am incredible. Not to be believed.”
Nancy laughed, and Frances did her best to mirror her cousin, to look like a high school girl cheerfully celebrating 268 years since de Vargas’s retaking of Santa Fe. Nancy lost her balance and started to stumble. The painter caught her and didn’t take his hand off her elbow after she’d steadied. He winked at Frances, and just like that the music drained out of her.
Under the west portico, some kind of commotion. A man on horseback pumped his arms, then nudged the horse forward and into the Plaza Bar, ducking as he passed through the door. Catcalls, cheers, and a moment later, man and horse backed out; whooping, calling patrons spilled after him.
The band struck up “La Cucaracha” for the third time that night, and the crowd sang along, mumbling and braying through the lyrics.
The painter grabbed Frances’s wrist. “I think you owe me a drink. You and your cousin both.”
“No, thank you. We can’t.” Frances detached herself and took her cousin’s hand, intending to draw her into the crowd and away from the painter, but Nancy shook her off.
“She doesn’t talk to boys,” said Nancy, laughing. “They terrify her.”
“Not me,” said the painter. “I don’t terrify you, do I? This afternoon I didn’t terrify you a bit.” He turned to Nancy, whose elbow he was still holding. “She’s not really so hopeless. We had a terrific conversation all the way from Wagon Mound. I told Frances all about my painting.”
“Tell me,” said Nancy, canting her head in the way she thought was sexy and probably was. “What do you paint?”
He regarded her, thumbing his mustache. “All kinds of things. Portraits, for one—especially of beautiful women.” He smiled. “I get paid a lot of money for my portraits. Isn’t that right, Frances?” His smile vanished.
“We need to go, Nancy,” she said, but her cousin ignored her.
“And you have shows in Paris and London?”
The painter laughed, returning his attention to Nancy. “Oh, yes. I’m always on the lookout for models.”
“I bet you are,” said Nancy, laughing. “I bet you look high and low for pretty girls. But I’m listening.”
It would have been so easy now to say, “I found something of yours,” to hand over the lunch bag and slip into the crowds with Nancy, but Frances said nothing. Really, there was no question of giving back the money. It was already a part of her, or not of her, but of the Frances she was becoming. Already the money had transformed into Frances’s future: her next year and her year after that, and all the years that would take her away from the tongue-tied, stiff-legged person she was now.
When the painter leaned in to say something to Nancy, Frances broke away and pushed through the crowd toward the bus depot. She weaved around people, forcing her way through their laughs and protests. At the edge of the Plaza she turned, expecting to see the painter at her heels, but the crowd was oblivious, caught in its own net of drunkenness.
She ran, her heels catching on the uneven sidewalk, dodging a group of men with painted faces and massive feathered headdresses. They called to her with war whoops, but she didn’t stop until she reached the depot.
There Frances waited, but her father’s bus didn’t come. Of course not; he was fast asleep now, at home in Raton. He wouldn’t even wake up for another four hours, and it wouldn’t be until noon tomorrow—today—that he’d pull in at the depot. Still, a part of her thought he’d somehow know she was waiting for him, or that fate would intervene with a breakdown or a baby left behind, anything to disrupt his route and send him back. She thought of her father’s jabber on the bus and her irritation, then remembered that she hadn’t told him she loved him. Her eyes welled.
She could hear the music from the Plaza. That pounding, tireless mariachi cheer! A group of revelers passed noisily on the sidewalk, and Frances braced herself to fight them off if need be. No one looked her way.
For the first time it felt like September; the air had that chill. Frances tightened her cardigan and rifled through her swimming bag again. But there was nothing warm there, nothing she needed, just some clean underwear, her short summer nightgown, another flimsy sundress. Nothing else except the money. She began to count it again. It was all there, minus two Frito pies. She shoved it back into the paper bag, feeling sick.
Frances opened her book, but it was too dark. She could barely see the words, couldn’t have followed the story anyway. Frances would not think about Nancy and the painter. She would not think of what he was doing to her cousin—her younger cousin, a child she ought to be watching out for. She wouldn’t think of them on the mattress in his dingy one-room shed, Nancy stretched out lush and pink, waiting to be painted. As he moved toward her, the painter would tell Nancy how beautiful she was, even though he didn’t have to, not now that he had paid for her. Poor Nancy would close her eyes and listen. Frances could almost smell his breath as he leaned in. Nancy, who didn’t understand how the world worked, who didn’t understand that people could be cruel, would believe everything he said.
As if conjured, the painter appeared at the top of Water Street, and Frances’s heart stilled. He was walking slowly toward her, head bent as if absorbed in thought. He seemed to have lost his jacket now, too. A beer bottle swung between his fingers.
Even if he lifted his head, from this distance he might miss Frances sitting on her bench in the shadows, his paper bag in her lap. He wouldn’t see her until he passed directly in front of her. She wondered if the painter, too, had been drawn to the bus station by the promise of return, if he, too, was counting the hours until he could head back north, though he’d be leaving without his bolo tie, without his jacket, without his money. He rubbed his arms, seeming to feel the cold.
The street was empty now but for the two of them, the painter at the top of the block, Frances waiting like his bride. As he approached, she clung to the sack, her heart sloshing in her chest. If he looked up, he’d see her. Frances imagined the scene: the dark windows of the depot, the framed schedules, and a young girl, defenseless on her bench. Except that she wasn’t defenseless; she was solid and powerful and rich. Frances held still, her grip cold on the bag. As he neared, his progress intolerably slow, the hairs on her bare legs lifted. Surely he saw her. Twenty feet, ten. Now if she reached out from the shadows she could almost touch him, and then, like a breath, he was beyond her.
Frances rose, the sack still in her hand. She stepped from the shadows into the center of the sidewalk, under the yellow streetlight. There she stood, bereft and disbelieving, watching the painter’s unsteady progress away from her. Past the newsstand, the stationer’s, the pharmacy, and then he turned the corner and was gone. On the Plaza, the music suddenly stopped, and in the pause between the music and the cheers, the endless night settled across her shoulders.
THE GUESTHOUSE
JEFF STANDS WITH HIS SISTER IN THEIR GRANDMOTHER’S kitchen, still in his funeral clothes, but barefoot now. He heard the stroke had been painless and decisive, yet, judging from the state of the house, his grandmother had clearly been in decline even before the clot wedged itself into that tight corridor in her brain. She was always tidy, but the place looks awful: the floor
is sticky and grainy, the sink full, and on the stove smelly water stagnates in an egg pan. In the cupboard beneath the sink, there is a leak. The wood is buckled and soft, stinking of spores and damp garbage. He thought his grandmother was doing fine, and his obliviousness pains him.
“Why didn’t you tell me things had gotten this bad? Didn’t you ever check up on her?”
“Excuse me?” says Brooke. “Are you blaming me for Grandma dying?”
“Of course not,” Jeff says, although he is. The house is ten minutes from UNM. Brooke couldn’t stop in once? He blames his mother, too, and himself, even if he does live two thousand miles away, because he should know better than to expect anything of the two of them. He forces a laugh. “At least the house is standing. At least it hasn’t been pillaged by obit-scouring meth-heads.”
“Yet,” says Brooke. She takes a handful of cashews from the cut-glass candy dish that has been on the counter since Jeff can remember. It occurs to him that it’s a little creepy, eating a dead woman’s nuts, but he doesn’t say so. Brooke is squeamish about these things, and if she’s not thinking about it, he won’t point it out. She wears a baggy linen skirt with a bunched elastic waistband, wrinkled everywhere except at her bottom. Nineteen years old and already middle-aged.
“You okay?” he asks, his concern for his sister a reflex. “You can leave if you want.”
“I’m fine,” she says. “Quit asking if I’m okay.”
He nods and flips to a new page in the steno pad, refusing to linger on the lists and notes and telephone numbers in his grandmother’s looping cursive. Jeff is awash in an enervating, aching nostalgia, his limbs thick with it. There’s so much that needs to be done before he flies back to New York: he has to cancel his grandmother’s cell phone and credit cards and order more copies of the death certificate for the insurance companies, sort through her files. And he’ll need to get in touch with a real estate agent. Not that the house will fetch much in this market. It’s just a slump-block two-bedroom ranch with brown carpet, ratty grass in the yard, and a few scraggly potted geraniums on the concrete porch. Jeff’s grandmother was certain the land would appreciate—and it should have—other neighborhoods on the edge of the city did—but instead, trailer parks sprouted around her. Occasionally there are shouting matches, drug busts and gunshots and sirens, misery constantly turning over.
It’ll be awful to sell. Everything about the house is suffused with significance, Jeff thinks, looking around: the orange enameled pots and pans, the brown velveteen throw pillows, the bedspreads with their polyester ruffles. Everything touched by her, everything bereft. In the shadowed living room, the coral couch waits, fabric rumpled where she used to settle under the lamp. They spent hours deliberating here, Jeff and his grandmother, the adults of the family, sorting out his mother, sorting out Brooke. Jeff and his grandmother were the doers, the fixers, and now Jeff is alone. The fact is, he doesn’t know if he’ll survive the loss of her.
Brooke tosses her head and shakes a handful of cashews into her mouth. “If Grandma was here she’d point out how fattening these nuts are. We should have buried her in her jeans with that patent leather belt cinched tight.” She draws herself up and strikes a Vanna pose. “I’ve used the same notch since 1960,” she mimics in a voice totally unlike their grandmother’s. “You’d think by eighty she’d have grown out of that kind of vanity.”
“You’re being mean,” says Jeff, then softens. Their grandmother could be hard on Brooke. Brooke isn’t pretty like their mother and grandmother—she is plain and pale, small-breasted, with a cap of short dense hair and a loose paunch. She is regularly mistaken for a lesbian. He wishes she were one. Women are so much more forgiving, it seems to him, so much more likely to let his sister be a little ugly.
“Lisa couldn’t come?” Brooke asks.
He listens for a trace of spite in her voice, but doesn’t detect any. Brooke chews blandly. This fall he flew her to New York to stay with him and his girlfriend. The trip wasn’t a success. Lisa was hurt by Brooke’s reserve, but soldiered on, cracking terrible jokes, insisting on standing in line for hours at the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, efforts that made Jeff feel self-conscious and faintly embarrassed by his girlfriend. Now he wishes he’d had the chance to introduce Lisa to his grandmother.
“She couldn’t get away,” he says. “But she says hi.”
Brooke licks her finger and runs it through the salt in the bottom of the bowl. “Weird how you quit seeing stuff, you know? I never realized just how much crap Grandma had.” She flicks at a souvenir tea towel pinned to the wall. It features a coy brown child in a hula costume with one suggestive hip cocked. “Like, this is so offensive on so many levels.”
Jeff nearly defends the tea towel, but catches himself. He forces a smile. “You know Grandma and her finely tuned ironic vision.”
Initially, Jeff thought they’d rent out the house—the extra income would be good for his mother—but he doesn’t think she has the emotional wherewithal to be a landlord. She doesn’t have the emotional wherewithal to handle most things, really. She’s in England now, on a walking tour of the Lake District. When he asked when she was coming home so they could arrange the funeral, she cried, “But I’ve been saving for this trip for years!” Then she added resentfully, “Besides, my mother would rather you be there than me,” as if the church could accommodate only one of them. She’d told him to go ahead with the funeral, claiming she couldn’t bear it, claiming she’d rather mourn alone, neither of which stopped her from calling all morning and texting throughout the service to tell him about her devastation. He sees her gesture for what it is, a last childish assertion of her independence, despite the fact that the intended audience—his grandmother—is no longer paying attention. Honestly, he’s glad to have his mother offstage, and he’s glad for the time difference, too, which means that for the next seven or so hours she’ll be safely asleep in some chilly floral B&B in Grasmere.
Jeff has heard it said that teachers reach only the emotional maturity of their oldest students. His mother, then, is a kindergartener, launching out stubbornly on her own, and then rushing back, crying, for comfort. She calls Jeff nearly every day, unless she’s feeling fragile, in which case Jeff is supposed to call her and to keep calling until she picks up. Small problems loom large for Jeff’s mother and require endless discussion—whether or not to replace the microwave, what to do about the stray cat that has begun to linger at the patio doors. Just a few months ago, she called Jeff in tears because she’d run into Jeff’s father at the gas station. She hadn’t even talked to him, just glimpsed him, or thought she had. Almost twenty years they’ve been divorced, and she’s still ready to fall to pieces.
Jeff thinks, not for the first time, that maybe he should move back to Albuquerque and finish his dissertation here. Lisa wouldn’t be happy, but she couldn’t object, not with his suicidal sister and bereaved mother needing him. He could live right here—or, better, in the guesthouse out back. That would make a certain kind of sense. He’s always felt proprietary toward the guesthouse. When he was a kid he played out there among the remnants of his grandmother’s New England life: his dead grandfather’s clothing, his mother’s childhood toys, everything she’d dragged with her across the country. It occurs to him for the first time how unlike her it was to save all that stuff, since he’d never known her to be sentimental, unlike Jeff himself, who mourns even memories that aren’t his. “Can I live here when I grow up?” he asked when he was ten, and his grandmother laughed. “Consider it yours.”
Jeff swallows hard and thumps his list. “We’ve got to unload this place, pronto.”
“Maybe we should discuss it?” There’s something rigid in his sister’s tone that makes Jeff look at her more closely.
“What’s to discuss? Mom needs the money.”
“Well,” says Brooke, straightening a pile of junk mail, “I don’t want to sell, and I don’t think you do, either. Also it’s not your decision.”
>
Jeff exhales. “You think Mom’s going to step up?”
“You know, being the favorite may have meant something when Grandma was alive, but it doesn’t grant you total authority now.” She raises her head in challenge.
“Oh, stop.” This is an old accusation, made by both Brooke and, less frequently but with more bitterness, their mother. But it isn’t fair, attributing Jeff’s closeness with his grandmother to favoritism—unearned, undeserved—given how much Jeff put into that relationship. For years he stopped by most days after school and, once he’d left home, called every other day. By comparison, Brooke and their mother barely tried. “You want to find renters? Deal with inspectors and repairs and leases? Run a little property management company on the side while you finish up your gen-ed requirements?” He pushes the steno pad at her so hard the pages riffle, then immediately feels foolish.
“You know,” Brooke says, “Grandma would have hated that service. The preacher or whatever looked at his notes before he said her name.”
The funeral, which took place in a flat-roofed brick monstrosity moored in an expanse of crushed rock, was terrible, dreary and sparsely attended. “I did my best.” Jeff’s voice cracks, and he’s glad, because his sister should feel bad about giving him a hard time.
Brooke’s tone softens. “You did a fine job.” She leans on the counter with her knuckles, rocks back and forth, then laughs a single harsh bray. “But if my funeral is like that, I’ll kill myself.”
“Christ, Brooke,” Jeff starts, but he’s stopped by the ringing phone.
She answers, listens a moment, then says, “Talk to Jeff.” He gives her a puzzled look as he takes it, but her face reveals nothing.
“Jeffy, honey. I’m real sorry your grandma died. She was a great lady.”
His stomach seizes even before Jeff consciously places the voice. Victor, their father: unemployed and undependable, obstinately friendly, chronically drunk.
Night at the Fiestas: Stories Page 10
