These Women

by Ivy Pochoda

  He’s still staring.

  “Dad!” Marella shouts, stepping away from the wall, placing her hands on her hips and frowning like a petulant teenager. “Stop!”

  Roger blinks, takes a breath. “Sorry,” he says. “I guess your work is transporting.”

  “Okay,” Marella says. “That’s good.”

  Finally, Roger moves on to Dead Body #2.

  She watches him watch the video.

  “That’s me too, Dad,” Marella says. “It’s not real, you know. It’s staged. But not like a movie. It’s supposed to be something. Like, be it, not re-create it or represent it.” She’s blabbering, filling the silence of the gallery with her chatter. Talking over and around and through the disquieting look in Roger’s eyes, the gaze that tells her that there’s more that he wants from the images on the screen, that she’s awakened something in him.

  “What are you running from?” Roger asks.

  “You know, like, it’s an abstract concept but also a real one. Violence is all around us. Sexual. Physical. I am embodying that. I’m re-creating the everyday fear that goes hand in hand for women—the lack of safety. We are prey.”

  “Prey?” Roger says. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  “What I’m trying to do here is to master the fear. I want to control it.”

  “But you’ve become the prey,” Roger says.

  “I guess.”

  “So you can’t control it. Ever. Look.” He points at the screen. “You’ve lost. Whoever is chasing you has won. He always wins.” He sounds almost triumphant.

  “Well, it’s not about him,” Marella says.

  “I like it,” he says.

  Marella wants to tell him that he’s not supposed to like it. It’s supposed to disturb him.

  “Good,” she says. “Thanks.”

  The smile on her face feels forced.

  He’s on to the third piece—Dead Body #3.

  The wind hammers harder. The lights flicker, the monitors flash. Then everything is restored to normal.

  Roger takes a step back so he can see all the monitors at once. He takes his time, his eyes lingering on one through several revolutions before moving on to the next. Marella marks time. Cars swish by. She can hear the buzz of the overhead lights.

  “Dad? Dad?”

  A volley of rain assaults the window.

  “Dad?”

  “How do you know these women?” he says.

  “I mean Julianna lived next door so—”

  “Julianna,” he says. “But you don’t know her.”

  “We’ve met.”

  “But you don’t know her. I know you don’t. You don’t know any of them. You don’t know Katherine.”

  “How do you know her name?” Marella asks.

  “This isn’t your world. This is a dark, dark place. A very dark place.”

  “That’s not the point,” Marella says. “You can find beauty anywhere. Or at least power. Or at least the suggestion of one of those.”

  Roger’s not listening. He’s staring at the monitors like there is nothing else in the entire world. She wants to slap him out of his reverie. She dips into the office and finds a bottle of water that she hands to him. She watches him open it and drink as if in a trance.

  “These women,” he says. “Look at these women.”

  Marella jumps at the sound of her phone ringing in her pocket. She takes a deep breath, then another, trying to summon a calm tone before answering. She looks at the screen. Her mother.

  “A family reunion,” she says, holding the phone to her ear.

  “Marella?” Her mother’s voice sounds tight.

  “At least one of my parents remembered my show.”

  “Your father? He’s there?”

  There’s an edge in Anneke’s voice Marella doesn’t like. “Mom?”

  “I’m coming to get him.”

  “He’s fine, Mom.”

  “Marella, I’m coming to get him.”

  “Just let him be. Let him enjoy my work.”

  But Anneke has already disconnected.

  Marella puts her phone away. If Roger was aware of the conversation, he doesn’t indicate it.

  “These women,” Roger says for the third time. “They don’t belong here.”

  “It’s an art show.”

  “But they don’t belong. They shouldn’t be here. Not here. Not with you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where did you get these photographs?”

  “It’s a collaboration.”

  “But where did you get them?”

  Marella sighs. “I found Julianna’s phone.”

  Roger looks away from the monitors for the first time. Suddenly he’s all business, his voice precise, on point. “Tell me exactly where you found it.”

  “Right outside our house by the tree on the sidewalk.”

  “Do you have it?”

  Marella’s stomach begins to flutter. Her fingers tingle. “I gave it back.”

  “Marella, what have you done?”

  Roger looks down the row of screens. He squats down, looks at each one in turn. He reaches toward the middle screen, presses his fingers to the glass. Leaves them there. Marella watches the images rotate, reflecting on his face as they do. “These women don’t belong here. They don’t belong anywhere.”

  Marella realizes she’s been holding her breath. Realizes she has been holding it not just now but for years. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

  And the violence, it’s not elsewhere, it’s not upstairs with her mother or out on the streets. It’s here.

  And she’s not ready.

  Feelia 2014

  YEAH, IT’S ME. I’M BACK. SO WHAT. I GOT BUSINESS HERE. Lemme talk to a detective. This isn’t some made-up shit. This shit’s important. I have evidence. I need someone to take my motherfucking statement.

  No? You’re gonna tell me no?

  Take a look at this motherfucker. This motherfucking scar—you know what that is. That’s you not doing your job.

  You want me to go into that now? You want me to make a scene? Got my throat slit and left for dead and LAPD did fuck-all.

  But listen up. I’m not gonna haul that dirty laundry out right now. I’m going to turn the tables. I’m going to do you a favor. I’m going to help you out. That’s right, you heard. I’m going to help you out.

  What’s that? You think I can’t be of any assistance. Well, excuse me, Mr. Desk Sergeant. Excuse-fucking-me.

  I think someone is going to want to hear what I got to say about the man who tried to kill me. Because I remember something. Got my memory jogged.

  You want to know what it is before you call someone? You a fucking gatekeeper?

  Fine. Lemme tell you.

  The guy who cut me, he was drinking this wine. Said it was South African. That shit made me laugh, because no way there’s wine in South Africa unless they got giraffes making it. But then he told me to stop laughing. He told me his wife was from South Africa.

  How come you’re looking at me like that?

  That’s what I remember. That’s what I just remembered.

  So you gonna call someone, take my statement.

  Listen, you all got a serial killer running loose around here. So who are you to decide what’s worth repeating up the chain? You want that on your conscience?

  Thank you.

  Thank you for doing your job.

  Thank you for picking up that phone.

  Now hold up. Who’s that you’re calling?

  Homicide?

  Fuck Homicide.

  I know this is attempted murder. But the detective I want to see is in Vice. Detective Perry. Get me Detective Perry.

  How come?

  Last time I was here you were more than happy to show me to her desk. Now it’s all, how come?

  Let me tell you how come. Lady’s the only one who ever listened to me. That’s the truth. So she’s the one I’m bringing this to.

  Call her.

&nbs
p; I’m waiting.

  1.

  THE GROUND IS SWAMPY. THE RAIN HAS RAISED THE MUD above the grass. This is not a nice corner of Rosedale Cemetery. Too close to Washington and Catalina—a filthy side street with dirty houses and human waste from the residents of the campers that are never moved or ticketed. Anneke supposes people don’t consider everything when they choose their child’s grave. She can see how you might overlook certain details. But still the Vargas family should have been more thoughtful. It just goes to show—there’s a pattern. Careless in one respect, careless in another. Bad things happen for a reason.

  Dorian had picked better, up on a hill with a view. Shady in the summer. Green in the late winter and spring.

  Down here is a different story, a muddy, sodden mess of wet earth and debris that’s run downhill.

  At least Julianna’s parents chose Rosedale. At least they didn’t skimp for something farther south.

  Not that Rosedale is as clean or respected as it was even two decades ago. There was a notice at last week’s neighborhood council meeting about a woman who scattered her daughter’s ashes in the cemetery and then claimed one of the most stately graves as her own. She’d even vandalized the chiseled name with spray paint.

  The last time Anneke was at a funeral here was Lecia Williams’s fifteen years ago. A sad, small affair—just the mother, an elderly black couple, and a few school friends of Lecia’s. There were a couple of bouquets, nothing like the garish wreaths and floral crosses propped up on easels at Julianna’s gravesite.

  Today’s event is tasteless and immoderate—a gaudy display of grief and religion.

  Look at Julianna’s friends in their miniskirts, tight dresses, thigh-high boots, and halter tops, their artificial hair and fake jewels. They show too much cleavage and their faces are streaked with runny black makeup. Their laments are vulgar, peppered with coarse words and outsize grief.

  Anneke keeps herself apart from the crowd under one of the few trees in this section of the cemetery. The low winter sun is a healthy yellow orb, neither dangerously hot nor painfully bright. The rain stopped last night and the sky is clear.

  People think that rain is a cleanser, that it washes away the dirt and grime. They think it’s baptismal. Anneke knows better. Especially in the places she’s lived—El Salvador, Central America, India, Thailand, where mud is a disease. Just look around the cemetery at the dirt and funk lifted by the storm—the city’s underbelly bared. The rain hasn’t scrubbed anything away. It hasn’t washed or cleansed. What it’s done is reveal the nature of things, the grime below the surface, the violence glossed over.

  The pastor is alternating between Spanish and English. Julianna’s mother, Alva, is being supported by her husband and her son. Armando doesn’t strike Anneke as much of a crier. He’s a snake, that man. From her second-story window she’s watched him cheat at dice over the years. He uses a controlled throw, predetermining his outcome—using one die to stop and trap the other. A cheap but skillful trick she’s never reported to Roger or the rest of them. Let them lose their money if they’re too dumb to figure it out.

  She’s also heard their fights—the way Armando bellows at Alva, his coarse anger just like someone on a bad TV show. He should have more respect, not just for his wife but for the neighbors. It’s selfish. Improper. That’s what walls are for, to keep everything inside. You pull the curtains. You keep quiet. You maintain order.

  Anneke feels sorry for them, the way they lost track of their daughter. She’s not saying it was all their fault. But there are steps that could have been taken, steps she’s tried to take on their behalf. Thankless is what she’d call them.

  That’s what people don’t understand. All her work to remove prostitutes from Jefferson Park—the plans she’s unveiled at the neighborhood council for photo-shaming, online exposure, and citizen patrols—isn’t simply to make the neighborhood more genteel. Her efforts are not to raise her home value. She does it to save the women, make them feel unwelcome and move on. Because look around—this is no place for someone to be working the streets.

  Anneke folds her arms over her chest and purses her lips. She can feel the twitch coming in her right eye. She tightens her lips to try to still the tremor, pinching them so tight her teeth grind against one another.

  Dorian, dressed in an old black dress now blue with age, is standing off to the right of the family. You would think that one time would have been enough for her to go through this. But here she is again like she’s inviting the pain.

  Her daughter—now that was a shame. She wasn’t like the others. Even Anneke knew that. But it doesn’t matter how you lived, only how you died.

  If only Dorian knew what she was doing by feeding those women, grounding them here and making them comfortable. Anneke tried to show her. But no one pays attention. No one listens to her.

  A decade and a half of working at NGOs around the world taught her that. Fifteen years of explaining hygiene and hazards to mothers who looked at her with blank faces like there was no way a prim white lady could understand how their bodies work or the work they did with their bodies.

  Roger taught school in those impoverished communities. That was a better job. Anneke didn’t have the patience for schoolchildren.

  By now she no longer has the patience for any of it. Which is why she moved into elder care when they settled in Los Angeles—a city that often seems little better than their third-world communities. At least there’s nothing she needs to teach her wards in their sanitized home in the cliffs of Malibu. There’s nothing left for them to learn. All they need is to pass their days in peace—a card game, a craft, a digest of bland midday television.

  It’s a relief not to care whether or not someone listens to her, whether anyone follows her directions. There is only so often you can tell people about the diseases in a droplet of water, in a puddle of mud, a pinprick of blood. There are only so many times your warnings can go unheeded before you grow angry, filled with the sour venom of disregard.

  The women in Malibu are always happy to see Anneke. They already know that the world provides no spectacular surprises and that they are not invincible or immune. They are done, coasting to their inevitable close.

  She puts a hand to her eye to stop the twitch. Her skin feels hot, as if it, too, were angry.

  They are singing a hymn now, first in Spanish then in English. The congregation has come together—the family, those women, and even Dorian. They are clasping hands, singing to the Lord that Julianna be preserved.

  There is no Lord. Anneke could tell them that. Her father was a missionary, her mother an international Red Cross nurse. They met outside Johannesburg. Soon the family was moving from country to country as one preached and the other tried to heal, and not once—not in any of the slums, not in the famine areas, not in any of the war-ravaged cities or the refugee camps—had she detected an iota of God’s grandeur or grace. All she saw was chaos and desperation.

  Which is why you need to tend your own house, keep it neat, make rules, instill traditions, anything and everything to keep the chaos out and the evil at bay.

  But her father saw things differently, putting his trust in God, pronouncing his benediction, commanding his wards to believe as if that was all it would take.

  May God preserve you in his light.

  May God preserve your family in your heart.

  May the beauty of God be reflected in your eyes.

  May the kindness of God be reflected in your words,

  and the knowledge of God flow from your heart,

  that all might see his grandeur all around you

  and in seeing, believe.

  Every day these words. Sometimes hourly, sometimes more. And never once did Anneke see God’s grandeur. Never once did these words elevate or ameliorate. They didn’t fix anything, and as far as she could tell, they didn’t keep anyone safe.

  Babies died.

  Mothers died.

  Men were murdered.

  Men murder
ed.

  But still:

  May the kindness of God be reflected in your words,

  and the knowledge of God flow from your heart,

  that all might see his grandeur all around you

  and in seeing, believe.

  Believe. Believe in the face of desperation, devastation, and a hundred types of death. Believe when you’re riddled with disease. Believe when your home has been destroyed, when bombs are falling, when the world around you is rubble.

  Regardless, her father prayed. His wards repeated his words. And decades later his prayer is still stuck in Anneke’s mind. It comes to her in dreams and reveals itself in the rattle of the car over rough roads and the roar of a muddy river. She hears it in the stop-start traffic on the freeway and the crash of the surf in Malibu—the words commanding the impossible. Believe.

  The priest in Rosedale begins his own benediction. A conventional one from Romans. Armando and Hector lead Alva around to where the priest is standing. Anneke watches her swat their hands away as she steps forward to stand unaided. She takes a small scoop from the priest’s hands and bends down to fill it with dirt from the mound on the side of the grave. She takes off her sunglasses so the crowd can see her eyes. Her mouth opens and closes several times.

  What could she possibly say? What needs to be said?

  Hector rubs her back. Alva takes a deep breath. Then her eyes find Anneke’s, fixing on the one person standing apart from the proceedings. As if somehow that gives her strength.

  “We will never know why,” she begins. She stands up straighter and tries again, her gaze never leaving Anneke. “We will never know why,” she says once more. She clears her throat. “We will never know why the Lord decided to take Julianna from us.”

  The space between the two women narrows. There’s no open grave. No congregation of mourners. There are no tacky wreaths or muddy earth. It’s just Alva and Anneke alone.

  “We will never know why the Lord decided to take Julianna from us,” Alva repeats as if Anneke might provide an answer. “We will never know—”

  Anneke shakes her head. “If that’s what you want to believe,” she says, her voice clear and proud. “The Lord had nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.”