“At this hour of the morning?”
“We used to.”
“We were younger then.”
“Oh, and now we’re so ancient.” He laughed again. “I like to feel your skin. You have a small mole right there.” He touched the inside of her thigh. “You excited?”
“About the move or about where you’re touching me?”
“The move.”
She moaned.
“Is that a yes?”
She moaned again. She heard the baby cry. “Feeding time,” she said. They both laughed.
He turned on the lamp and watched his son nurse.
“Are you watching him or me?”
“Both.”
“Be honest.”
“Mostly him. He’s newer.”
She laughed.
“He’s getting too big to still be nursing. He’s practically walking.”
“I only nurse him at night, now.”
“He eats solid food, Nena.”
“He’s still a baby.”
“He’s almost a toddler.”
“Almost—but not quite.”
“He’s going to be walking—and you’re still going to be breastfeeding him.”
“He’s one year old.”
He smiled as he watched them—then started laughing.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because I’m scared.”
“Are you, Eddie?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do on your last day in Palo Alto, amor?”
“I’m going to take you and Jacob Diego for a walk in the evening and sit in the park and read you a poem.”
“Read me one now,” she said.
He thought a moment, then smiled. He walked out of the room, then reentered waving a book at his wife.
“Where did you find that?” she asked.
“In your secret hiding place.”
“You rat!”
“Shhhh, the baby’s sleeping.”
“He can’t hear.”
“He can feel.”
“I can’t believe you spy on me.”
“I don’t spy on you—I was packing. When one packs, one finds interesting things—and I found this book. It’s a great book, you know?”
She nodded, “I was selfish—I didn’t want to share. I wanted it to be mine.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t read the poem if you don’t want.”
“No, read it.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded.
He opened the book, kissed his wife, kissed his feeding son, and cleared his throat.
“I love you,” she said.
“Shhh.” He cleared his throat again and began reading:
My vision of hell is the large moving van
I am condemned eternally to pack and unpack
as payment for my middle-aged foolishness.
Twice I moved my heavy household coast to coast
and right back, unwilling to give anything up.
Possessions battered from being crated,
friends lost, things bent beyond straightening.
All for learning; If you’re here, you can’t be there …
Maria Elena listened to her husband’s voice and smiled at him. He was the desert after a storm, calm and clean and smelling of sated earth. There was an innocence about him, an innocence no one could take from him—beautiful—especially when he was lost in what he was doing or reading. She could stare at him for hours, and seeing his face, she could find pieces of her life she had lost. He had written his voice into her skin and listening to him was almost as physical an experience as feeling his hands on her body. She wondered to herself how her life had happened to her, how he had happened to her. “Eres un milagro,” she whispered. She rubbed the back of her baby’s head, and thought it all must be a dream, this child, this man, this light in the room, this bed. It seemed she had forgotten her life before him, and now she was beginning to remember again. She wanted a pan of her life back, wanted to retrieve it and give it to her husband, and give it to her child—and give it to the brother she had tried to pretend no longer existed. Home, she thought, I’m going home. Her heart jumped as if it were reaching for the city of her birth. Place mattered. Brothers mattered. She had dreamed of the river, and she tried to remember what the river was saying. No, it was not the river who had been speaking, but her. It was a prayer, a prayer to the river. River … Diego … Home … River … Diego … Home. She stared at her husband. What if he hated it there? What if he hated her for dragging him into a place that was foreign and strange and barren?
Once on a bus in Dime Box. Texas.
a woman who had flagged us down
said to the driver as she sat close behind him
and unpinned her hat: “One place
is as good as another when the heart
grows cold.” “What’s that?” the driver
said, glancing back in the mirror
“One place is as good as another,” she said.
Eddie shut the book. The baby was sleeping. Maria Elena let the quiet in the room surround them. “I liked the poem,” she said finally. “It’s the last one in the book.”
“Is it true?” he asked. “Is one place as good as another?”
She shook her head.
“Will you make love to me?” he asked, his dark eyes wide and pleading.
She put the baby down in his crib. He kissed her. When she tasted him, she thought of the river and tried to remember the prayer in her dream.
Lizzie watched her mother sleeping in the bed next to her. She’s looking old. How many years for her? Is it the years that mattered? But at least she wouldn’t die in his house. She kissed her on the cheek softly, then silently slipped out of the room. No one was awake, not Eddie nor Jake nor Nena. Not the baby. The house was quiet, hollow, stripped of the things of the living. Lizzie stared at the bare walls of the living room—she imagined her name on them. She sat on the back steps in the cool morning. The bridge, she thought, I want to see the bridge. She shut her eyes, felt the weight of her body disappear. She looked down and saw herself sitting on the steps, her white bathrobe rippling softly in the breeze. She felt herself moving toward the city, and found herself astonished as she saw the buildings on the horizon, San Francisco, the only city she had ever loved. Lizzie wondered how she could leave this place so easily. It had meant so much to her, the city where she had learned to care for someone other than herself, the city where she had learned about death, about the dying, about the fragile, ephemeral beauty of the body and how the body suffered and yearned and loved. She remembered the first time she’d ever seen the skyline at night. She’d thought the lights of the buildings were more brilliant than the stars. There was no place on the earth like this city, and yet she was leaving it freely. There was another city in her future. She had dreamed it. Lizzie drifted toward the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. She thought of her father who was not her father and who had brought her here once when he still had some kindness in him. She took herself to the very top of the bridge, then let herself drop into the water. She floated down, down, faster, faster until she felt she had ceased to be—nearer and nearer to water, and as she was about to go into the depths, she pulled herself back up toward the sky. If she would have had a voice, she would have laughed out of pure joy.
Lizzie was back in her body again. Jake was sitting next to her, his hand trying to read her pulse. She turned to him.
He seemed more curious than frightened. “Were you away?” he asked.
“Joaquin told me you didn’t really believe.”
“I felt you. You were gone. How will we know when you’re dead? What if you don’t come back some day?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“I am,” he said. “I don’t want to die.”
She took his hand, opened his palm and rubbed it. “What are you doing?” he said.
“I’m trying to give you my gift.”
> He laughed. It was a beautiful thing to say. He slowly moved his hand away from hers. “Where did you go?” he asked.
“I went to say good-bye to an old lover.”
“Will you miss him?”
“Yes,” she said.
17
TUESDAY NIGHT, Diego spent the evening alone. He was tired, but he tried to keep himself from falling asleep. He was afraid of the dreams, but he wasn’t strong enough to fight sleep. He saw his mother: She was young and was wearing a turquoise cotton dress and her long, dark hair was shining in the sun. In the dream, she had Indian features but white skin. She was holding his sister in her lap. They were yelling and looking for someone. He felt himself in the dark, almost as though he were in a coffin. “I’m right here!” he yelled. “Do you see me? I’m right here!” His voice never reached beyond the darkness. His mother and sister kept looking for him, asking for him, yelling for him. He could see their moving lips. “We’re over here! We’re over here, Diego!”
He woke up with a headache. The sun was coming up and the shadows in his room were cold and unfriendly. He filled the tub with hot water and soaked himself, feeling the wet heal against his skin. He remembered how pretty his sister had looked when she wore her dark red dresses. It made her skin look as gold as the color of cognac. He remembered she once smelled like the rain. He saw a face, a little girl, saw how she looked at him, felt sorry for him because he was different. And then he remembered how she used to tell him to go to his room and hide when her friends came over. He saw himself looking in the mirror when his sister led him to his room. He knew she was playing with her friends. Diego looked in the mirror to see if he was ugly, and the little boy he saw was ugly. He saw his mother’s face—crying. She sent him to a school where everyone was nice, and he had friends. They learned to talk with their hands and look at people’s lips. His teacher was so beautiful, and he wanted her to be his mother. He felt bad because he knew his mother knew what he felt, and he never looked at her in the same way ever again. Their faces wouldn’t go away. They covered him like the hot water in the tub, and he wondered if he had ever loved them.
All day Diego thought of his mother, and his sister. He wondered what city his sister lived in—maybe Chicago, maybe El Paso. He pictured her face at their mother’s funeral—accusing him. He pictured the casket, the flowers, remembered everything as it was except that he could not remember how she died. Maybe she had just died. Diego didn’t remember. He was nineteen when it happened. He should remember—why couldn’t he remember? He felt the steam clean his body; he washed himself and stuck his head in the water and wanted to stay there. Fragments of Mary’s clothes kept appearing before him like pieces of glass. He was afraid of cutting himself.
Diego got out of the tub and made some hot coffee. He dressed himself and shaved in front of the mirror; he looked at himself tike the little boy he remembered. But I’m not ugly, he thought, maybe I was never ugly.
He took a cup of coffee to his desk and stared out at the purple Juárez mountains. He tried to erase the memories. He concentrated on the colors and shadows in the mountains. “They’re really brown,” he thought to himself, “they’re not purple—it’s just the sun that makes them look that way.” He tried to think of nothing. He finished his coffee and filled his cup again. He emptied the dreams out of his thoughts, out of his room. Diego left his building and walked to the bridge; he sat where Luz used to meet him and tried not to cry. He wanted to cry for Mary because they killed her; he wanted to cry for his sister because he had learned to hate her; he wanted to cry for his mother and for himself because he couldn’t remember how she died and because he was thirty and was still afraid. He saw the river, and it seemed to him to be the same color as the inside of Vicky’s Bar. He saw himself jumping off the bridge, and wanted to jump, but stopped himself. I still have a funeral to attend. He walked by Sacred Heart Church and stared at it. The outside was still the same, but inside it was nothing but black dust. The church was gone.
Diego wandered around the city. He sat on a bench at the plaza and waited for the sun to set. When it got dark, he went to bed. He saw a car coming down the street. He saw the space where his mother’s face was supposed to be. The space looked at him. He saw the car. He heard a scream. The car tried to stop, couldn’t stop—his mother was gone. He woke up. He didn’t want to go back to bed. It was four o’clock. He made coffee and lit a cigarette to help him stop trembling.
He put the hot cup of coffee to his lips, and looked up. His mother’s broken body was standing in front of him. He dropped the cup on the floor. His mother was gone again. He remembered, saw her throwing herself in front of that car. It happened in the spring. She did it right in front of him, threw herself down on the street. He put his face between his hands: It wasn’t my fault, he thought, not my fault. But he knew his sister would always blame him, and he would never find either of them again. He thumbed through the pages of his suicide note, and wished his mother had left him a letter.
Diego went back to bed and stayed there all day. He was cold and the dreams, Mary, his mother, his sister, covered him like blankets making him colder. He felt he would never be warm again. Thursday morning he woke up, was lost, and the coffee was more bitter than usual.
As Diego sat on the steps of his house dressed in his tie, yellow shin, and imitation gray fedora, Mundo came by in a parade of three cars. Mundo’s car led the way, a canary yellow ‘57 Chevy with gleaming chrome rims. A deep blue ‘65 Mustang followed and the third car, a ‘71 cherry red El Camino revved its engine as it came to a stop. The cars sparkled, newly painted, as clean as anything Diego had ever seen. The cars were full of dark-faced young men dressed in white shirts and dark hats, young men who looked as if they were going to a wedding. As the cars reached a full stop, Mundo jumped out of the first car, “What do you think? The streets got style when we travel.” He took out a handkerchief from his back pocket and polished the car he was driving. “Gotta treat these babies right.” He took a good look at Diego, puckered his lips; and whistled. “Now we’re cookin’ with gas, man—now we’re lookin’ good. Any woman you want is yours, man—I know what I’m talkin’ about.”
Diego smiled. “You like the hat?”
“It does something for you. All you need now is to grow a mustache, and then you’re gonna be one mean man. They’re gonna call you El Vato de Sunset Heights—I’m serious, ese.” He clenched his fist and thrust it in the air. He motioned his friends, nine of them in all, to get out of the cars. All of them moved toward Diego and Mundo—slowly. Graceful. Diego thought they all looked like dancers. Mundo looked them over and began introducing them.
“This guy,” he said pointing to a dark, hazel-eyed youth with a gold chain around his neck, “his name’s Kiki, but they call him El Guante. He’s got big hands and he used to play baseball—great hands.” El Guante stuck out his hand and gave Diego the handshake of his life.
“You ever hurt anybody with those hands of yours?” Diego wrote.
El Guante looked at Diego’s note strangely. “I don’t like to hurt no one, but sometimes it can’t be helped, you know?” He nodded seriously.
“El Guante’s gonna make a great pallbearer,” Mundo said. “He’s got the most experience of any of us. He’s been a pallbearer seven times.”
El Guante smiled.
“Maybe you should stop hanging around him, Mundo,” Diego wrote, “all his friends are dying.”
Mundo laughed and turned to the guy standing right next to him. “And this guy, this here’s El Kermit. His little sister says he talks like the frog on Sesame Street.” El Kermit smiled and tipped his hat.
A small guy with rough hands and tattoos all over his arms moved forward and shook Diego’s hand. “Indio,” he said, “sometimes they call me Apache.” His muscular arm rippled as he shook Diego’s hand.
“And this guy, here, is El Güero. He looks like a gringo, but he’s all right. He doesn’t like to talk English because of the way he looks.” El
Güero cocked his head toward Diego and took a drag off his cigarette.
“And this guy,” Mundo said nodding to the driver of the blue Mustang, “is El Romeo. His last name’s Romero. The women love his ass.” He looked very plain to Diego, but his skin was dark and smooth. El Romeo shook Diego’s hand and took his shoulder with the other. “Sorry about your girlfriend,” he said. His eyes were black and intense and looking at them Diego knew why they called him Romeo.
“The rest of these guys just came along for the ride.” Mundo pointed to three guys leaning on the El Camino. “I thought you’d want to meet the pallbearers—I picked the most experienced guys. We’ve all done this before—last year I did it twice, but like I say, El Guante’s the best, but all of us are good. I got the best for La Mary.”
Diego smiled and shook Mundo’s hand. “You guys got some weird hobbies,” Diego wrote. El Güero stretched his neck out to read the note Mundo was reading. He tried to keep from laughing, but couldn’t control himself.
As they were getting into the cars, Mundo took him over to the side. “They like you, I mean it. El Güero doesn’t laugh at too many things.” Diego stuck out one of his thumbs in the air and cocked his head. As soon as Diego got in the front seat of the car that Mundo was driving, the engines roared and the cars drove slowly toward the funeral home.
The man in the dark suit stared at them in a controlled manner. He eyed Mundo carefully. Diego handed him a note. “We’re here to accompany Mary Ramirez’s body to the church. We’d like to view the body.” Mundo looked over his shoulder as he wrote.
“Hey,” Mundo whispered to Diego, “you got a real smooth way of saying things. You could be a writer.”
The man in the dark suit stared at them.
“He’s deaf,” Mundo said.
The man’s expression remained the same. “Are you next of kin?”
Diego nodded.
Mundo pointed to his friends. “And these guys here are all the pallbearers.” He looked at them in a professional manner and smiled courteously. He handed a box of carnation boutonnieres to Mundo. “You may put these on, please.”