The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue: A Novel

by Barbara O'Neal

  “Four.” She says it with a lift of her eyebrows, as if she knows it’s shocking. “Two different women. I know it sounds terrible, but that’s how I met him, at Social Services. He was strapped because he was paying so much child support and wanted to see if there was anything he qualified for. None of the babies were on any programs—the mamas were both smart women with decent jobs—but Dante qualified for food stamps because he was paying so much out.”

  “Really,” I say, a trick I learned from listening to teens who need to get a story out. “How old are the kids?”

  She takes a breath. “Let’s see—Portia’s two are eleven and ten. That’s Jacob and Danielle. Eileen’s two—Keisha and Tyrone—are eight and six. Tyrone was just a baby when I met Dante, but Eileen had tossed him out.” She accepts another bite of cookie from Minna, who laughs happily. “I know how it sounds. I should have known better.”

  I put spoons on the table. “Maybe. Maybe not. Obviously he has a talent with women.”

  “I knew better. I saw my grandfather and my stepfather. Saw how they did things.”

  The teakettle whistles and I take it off the burner, glancing out the window, as is my habit, to see the lights burning next door. “Have you seen the guy next door yet?”

  “Should I?”

  “Oh, yeah.” I raise my brows and can’t think of any words to do him justice. “Trust me.”

  She brushes her palms together. “I’m not interested in any man. A year. I have to be celibate for a year, and then I can think about men again.”

  “That’s sensible.”

  “But?”

  “Nothing. I wish I could get my head together that much.” I sit down, stir sugar into the tea. “And, too, maybe the easiest way over one man is to fall in love with another one.”

  “Maybe.”

  A knock sounds at the back door, and we startle, both of us looking at the door like it’s marauders about to slam inside. I stand up and hurry over, hoping it might be Angel to tempt Jade away from her vow. All it will take is five minutes in his company.

  But it’s Rick. The yellow porch light skates over his hair, touches his nose. His mouth. “Hey,” I say, and it’s surprising how natural I sound. I’m proud of myself for leaving the door open, walking away casually, like it’s all no big deal for me. “Your granddaughter is here.”

  “Minna-girl?” he says.

  Minna shrieks, “Popo!” and starts trying to scramble out of her chair. I lift her out, give her to her grandpa so he can make noises on her tummy and tickle her and lift her high over his head. Vigorous, that’s the word for Rick and babies. Hands-on and vigorous, and I’ve never met one yet who didn’t absolutely adore him.

  “You remember Jade,” I say, gesturing toward her like a gameshow host. “Roberta’s granddaughter?”

  “Sure. How are ya, kiddo?”

  Jade is aloof. “All right.”

  “Roberta doing okay?”

  “As well as can be expected.” She takes another cookie out of the box, doesn’t look at him.

  I say, “The funeral is Wednesday at two o’clock at the church, if you’re interested.”

  He looks away. Nods. He won’t go, because he’s ashamed to face everyone we’ll see there, but he says, “We’ll see.” He pats Minna’s legs. “I just came by to get a couple of tools out of the garage. Got a restoration going tomorrow.”

  I notice his jaw has the painful newness of a fresh shave, and under his coat, he’s wearing a red shirt I’ve never seen. He smells of cologne, and I look at the clock, wondering if he’s going out to dinner, or maybe out to hear some music. Taking a breath suddenly feels as if I have shards of glass in my lungs.

  “Come here, Minna,” I say, holding out my arms to her. “Grandpa’s got things to do.”

  She turns away fiercely, putting her head on his chest. “Popo.”

  “I’ll take her out with me, bring her back in a minute.”

  “Bye?” she asks hopefully. “See ya?”

  He cocks his head, looks right into her eyes. Winks. “Let’s go out to Grandpa’s workshop. I’ll let you put an eye out with a screwdriver.”

  She nods, jerks her body like someone on the back of a horse. “Le’ss go.”

  * * *

  As they walk out, I notice his pants are bagging around his butt a little, and his cologne lingers in the air like a ghost. For a minute, I’m just lost in it, in a thousand days when this never even figured into anything I could ever have conceived.

  Jade is looking at me, and I say, “Where were we?”

  “Men are assholes.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say. But for one long, hot minute, I am afraid I’m going to cry if I say anything else.

  She raises her fists in front of her and feints punches, right, left, right. Her breath comes out in hard whooshes with each one, whoo whoo whoo. Then she wiggles one great, arched eyebrow.

  It’s enough to make me move past the dangerous moment, grin wryly. “I’m glad you’re here, Jade.”

  “Me, too.”

  SHANNELLE’S WRITING WALL

  Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing and it becomes chronic in their sick minds.

  JUVENAL (A.D. 60–130)

  10

  SHANNELLE

  TO: naomiredding@rtsv.org

  FROM: chanelpacheco@hotmail.com

  SUBJECT: sneaking in late at night

  It’s 3:34 A.M. on a Tuesday morning. I have to get up at six to get my eldest ready for school, and I have to work at the bowling alley tomorrow night, and I’ll be feeling the fact that I’ve only slept two hours by then. The next day is the funeral. My tooth hurts. I’m cross-eyed with exhaustion.

  But I don’t care. Oh, what a great night!

  I went to bed with Tony at ten thirty and we had a cuddle, then he feel asleep. I just laid there in the dark, seeing scenes and hearing dialogue, as if I were a director sitting in a theater and the actors were trying out their parts. It upsets Tony when I do this, so I tried to resist, but in the end, I couldn’t sleep at all and I got up very quietly. I started writing at a quarter to twelve, and have written thirteen pages. Good pages, I think.

  The reason is, of course, that it’s quiet. No distractions. No phone ringing. No one coming to the door. No requests for macaroni and cheese, or fights to mediate. No comments from Tony about the television program he is watching (one thing I dream of is a real study, a place where I can shut the door and not be in the middle of all the chaos). I can play my earphones and write with everyone around, but it’s often in fits and starts and I can’t get the flow going the way I did tonight.

  Tony will be annoyed with me in the morning, and maybe with some justification. I’ll end up making Hamburger Helper for dinner because I’m tired, and he doesn’t much like it, and I’ll want to fall asleep when I get home from work and not want to sit and chat with him. But I don’t do it that often—only when I can’t stand not to. I wish he’d make an effort to understand that.

  Sorry. No whining. I really just came in to tell you how excited I am about getting thirteen pages done tonight!!

  Love,

  Shannelle

  TO: chanelpacheco@hotmail.com

  FROM: naomiredding@rtsv.org

  SUBJECT: re: sneaking in late at night

  shhh! that’s the sound of two children asleep. it’s five a.m. and i got up to write and just sneaked in here to find your note. great minds. i’m so close to the end of this book and really want it finished before the end-of-pregnancy brain drain arrives. do you have time to do a quick read of a chapter that’s bugging me?

  love,

  naomi

  The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree

  nor the horses, nor the ants in your own house.

  The child and the afternoon do not know you

  because you have died forever.

  “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias”

  FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA,

  Translated by STEPHEN SPENDER AND J.
L. GILI

  11

  TRUDY

  Bedtime is the worst. For the first month, I drank a lot of wine every night just to be able to face it, but since I don’t seem to have any natural tendencies toward true self-destruction, I got tired of the hangovers and decided to white-knuckle my way through the nights in a bed that smells of him still, no matter how I try to wash the scent of him out of the pillows. They smell of laundry soap and fabric softener for the first few days, but the minute I accidentally spend a night hugging one to my chest, my body heat sets it free again. You might ask why I don’t just put them away in a closet or something.

  Good question.

  I have developed some new rituals. I used to take quick showers before bed, wanting to hurry in and lie down before Rick fell asleep so we could have a few minutes of conversation with my head tucked into the hollow of his shoulder. We touched bases about little things going on in our lives then, shared concerns about the children, or laughed about something one of them had done, or reminded each other about little things that needed doing. All the while, our bodies close together on the queen-sized bed, because I never wanted a king, his hand on my back, mine on his bare tummy. One of those ordinary rituals of a long marriage.

  One that never changed, by the way. You’d think an infidelity might put a wedge in moments like that, even if only one person knows about it, but it didn’t. The night before I found out, actually, we’d laughed hysterically over a major scene with our middle child, Colin, who thought himself completely grown and declared, “I am almost twenty and I know what I’m talking about.” Then, after the laughing, we made love. There weren’t any major rockets going off or anything—just ordinary, warm, pleasing.

  I really didn’t appreciate it enough.

  Now I take baths instead of showers. Attempting to treat myself, luxuriate in the bathroom I adore so much. It’s Arts and Crafts all the way, with built-in cabinets tiled in an intricate pattern, and a huge, old tub. A big window lets in plenty of north light for the orchids, which love the humidity. There’s one blooming now, a cattelya in purple and white, and as I wait for the water to get hot, I notice another one, a lady’s slipper, is about to bloom again, too.

  Pouring lavender oil into the tub to relax, I pin up my long hair and take off my clothes, avoiding my reflection in the mirror, and light the candles I’ve been collecting lately. They smell of patchouli, a fragrance that makes me think of a stronger version of myself, the one who lived in a wonderful old apartment close to downtown. I had a view of the city from the top of my hill, and quirky black-and-white prints of faraway places on the walls, and I was sure I would end up as a professor, cheerfully eccentric and alone, taking lovers when I wished, traveling through the summers granted by academia.

  I turn off the lights, sink into the hot, scented water, and reach for my mug of Sleepytime tea. I have put quiet Spanish guitar on the CD player, and pick up the paperback edition of Lorca’s selected poems. It’s a soft practice, this one, reading aloud in the Spanish I have largely forgotten. Sunk to my shoulders in the hot, scented water, I open the book at random and read aloud. By luck, it’s one of my favorites. In English, it’s beautiful:

  And at the fall of night,

  The night benighted by nightfall.

  But you don’t even have to speak Spanish to hear the difference in syllabic roll in the Spanish version:

  Cuando llegaba la noche,

  Noche que noche nochera.

  Lorca and Spanish distract me from Rick. I sink low in the water and keep time with the music by running my toes back and forth beneath the slight drip of the faucet. I read another poem aloud, taking pleasure in my own voice echoing around the tiles in the room, bouncing off the water, in a language I fell in love with at three and have not spoken in at least fifteen years.

  Reclining in the water, seeing the whiteness of my breasts, the green of the orchids reflected mistily in the mirror, the young woman in me turns around for the first time.

  You let us down, she says.

  I close my eyes against her.

  The CD ends and the water is cold, so I dry off with the big towels I treated myself to when I sent all the old, yucky, threadbare ones with Rick. A small revenge that I’m sure he noticed. To be honest, in the second round of boxes, I did stick in his favorites—a beach towel my mother sent him once, and a fluffy green one he loves. It surprised me to discover that my capacity for meanness, even when he deserves it, is so small.

  But really, how can you be cruel to someone you’ve been focused on taking care of for twenty-four years?

  I blow out the candles, put on my flannel nightgown because the house is really not easy to heat, and to save money we’ve always turned off the furnace at night. On the landing outside the bathroom, I pause to listen for Annie, but the house is silent and I have nothing left to do but go in my room, crawl into bed, push my pillows to the middle in an attempt to be luxurious instead of lonely, and read. Late, because he didn’t like it when I left the light on, hated the rustling of pages. I read a thriller until it falls on my face, and hope that when I roll over, I can stay asleep.

  Tonight, I manage to last until two thirty before I wake up in the utter silence of no one breathing beside me. Somehow, though I always put my pillows in the middle of the bed, I always end up on the far right side. Leaving Rick’s place open for him.

  There are no defenses available in the middle of the night. I roll over, dislodging the cats, who meow at me with annoyance, then settle back in on various parts of my body. Athena, all twenty pounds of her, collapses on my stomach and starts to purr. Zorro stands up, circles, bumps against my ankle.

  At least the cats are happy.

  If I close my eyes, I can pretend he’s there, sleeping on his stomach, naked beneath the covers. The ghost of his shape settles with a sigh in the darkness, and I can almost smell his skin, think of his thick, coarse hair scattered over the pillow, hear the sound of his breathing. The tension in my chest eases away and I even imagine I reach over and put my hand on the small of his back, where it stays so hot. It’s real enough to get me through the night.

  * * *

  I’ve been to a lot of funerals in the last few years, starting with Rick’s mother in August three years ago. She died of breast cancer after a decade of ups and downs, and there really wasn’t much relief even then. We all wanted her to live longer, me and the kids, and mostly Rick, who still misses her painfully. They were close—he was the son she counted on, the one who ran errands for her, stopped by every day to see how she was doing.

  And I must be the only woman in the world who doesn’t have some awful mother-in-law story to tell. She was good to me. Accepted me into her heart the first time we met, and did everything she could to make me feel good about my marriage, my mothering, myself. I miss her. She was a lot warmer—and closer—than my own mother, who still lives in Clovis, New Mexico, with my father, the machinist. My mother spends her time complaining about their lot in life. My father spends all his time fishing or bowling. We check in once a month. The last time I saw them was three years ago, and no one seems in any hurry to schedule a new date.

  There have been other funerals, too. They’re in my mind as I dress this bright cold Wednesday morning. A thin black sweater, a black skirt, a black suit coat—my funeral clothes. And as I put them on, I think about buying them. Not for Rick’s mother. For his best friend, Joe Zamora, who died as he lived, driving too fast on his Harley on a hot summer night a little over two years ago. Smashed into a guardrail on the bad turns on the highway through town, and ended up thirty feet below in a junkyard.

  Zipping up my skirt, I can see his swarthy, bearded face as clearly as if he is standing beside me. In my vision, he’s lifting a beer with one beefy arm, tattoos blueing his skin all the way to the shoulder and beyond. In his other hand is a pool cue, and he’s grinning as he says, “One for the ditch?”

  I twist my too bright hair into a knot and think that the sudden deaths a
re a lot harder than the ones you expect. Joe was one of those wild, bigger-than-life guys—robust and hearty, a cheerful renegade who never married and never intended to. He was Rick’s best friend from the time they were six, living next door to each other just a few streets away from here.

  I miss him, too, but for Rick, the wound is still so raw that he’ll choke on it sometimes when Santana comes on the radio, and he still can’t talk about him much, though I noticed a lot of pictures are coming out of the trunk, going up on the bare walls at his apartment.

  Joe’s funeral was a biker bash, so big that they had to move it to Sacred Heart Cathedral. The line of bikers in their fringes and chrome and cherry paint jobs snaked all the way through town, soberly shining in the hot August day to the graveyard on the south side of town, where Joe was laid to rest with his family. The wake afterward lasted well into the night.

  Edgar’s funeral is huge, too. It’s held at Bethlehem Baptist, the biggest black church in town, and the pews are overflowing. Shannelle and I have arrived together, and she sticks to my side as we navigate the roomful of dark faces. No one glares at us or anything, but we do stand out, the tall redhead and the lush little blonde. Shannelle is wearing a flowered dress that looks like she might have bought it for a high school dance. It’s about ten years out of date, with some lace around the collar. Her high-heeled sandals are a tawdry brown plastic that have seen better days, and my heart aches a little for her, because she is quite aware of how it all looks. Her nails are freshly manicured with a tasteful nude polish, and she’s tucked her thick blond hair into a knot, and she smells—very delicately—of her sacred Chanel No. 5. I wish I could have loaned her something without hurting her pride.

  Because she is proud, and has reason to be. She is from what I can only tell you is poor white trash. There’s no other way to say it—her father is a fat drunk who collects disability checks for his bad back. Her mother, who seems nice enough, is a waitress at a diner. I’ve never seen her when she didn’t look as worn as an ancient dishrag. Her brother is a petty criminal who’s in and out of jail for a series of pathetic crimes. They live in a trailer park.