Been logged off here for about a month... I've got so many people to reply to but I wanted to post something first :)
The sensation of the lye lingers long after the straightening's done, burns my scalp and the back of my neck like I'm being dissolved in acid— which isn't the least accurate metaphor in the world, considering what that stuff actually is. "Be careful," I hiss at Ximena, swivelling my head a solid one-eighty degrees as she knocks the brush against another sore spot. "Do you always have to tug like we're about to miss the bus if we don't hurry up? You're gonna break it."
"Stay still, you always was tenderheaded." The warmth of her smirk hits like a stray sunbeam as I sit between her spread knees, casting me back to childhood. "You're lucky I don't whack you with the back of the brush like Mami did, when we squirmed around."
My mama used to stand me in front of the mirror before bedtime prayers, her scent of Pond's cold cream and rose lotion soporific, and tell me that I was the most beautiful girl in the entire world— which makes me feel blessed that unlike Jasmine's, mine wasn't Lauren Bacall's doppelgänger. As sorry as I often felt for myself growing up, I can't imagine looking into my own mother's face and struggling to find myself reflected in it.
Patience with her unruly children, however, wasn't her strongest suit.
"I'll show you tenderheaded— what'd Tía Salomé always tell you, that you had a waterfall of those perfect, silky curls—"
"You wouldn't be so hard on her, if you knew what she had to deal with," Ximena says matter-of-factly, tipping me backwards by the scalp and straining my hair at the roots. "Tío Chaco's steppin' out again with some perra half his age, tryna get that son on her, and either she's in denial or nobody's got the heart to tell her, but—"
I reach down to scratch an unshaven patch of skin on my ankle instead of groaning out loud, but it's a close thing. My Tío Chaco, who thinks the three guitar chords he knows qualify him to join Los Hermanos Carrion and expects to score girls like they're his groupies, despite coming on fifty, isn't on his first rodeo here— like some knockoff of Henry the Eighth, he's starting to get worried about who's going to carry on his family name and inherit his two-bedroom shotgun house and rusted-over truck, once he's gone. He also walked in on me in the shower when I was seventeen, playing it off as an accident. If I'd told Papi and let a couple of tears drop onto my towel, I could've sent Tío Chaco to kingdom come that night, but I was a lot more naive in those days. I reckoned the lock on that bathroom door had always been finicky, after all, and never thought about it again.
Tía Salomé can relate every piece of gossip on the East side, a decent amount on the North too, about who's dropped out of junior college or knew each other carnally before they reached the altar, but if a word of this has ever gotten back to her, she sure has one heck of a poker face. At any rate, she's a Catholic. She's making the best of it.
"If he'd ever succeeded with a single one of those women, maybe I'd feel sorrier for her," I say a little too drily as Ximena yanks the brush through yet again, sucking in a hiss between my teeth. Or if she had a nicer daughter, for that matter— my b-word prima Leti asked, when I could barely stand up unsupported and was soaking through maternity pads as thick as diapers, when I was planning to try for a boy. "As it is…"
I don't love the bitterness in my voice, or the tremors in one of the tenets of my faith, like an earthquake running through a fault line. I know, even if it's hard to always accept, that God doesn't give us anything that we can't rise up and handle. Going through what I have, it's all made me into a better person— it's my obligation, in fact, to leverage all of it to be a better person, someone with compassion and empathy for everybody else who hurts. But what does it say about the value of that particular teaching, if Tía Salomé's own pain's made her no more sympathetic to Sugar Beth's man running off to Bixby with a cocktail waitress, and, in fact, made her twice as eager to speculate about what failing of hers as a wife drove him to it?
What does it say about me, that some malaise with my daily routine is curdling inside of me like this, turning me more jaded than a Ming dynasty vase? I don't know if my sarcastic streak is the best quality for the Lord to be developing, and it's sure been getting sharpened to a fine point lately.
"I'd just like to point out, for the court stenographer—" Ximena pauses halfway through the stroke to examine me, jolting me out of theology and back into the present moment— "that you're married to a man with a massive facial scar. I don't think he's got any room to be twittin' about your looks… in your mind, that is, 'cause he sure didn't actually say anything."
I'd rather drop dead right here and now than tell my kid sister just what led me to that conclusion— that he hadn't had to say anything, to make it perfectly clear. And sure, Lucy Gallagher put on twenty pounds with gestational diabetes she's made no progress shedding, which hasn't dampened the fire of Harvey's ardor for her whatsoever— she came into Bible study Monday night with a hickey sucked into her neck like a Will Rogers senior, not covered up with any powder makeup, either— but Harvey's kind of simple. Lucky the third or fourth prettiest girl at Central High looked twice at him before she was in the family way with Nicole, and he knows it.
Tim had that woman sitting at my kitchen table like it was where she'd always belonged.
"Don't make fun of his scar now!" I say instead, especially since she doesn't even know the gut-wrenching circumstances of how he got it, behind the cover story he spun for Angela's sake. "It gives his face character— I swear that whole family's too pretty for their own good."
"If that's the kind of crap you have to start comin' out with after you get married, you shouldn't be so surprised I ain't as eager as you were to walk down the aisle."
"It's not a prison sentence, you know, even if they call it a ball and chain," I try to chide gently, and end up lacing it with more harshness than I intended. I'm only four years older than my sister, but ever since Mami got sick, somewhere between figuring out how to best scrub vomit out of the carpet and cater to Ximena's picky eating, I've felt responsible for bringing her up all the same. "You're not plannin' to live with Papi forever, are you, look after him in his old age?" Though I suppose he's got that woman of his— no, I can't let myself get distracted, that needs to wait until later. "Don't you want your own home, your own family?"
"There's a couple more options in between, there, if you ain't heard it's the seventies now." She layers my hair over my shoulders with a care that belies her dry words. Then she takes a deep breath, like she's about to confess to pocketing a lipstick from the drugstore before she loses her nerve. "I can always strike out on my own—"
"What?" It's rude to interrupt, even as I'm crushing my sister's dreams with the blunt force of a dropped anvil on Looney Tunes, but I can't stop the word from flying out of my mouth all the same. "With what money, and who do you think's fixin' to rent to you?" The bank wouldn't even let me take a credit card out without my husband's permission— not that he'd had to be persuaded, but they still asked for a signature— and she wants to tangle with a landlord by herself?
"With my own money, from a job." She puts a condescending inflection on the word 'job', like she's the one explaining basic facts of life to me. Like I sit around this house eating bonbons all day, for that matter, some West side socialite with a nanny and a maid to pick up after her mess. "I'm not just in school to husband-hunt— I don't know why you're so against me takin' college seriously, you was always buggin' me about homework growing up. Even you wanted to get one, a few weeks ago—"
"I don't want a job because I think it'd be a nice change of pace, or to get empowered," I say, maybe a little more bitingly than she deserves. It's also, at least in part, a lie. Neni squirms from where she's laying on the floor, gestures towards me with her flailing arms like she's trying to swim on dry land. I make a kissy face at her. "We need the money bad, we've got bills up to here, especially from when I was in the hospital." Some with FINAL NOTICE in bold red letters splashed across the envelope, which I'm not supposed to be noticing, but I've got a working set of eyes.
I'm telling myself it's her naiveté I find annoying, that having grown up in the protective if smothering cocoon of Papi's love, she doesn't even understand the implications of her petty rebellion. What I'm really trying to take a stab at is my own sense of guilt. I made the financial mess we're in, I should be helping clean it up.
"I was talkin' to my advisor," she says, with a bullheaded determination that tells me her mind's made up, "I'm not doin' a home economics major anymore, I hate it and I can't sew worth shit. I'm switching to chemistry, maybe."
"You want to be a scientist? Like Marie Curie?" I'd imagined she wanted to teach, maybe, nursing at the most risqué. "They won't even have a women's bathroom for you to use in the laboratory—"
"Like I said, you'd be shocked by what they're lettin' girls do nowadays—"
"You'd be takin' a place from a boy that could get a draft deferment, in graduate school." I'm thinking of Soda— though, God bless him, a college anything wouldn't have helped his particular case all that much— but there's already so many being sent back to this neighborhood, in coffins draped with American flags. "Didn't you think of that?"
"So the war in Nam's my fault now, is that what you're sayin'? I wasn't even old enough to vote for Nixon when he got re-elected, it sure wasn't my idea." She attacks the ends of my hair now, her strokes brisk, with a cylindrical curling brush. "I can't stand it any longer, Papi and our aunts and even you all up in my business all the time, settin' curfew, sendin' me out on dates with accountants to finally get me off the shelf. I don't want to go straight from my daddy's house to my husband's, and I don't want to just be some wife and mother, and I don't think that's a crime against our hometown heroes."
"Let's don't fight," I concede with a heavy sigh, like that's supposed to be some kind of peace offering. I want to tell her about how hard the world beats down women who try to strike their own path— heck, it's barely ever kind to women like me, who try to play by the rules and be good— but it's not coming out right, it never does. Or about how much 'just' a wife and mother stings like a slap with her shoulder put into it, but I don't so much feel like disemboweling myself and strewing my guts all over the floor right now, either. Then Ximena puts down the brush and flashes a mirror in front of my face. "Holy shit." My hand flies to my throat. I can't even bring myself to take back the cuss.
She grins at me, our earlier animosity forgotten, as our gazes meet in the glass. I had my doubts about soliciting her services, but my hair looks great.
I'm not allowed to be on the North side anymore— Luis left the consequences to my fevered imagination— so Diego agrees to meet me in some decrepit dive along the Ribbon, the kind only the ballsiest of high schoolers try to sneak into. I feel about nineteen or twenty again as I walk in, the air as muggy as a Louisiana swamp with cigarette smoke and Old Spice-masked sweat, my stomach lurching like I've been grabbed from behind. Not out of dread or nervous anticipation, or hell, even guilt over the sneaking around— I'm allegedly helping Darry move in a couch he got from the Salvation Army, and didn't even bother to call him and confirm my alibi— but because of just how easily the man I was comes back to me. I might as well have been on an extended vacation or a reconnaissance trip to the suburbs, the way I expect to immediately be approached with someone's outstretched bundle of cash or choice piece of gossip or fist flying towards my face.
"Took you long enough, hermano." Diego could be handsome in the same way I could be handsome, if he didn't show his entire life story on his face— crooked nose, puckered scar in the center of his forehead, angry slash stretching out the side of his mouth from a prison knife fight, which makes him look like a stroke victim. He stands up from the bar like a rabbit poking his head out of his warren, waiting for a hawk to swoop down and scoop him up if he loses focus. He visibly relaxes when he sees it's me. "Figured that note was long gone before you ever got a chance to ring the number."
I lean forward and realize, with no small amount of embarrassment, that I was about to start in on our complicated handshake from when I was eighteen. Diego just grins at me, though, a slice of crescent moon in his face, and falls right back into motion. Even after five years, all the steps are still etched into my muscle memory, too.
"How was the big house?" I drawl, settling into my own barstool and promising myself to drink slow. I've learned from years of harsh experience about the dangers of dealing under the influence. A dozen shots each, and I'll wake up having sold my soul to the devil in exchange for a car I don't have to push up particularly stubborn hills.
"Better than yours, by the looks of it." My eyebrows about hit my hairline. "I saw your place the other day, don't even start playin' it down, it's a complete shithole," he says, bluntness not just born out of a glass of whiskey. After a few seconds' deliberation, he sips some more of it from the brim like it's hot soup, liable to burn his mouth if he gulps down too much at once. "Agustín, that tightass won't give you a penny to renovate, will he? Swear 's just like him. Probably lettin' Gabi suffer just to prove a point, 'bout what happens when you don't listen to him."
"You been to see him yet?" I ask, instead of saying anything else at all.
He looks me dead on, then spits on the ground. "I didn't bring you here to talk about that kind of shit," he says. "Tú lo sabes."
"Then enlighten me already, I'm missin' Neni's bathtime for this."
"I'm lookin' to spread my wings," Diego says. My mind goes to turkeys, flightless birds that end up nowhere, before I can stop myself. "I had nothin' but time to think in the pen, 'bout what I was gonna do next." I'm delighted that our justice system's proven to be as successful as ever, in turning a twenty-something dumbass who probably would've grown out of it into a hardened career criminal. "Reckon I want off the East side altogether."
"The hell's there to do on the West?" That's where all the white folk live, and not even the poor white trash who raised me— the kind with window alarms and security systems, who call the police and expect actual help to come running. "You're borrowin' trouble."
"A whole fucking goldmine, if you're pushin' coke, there ain't no real market for it around here." He smiles. "Doctors who need an extra boost to make it through their shifts. Bored housewives who want to drop twenty pounds before the high school reunion. Maybe get in a little burglarizing while we're at it."
"You're fixin' to get yourself shot." Breaking into people's houses is going a little far even for me, and that's saying something. "This is Oklahoma, you think even on the West side people ain't armed?"
"Hell, like we ain't fixin' to get ourselves shot on the East, too?" He traces the ring of precipitation from his glass with his finger, smearing it around. "Look, I want you on board, you know what you're doin' better than me or half my guys." Oh, I'm certain of it. He gives me another smile I'm sure he thinks comes off as charming, and just reads as unstable. "We're brothers— it'll be like a family business."
I bite back my automatic addition, in-law. Sounds too much like Curly sticking half wherever he could fit it in, when he was hacked off at me, and I can't think about Curly, not here, not now. Not to mention my powerful aversion to getting roped into yet another 'family business', when I just managed to extract myself from the last one. "Sorry to disappoint, but I'm out of the life, all of that shit, for good." Which is why I'm here in this dodgy bar, and not laying out Neni's pajamas and floating her rubber duck in the sink, because I'm so very committed to going and sinning no more. "Gabi won't have none of this, anyway, so don't get your hopes up. Our marriage ain't gonna survive another custodial sentence."
He makes a loud cracking noise with his tongue; I glare at him. "Whipped or not, she ain't the man of your house— she'll change her mind real quick when you start bringin' in this kind of money, besides. That hole in the kitchen ceiling alone must be drivin' her insane, she used to have clippings on her bedroom wall from Ladies' Home Journal, with all the junk she wanted to decorate with after she was married."
"I already knew you weren't hitched, without you havin' to tell me as much," I say instead of thinking about the complete shithole I dragged her into. "Sleepin' on the couch gives me neck aches, sorry."
"Chinga tu madre," he capitulates without a lot of heat. "At least have another drink with me, c'mon, I'll pay. Been a long damn five years, and nobody's kept me real well caught up."
"I can't," I say, draining the last few dregs of from my glass and dropping a dollar onto the bar, "I need to start gettin' back." Maybe I can see Neni before she goes down for bed, at least. I miss my kid.
And if I leave now, I won't think about the bills and the interest that keeps accruing on them, and I won't think about the hot, sticky shame of Diego's daddy telling me I can't look after my own wife, and I won't think about how flattering it was to hear him admit I know what I'm doing, when Luis had been all harsh words, ego-stomping, life lessons delivered with a condescending smirk. He's playing me, but realizing he's doing that isn't making it less effective.
"Just consider it," he tells my retreating back. "I know what you were really tryin' to do was get the hell away from your uncles, and nobody can blame you. You want to be a shot-caller instead of a shooter, for once?"
My makeup's a flaky mess by the time he's finally home, foundation sinking into my pores, lipstick half-faded off— I'm starting to feel ridiculous with my sudsy forearms in the sink, all dressed up with no place to go. How did June Cleaver manage to pull it off every night when Ward came home from work, and in heels with a string of pearls around her neck to boot, an amphetamine diet pill script? With the baby down— at least for now— I want to be in slacks, a bowl of ice cream clamped between my knees, watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
"How was Darry's?" I clasp his arm, Audrey Hepburn clinging to Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, but I've missed my cue, and was never much of an actress to begin with. He kisses me like an uncle kisses his second or third-favorite niece at Christmas, perfunctory, fleeting. I leave a damp handprint on his shirtsleeve. "Did y'all have fun?"
What I really want to ask is why he wasn't home in time to help with Neni's bath, or putting her to sleep, or the endless pile of dishes, like he said he'd be, but I'm forcing myself to put aside the nagging wife routine for once. I'm tired of hearing myself talk at this point, for Pete's sake. "Yeah, it was a real gas," he says, avoiding eye contact like I'm Medusa and can turn him to stone with a glance. "Darry's, uh, got a new girl now, Lydia? I think it's gettin' more serious… 's good for him, he's been real down since he and Judy split."
For someone who used to be an accomplished gang leader, Tim's a terrible liar, at least to my face. Moreover, I love him dearly, but worrying about how Darry's been holding up during the divorce process is not something, in a million years, he'd think to do. Now I'm forcing myself not to dig into where he actually was, not waste ten dollars and hours of effort. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he's really been working on his emotional and interpersonal intelligence. "What do you think of my new dress?" I try to ask in a sultry way as I pose, looking up at him through lashes the result of Maybelline Ultra-Lash ('so soft, so natural he won't believe his eyes!') and a curler I had to borrow from my sister (and almost burned my eyeballs out of my head trying to use). The stink of desperation coming off of me has got to overpower my perfume.
He cringes. Visibly. "I don't tell you what you can or can't wear out, when have I ever done that?" He gives me a reassuring, pitying look. "It's nice, y'know, appropriate."
Why, how'd he guess 'nice and appropriate' was just what I was going for? My post-partum stomach strains against the tight fabric cinched at the waist; I want to take it off, and it seems like it won't be coming off the fun way. "I straightened my hair, too," I say, brushing aside a piece the steam from the sink made cling to my forehead. This is just getting pathetic. "Ximena came over, to help…"
Judging by his viscerally uncomfortable expression, he hadn't noticed a thing until I pointed it out. "I really don't think it's my place to tell you what you should or shouldn't be doin' with your hair."
Lord, okay, I quit— I've got enough dignity left to not outright fish for compliments with bait at the end of my hook. Then I turn my neck, and it's faint even in our cramped kitchen, but still there all the same; the sharp, rubbing alcohol stench of hard liquor. "You and Darry been drinkin'?" I'd understand beers, but they wouldn't be knocking back anything harder; they both work construction, they'd have enough sense between them. And Tim doesn't drink that much to begin with, he wouldn't need shots of whiskey to lubricate a night at home with, well, the closest he'll let himself have to a friend.
He rubs the back of his neck. He couldn't be more obviously guilty if he was on the stand, waiting to get sentenced, and I really need to abandon that particular metaphor before I run away with it. I didn't cry, when the judge told him he'd be spending a year in Big Mac; his mother did, though, like she had any right to. "A little. I'm sorry," he adds, unnecessarily, taking his own step off cue.
"Okay." I give him a beatific smile, like you'd see on statues and paintings of the Virgin Mary. Patient and long-suffering, the way a woman should be, right. A good Catholic woman, anyway. Making the best of it. "Can you fetch Neni her bottle when she wakes up later?"
I scrub at my face with a soapy rag, once I've locked myself in the bathroom. The faucet leaks in an unpredictable rhythm, jarring me out of a sense of dread so complete, it settles over me as calm. I need to square up to the truth, no matter how much I don't want to: my man's stepping out.