Banana Rose

  She looked up from the pigweed when she became aware of my presence. “Banana, I’ve got to go to Valencia to train with the young bulls. That’s how you begin.”

  I pointed at the long weeds and yelled, “Watch out! Don’t take your eyes off them. They’ll charge!”

  A week later, I saw her at a party, standing by the guacamole, about to make a quite: legs and feet together, perfectly erect, ready for the charge of the bull. It was a dangerous moment, when the matador faced death at the horns of the great animal. Blue stood still and courageous.

  The Belmonte book was thick. It took her a month to read it, so for a full month she was wholly a matador. I knew she’d finished it when I asked her one morning to tell me about the bravery of the Andalusian bulls. “Oh, I don’t really care about that anymore. Come, see the pink stone I found in the hills.” Her matador career had lasted as long as the book.

  Then she read something about Stevie Wonder. Of course, she became blind. I tried to reason with her. “Look, Blue—”

  “Please, call me Stevie,” she interrupted.

  “Look, Stevie. Shit, you’re not Stevie!” I was exasperated.

  “How do you know? I’m anything I want to be.” She shook her head. “I’m Stevie Wonder. Could you please lead me over to my piano? I can’t see the light.”

  “But you can read. If you were blind, you couldn’t read,” I again tried to reason.

  She turned to me haughtily. “Each person who has lost the use of their eyes is given another gift to compensate. For Stevie Wonder, it was music. For Helen Keller, it was her brilliant mind. I was compensated for the loss of sight with my great ability to read.”

  I couldn’t wait for her to finish that book, because while she was blind, she couldn’t drive and I had to take Lightning to school each day.

  Sometimes I thought Blue was nuts, but it was the kind of nuts I enjoyed. Plus I knew her kind of nuts also made her wise. I wanted so bad to believe what she said about Gauguin—that he would return. I said good-bye to Blue and walked down the hill to the Elephant House.

  Gauguin had stayed with me for five days. He left on a Thursday. I said good-bye to him before I went to work. By lunch, I was surprised how lonesome I was for him.

  After school that day, I went home and tried to paint. I repeated the words he had told me: “ ‘Just do it.’ ”

  I painted the paper all brown, then with red stripes, then blotches of turquoise. I couldn’t get anything going.

  Suddenly, Blue appeared at my door. “Geez, honey, that’s disgusting,” she blurted out, and then put her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry.” She paused. “Well, what is it?” She cocked her head trying to make sense out of it. “Is it a dog? A cat?”

  “No, it’s a helicopter,” I assured her. “You’re right. It is disgusting. It’s entitled, ‘Gauguin Left.’ ” And I began to put away my acrylics, thinking how I hated painting. I didn’t know how to do it. Whoever thought of being a painter, anyway? My mother said being a teacher and then getting married was just a fine thing for a girl to do. I wasn’t a girl, though. My mother didn’t understand. I was a monster. I didn’t fit in. I wanted to be a painter.

  Blue started to laugh. I turned my head. “I’ll buy it if you come down from $2,000 to $1,500,” she said.

  “Never mind,” I said, still grumpy. And then I lifted my brush and stroked a blue line across her forehead. “Ten dollars for this, please.” I held out my palm and smiled.

  Blue was quick. “It goes for fifty.” She put her hands on her hips and pranced around the room.

  Then she stopped and turned to me. “He’ll be back,” she said, and nodded.

  3

  “OKAY, OKAY, MOM, I know. I’ll be real nice to Rita while she’s here,” I said into the phone.

  “Don’t just be nice. Knock some sense into her, Nell. We don’t know what to do with her. Please do something. You’re the oldest....

  I’d heard this all before. I picked at the peeling green paint on the table as my mother harangued me long distance. The more she talked, the more I wanted to murder Rita. I was sitting in the staff room at the Red Willow School. I looked at the clock. In five minutes, I had to go back to my class of fifth graders.

  “Mom, don’t keep calling me here. I’m at work,” I said. “Look, I wasn’t put in jail—Rita was. Stop nagging me.”

  “Well, your so-called commune doesn’t have a phone. How am I supposed to talk with you?” my mother demanded.

  “Don’t. Write letters,” I offered brightly.

  “Never mind. A mother needs to be in contact with her daughter. Please, Nell—”

  “I know, I know. Rita! Take care of Rita. Look, I have to go. Sure, I love you, too.” I hung up the phone. It was two days before Thanksgiving. I heaved a long sigh and went to the door of my classroom. Most of the kids I taught had hippie parents. Four of the children in my group of twelve had dropped acid at least once and probably more. Curly-haired Janice had told me her mother gave her acid on her seventh birthday and they tripped together for the whole afternoon, watching the water at the Rio Chiquita.

  My mother and I had had trips, too, I thought: to Macy’s, to Fortunoff’s, to Abraham and Straus, and then always, after the shopping spree, to Micky’s on our corner for ice cream sodas.

  Just yesterday the kids in class had asked me about my childhood, and I told them about playing school with my grandfather in the living room of the apartment we shared with my grandparents in Brooklyn. Some of them weren’t sure what an apartment was—they lived in rambling, run-down adobes surrounded by fields or in communes, and two lived in log cabins up Kit Carson Road. So I described the fire escape off the kitchen, the dark-green-flowered wall-to-wall carpet, the smell of boiling chicken from the apartment across the hall, the sound of locks clicking into place after the slam of the neighboring apartment door, the footsteps of the people in apartment 3C above us, and the silver bugs that scuttled across the linoleum in the kitchen.

  I’d say to my grandfather, “Sam, you got your addition wrong. Now go to the corner,” and he would stand up, take off his spectacles, and walk slowly to the corner of the room, pretending to weep.

  “You were mean,” Ronnie called out.

  “I was a strict teacher. Sam had to learn to add,” I teased.

  “And then what? And then what?” they would ask eagerly whenever I talked of my childhood.

  Once I told them how my cousins and my sister and I sat out on the stoop.

  “What’s a stoop?” Mirabai asked.

  So I explained stoop and curb, getting the picture just right. I set up blocks like they were steps in front of our apartment house and sat on them.

  “When we all were out on this stoop, we’d bend over with stones in our hands and smash caps.” I bent over and pretended to smash at something. I told them about the thin strips of red paper dotted with infinitesimal portions of gunpowder, and how when you hit the dots just right, they would ignite with a sharp sound and emit the smell of smoke. Some of them had played with caps, but they were surprised I had.

  Then I explained to them about the newspaper stands on the corners in the city and how in Brooklyn, when the rain pelted our street, the drops would bounce when they hit concrete. My sister and I would splash in the river that ran in the gutter.

  “And your sister? Did you love her?” Sage asked.

  “Yes, I loved her, but sometimes I was mean to her. I’d hide from her in the alleys, and she would be scared all alone between high buildings.” Emile and Coyote snickered. “But I did love her.”

  The Greyhound bus was late that afternoon. I stood in the slow Taos rain that was trying to be snow and waited for Rita. I breathed in deeply and looked around. I could hardly see Taos Mountain. It was misty gray, like in a Japanese painting. I’d come to Taos a year and a half before with an old boyfriend named Nicky. We broke up two months after we got here. He left, and I stayed on. I’d known it was my home the moment I saw the mountain.

&
nbsp; It figured Rita was late. Even though I knew it couldn’t be her fault—after all, she was on a bus—it felt like her fault just the same. She was always late. I stuck a piece of chewing gum in my mouth.

  Then I saw the bus in the foggy distance. It pulled up in front of me, and as soon as the door opened, Rita fell out. I caught her in my arms. The driver threw her knapsack out after her and I caught it.

  “Good-bye,” he yelled with a good-riddance voice.

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing.” Rita waved her hand dismissingly.

  “C’mon, it wasn’t nothing.” Rita had beautiful long black wavy hair that frizzed out like Jimi Hendrix’s, and she always wore silver sneakers.

  “I was just singing in the bus a lot, and someone complained, and I asked the passengers to take a vote. I won, and so I kept on singing. Then I lost my wallet in Pueblo, Colorado, where we made a pit stop, and I wouldn’t let the bus leave until I found it. After everyone searched for fifteen minutes, I found it in my pocket.”

  “So you were why the bus was late?” I asked.

  “Naw, it was an awful driver. He was so slow.” She turned her head around. “So this is Taos. It’s so small.”

  “My car’s over here,” I said, toting her bag.

  I took her to dinner at the House of Taos.

  “This restaurant is dark,” she said.

  I looked around. “It’s adobe, and they did a thin wash with straw and sand over the adobe bricks. They have great pizza. Let’s get a green chile. It’s my favorite.”

  “This place feels like jail.” She made a face.

  “Look, Rita, it’s a great place. It’s not New York, okay?” I felt that old crunch in my stomach. It was a cross between rage and claustrophobia. It made me want to run. I’d been feeling it since I was a young kid, so I bolted from Brooklyn as soon as I could and went away to college in Michigan. Since then, I’d only been back home for a week or two at a time for visits.

  “So what was it like in Kearney?” I asked, as a way to shift the energy from Taos.

  “How would I know? I only saw a cell. Look at all the weight I lost.” She showed me the waistband on her pants.

  “Well, let’s order a large. You want anything else? A malt, salad?”

  “Yeah,” she cheered a bit. “Everything. How ’bout a beer?”

  “They don’t have a liquor license.” I made a gesture at a smile.

  “Brother! This place is a honky-tonk—”

  I cut her off and called over the waitress. “We’ll have a large green chile, extra cheese.” I turned to Rita and took charge. “Do you want a chocolate malt?” She nodded. “And a salad with blue cheese. We’ll share it.”

  Rita told me how she and four friends had been driving through Kearney at 3 A.M., high on Quaaludes. They were headed for California and had stopped in a café. “You could just see it,” she said, slurping her malt.

  Just then the waitress placed the pizza before us. Rita pulled some of the cheese off a slice and put it in her mouth. “Five wired freaks from the Big Apple stop for OJ. The café owner took one look at us and called the cops while we were sucking juice at the counter.”

  “You were wearing your silver sneakers, I presume?”

  She nodded, laughing.

  “And your hair was way out, no doubt?”

  She nodded again. “And Calvin had painted a cross on my forehead. I guess it was still showing.” She smiled.

  “I guess it was,” I said like a lawyer. God, I hated playing the part of the big sister. I had my own life, but around my family I always fell back into the same role.

  But I couldn’t stop myself. “And so how long were you there?”

  “Two weeks. Man, I thought I’d die. Daddy started to cry when he heard. I got one call home when they busted us. Mom screamed, ‘This is the final straw!’ I don’t know what she was so uptight about. It wasn’t my fault.”

  I just nodded. I would have liked to put my hands around her throat. Instead, I paid the bill for the food and we left.

  That night Rita wanted to stay up late. I had to teach the next day, so I loaned her my car.

  “Careful,” I said as I handed her the keys. Why did I have to say that? It sounded so square. I sounded like our mother—but, after all, it was my car and Rita had been known to take Mom’s car, run out of gas, and then just abandon it at the roadside.

  Rita’s eyes glazed over as she took the keys. “Sure.”

  Maybe I should go with her, I thought. It’s her first night here, she just got out of jail. But Rita grabbed her coat and in a flash was out the door.

  I went in the bathroom to brush my teeth. I looked in the mirror. Rita and I looked alike, but my nose was bigger. Her chin was wider. She was three inches taller. I don’t know how that was possible. After all, she was the little sister.

  Hey, cut that out, I said to myself. No big, no little. We’re both in our twenties.

  I squeezed co-op mint toothpaste onto my gold toothbrush.

  Happiness knocked at the door. “Come in,” I called, and put the brush in my mouth.

  We both stood facing the mirror. “So that’s your sister, huh?”

  I nodded, my mouth full of paste.

  “You look alike, but you’re different. I mean, I don’t know, she seems tough.”

  I spat out the paste and turned my head to face her. “You only met her for a minute.”

  “It feels like she’s casing the joint or something, and she doesn’t look you in the eye.” Happiness paused awkwardly. “But hey, Banana, what do I know?”

  I just nodded. I didn’t want to get into it. I pulled out a long piece of floss and leaned close to the mirror. “Look at this pimple,” I said. “It’s almost ready to squeeze.”

  The next day, Rita and I walked into town. My right back tire was flat when I went out to get in the car. Rita swore she didn’t know how it happened. She said the car had been fine when she left it in the drive at one in the morning. Luckily, I didn’t have to be at school until ten that day.

  “Well, Nelly, here we are. Riteey and her sissy. Just the two of us.” She took my hand and swung it, like a schoolgirl. “I’m glad I’m coming with you. I’d get bored at that commune. You don’t have a phone, a TV, or music. I don’t know how you live that way.”

  We were walking along a narrow two-way road. Taos Mountain wore a necklace of clouds, with the blue peak high above them.

  “Gee, Riteey, since you’re my sissy, will you fix the tire while I’m at school? Then you can drive and pick me up afterward. Doc’s Automotive is near Red Willow.” I was feeling better. I wasn’t taking all the responsibility. “And then we’ll have some time together. I can show you some of my paintings, and maybe you can even pose for one.”

  “I never changed a flat tire before. I don’t know, Nell. Don’t you have a friend?” she whined.

  “Nope, no friends.” I was beginning to enjoy myself. “You have five hours to do it. I’m sure you can figure something out. Right, sissy?” I ruffled her hair.

  The sky was so blue, so beautiful. I thought of pointing it out, but I declined. I bet Rita could find something wrong with it. It wasn’t L.A. or New York. It had no pollution; it wasn’t gray; it didn’t smell; it was too big; it was a waste of space.

  Just then, Neon pulled up behind us in his electric pink jeep. He had a yellow rubber chicken dangling from his rearview mirror.

  “Hey, Banana, need a ride?” He stuck his head out the window, all shaggy with curls like a lion’s. His head was too big for his body, he had narrow shoulders and a small chest.

  Rita lit up. “Yeah!” she cried, and ran to the passenger seat. The old jeep jangled and jumped and chugged even in idle. We had to speak loudly to be heard. Rita yelled at Neon, “Nell has a flat. I told her I’d fix it while she’s at school. Maybe you could help?”

  I rolled my eyes to the roof in the back seat as we passed the tortilla shop.

  “Sure enough. I’
ll take care of it.” Neon smiled gallantly.

  “Hey, why don’t we all go to the boogie together tonight? I could pick you up at eight.” Neon swiveled his head around to look at me as he turned onto Taos Highway.

  “Hey, watch it!” I yelled.

  Neon turned his oversize head back slowly. “Banana, you seem nervous. Don’t you worry. Neon can drive.”

  “He certainly can,” Rita chimed in as she lit a joint in the front seat.

  “Well, don’t forget the tire,” I said. As I climbed out in front of the school, Neon was handing the joint back to Rita.

  “Oh, we won’t.” Rita waved as they pulled away.

  That night, I wore a red dress I had found in the co-op free box two weeks before, and my sister wore lots of jewelry and a skin-tight sweater dress.

  “You’re fit to kill,” I told her. It was a line I’d heard from our father. She smiled in the mirror and applied silver glitter to her cheekbones. We were leaving in a few minutes for the boogie. I could hear Neon’s jeep in the distance.

  Martinez Hall was across from the Ranchos Church and it was jammed. Everyone I knew was there, including half of my fifth graders with their parents.

  Blue walked over and pinched me on the butt.

  I swung around. “Blue!” I gave her a big hug. “And Lightning!” I grabbed him. He was wearing his black wool cap. He never took it off—not in school, not to go to the bathroom, not to sleep. He was shy and squirmed away, held up his hand solemnly and said, “Hi.” I could barely hear him. The band was tuning up.

  “I want to meet your sister,” Blue said.

  Where was Rita? I looked around. She was gone. I knew where. “You just wait here. I’ll find her in a sec.”

  I elbowed my way through the crowd to the bar in the back. Rita was handing cash to the bartender and reaching for a margarita.