Night at the Fiestas: Stories

by Kirstin Valdez Quade

  Claire smiled back. For a long time, it seemed, they stood smiling at each other, like people in a movie in love. Then Claire remembered the strange phone call.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “Why were you so sad?”

  Patsy pulled her close. “You could be my daughter,” she said. “I feel like you are.” Patsy kissed her on the mouth.

  Warmth and happiness flooded Claire. “I know,” she said. “Me, too.”

  Patsy pushed Claire’s hair back, and shivers went down Claire’s spine in wave after wave. It was almost too much, this happiness.

  Patsy cocked her head, coy. “Can I tell you a secret? Promise not to tell?”

  The sense of her loyalty brought tears to Claire’s eyes. She wanted to do something for Patsy, to sacrifice, to obliterate herself for this woman. “I promise.”

  Patsy put her face close, and Claire could feel her breath on her lips when she whispered. “No one knows where we are. Not Mr. Swanson. Not your mother. No one.”

  Claire realized she’d already known this, but as soon as Patsy spoke the words, she was afraid.

  Patsy put her wet forehead against Claire’s, and though she wanted to, Claire didn’t step back. It seemed only the pressure of the water surrounding her kept her on her feet. “You and I have a bond here that is really special, Claire. You may not recognize it now, but you will.”

  In Patsy’s lopsided smile, her misty eyes, her affection, there was a ripple of something dangerous that Claire hadn’t noticed before.

  The Fruit Coolers.

  “Patsy,” she said. “I need to tell you something.” Claire took a deep breath. “My father is an alcoholic. My real father. He screams and breaks things. Once when he was drunk he kicked the dog and she threw up blood.” In Claire’s mind her voice was strong and clear, but when they came out, the words were small and whimpered in the dripping vastness of the baptismal. “I need to tell you that the Word of Wisdom is right.”

  A shadow passed over Patsy’s face. For a long moment she regarded Claire. Then she drew away and set the current swirling. She rose grandly up the steps, water flowing from her nightgown, and wrapped herself in a towel. “Of course it is.” Her shape loomed black against the orange glow from the windows. “I know that.” Patsy held open the door. “Get out,” she said sharply. “It’s bedtime.”

  Suddenly, Claire didn’t want to leave the pool. “I want to go home.”

  Patsy laughed harshly. “Oh, you’re going home. Tomorrow first thing.”

  In the dark bedroom Claire peeled off her soaking pajamas, hunching to hide herself while Patsy watched. She didn’t have another pair, so she pulled on a t-shirt and shorts, shivering.

  In ten days, Claire was scheduled to fly to San Diego. Six weeks would stretch on as if forever. She would have to relearn how to be careful, how to call him Papa, how to smile when he was in a good mood and make herself small when he wasn’t. She would have to gauge how much he’d had to drink, to pretend not to notice when he raged. And all the while she would carry the vast darkness inside her. Meanwhile, life at home would go on. Emma would continue her Little Guppy swimming lessons at the Y, her friends would become more and more adult, more and more the ladies Claire would never be. Her mother and Will would do puzzles with Emma, their three heads bent together. Safe in their ignorance, her family would close around the space she left, and when Claire came back in August, she’d be a stranger to them.

  Patsy patted Morgan’s bed. Morgan breathed open-mouthed, her neck angled so that it looked almost broken. “Lie down.”

  Claire looked uncertainly at her own bed, but obeyed. She tried to read Patsy’s expression, but the moon had shifted and her face was in shadow. Morgan rolled in her sleep, her body hot and soft against Claire’s own, and Claire felt ill.

  “You needed this time with us, Claire. A child drinking wine. Disgusting.” Patsy tucked the blanket under her chin and pushed it hard into her throat, then lifted Morgan’s heavy arm so it lay across Claire’s chest. “Sleep tight.”

  Patsy crossed the dark room, stood for a minute at the threshold, and then shut the door.

  JUBILEE

  WHEN ANDREA PULLED INTO THE DIRT LOT BY THE ORCHARDS that adjoined the blueberry fields, she saw she’d timed their arrival just right. Where the farmworkers normally parked their beat-up sedans and rusting pickups, the Volvos and Mercedes and Audis were lined up, a faint scrim of dust from the dirt drive on their hoods. Usually, Andrea was embarrassed by her mother’s old Chrysler with its missing wood panel, but today she parked it among the luxury vehicles with a sense of vindication.

  “Nice rides,” said Matty, nodding appreciatively.

  “I told you, they own everything. Like three hundred acres.” She gestured at the trees and at the sky, too, as if the Lowells actually did own the whole wide world. “Not just blueberries, either. They grow practically every stone fruit ever invented. Even the dumb ones, like nectarcots.”

  For several years, the blueberry industry in California had been expanding, and the Lowells had been early adopters. In honor of their eleventh annual blueberry party, the field-workers—a few of whom Andrea had known her whole life—had been given this Saturday off, paid. “Wouldn’t want the precious guests to have to pick alongside Mexicans.” She snorted, picturing the Lowells’ friends in their Brooks Brothers chinos and silk skirts and strappy heeled sandals making their way down the rows.

  Matty shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind a paid day off.”

  “You’d have to have a job first,” said Andrea, then glanced at him, worried she’d offended him. But it wasn’t even clear he’d heard; he was looking, as usual, at something that wasn’t her. Andrea wished he’d shaved that wormy black mustache or had at least put on a button-down. He looked so good in a button-down. But whatever, she reminded herself; she didn’t actually care what the Lowells thought.

  Andrea had dawdled in a gas station off the highway so they wouldn’t be on time. She’d bought Matty a forty—rather, he bought it with his fake ID and her cash—then lingered, trying to distract him. She flicked a plastic bottle of pheromones near the checkout. “Imagine the kind of guy who thinks Sexxx Juice is going to improve his prospects,” she said. Andrea was always bringing up sex around Matty so she could demonstrate how cool she was with it. At the magazine rack, she dragged on his arm, trying to look game and easygoing as she pointed out details in men’s magazines. (“Guys really think that’s hot?” “Yes,” Matty said.) Finally, though, Matty had pitched his bottle—still half-full—and asked if they were going to this party or not.

  Technically, Andrea had been invited to this party. Rather, her parents had been invited. Technically. But she was certain that the Lowells didn’t actually expect them to come. After all, they’d never been invited before. This invitation—letterpress-printed on thick, soft paper—had been a gesture of goodwill, and not even that, Andrea was sure, but something the Lowells had felt they had to do, given that her father would be there anyway, with his taco truck.

  The truck was a highlight of this year’s party, according to the invitation: “Tacos provided by our own Salvador Romero and his El Primo taco truck!” And there, instead of blueberries on sage-colored sprigs, was the truck itself: a festive little line drawing debossed in red and yellow.

  The taco truck was a recent acquisition. Andrea’s father had saved for four years, plotting, cobbling together loans (including a pretty substantial one from William Lowell), driving the family crazy with his exuberance. The truck would pay for itself, he said, would give him something to do. All week it was shuttered, parked in the driveway while her father worked as a supervisor in the Lowells’ orchards, and on the weekends he drove it to the park, where he served egg burritos and Cokes to young men famished after their soccer games, tacos and tortas to families out for a stroll. Her father never said so, but Andrea suspected from her mother’s strained silence on the subject that the taco truck wasn’t as lucrative as he’d hoped.

  “Are
they kidding?” Andrea said when she heard the Lowells were hiring her father for the party. “You’d think they’d want something fancy.”

  “Oh, you know these wealthy people,” said her mother, shaking her head in bemusement. “They get their ideas.”

  Her parents had been delighted to see the truck featured on the Lowells’ invitation and had gushed about how touched they were to have received it. Her mother turned the invitation in her hands and shook her head in wonder. “They didn’t have to think of us, but they did.”

  Andrea was hijacked by the image of her mother in her teal dress with the gold chain belt, trailing the Lowells all over their party. “You’re not actually thinking about going, are you, Mom?”

  Hurt flashed in her mother’s face, and Andrea bristled at the Lowells for causing this hurt. “I work on Saturdays,” her mother said stiffly and dropped the invitation in the trash. Later, in spite of herself, Andrea had plucked it out and squirreled it away in her room, saving even the envelope (yellow lined in red—why was she so impressed with the invitation?—she hated that she was so impressed).

  Well, if the Lowells wanted Mexicans at their party, that’s what they’d get.

  The day wasn’t ideal for an outdoor party, Andrea saw as she unstuck herself from the driver’s seat. The leaves of the peach trees were dusty silver in the hot afternoon light, and a breeze stirred the dry soil. “You won’t believe these people,” she told Matty, shutting the car door. She told him about the framed photograph she had once seen in their kitchen: the redheaded brother and sister as children in their green velvet coats, the Eiffel Tower lit and snowy behind them. “Can you believe that? Matching coats! And she was actually wearing white gloves. What a waste to bring little kids to France. They probably planned the whole trip just for that one stupid picture of their kids being adorable in Paris.”

  “Annoying,” conceded Matty.

  “Tell me about it. They probably read Madeline every five minutes. They probably couldn’t stop themselves.”

  Andrea still remembered the children’s expressions: the boy flashing a showy television-child smile, little Parker scowling at her patent-leather toes. She’d seen the picture years ago; Andrea had come with her father when he’d stopped by to pick up paychecks. She remembered the kitchen, too, large and gleaming, the row of pale green porcelain bowls as thin as eggshells stacked in the open shelves. Mrs. Lowell had given Andrea three still-cooling ginger cookies wrapped in a napkin, which Andrea had made last for over a week, tasting in the increasingly stale nibbles the calm and security and beauty of this home.

  “I’m pretty sure Parker Lowell isn’t even that smart. She’s too sweet to be smart.” Andrea fingered an aching pimple on her forehead.

  “Do you think she’s easy? In my experience lots of rich girls are easy.”

  Andrea ignored the pang in the center of her chest. “I’m pretty sure she only got into Stanford because she’s legacy,” she said, even though she didn’t believe it.

  “Why are we here?” asked Matty. “If you hate them so much.”

  Matty was here because Andrea had strong-armed him into coming; she intended for people to assume he was her boyfriend. It was the least he could do, after all the essays she’d written for his classes at Chico State.

  And why was Andrea here? Driving, she’d felt full of the brazen courage she would need to crash this party. She would show up full of breezy, sparkling confidence that would startle these people. Andrea was an equal now, a Stanford student, poised and intelligent, no longer just the daughter of one of their laborers, no longer an awestruck kid worshiping their cookies, and if the Lowells wanted to trot out her father and his taco truck to provide a little kitsch, then they’d have to do it in front of her. By her very presence today, she would prove to them their snobbery and make them ashamed of their entitlement and their halfhearted acts of charity toward her family. Admittedly, her plan was vague, but it involved making Parker eat a taco in front of her. And she would have Matty at her side, handsome bad-boy Matty Macias, whom she’d loved since eighth grade. Matty, with his gelled hair and warm, thick-lashed eyes and the cords of his scapular showing at the neck of his t-shirt. Matty would not fail to disconcert.

  “We’re here because I was invited. I can’t just snub them. Parker and I are classmates.”

  Andrea smoothed the wrinkled back of her new sundress (J. Crew—the most expensive dress she’d ever bought, and she did not intend to keep it; the tag still hung, scratchy and damp now, down her back, and she hoped, should Matty touch her, that he wouldn’t notice it).

  “Just, you know, be polite,” Andrea told him.

  “—the fuck?” Matty said, shooting her an irritated grimace. “You think I’m an idiot?”

  “I think you’re not used to being around people like this.”

  Andrea strode past him, clutching the invitation. Only now did it occur to her that maybe she ought to have brought something: Flowers? Wine? Already she could hear laughter through the trees.

  ANDREA HATED IT, the constant alert hunger for every possible chance to move up in the world. “He’s lazy,” her father would tell Andrea’s mom in the evenings, referencing one or another of the farmworkers. “He might as well go back to Mexico. Work hard, get ahead. Look at me.”

  Over and over, the same conversation. “You should talk to Bill about law,” her father would urge, pronouncing his name Beel. “Maybe he could help you.”

  “He doesn’t practice,” said Andrea.

  “Still,” said her mother, “it’s nice to show interest.”

  “We’ll have to get the girls together,” William Lowell had said after Salvador told his boss with tears in his eyes (Salvador’s eyes had filled even relating the exchange) that Andrea had been accepted at Stanford. “Maybe lunch at the house, and they can swap notes.” But though Mr. Lowell asked after Andrea (Salvador always told her when he did), and remarked over and over how wonderful it was that she’d gotten in, and on full scholarship, too, they never did get the girls together. And thank goodness. It would have been strange and awkward. As children they’d played together on a few sporadic summer afternoons—Andrea remembered running after Parker through the orchards, bashful and grinning—but the girls hadn’t seen each other in years.

  Stanford, Stanford, Stanford. There were weeks last summer when Andrea couldn’t sleep, so thrilled was she by the sense that her life was blooming into something marvelous. She’d tremble in bed, eyes darting around the dark familiar shapes of her room, which was really just an alcove off the kitchen, amazed that she would actually be leaving this home she’d known her whole life: goodbye to the rippled linoleum, goodbye to the Aladdin-print curtain that was her bedroom wall, and beyond it, goodbye to the refrigerator’s intestinal gurgles. Oh, the success and wealth and greatness the future held for her! It actually made her breathless to think of it. Parker Lowell was the single blight on her joy. During freshman orientation, as Andrea was herded through White Plaza with others from the Chicano student association, she found herself looking with dread for Parker among the clumps of happy milling students. It was only a matter of time, Andrea knew, before they ran into each other at a party or on the Quad, and when they did, Parker would smile and make small talk and, through her very graciousness, expose Andrea as she truly was: cheap, striving, unworthy. Maybe, Andrea thought, Parker would get mono.

  But the campus was sprawling and Andrea’s freshman dorm mercifully distant from Parker’s. The first quarter passed, and nearly the second, before Andrea saw her, in the winter production of Once Upon a Mattress. She’d sat tense in the audience, searching the actors’ faces, and felt oddly thrilled when she finally spotted Parker. As Parker, lady-in-waiting to Queen Aggravaine, curtsied and twirled and warbled on stage, Andrea considered pointing her out to her roommate, but didn’t.

  Her whole life Andrea had been subjected to her parents’ slavish interest in the Lowells’ affairs, so she shouldn’t have been surprised that all through fr
eshman year they kept her apprised of the Lowell family news. “I really don’t care,” Andrea said, but she listened anyway, thinking as she did that there were lots of interesting things she could tell them about power structures. They reported on leaf curl and how the Elbertas and Elegant Ladies were faring, and on the Lowell boy’s job in the governor’s office, and then in the spring they called with the news that brought Parker lower than any bout of mono ever could: Mrs. Lowell had left her husband for their landscaper—their twenty-eight-year-old female landscaper—and William Lowell, apparently unable to live for twenty seconds without a wife, had started up with the widow of his roommate from Exeter.

  Andrea had been shocked. In the face of her mother’s shock, though, she’d feigned total equanimity. “No one’s really straight,” Andrea explained, “not one hundred percent.”

  So it was that the Lowells, poised and affectionate and photogenic, now found themselves cut down by a crisis that had all the elements of a joke, and it seemed to Andrea that the balance between them had shifted. In Andrea’s mind Parker underwent a faint oxidation, taking on a patina, for the first time, of vulnerability. Again Andrea found herself seeking Parker on campus, this time so she might extend her hand in friendship.

  WHEN THEY STEPPED into the clearing between the orchards and the rows of highbush Jubilee blueberries, Andrea saw that her father’s taco truck had inspired a whole Mexican theme. Gone were the sun-faded Porta-Pottys and the water truck; in their place, the Lowells had erected a tent festooned with fluttering papel picado flags. Elderly people in pastels sat in the shade and the younger people stood around drinking margaritas. White tablecloths rippled in the hot breeze. In the center of each table sat a little piñata on bright woven fabric.

  And there, at the edge of the party, was the taco truck itself. From where she stood, Andrea could see her father’s arms handing full plates out the sliding window. She remained out of his line of vision. He’d be surprised and proud and pleased to see her here as a guest, would probably think Parker had invited her personally, but she didn’t feel like getting into explanations, and she didn’t want to establish herself as the daughter of the cook, at least not yet.