The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue: A Novel

by Barbara O'Neal

“Me, too. Not about the bikes. About him.”

  I’m quiet, giving him space to say more, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t seem in a big hurry to get off the phone, either. “Are you okay?” I ask softly.

  “I don’t know. I guess we’re just getting old now, huh? People dying on us like this.”

  “I guess so.”

  He clears his throat. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get all choked up on you.”

  “That’s okay. I really just called to tell you that I’m home and I’m going to take a nice hot bath and go to bed early.”

  “All right. Call me if you need me.”

  Oh, Irony, thy name is husband.

  Or maybe that should be Idiocy. “I will.”

  * * *

  I never planned to get married. Back in my hometown of Clovis, New Mexico, the girls got married young and beautiful, had a couple of babies, got fat and put on spectacles, and lived the rest of their lives in a gray between-place that seemed as barren to me as the dry desert that swept away, vast and empty, from the edges of town.

  Even before I met Lucille, I knew I didn’t want a life made up of Tupperware parties and the slightly wild desperation I saw in those women’s eyes. I would sometimes lie in my bed, sweating in terror and the heat, trying to imagine where I could go, what I could do. How I could escape. People like us didn’t really go to college. Nobody in my family ever had, and they were suspicious of the dream.

  Then Lucille blew into my neighborhood, fresh from Peru. Her health was failing after fifty years of traveling the globe as an archaeologist, and she landed in Clovis because she had a brother there and he convinced her the weather would be good for her. It was. She moved into a house on the route to the grocery store, and I saw her the first day she moved in, a hot July Saturday.

  I was on my way to the store to buy a red cream soda. Sun was beating down out of the sky, mercilessly sucking what little green might be left in the plants and grass, making my scalp sweat so much, rivulets were running down my neck.

  And suddenly, right in front of me, was Lucille, a tall woman draped in thin white cotton that showed her bra and underwear. Her feet were bare, with red toenails, and when she stepped I glimpsed a bracelet of bells around her ankle. She had thick strands of exotic beads around her neck, and at least a dozen bracelets on her sun-darkened arm. She was carrying a drum. A giant drum made of skins and wood, painted with primary colors in some tribal design.

  I didn’t mean to stare, but I had never seen anyone like her in my life. I fell instantly in love. In love with that wild, long gray hair tied in a braid, her eyes bright and clear when they lit on me, a face as wise and lined as a river goddess.

  “Hello,” she said to me. “I’m Lucille. I’m new here.”

  I blinked, clutched my sweaty, folded bill more firmly. “I’m Gertrude, but everybody calls me Trudy.” I pointed back. “I live over there, in the blue house.”

  She looked, nodded. Inclined her head. “I’d pay you to help me bring these things inside. Then perhaps we could have a cup of tea.”

  “You don’t have to pay me.”

  “Oh, never turn down an offer of payment. Women need money to maintain their independence.”

  Oh.

  Over the next three years, Lucille became my friend and my mentor and the single most influential person I’d met before or since. I adored everything about her—the exotic clothes she wore, things she bought all over the world. Comfortable things that sometimes showed parts of her body that women in my world did not ever show once they passed the age of twenty-five—her long, freckled back with the slight rolls on either side, a snippet of belly, ample and tanned. Thighs like crumpled paper sticking out of her bathing suit.

  She had never married. But she kept a wooden box with the pictures of men with whom she’d had great love affairs—the matador with his fierce nose, the black African attaché with his wide mouth and kind eyes, the wiry German archaeologist—and she was bold about the details of their seductions and the grand times they had here or there. I asked her once if she minded that one didn’t stay, and she laughed and laughed. They all wanted to stay. She wouldn’t let them. Life was short and she didn’t intend to tether herself to any one part of it.

  She taught me to dream, Lucille. Prodded me to imagine the life I most wanted. I started dressing like her, draping myself in light India cottons and ethnic blouses. I grew out my hair, which my mother had always kept short because it was wavy, “uncontrollable.” Lucille helped me figure out the bewildering steps it took to get into college—taking the SAT and the ACT, the scholarship and financial-aid papers, the application fees. I wanted to study Spanish and travel the world as a teacher. The first place I would go was Seville, to learn to dance the flamenco, for Lucille, who died two days before my college graduation, leaving me a considerable sum, along with a letter that said, “Use this to see the world, child. Dream big!”

  It still sits in an annuity, gathering interest. I’ve dipped into it twice. The first time was to pay for the natural healing school in Boulder two years ago. The second was to pay for Colin’s trip to Italy. I haven’t touched it for anything else. I was waiting for the kids to grow up, so Rick and I could go together.

  Sitting now in my living room, sorting through the CDs, I pause over a Gipsy Kings collection of love songs that I bought because the music reminded me of her. But tonight, I’m not grieving Lucille. I’m letting go of Rick and my marriage. That requires a different soundtrack.

  I pull out all the CDs I’ve been avoiding the past few months, the Allman Brothers and Jimmy Buffett and Lucinda Williams, which I put aside to listen to last.

  First the Allman Brothers, because that’s what was playing the night I met him. I pop it in the CD player, pour some wine, get comfortable on the floor. Let myself flow into the music, let it pluck the pains I’ve been hiding and ignoring.

  “Whipping Post” fills the room, the excellent guitar and fine voice of Greg Allman. It was this song that was playing when I met Rick at a party for someone’s thirtieth birthday.

  Here’s the truth: He was not my type. I had just graduated from college with my Spanish degree, and I thought very well of myself, thank you very much. In the fall, I would be moving to Boulder to study for a master’s degree, and in the meantime, I was dating intense, scholarly types who liked to talk poetry over too much Guinness in dark clubs. Or well, one club, anyway, the Irish Pub, which was agreeably atmospheric and reliably hip. I liked men who wrote and played their folk or blues songs, who wore wire-rimmed glasses and had clean hands. Men who, like me, were headed for academia someday. A world that kept you alive and young, I thought. Away from things like Tupperware parties.

  My hipness did not end there, though, I must tell you. I was a vegetarian and eschewed cigarettes long before it was popular, and did yoga three times a week in a tiny studio over on Union Avenue. My apartment had nothing of Clovis in it. The entire second floor of a slightly seedy Victorian in Mesa Junction, it had bare wood floors I painted red. There were no curtains and at least twelve-dozen candles. I’d taped go-get-’em mottoes up over the kitchen counters and in the bathroom, the Marilyn Monroe one about having too many fantasies to be a housewife, bits of wisdom from all kinds of women who’d done things. I thought at the time it was wonderfully quirky of me.

  Brave, I think now. Brave to believe in that vision of myself.

  The walls of that apartment were hung with black-and-white photographs of the places I wanted to visit and had not yet managed to, thanks to the struggle of putting myself through college.

  I was even proud of that, fiercely proud of my poverty and the reason for it—I made it through the bachelor’s degree, sometimes making fifteen dollars stretch for an entire week of groceries. I worked in a restaurant in order to guarantee myself a solid meal five days a week, and at least a little bit of free alcohol.

  I really did think I was so mighty. So immune to falling into the ordinary life of a woman, a wife, a mother.


  Sipping my wine, I look at my feet. Feet I thought would carry me to Seville and carried me only over here to the north side of Pueblo. One night that summer, I went with a friend to that party for someone’s thirtieth birthday. It was noisy and full of students, not all of a traditional age, since the University of Southern Colorado has always catered to a larger population than that—something I liked about it. So much diversity gave it an interesting energy.

  Thus, it wasn’t odd to see this slightly older guy there—he wasn’t quite thirty—but he was oddly misfit in other ways. Working class, in a black leather motorcycle jacket, jeans, an ordinary Budweiser in his hands. He looked at me boldly when I dug in the cooler, looking for a Heineken, which was slightly less smart than a Guinness, but only a little. “Hey, darlin’,” he said, “don’t you know Heinekens are made of skunk piss?”

  Well, with an opening like that, how could he lose? I looked up with my most withering gaze. “And Budweiser is made of what? Buffalo piss?”

  He laughed.

  It sounds so small now, to say it like that. But it was robust. Rich. In the sound, I heard children screeching on a playground in glee, and the pulse of an orgasm, and lemonade pouring into a glass. It caught me, made me look at him. And he was looking back with eyes as blue as morning, lively as his laugh. In that first minute, I didn’t notice that he had hands as elegant as a painter’s, or the depth of his lostness. I was mesmerized by the way he was looking at me. Boldly. With amusement. As if he saw right through me to the girl who used to blow soap bubbles on the back porch.

  I ran. Hid in the sharp barbs and tough intellectualism in the other rooms, places where one had to stay on one’s toes to keep ahead of the verbal banter; ducked when I saw the softness of his wink. I could hear him, talking and laughing, turning aside the sly questions about his bike, his leathers, his work as a mechanic. His voice was deep and warm, like a thick mattress.

  He captured me outside on the porch, where I’d retreated to breathe in the starry night. He carried a Heineken and a Budweiser. Pointed to the spot next to me on the step and said, “Mind?”

  I shook my head, accepted the beer. He settled, and I noticed his long legs, next to mine. His hair was too long, looked as if it had been cut with a dull ax, but it was a rich, thick black, and he smelled of afternoon. It was like meeting Lucille for the first time. Like I already knew him and had just been waiting for him to show up. All the words that tripped off my tongue so easily, all the time, the bright, funny, brittle words I used to hide behind so no one would see the girl from Clovis, dried up, and I looked at the sky.

  He pointed. “That’s Orion.”

  “Yeah?” I pretended I knew what he meant. But I didn’t know the stars.

  “Look for the three stars. That’s his belt. See it?”

  I did, suddenly. Winking in a row. I sipped my beer, felt my skin shifting, like it had grown too tight. I thought about his shins, his ankles. If they would be that dead white of unseen skin, or if he sometimes went out in shorts. I glanced at him. No. He wouldn’t wear shorts.

  He pointed out some more of the stars. His arm brushed mine. He leaned in, shoulder to shoulder. “It’s a lot easier to see them from the prairie. Want to go for a ride?”

  The first time he kissed me was out there under those stars, under a sky so wide and dark and filled with so many millions of blinking stars that we lay down on our backs and admired them for an hour. Maybe two. Maybe ten. I don’t know. By the end of the night, I knew he was in love with me, and that hadn’t ever happened before, that someone fell so deep and hard. Not for me.

  But I knew it. When he kissed me, I tasted it on his wide mouth. Focus. Recognition. His body fit me as he leaned in. He knew exactly how to open my blouse, let the wind press over my breasts, his fingers skilled, his kisses rich. It was so easy to make love to him out there in the prairie, the first night we met, and I never did that. Never slept with a guy on the first date. He just made it seem reasonable.

  And it was so amazingly good. I wasn’t in love with him yet, but one taste of his body, his mouth, his hands was absolutely not enough. I needed more and more and more.

  All summer, that’s what we did. Made love and rode his motorcycle and ate and drank. We camped nearly every weekend, finding hot springs to swim in naked, and making love by campfires and getting drunk on Budweiser, which always gave me a headache the next morning. He cooked for me. Not just steaks, either. Real food, like roasts and potatoes and carrots. Barbecued ribs with beans. Trout steamed with lemon juice over a campfire in a pocket of foil.

  For me, it was a way to pass the summer. I enjoyed him, sometimes even felt a piercing sense of recognition, but I was going to Boulder in the fall and he wasn’t going to follow me, and that was that. It gave the fleeting weeks a gilded sense of magic. I knew I’d remember it forever, but I truly didn’t think he was The One.

  Rick pretended to go along with that, but he was in love. In Love. I have never known why. God, I was obnoxious in those days. Skinny and intense and full of myself, covering a vast sense of insecurity with bravado and snobbishness. I was quite clear about my plans, about my feelings for him, never promised him anything at all. I have never understood what Rick Marino saw in me to love—which of course makes it all the harder to figure out why he fell out so suddenly and with no warning.

  Anyway.

  In August, I packed up my apartment and Rick helped me mop the floors and clean it up. I had the blues. The apartment had been my first home, and I’d been there three years. I hated leaving it.

  And Rick, too, seemed suddenly precious. I couldn’t stop watching him as he taped up boxes and hauled them down to the truck I’d rented. I saw a million things I would miss—the way light, even the brightest August sunlight, was sucked into the depths of his thick long hair, the way his arms corded with so much power, the crinkle of his eyes when he teased me. I ended up jumping him in the empty living room, and we made love on the carpet in a pool of sunlight.

  Afterward, curled against his chest, I said, “I am really going to miss you.”

  “I know,” he said, and kissed my forehead. “It’ll be all right. We can get together on the weekends.”

  My chest felt hollow and I closed my eyes, smelling him, rubbing my fingers across the hair on his chest, my foot across his very white ankle. How could I have missed the fact that I’d fallen in love with him? And what in the world could I do about it now? “I wish you’d move to Boulder.”

  “Too many granola-heads.”

  “I’m a granola-head.”

  He chuckled, rubbed his hand through my hair. “Yeah, but I’ve got you trained to drink Bud now.”

  “You know I’ll revert the minute you’re away.”

  “But I’ll know you’re wishing for a Bud in your heart.”

  Very quietly, I said, “This summer has been the best time of my life.”

  “Mine, too, kid.”

  “Maybe,” I said earnestly, lifting up on one elbow, “I should just stay. I could transfer to UCCS in the Springs, just commute.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not what you want.”

  That was the thing about him. He supported even my most grandiose plans for the future, believed in my abilities even more than I did. He was extremely proud of my fierce journey to this point, of my need to escape the small world of Clovis and find a bigger, more challenging life for myself. Tears stinging my eyes, I bent down and kissed him hard. “I love you, Rick.” It was the first time I said it, the first time I knew it.

  “You can’t help it,” he said.

  SHANNELLE’S WRITING WALL

  We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

  RAY BRADBURY

  13

  TO: naomiredding@rtvs.com

  FROM: chanelpacheco@hotmail.com

  SUBJECT: filling the well

  The funeral was today and I can’t tell anyone else this—it
was so artistically thrilling! I will miss Edgar—he was a very kind old man and he told wonderful stories of his life and his childhood in segregated Mississippi and his passing will leave a gap.

  But his funeral—oh, my God!—what an experience! It wasn’t a funeral, first of all: It was a home-going. And the ladies in the church were not dressed in funereal black, but in shining white to celebrate a saint going home. (I think that might be one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.) I was so moved by the ceremony—by the big voices, singing so boldly and in such celebration, by the granddaughter who could not help but weep in her grief, by the nurse in her uniform who was there in case anyone fainted in sorrow. It was strangely exotic to be one of only a handful of white faces in a church packed with black people. It made me think about what it must be like to be black most of the time, an interesting turnaround. Not that anyone was even the slightest bit unkind—quite the opposite—but it was an interesting thing to notice.

  The person who was falling apart the most was my neighbor. Not Roberta, Edgar’s wife, but the woman across the street who is getting divorced and is still so painfully in love with her husband that she shimmers with longing when he rides up on his motorcycle. She looked like a walking skeleton in her black suit and red hair, like a Day of the Dead figure, her cheeks and eyes hollow, her hands shaking. I felt sorry for her, but when I went to find her later, she was gone.

  I see the dentist tomorrow, finally!

  DO NOT REPLY.

  Love,

  Shannelle

  The he-lizard is crying.

  The she-lizard is crying …

  Having lost without wanting to

  Their wedding ring

  Ah, their little leaden wedding ring,

  Ah their little ring of lead!…

  Oh, how they cry and cry,

  Oh! Oh! How they go on crying!

  “The Lizard Is Crying”

  FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA,

  Translated by STEPHEN SPENDER AND J. L. GILI