“This dump? Never. I grew up in a Protestant suburb of Chicago called Libertyville. No one could recover from that, Helen, no one—everyone there is as screwed up as they are white. And then my dad gets this job in what we now call Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley!—shit, that’s worse than Libertyville. When I was in high school my father used to take me to the Hoover Tower and when we’d get up to the top, we’d look out at the Stanford campus, and he’d tell me, ‘This is your school, baby—it’s all yours.’ When I didn’t get in, he blamed the ‘chinks’ and the ‘blacks’ for using up my assigned place in the select school of his choice. It didn’t seem to matter to him that I had nothing but C’s and D’s—and I was stoned out of mind when I took the SAT …” As she continued talking, Helen watched her friend intently and smiled to herself. It didn’t matter in the least to Lizzie that Helen was intimately familiar with every detail of the story she was telling. But Helen didn’t mind: Lizzie’s voice was warm and intense and comforting, the sound of a woman who was real, who enjoyed being alive, enjoyed having a voice, and understood the great pleasure of using it. Helen envied her spontaneity—Helen who was cautious, Helen who was often conspicuously quiet.
The light pink in Lizzie’s short fingernails flew around in the air, and her long, cheap, flamboyant earrings dangled like chimes in the wind as she emphasized the point she was making. “… of course, my parents have never really gotten over my attitudes. Well, I’ve never gotten over theirs. Did I ever tell you about the time I asked my mother if she’d ever had oral sex with my father? She really lost it.”
Helen smiled. “Yes, you told me. But what did you expect? Did you expect her to tell you about her sex life? Give the old girl a break.”
“You always take her side.”
“That’s not true. Why are you always expecting your mother to be someone she’s not? You know her; you know her borders, her limitations—what you can and can’t say. Why do you expect her to change just for you?”
“Well, that’s what’s so wrong with this pop stand of a town—it has too many lines you can’t cross. Everyone’s busy writing their stupid scripts and reading them as if they were the truth. You know, Helen, sometimes people have to depart from the roles their parents hand them. It’s so sickening to watch all the energy people exert in this place to look and be sooo sophisticated, but once you get inside their houses you might as well be living in a small town in Texas. It’s all for nothing, Helen.”
“And San Francisco’s better?”
“Yes, it’s better.”
“There aren’t any snobs in San Francisco?”
“Oh, there are plenty of snobs. If we made them illegal, they’d start speakeasies.” She laughed. “But in the City—in the City at least everybody’s all mixed up with everybody else. Here, in this small town for the overly paid, everybody believes in recycling, everybody drinks expensive coffee, everybody buys organic vegetables and chicken breasts from free-range chickens. But all the Blacks and Latinos who work behind the counters live in the next town. I don’t want any part of it.”
“You are a part of it, Lizzie.”
Elizabeth sipped her coffee, and rearranged one of her earrings. “Yes, I’m a part of it. In some goddamned way we’re all a part of it. But it’s not OK, Helen, Don’t you think there ought to be a revolution in this country?” She pushed her hair back. She laughed at herself, “I’m being ridiculous.” She reached over and grabbed Helen’s hand. “It’s the smoking,” she said, and then added, “but there ought to be a revolution.”
“The smoking?”
“Yeah, the smoking. I quit—cold turkey. It’s been three weeks. Can you believe it?”
“Oh, Lizzie, that’s great.”
“‘Oh, Lizzie, that’s great?’ That’s it?”
“Well, I could have said it’s about damn time.”
“No, that’s my father’s line—he of the pack-a-day habit.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Do I miss it? Are you nuts? Of course I miss it. I’m completely crazed. Oh, Helen, I can’t tell you how much I miss my little lovers. They’re so much more comforting than men.”
“But I bet you feel better.”
“No. I feel worse. I wilt say that my sex addict lover tells me I smell much better. He also says I’m better in bed since I quit.”
“And are you?”
“I suppose so. It’s all that rage—he likes angry sex. Anyway, I fee! as though any minute I’m going to start up again.”
“I stopped three or four times before it finally took.”
Elizabeth stared at her friend with a look of amazement. She ran one of her fingernails against her teeth. “I’ve known you for five years, and you never told me you smoked?”
“I never had a reason to tell you.”
“I talk about smoking constantly—”
“Incessantly.”
“Incessantly—and you never told me you smoked! You snake in the grass.”
Helen smiled and placed her hand over her cup of coffee. “I keep secrets.”
“How many secrets do you keep?”
Helen kept a steady smile. “Oh, I don’t want to talk about this, Lizzie. Let’s not. It was a long time ago. I have a different life now. And it’s this one that counts.” She looked at her watch. “Listen, are you free for dinner?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
“Eddie will flip when he sees you.”
“Yes, your husband loves to be entertained.”
“He loves you, Lizzie. He adores you.”
“Well, I like him, too,” Lizzie admitted, “I just wish he didn’t look and live like such a Republican. My father likes him, you know—that’s not a good sign.”
Helen shook her head and grinned. “Well, Eddie may dress like a Republican, but he makes love like an anarchist.”
“Well, it sounds as if—”
“Shut up, Lizzie, and help me up.”
“Oh, Mama’s getting pushy. Are you going to be a pushy mama?”
Helen put her hands out as Lizzie took hold of her and tugged her up. They both grunted, then broke out laughing. They held on to each other as they walked down the street. Helen wanted to lean into Lizzie and cry and never stop crying. She wanted to learn to let everything out like Elizabeth—all of Lizzie’s words were beautiful balloons floating up into the air, higher and higher. But not hers—she felt too heavy and too self-conscious about the life she’d constructed out of nothing more than words that had no reference to truth. Every word had to be the right word. She was no longer able to enjoy her own speech. She felt obese and ugly and awkward. She wanted to be light, full of grace. It’s this pregnancy, she thought. I’m falling apart. As they turned on Emerson to walk toward her house, Helen hesitated. “Wait,” she said as she turned around, “I want to buy a book.”
Helen rushed into the bookstore, and a few minutes later she held a book in her hands.
“I didn’t know you read poetry.”
“I don’t, but, well, I just, I don’t know. I just got this urge to buy this book. It doesn’t make sense, does it? Cravings. Pregnant women get cravings.”
“For poetry?”
“It beats the hell out of anchovies.”
6
OFTEN, DIEGO WONDERED what it would be like to be dead. Probably, he thought, it couldn’t be very much different from Vicky’s kitchen. He had decided a long time ago that he didn’t like the idea of being alive. When he was twenty, he had begun a suicide note. He was serious about it, and he meant to kill himself as soon as he finished the letter. He worked on his letter almost every day. He told himself he’d end his life when the letter was perfect.
During the week he woke up at three-thirty. He shook—he always shook. It was as if his blood was too heavy for his veins to carry, tco heavy because it had picked up the litany of loneliness that made up the hours of his life. So he shook. And after the shaking stopped, he made coffee. Waking up in his room was like waking up in Vicky?
??s kitchen. He sat at the window looking at the outlines of the downtown buildings and the soundless freeway that was almost empty of traffic. The cars moved so quickly when he saw them pass and he wondered about the sound of moving tires on the pavement.
He had constructed a desk out of a few wooden boards and some bricks he’d stolen from a torn-down building. That was all downtown seemed to be: torn-down buildings replaced by new buildings that would also be torn down. He drank coffee and read the newspapeper from the day before, the newspaper his boss gave him as he went home every day. He enjoyed reading the news a day late.
He put down the newspaper and took out his suicide note, which he kept displayed on the corner of the desk next to a stack of books he’d checked out from the public library. He looked it over carefully, trying to think of changes he might make. It went that way every morning. He added, changed sentences around, scratched out entire paragraphs, and sometimes reinserted them in different places. He scratched his head and drank his coffee, lost in his thoughts. Somehow, he felt there had to be a way of saying everything he had ever wanted to say—everything he had ever thought. He had read a book on how to write, but it did not seem to have helped him very much. He read the letter slowly to himself:
“To whom it may concern …” That part bothered him, but he couldn’t think of what else to say. If it was addressed to someone other than the person who found his body, then there was the real chance they would not even bother reading it. He hoped the landlord wouldn’t be the person to find his body. He hated the thought of Mr. Arteago standing over his dead body like an unholy angel sneering down at him—and worse—he hated to think that he would read his letter. He wanted to write “To whom it may concern (except Mr. Arteago)” but he knew his landlord was just the kind of man to read it anyway, so it was a useless addition. He shook his head knowing there was no way out of his dilemma and continued reading:
“Death is easy. It was life that was so damn hard …” He wasn’t sure about that part either, not because it wasn’t true but because it was so true that everybody already knew it. Why was it necessary to state the obvious? People might not like it and never read the rest of the letter. He scratched it out with pencil. Maybe he could find a better way of saying the same thing. He made a note to himself to go to the library and check out a book of quotes or something like that. Maybe he could find an appropriate quote as a kind of epigraph to his letter. It would be a nice touch. He continued reading: “I always hated that I was born deaf. I think my mother always hated it, too. She never learned sign language. I don’t think she wanted to learn, or she didn’t have time—I don’t know. I think sometimes that she never wanted to hear what I had to say. She knew when I was hungry or thirsty or tired; she knew when I was happy or upset; she knew the easy things, but that’s all she knew. Maybe she didn’t think I had real thoughts. Maybe she thought things were different for the deaf. I don’t know. Maybe she figured because I talked with my hands she could guess everything about me from the outside. She was like everyone else I ever met: always smiling at me and hoping I would somehow go away. Where the hell was I supposed to go?
“I guess it doesn’t matter much. I know she loved me as much as she could. And she loved me better than anyone who has ever known me …” Maybe I should add something here, he thought. He took a drink from his cup of coffee, shook his head, and took down a few notes on the margins of the paper. “… Now, I just go to work in a place where there will never be any signs of the sun and I come back home. I watch people talk; I read their lips and they say things like, ‘I need to get out of his hellhole of a town, I hate this city—it’s fucking dead.’ I saw this lady once, dressed real nice with lots of jewelry, like the Empress Carlota’s, and she was telling her friend that life was a piece of shit; ‘My husband, he buys me rings and necklaces and clothes, and he takes me out once a year like a moveable, decorated Christmas tree.’ I think she wanted to cry—but she didn’t. The look on her face wasn’t angry. She was mostly sad, I think. Sad. And the people I see at work, they look like they’re in a war or something. They don’t even have enough energy to raise the flag of surrender. They all took tired. Maybe it’s me who’s tired—that’s what my friend Luz says. She says everyone looks tired to me because I’m tired. I wrote out on my pad: “Your eyes would be tired too, Luz, if you always had to stare at people’s lips to see what they were saying.” She told me to stop being angry. “You’re not the only one who has to look at those faces,” she said. Maybe she’s right, but goddamnit, I can’t help being angry. I can’t stop myself. Besides, Luz is as angry as I am.
“Most people don’t know I can read lips. It’s a secret I like to keep. Why should I tell them? I just pretend I don’t understand, so they write things down for me. When we have to write things down, we’re all equal. The people who come into the restaurant always tell me I have real nice handwriting—but I read their lips and they say things. And I don’t care for what they have to say. Well, it’s their world—but they don’t have hearts. Luz says I’m too nice to people on the outside and too hard on them on the inside. But one thing I do know: The only way to find out if some people have hearts is to cut them open and take a look because I sure as hell can’t tell by the way they act …” Right here Diego stopped and shook his head. Luz is right, he thought, I am too angry. It wasn’t fair to be so hard on people. And what if someone found this letter when he was dead? Wouldn’t they hate him for it? He laughed. But he’d be dead—he wouldn’t feel a thing. He made a mental note and continued reading:
“The owner of the place where I work, a place called Vicky’s Bar, he beats his wife. I’ve seen her bruises. She left him. She walked in one day and started throwing glasses and dishes and turning over tables all over the place. She had the strength of an earthquake. Talk about angry. ‘You’re lucky I don’t cut your balls off and feed them to the pigeons at the park!’ That’s what she yelled. She yelled alt kinds of other things. He laughed at her and told her all kinds of things. I couldn’t read his lips very well, but I do remember he kept telling her she was crazy. But she wasn’t crazy, not crazy at all. Anyone could see that. He called her a puta. Puta, puta, nothing but a whore. ‘Not yours!’ she said, ‘not yours anymore,’ And afterwards I had to clean up the mess.
The boss told his friends that if he ever saw her again he’d beat the shit out of her. He almost changed the name of the bar after that since he’d named it after her, but he figured he might lose some business, so he kept the name. The boss doesn’t like his sons much, either. He says they’re like their mother. He hired me instead of one of his sons because he said they would rob him blind. He called his sons a bunch of cabrones, and everything else he could think of—lazy, castrated thieves on top of everything else, ‘And besides, the deaf guy’s cheaper.’ I saw him say that to his friend. Everybody’s a target to hit with fists or words; everybody’s toilet paper; everybody uses everybody. Everybody’s mad at everybody—me included. Who wants to live in a world like this? I don’t. Not me. What for?”
He finished reading the letter, and looked it over. He hadn’t signed it yet. Today, it struck him he liked the ending very much, but he didn’t much like the part about his mother. Why drag her back into the world by mentioning her in his letter? She had died her own death already. Why drag her through another funeral?
7
March 27. 1992
Lizzie, you’re just tired—I kept repeating that to myself all the way home. But that last patient, that newly admitted patient, he was real. And I know that being tired has nothing to do with anything. He just stared at me with eyes as black as the grave, stared and stared and then he took my hand and stared into my palm. I had never seen him before and yet his hand felt safe and familiar. “You have a gift.” he said. I smiled at him: “Will my gift get me a raise?” “No,” he said. He didn’t smile back. “It’s not a commodity.” He seemed so sane and deliberate in his speech. It seemed impossible that such a body could speak with such force.
I’ve seen so many AIDS patients that their breaking bodies no longer affect me—and yet I was surprised to feel afraid in his presence. I tried to make a joke. “You’re telling me I can’t make money on my gift? What about the free market? This is the nineties—Marxism is dead.” He laughed, but there was something cold and hard and ironic about the sound of his laughter. It was as if he was laughing not from his heart but from his memory. I felt a chill. The man kept talking, and it seemed odd to me that the cynicism in his voice completely disappeared: “You know, I used to be a Marxist—a real one. But now I’ve regressed back into Catholicism. Did you know you were born a Catholic?” It occurred to me that he had developed dementia. After I changed his IV, I asked his name. “Salvador,” he said. “It’s a lovely name,” I said. “Your friends call you Sal?” “I don’t have any friends,” he said, “they’re missing in action.” He sounded as if he were already accustomed to being alone—his voice as lonely as his laugh. I started to walk out of the room, but he spoke again. “You don’t believe, do you?” “Believe what?” I asked. “You don’t believe you’re Catholic,” he said. “You have to believe.” I lost my composure for no reason at all. I just wanted to leave the room. I wanted to run. “We’re all Catholic,” I said, “everyone who works at St. Mary’s becomes a Catholic. All the nurses here are nuns.” I laughed nervously, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth—the strangest thing—I could suddenly read his mind: “Check the records. Go ahead. Check the records. Mission Dolores. You know where it is. See for yourself.” I had my back to him, but I could hear everything he said, and his voice was inside me—it was his voice, and it wasn’t passing through the air—as immediate as someone touching me. “Stop it,” I said. I think I almost yelled it. “It’s not me who’s doing it,” he said, but he didn’t actually say anything at all—I was reading every word in his mind again, but really it wasn’t even sounds, the words, they had no sounds. I just knew what he was thinking. In that instant, I could read what he was thinking, just like watching a patient being cut open on the operating table for the first time. And then I read his great loneliness, his physical pain, the mourning he felt for his body, the regrets that covered his mind like the unintelligible chaos of graffiti on a wall. His grief was the heaviest thing I’ve ever felt. I don’t know how he bore it, and I was ashamed of myself because I had always assumed I knew what they were going through, my patients. I thought I knew. I was ashamed.