Tony has a friend who is a Lakota Sioux, and he was over for dinner tonight. (I have had so many people over lately! It just seems like Tony always knows somebody who needs a meal. And if I’m honest, I have to say I really like it, setting the table very nicely, with the good dishes Tony’s mom gave up when we got married, and putting out lots of food for somebody who is hungry. I like having the boys learning their manners and remembering to do some little thing, like remember to put their napkins on their little laps. Mostly they forget a lot still, but they’re just little boys. They’ll get it.)
ANYWAY, I was thinking tonight while Harry was here that he has a great name. Harold Runs With Colts. Is that great? And then during dinner, my idiot brother called to yell at me over something or another, and I just told him I couldn’t talk because it was dinnertime, and I hung up while he was still calling me names. And I was thinking that where I come from, it could be bad to get named like that. For who you are or where you live or what you do. John Collects Junk Cars. Hank Never Changes His Shirt and his wife, Dana No Teeth. Micky Lives in Turquoise Double-Wide.
Now I’m cracking myself up. They are awful, awful people. It’s an awful world. I hate it. I hate them. I wish I could move to Pluto.
That’s not fair, really. They’re not all awful. They’re just poor, that’s all. Poor and ignorant. Not everybody is even ignorant or slimy. There was Mr. Tesla, who built a porch all around his trailer and had roses growing up the redwood and as much of a lawn as he could fit in the rest of his yard, which was about six square feet, and it was always so green. His grandkids came over to see him and he cooked outside for them on Labor Day and whatever, cooked on a red tabletop grill he told me his daughter gave him. He raised four kids in that trailer and every single one of them lives in a good neighborhood now.
But I was thinking some more about names. Why is everyone in a trailer park named Ruby or Misty? Even me, my stupid name, which could have been cool, being named for a perfume, but my mother got the spelling wrong. (!) Why are all the boys named Darryl? (Even my brother is named Darryl.) Why do girls who see everybody else get pregnant and old too fast go out and do it themselves? Just to see what weird thing they can name their kids? No kidding, I know two boys named Harley and Lightning. They’re actually very nice. Their mother worked construction and she didn’t drink. She was just a tattooed biker babe who cooked Hamburger Helper every night and grew two giant boys. I think she moved, finally. They haven’t talked about her lately.
Now I’m getting depressed. I have to remember that I don’t live there anymore. I wish my mother didn’t have to. Wish I could get her to see she could leave my loser father and loser brother to drink themselves to death in the pigsty they’d make it by the end of a week, and they’d be dead for a month before anyone noticed.
I’ve had a couple of dreams about my sister the past few weeks. Would she still be alive if she’d been born to some other family? Would someone, somewhere have seen that she wasn’t just a little blue, but suicidally depressed? Would she have had more of what she needed somewhere else? If her bedroom had been spacious and airy, instead of a shoe box she had to share with me, would it have made a difference? If she could have walked outside and seen a few trees and had a place to sit on a little grass, would she have been able to hang on?
Always the same questions. Always the worst one at the last: Why didn’t she come to me? Why did she just DO that? I wonder if it will ever make sense to me, if I’ll ever put the pieces together.
S.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: re: Harley Blue Trailer
dear shannelle,
that is wonderfully evocative material. why don’t you write about the trailer court?
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: re: re: Harley Blue Trailer
Naomi—
Ugh!
Shannelle
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: re: re: re: Harley Blue Trailer
shannelle: meet me on-line, 4 p.m. it’s bronco sunday, right?
TRANSCRIPT:
CHANEL: Hi, Naomi. What’s up?
NAOMI: i am on a quest.
CHANEL: What quest? Am I gonna like this?
NAOMI: i need some character sketches from you.
CHANEL: Let me guess: the Trailer Court Gang, right?
NAOMI: what a smart young woman you are!
CHANEL: Oh, Naomi, I’ve never said no to one of your exercises, but I can’t do this. I don’t even want to. YUCK!
NAOMI: do you trust me, shanelle?
CHANEL: Yes.
NAOMI: i want four sketches—john collects junk cars. mother of harley. lightning. and one more: darryl.
CHANEL: I’m not writing about my brother.
NAOMI: scared?
CHANEL: No! I just hate his guts, that’s all.
NAOMI: good. it’ll make a good sketch.
CHANEL: Naomi!
NAOMI: you can always refuse, sweetie.
CHANEL: No. I know you must have a reason. But please don’t make me write a book about them, okay? I don’t want to be like that woman who wrote about the backwoods and ended up getting stuck there forever.
NAOMI: that’s not going to happen to you. i promise.
CHANEL: Naomi, I do trust you, but this is going to depress me to no end.
NAOMI: you might be surprised.
CHANEL: But I only have an hour a day to do my writing as it is! Wouldn’t it be smarter to spend it on the new book?
NAOMI: your call, sweetie, but i’m gonna ask you to trust me to take you on a little journey, all right?
CHANEL: Heavy sigh.
NAOMI: go write the first one, then.
CHANEL: Right now?
NAOMI: how long until tony gets home?
CHANEL: Nearly two hours.
NAOMI: better get cracking, then. when it’s done, send it to me raw. don’t rewrite, and don’t keep a copy.
CHANEL: This is the weirdest thing yet.
NAOMI: heheheh.
CHANEL: Bye!
I want to sleep awhile,
awhile, a minute, a century;
but all must know I have not died;
that there is a stable of gold in my lips;
that I am the small friend of the West wind;
that I am the immense shadow of my tears.
“Gacela of the Dark Death”
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA,
Translated by STEPHEN SPENDER AND J. L. GILI
33
TRUDY
At the Springs airport, I wait with the other families gathering missing pieces for the holidays. It’s hard to keep my eyes away from the husband-wife pairs waiting for their children or parents.
Don’t think about it.
It’s too hot, but that’s how it always seems to me lately. I wonder, fanning myself with a newspaper, if this is perimenopause, if I’m going to start having hot flashes. There’s a thrilling thought.
I spot Colin over the heads of the others—he’s the one who looks most like my family, his thick black hair freshly cut to show his good cheekbones, his full lips. He’s wearing a greeny-blue sweater I would bet money his girlfriend picked out for him. His khaki pants have a crease ironed into them. He has his laptop slung over his slim shoulder. For the first time, I see he’s grown into a young man, one who has left provincial Pueblo behind. I see young women eyeing him, the aura of success he carries, the genial, almost Continental carriage.
He spies me, this elegant, gorgeous young man, and breaks into a grin. Lifting a hand, he hurries past the older couple ahead of him and throws his arms around me in a bear hug. “Hi!” he says. “Man, I missed you! You look good, Mom,” he adds, holding me at arm’s length. “What have you changed?”
“Do I? Nothing I can think of. You look terrific. It’s so good to see you.�
��
It’s only as we head toward the stairs to the baggage claim that it seems to dawn on him that Rick is not here. “Dad didn’t come?”
“No, but he’s hoping you’ll come see him tonight. He’d love to cook for you.”
“I was expecting both of you.” Thunder boils in his Celtic eyes. “It’s always been that way.” He halts, scowling, at the stairs. “Couldn’t you guys have done that much for me?”
“We’re in the way.” People are staring.
“Mom.” He moves, but not mentally.
“Colin,” I say. “We’re divorcing. We won’t be doing things as a pair anymore.”
“Divorce? I thought—”
I put my hand on his arm. “Let’s go get your bags, then we can find a place to eat before we drive back, okay? We can talk about it over a hamburger or something.”
He nods. The polite young man reemerges, but there are two bright patches of color in his cheeks. It makes him look even more handsome, and a girl of about twenty trips over her suitcase staring at him. She bumps right into him, and he kindly steadies her, smiles, picks up her dropped purse, and settles it over her shoulder. The whole thing replays in my mind as we walk to the car, and I laugh. “The same thing used to happen to your dad all the time.”
“Really?”
“Constantly. You don’t really look a lot like him, but you have a lot of his charm.”
“Mrs. Guiterrez used to say we were cut from the same cloth.”
Mrs. Guiterrez was our next-door neighbor, the one who lived in Angel’s house.
Angel. Wickedness swirls under my skin at the thought of him, anything connected to him. I’ve been trying not to let my thoughts stray that direction, and there’s been no time to spend with him, though he’s been by to invite me. I think I hurt his feelings last night, and have been worrying about it.
But maybe I’m a little embarrassed or ashamed of myself. How foolish is it of me to even think of a liaison with someone so much younger than myself? Someone who will be off on his travels sooner or later? Someone who is in love with another woman? Maybe all those things make it all right. I really don’t know. There are no markers to tell me what to do.
“Mom?” Colin says.
“Sorry. Woolgathering.” I bend down and unlock the trunk, and we settle the bags. I pause in the bright winter sunshine. Pikes Peak rises behind him, dusted with snow, burly against the sky. “Colin, I don’t want you to think your dad didn’t want to be here. He did.”
“Then why didn’t he come?”
“Because I asked him not to.” I take a breath. “We are connected, all of us. That won’t change. The way we are connected is changing, and I know how much you hate it. But I’m also going to tell you that the sooner you try to see the new way, the smoother it’s going to feel for you. Does that make any sense?”
He bows his head. Nods. “I just hate it. I can’t help it.”
“I know. But let’s try to have a great Christmas this new way, huh?”
“That’s a good idea.”
* * *
So that’s what we do. We make butter cookies and sit around the table frosting them. Minna comes over to help, and Colin laughs and jokes with her. I play my Christmas CDs, the same ones I always use to get in the mood, and hum along as I stick candy flowers on the snowmen’s fronts. We eat as many as we frost. We wrap presents and drink gallons of eggnog. Annie and Colin scuffle over the bathroom, as always, but she’s as happy as I am to have someone else in the house to break up the monotony of the two of us.
One night, Colin and I rent movies to watch, a ritual we have not missed since he started college three years ago. He and I share a taste in movies and books that no one else in the family likes, and we long ago realized we could curl up and eat odd things and watch French subtitles and everybody would leave us alone. His toleration for noise is about on par with a nervous cat, which is fairly unusual in a second child. As a baby, we had to play lullabies quietly in his room to buffer any outside distractions, and even in the womb, he used to startle violently if someone slammed a door.
In many ways, he’s the one most like me. Richard is clever and ambitious, sturdy and stalwart, most like his grandpa Marino in character than anyone else. My Richard is Italian to his core, an old-fashioned, salt-of-the-earth man who will always take care of his family and do the right thing. Annie is the one cut from her father’s heart—charming and outgoing and charismatic, an extrovert and dazzler.
Colin is like me. Cerebral and thoughtful, too serious and often irritatingly idiosyncratic. When he comes home, I enjoy the chance to sit around and just talk for hours at a time—talk ideas and politics, art and music and current events. He was born to take a doctoral degree in some esoteric specialty and spend his life in academia, taking sabbaticals to foreign shores. It drives his father insane. What kind of life is that for a man? he’s grumbled to me more than once. Rick is painfully proud of Colin, brags about the prizes and scholarships he’s won, his perfect sixteen hundred on the SAT, his accomplishments. But he doesn’t understand him.
Tonight, Annie is working, and rolled her eyes over the stack of movies we picked out, anyway—a French historical drama I’ve wanted Colin to see; Quills, which he’s wanted me to see; and two of the year’s indie films that are highly favored by critics as next year’s possible Best Picture. On Oscar night, we’ll be in touch by phone, after sending off in e-mail (by three P.M. MST, no fair cheating) our entire ballot for the evening.
God, I hope he never gets tired of sharing such things with me! Realistically, I know he will. That he’ll have a wife one day, and children of his own, and friends to have Oscar parties with. It makes this little space of luxurious time even more precious.
We get a pile of finger foods ready—baby Gouda cheeses, crackers, three kinds of apples, some Bosc pears, and my favorite Vermont Cabot cheddar, little cold shrimps for Colin—and carry them into the newly arranged television room. Colin says, “Wow! It looks like the Arabian Nights in here!”
“Mmm.” It’s a theme that seems to be spreading through the house these days, I’m afraid. Splashes of scarlet and fringes of gold and tendrils of velvet.
“It looks like you.”
“Thanks.” We settle in, prop our feet up on ottomans, and nestle elbows into pillows. Zorro wanders in and spreads himself royally along the back of the couch, his extravagant tail twitching. Athena follows shortly thereafter, nudging Colin happily for tidbits of shrimp. “How’s she doing without Dad?” he asks.
“All right.” I chuckle. “But she faints with pleasure when he comes over.”
We put in Quills and I sip cold wine. “Do you drink yet, Colin?”
He raises an eyebrow. “I’ll take the Fifth on that.”
I laugh. “D’you think I don’t know everyone drinks wine in Italy?”
“Well, that’s there.” But he lifts one side of his mouth in a rueful smile. “Yeah, sometimes I drink a little.”
“What do you drink?”
“Mom, I’m twenty years old. I’m not legal yet. I drink what’s available.”
“Not hard liquor, I hope.”
“Fifth.”
I laugh at the pun. “Just be careful.”
He puts a slice of cheese on a cracker. “I got this lecture about seventeen times the summer before I went to school, remember? I heard you.” He enumerates the points on his fingers. “No shots. No shotgunning beers. No sweet drinks, like rum and Coke, unless I want a massive hangover the next day.”
“Did you test the truth of my injunctions, my sweet?”
“I did, Mother dear, and discovered you to be correct on all counts.” He picks up the remote. “Can we watch the movie now?”
“Sure.”
He hesitates before pushing the START button. “If I ask you an honest question, do you promise to give me an honest answer?”
“I’ll try.”
“Was my trip to Italy one of the things that led to you and Dad splitting?”
I dodge a direct answer. “What gave you that idea?”
“I know you guys fought about it. Dad didn’t think I should go. He wanted to use the money for something else.”
“A new bay on our garage.” When we already had two and he works in the garage at Harley-Davidson. “But that was my money. Lucille left it to me, and it wasn’t to be used for things like houses and garages.”
“What was it for?”
I take a breath, pluck a sliver of apple from the plate beside me. “Travel and education.”
“So why haven’t you used it?”
“I haven’t really had a chance. I’ve been busy raising you guys. I might go to Seville, though, did I tell you? I’ve been exploring the idea pretty seriously.”
“You’re sidestepping my question, Mom.”
I look him straight in the eye. “No, Colin, the trip had nothing to do with the problems between your father and me.”
“Promise?”
What could he possibly do to change the past, even if I told the truth? “Promise.”
But it’s hard, as the movie begins, not to think of this again, think of the money Lucille had left and the way it had become so immovable and gigantic between us. The first time he wanted to use it was when I was pregnant with Colin, to put a down payment on a house. It had never occurred to him that I would not agree, that I would see anything wrong with it, and it honestly shocked him when I steadfastly and simply said no. I was equally astonished that he had even expected it. It had been a very specific inheritance—a substantial sum of money which, thanks to the big boom in the stock market, had nearly tripled over the past decade. I’d only recently moved it to less risky investments.
It represented the sum total of Lucille’s life savings, and she’d left it to me with the knowledge that I would understand what she meant it for. A woman needs money of her own in case of emergencies, or in case she needs to go somewhere, make an escape. She did not mean for it to buy a house, which she thought an overrated practice. She did not mean for it to go for cars or boats or down payments on anything material. It was for travel, I knew, or education, or anything else both ephemeral and enduring.
The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue: A Novel Page 23
