“He was there on his knees, crying over Benigna. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ he kept saying.”
How had it never occurred to me that, at five years old, Nemecia would have been too small to attack a grown man and woman all at once? How could I have been so stupid?
At school I watched for signs of what Paulita had told me, but Nemecia was the same: graceful, laughing, distant. I felt humiliated for believing her, and I resented the demands she made on my sympathy. Pity and hatred and guilt nearly choked me. If anything, I hated my cousin more, she who had once been a terrified child, she who could call that tragedy her own. Nemecia would always have the best of everything.
Nemecia left for California three months after Corpus Christi. In Los Angeles, my Aunt Benigna bought secondhand furniture and turned the small sewing room into a bedroom. She introduced Nemecia to her husband and to the miracle child. There was a palm tree in the front yard and a pink-painted gravel walkway. I know this from a letter my cousin sent my mother, signed with a flourish, Norma.
I moved back to my mother’s house and to the room that was all mine. My mother stood in the middle of the floor as I unpacked my things into the now-empty bureau. She looked lost.
“We missed you,” she said, looking out the window. And then, “It’s not right for a child to be away from her parents. It’s not right that you left us.”
I wanted to tell her that I had not left, that I had been left, led away and dropped at Paulita’s door.
“Listen.” Then she stopped and shook her head. “Ah, well,” she said, with an intake of breath.
I placed my camisoles in the drawer, one on top of the other. I didn’t look at my mother. The reconciliation, the tears and embraces that I’d dreamt about, didn’t come, and so I hardened myself against her.
Our family quickly grew over the space Nemecia left, so quickly that I often wondered if she’d meant anything to us at all.
Nemecia’s life became glamorous in my mind—beautiful, tragic, the story of an orphan. I imagined that I could take that life, have it for myself. Night after night I told myself the story: a prettier me, swept away to California, and the boy who would find me and save me from my unhappiness. The town slept among the vast, whispering grasses, coyotes called in the distance, and Nemecia’s story set my body alight.
We attended Nemecia’s wedding, my family and I. We took the long trip across New Mexico and Arizona to Los Angeles, me in the backseat between my brothers. For years I’d pictured Nemecia living a magazine shoot, running on the beach, stretched on a chaise longue beside a flat, blue pool, and it was a fantasy that had sustained me. As we crossed the Mojave Desert, though, I began to get nervous—that I wouldn’t recognize her, that she’d have forgotten me. I found myself hoping that her life wasn’t as beautiful as I’d imagined it, that she’d finally been punished.
When we drove up to the little house, Nemecia ran outside in bare feet and hugged each of us as we unfolded ourselves from the car.
“Maria!” she cried, smiling, and kissed both my cheeks, and I fell into a shyness I couldn’t shake all that week.
“Nemecia, cariña,” my mother said. She stepped back and looked at my cousin happily.
“Norma,” my cousin said. “My name is Norma.”
It was remarkable how completely she’d changed. Her hair was blond now, her skin tanned dark and even.
My mother nodded slowly and repeated it, “Norma.”
The wedding was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I was wrung with jealousy. I must have understood then that I wouldn’t have a wedding of my own. Like everything else in Los Angeles, the church was large and modern. The pews were pale and sleek, and the empty crucifix shone. Nemecia confessed to me that she didn’t know the priest here, that she rarely even went to church anymore. In a few years, I too would stop going to church, but it shocked me then to hear my cousin say it.
They didn’t speak Spanish in my aunt’s house. When my mother or father said something in Spanish, my aunt or cousins answered resolutely in English. I was embarrassed by my parents that week, the way their awkward English made them seem confused and childish.
The day before the wedding, Nemecia invited me to the beach with her girlfriend. I said I couldn’t go—I was fifteen, younger than they were, and I didn’t have a swimming suit.
“Of course you’ll come. You’re my little sister.” Nemecia opened a messy drawer and tossed me a tangled blue suit. I remember I changed in her bedroom, turned in the full-length mirror, stretched across her pink satin bed, and posed like a pinup. I felt older, sensual. There, in Nemecia’s bedroom, I liked the image of myself in that swimming suit, but on the beach my courage left me. Someone took our picture, standing with a tanned, smiling man. I still have the picture. Nemecia and her friend look easy in their suits, arms draped around the man’s neck. The man—who is he? How did he come to be in the photograph?—has his arm around Nemecia’s small waist. I am beside her, my hand on her shoulder, but standing as though I’m afraid to touch her. She leans into the man and away from me, her smile broad and white. My scar shows as a gray smear on my cheek. I smile with my lips closed, and my other arm is folded in front of my chest.
Until she died, my mother kept Nemecia’s wedding portrait beside her bed: Nemecia and her husband in front of a photographer’s arboreal backdrop with their hands clasped, smiling into each other’s faces. The photograph my cousin gave me has the same airless studio quality but is of Nemecia alone, standing on some steps, her train arranged around her. She is half-turned, unsmiling, wearing an expression I can’t interpret. Neither thoughtful nor stony nor proud. Her expression isn’t unhappy, just almost, but not quite, vacant.
When she left for Los Angeles, Nemecia didn’t take the doll that sat on the bureau. The doll came with us when we moved to Albuquerque; we saved it, I suppose, for Nemecia’s children, though we never said so out loud. Later, after my mother died in 1981, I brought it from her house, where for years my mother had kept it on her bureau. For five days it lay on the table in my apartment before I called Nemecia and asked if she wanted it back.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I never had a doll.”
“The cracked one, remember?” My voice went high with disbelief. It seemed impossible that she could have forgotten. It had sat in our room for years, facing us in our beds each night as we fell asleep. A flare of anger ignited—she was lying, she had to be lying—then died.
I touched the yellowed hem of the doll’s dress, while Nemecia told me about the cruise she and her husband were taking through the Panama Canal. “Ten days,” she said, “and then we’re going to stay for three days in Puerto Rico. It’s a new boat, with casinos and pools and ballrooms. I hear they treat you royally.” While she talked, I ran my finger along the ridges of the cracks in the doll’s head. From the sound of her voice, I could almost imagine she’d never aged, and it seemed to me I’d spent my whole life listening to Nemecia’s stories.
“So what about the doll?” I asked when it was almost time to hang up. “Do you want me to send it?”
“I can’t even picture it,” she said, and laughed. “Do whatever you want. I don’t need old things lying around the house.”
I was tempted to take offense, to think it was me she was rejecting, our whole shared past in Tajique. I was tempted to slip back into that same old envy, for how easily Nemecia had let those years drop away from her, leaving me to remember her stories. But by then I was old enough to know that she wasn’t thinking about me at all.
Nemecia spent the rest of her life in Los Angeles. I visited her once when I had some vacation time saved, in the low house surrounded by bougainvillea. She collected Dolls of the World and Waterford crystal, which she displayed in glass cases. She sat me at the dining room table and took the dolls out one by one. “Holland,” she said and set it before me. “Italy. Greece.” I tried to see some evidence in her face of what she had witnessed as a chil
d, but there was nothing.
Nemecia held a wineglass up to the window and turned it. “See how clear?” Shards of light moved across her face.
SUZANNE RIVECCA
Philanthropy
FROM Granta
DAYS BEFORE SHE MET the novelist, Cora went to the library and brought home a stack of plastic-sleeved hardcovers with one-word titles like Heirloom and Ruffian and Seductress. Her favorite was an early effort with an unusually loquacious title: The Illegitimate Prince’s Child. At first it was unclear who was illegitimate, the prince or his child. It turned out to be both. During the Hep C Support Group at the drop-in, Cora read aloud sentences like “Evelina knew Rolf would never marry her if she revealed her true station, but having been a bastard himself, how could he inflict the same fate on the unborn child inside her?” She regaled the needle-exchange staff with passages from Ruffian, substituting clients’ names for the well-endowed hero’s. She knew she was being inappropriate but she couldn’t stop. She studied Yvonne Borneo’s soft-focus author photos and imagined the hilarious incongruity of her vaunted good works—scattering gold pieces to hookers as she was borne down Mission Street on a litter, that sort of thing—and now that the appointed time had arrived for them to meet, she wanted Yvonne Borneo to deliver. She wanted a white mink hat and coat, a thick tread of diamonds across the collarbones, peacock-blue eyeshadow and sharp swipes of blush and impossibly glossy lips: the rigidly contoured, calculatedly baroque opulence of an eighties soap star auditioning for the role of tsarina. And Yvonne Borneo disappointed her by showing up at Capp Street Women’s Services in a plain taupe skirt and suit jacket. Her sole concession to decadence was a mulberry cashmere scarf, soft as a runaway’s peach fuzz, held in place with a metal pin shaped like a Scottie dog’s silhouette.
“Well, you’re just a tiny little mite” was the first thing she said to Cora. Her voice was butterfat-rich but filmy, like an old bar of dark chocolate that had taken on a gray cast.
The novelist/philanthropist was more vigorous than her wax-figure photographs, and at the same time much frailer. She thrust her shoulders back with a martial bearing when she laughed, which was often, but Cora noticed her hands trembling slightly when they weren’t clasped in front of her. Her hair was beginning to thin. She was grandly imperious in a merrily half-ironic way. When Cora offered her a slice of red velvet cake, which she’d read was the novelist’s favorite, Yvonne said, “Bikini season’s upon us. I daren’t indulge!” Yet she didn’t flinch at the posted Rules of Conduct, scrolled in silver marker on black paper, hung above the TV in the main lounge, and frequently amended for circumstance. In the past few months, necessity had compelled Cora to add NO SHOWING GENITALIA, FLUSH THE TOILET AFTER YOU SHIT, and DON’T JERK OFF IN THE BATHROOM. This last rule was intended for the pre-op MTFs.
Yvonne read the rules from top to bottom, and when she was done she ruffled herself slightly, as though shaking off a light drizzle. Then she smiled brightly at Cora.
“Well,” she said. “Girls will be girls.”
Cora reminded herself that Yvonne Borneo was not easily shocked. How could she be? Her only child, a girl named Angelica, had stepped in front of a bullet train at twenty, after years of struggling with schizophrenia and—it was rumored—heroin addiction and sex work, although Yvonne had never confirmed this. She focused on the schizophrenia, referring to her late daughter as having “lost a battle with a significant and debilitating mental illness.” The foundation she established after Angelica’s death, the Angel Trust, gave money to provide mental health care for young women who had “lost their way” and were at risk of suicide.
Angelica had been the same age as Cora. As teenagers in the same Utah behavior modification program for troubled youth, they had known each other slightly. Cora was waiting for the right moment to tell Yvonne this. She tried to engineer an interval of quiet, seated intimacy, lowered voices, eye contact. But Yvonne moved too fast and talked too quickly, asking about city contracts and capital campaigns and annual reports, and Cora needed her money—the money from airport book sales and Hallmark Hall of Fame movie rights and the pocket change of millions of frustrated housewives—so badly she could hardly keep the desperation out of her voice. The city cuts had been devastating.
The Department of Public Health’s deputy director, who had set up this meeting, warned her to cover her tattoos.
“Even the ones on my face?” Cora had said.
“I forgot about those. Okay, just don’t say anything about her daughter being a dope fiend.”
In Cora’s tiny office, Yvonne lingered a few moments before the Dead Wall, which featured photographs of kids who had overdosed or killed themselves or been stabbed. None of these photos were appropriately elegiac, since the bereaved families usually couldn’t be counted on to give Cora a cute school picture or a Polaroid of the deceased with a puppy. Most of the dead were memorialized in the act of flipping off the camera or smoking a bowl.
Yvonne put a hand to her chin. “It’s so sad,” she said. “Such a waste.”
“Yes,” Cora said.
“Well,” Yvonne said. She sat down, crossing her legs. “What do you envision the Angel Trust being able to do for you?”
She asked this without real curiosity, her tone silky, keen, and as expertly measured as a game-show host’s. Cora began to sweat.
“Well, first of all, I wouldn’t have to lay off any more outreach staff,” she said. Without realizing it, she was counting on her fingers. “And there are basic expenses like rent and utilities. And I’d love to increase Sonia’s hours—she’s the psychiatrist—because we’re seeing a lot more girls with serious mental illness out there right now.”
Yvonne frowned. “Well, the psychiatrist’s hours, yes, I can get behind that. But as for the layoffs—it’s always our preference that my funds not be used as a stopgap for deficits in government funding. My board prefers not to dispense bail-out money.”
And this, Cora told herself, was why she hated philanthropists. Their dainty aversion to real emergency and distress, their careful gauging and hedging of risks, their preference, so politely and euphemistically stated, for supporting programs that didn’t really need help to stay open, but sure could use a shiny new foyer, complete with naming opportunity. This was what she hated about rich people: their discomfort with their own unsettling power to salvage and save, the fear of besiegement that comes with filling an ugly basic need, their distaste for the unavoidably vertical dynamic of dispensing money to people who have none. The way they prided themselves on never giving cash to homeless people on the street, preferring a suited, solvent, 501c3-certified middleman, who knew better. For Cora, the hardest part of running the drop-in was not the necrotized arm wounds, the ubiquity of urine and rot, the occasional OD in the bathroom, the collect calls from prison. It was the eternal quest for money, the need to justify, to immerse herself in the fuzzy, lateral terminology of philanthropy. Over the past ten years Cora had learned that donors don’t give a program dollars to save it from extinction; they “build a relationship” with the program. They want “partners,” not charity cases. And deep down, they believe in their hearts that people in real, urgent need—the kind of person Cora once was, and the kind she still felt like much of the time—make bad partners.
Cora cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, “increasing Sonia’s hours won’t do much good if we don’t have a roof for her to work under, or a way of bringing clients to her.”
She thought she saw Yvonne stiffen. Cora knew she was terrible at diplomacy. When she got angry, she preferred to yell; and if she were in front of the board of supervisors or the mayor’s staff instead of Yvonne Borneo, she would have. But this woman, this sleek, self-made authoress—that word, with its anachronistic, feline hiss of implied dilettantism, seemed made for her—had to be handled differently. She had no civic obligation to stem disease; she helped at her whim. It had to be some little thing that reeled her in, some ridiculous coincidence, some accident of
fate. And Cora remembered her trump card.
There was no time to wait for a transition. She opened her mouth and prepared to blurt something out, something inappropriate and apropos of nothing—I knew your daughter when she was a dope fiend, maybe—when a pounding on the gate stopped her. Then a wailing. Someone was wailing her name.
Yvonne Borneo perked up so markedly her neck seemed to lengthen an inch. “Do you need to see to that?” she said.
Cora excused herself and went to the back gate. It was DJ, a regular client who had come to the door and screamed for her plenty of times before, but never when anyone important was present. Cora had once lanced a six-inch-long abscess on DJ’s arm—she’d measured it—and when the clinic doctor pared away the necrotized tissue, bone showed through. DJ had started coming to the women’s center at nineteen, freshly emancipated from foster care, clearly bipolar, and Cora had been trying to get her to see Sonia for seven years. She was twenty-six now and looked at least forty.
Today she looked worse than usual, in army pants held together with safety pins and a filthy tank top that revealed the caverns of scar tissue on her arms, the bulging sternum that seemed to twang fiercely under her skin like outraged tuning forks. When she saw Cora, DJ thrust both arms through the bars of the gate, like a prisoner in stocks, and wept.
“You came to see me when no one else did,” she sobbed.
“Okay, DJ,” Cora said. “Okay.”
DJ did this a lot: went back and forth in time. She was talking about when she’d been stabbed by a john two years before and Cora had been the only one to stay with her at SF General, eventually securing her a semiprivate room and making the nurse give her painkillers. “Yeah, she’s an addict,” she had snapped at the young woman on duty. “It still hurts when she gets stabbed.”