by Laura McNeal
“Keep driving,” Robby said with his usual semi-irritating authority. “We should close the borders to all mimes. And clowns. And folk dancers.”
Amiel, so graceful and brown and lean, was wearing a loose T-shirt and jeans, so he didn’t exactly have that I’m-a-mime look about him. To my surprise, Hoyt slowly swung the Packrat onto the dirt. Five men swarmed the truck right away, clapping their chests, gripping the doors, and shouting in English and Spanish until you hated yourself. They called Hoyt “Señor” and “Mister.”
“Uno momentito,” Hoyt said to the workers, his stock phrase, and I looked kind of desperately at Amiel, hoping he’d somehow impress my uncle.
“That one,” I said.
Amiel saw me, so he pointed to himself with an extra-long, extra-expressive finger. He raised one eyebrow. He looked in an exaggerated way behind him.
“Oh my God,” Robby said. “If he gets into a box, I’m going to shoot myself.”
The mime walked slowly toward the pickup, which was angled so that he was approaching Robby’s side. Hoyt patted Robby’s knee and said, “Roll down your window, Rob.”
It was that kind of truck, where you had to roll, so Robby did, but very slowly. “This is not worth a donut,” he muttered.
“You know how to use a chain saw?” my uncle called out Robby’s window at Amiel.
All the other men were still holding Hoyt’s door like they were in deep water and we were a boat. “¡Sí! Chain saw!” they said, but Hoyt was still looking out Robby’s window at the boy who was now six inches from me.
He was slender to the point of bony, with a smooth, narrow, mournful face. His eyes were a lighter shade of brown than his skin, like gold sand in a river bottom, and his nose might have seemed large if his eyes hadn’t been so arresting. In contrast to his straightness and tautness, his hair seemed uncontrollably curly.
Amiel held one hand in the shape of a C, a gesture I later learned was his gesture for “sí.” He strapped an imaginary pair of goggles over his creek-glitter eyes. He pulled on an imaginary cord and started up an imaginary chain saw. He shuddered and appeared unable to control the weight of it, then nodded to himself and smiled at us before starting to cut through an invisible tree limb. He stopped the chain saw and picked up the imaginary log and presented it to us.
Uncle Hoyt laughed. Robby groaned. The other men, the ones at Hoyt’s window, made disgusted noises and looked angry enough that I knew things would be worse for Amiel if Hoyt just drove away.
But he didn’t. “What the hell. Hop in!” Hoyt said, then he nodded at the oldest man hanging around his door handle, a guy who couldn’t have been more than four and a half feet tall under his black cowboy hat, and said, “You too, señor.” I felt extremely happy and was full of affection for my uncle. I just knew he wouldn’t be sorry.
The very small old man and Amiel climbed into the narrow backseat.
“What’s your name?” Hoyt asked.
The tiny vaquero said he was called Gallo, and Amiel handed us a not entirely clean business card that said AMIEL DE LA CRUZ GUERRERO. HARD WORKER.
“Are you deaf?” Hoyt asked him, returning the card to Amiel.
Amiel shook his head and pointed to his throat.
“Well, mucho gusto!” Hoyt said, another of his stock Spanish phrases, and Robby looked like he was figuring out how fast he would have to roll if he jumped out of a truck going thirty miles per hour.
“Where are you from?” Hoyt practically shouted in Spanish to the old vaquero in the back. The truck was loud with the windows down, sunshine and wind whipping us all, the motor roaring. But it wasn’t just that. Uncle Hoyt, like just about everyone else, spoke louder in a foreign language, and I think he still thought Amiel was deaf. Bougainvillea flew by.
“Acapulco,” the old man said beautifully, like it was the name of a love song.
“This is my son, Roberto,” my uncle announced real slow and loud, and Robby shrank into the door. “I’m Hoyt, okay?” he went on. Then he added, “This pretty señorita here is my niece, Pearl!”
“You daughter?” the old one asked in English.
“Sobrina,” Hoyt said.
“Sí,” the vaquero said. “Sí. Sobrina.”
By this time we were crossing the freeway to Rainbow, population 2,026, elevation 1,043. Rainbow had its own elementary school, café, gas station, and fruit stand but was otherwise just a strung-out collection of ranches, packinghouses, nurseries, and farms. Huge boulders were clumped in all the hills like brown sugar that’s gone hard on you, and lilacs and oak trees grew crooked and wild in their shade.
Six months from this day, a fire would leap from east to west, from Rainbow to Fallbrook. Eight lanes is a lot of concrete for a fire to cross, and I would have told you there was no way it could ever happen. In spring, everything is so conk-you-in-the-head pretty. Painted lady butterflies kept fluttering past the windshield, the air smelled like orange blossoms, and Amiel was in the backseat. I understood exactly why people wrote musicals.
We turned and headed toward the gate that Uncle Hoyt welded in adult education classes before Robby or I was born.
“Here we are,” he said, steering us under the sign that said LEMON DROP RANCH in loopy iron letters. When I was little, he would always sing, Where troubles melt like lemon drops, away above the chimney tops, that’s where you’ll find me.
In Rainbow, see.
We drove under the arch, gravel popping under the tires of Hoyt’s truck as I moved into the future, where I would be Perla and Amiel would sign my name by opening the oyster shell of his two hands and extracting a small invisible pearl, his long expressive fingers turning into a nest and then a bird, undulating so that you forgot his hand was a hand at all.
Six
My mother and I lived uneasily that year in my uncle’s guesthouse, the oldest structure in Rainbow. The cottage was the original homestead of a pioneer named Lavar Mulveen, who came to Rainbow in the thirties to raise olives but ended up planting alligator pears, an early, fanciful name for avocados. I hated Lavar’s rusty bathtub and dysfunctional toilet, but I liked how the porch was a big extra room, which my mom and I had fitted out with an old wicker sofa and a lamp and even a needlepoint rug that Robby and I bought at a garage sale for three dollars. Everything that reminded us of my dad we pitched: his sports memorabilia (not true that you can get a fortune for old baseball cards), his record albums, his ultra-lux leather sofa, his ultra-lux glass-and-steel office furniture, the model train layout his dad built and which was like a tiny green kingdom in our garage when I was little, complete with creeks and forests and bridges and houses and barns. We smashed it to pieces, my mother and I. I was King Kong and she was Godzilla. In case that seems slightly hysterical, I’ll tell you how he left.
It was a Friday in January, and on this particular Friday we were expecting my father to fly home from Phoenix, where he was turning apartments into condos, something you can’t do in a farm town like Fallbrook. He’d be gone for about a month at a time, and for those weeks it was like my mom and I were roommates. We never made our beds and we didn’t keep to any kind of a schedule and we watched girl movies after I finished my homework, and then my dad flew in and we cleaned everything up and my mom cooked fancy food and it was like they were dating each other in the type of movie we liked best.
At least, I thought that’s the kind of movie it was until I came home from Greenie’s on January 12. I’d made my bed in the morning, and the night before I’d helped clean the bathrooms and iron napkins and pick popcorn bits out of the lux leather sofa. I knew my mother was making lobster Newburg and bananas Foster. I knew she’d bought a new dress at Talbots because I helped pick it out.
I came into the house, the one on Macadamia Drive with a stained glass window of a hummingbird by the front door, and I saw that my mom had left pots and pans and food all over the kitchen. “Mom?” I said.
She was sitting extra still on the couch, like taxidermy. It’s hard to describe h
er because a parent is so close it’s like trying to see the glasses you have on. But she was a spunky, forty-five-year-old version of the woman in the wedding picture. She still had long blond hair and blue eyes that matched and tanned freckly skin and the sort of cheerleader nose I didn’t inherit. She wasn’t as thin as she used to be or as my father seemed to want, but she still looked nice in the linen dresses and blousy shirts she liked to wear. What was odd, at this moment, was that she was not even looking at anything. Normally, if my mother was sitting, she was reading a ten-thousand-page biography of Thomas Hardy or folding laundry. Not staring at the empty fireplace.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
No sign that she’d even heard me.
“Did you make gooseberry pie again?” I asked, going for humor. My mother is an impulsive overdoer who gets her feelings hurt a lot. When I was in second grade, she made me a Pilgrim’s dress for Thanksgiving complete with white cap, and then I had to wear it to school. When I was in third grade, instead of buying cupcakes at the grocery store like everyone else, she made petit fours decorated with pink French buttercream frosting—not pink because she squeezed a little bottle of red dye but because she boiled beets in water and made her own natural dye, which naturally none of the eight-year-olds appreciated. And once, she read a short story by Chekhov about this Russian guy named Ivan Ivanovitch who’d wanted all his life to eat his own gooseberries, so he bought a farm and planted the berry bushes and tended them like they were his little babies for what seemed like a century, but once he finally, finally tasted the gooseberries, they were sour—nothing could live up to his dream of the fruit. That’s the story. It’s all pointing to this moment when the fruit falls short of the memory of fruit. But my mom bought some canned gooseberries, the only kind you can get in California, and she made a gooseberry pie. (Gooseberries, if you don’t know, look like grapes, but they’re horrible.) I wouldn’t eat the pie, and neither would my father. It was a big letdown for her, even though I pointed out that this was the most Chekhovian result possible.
My mother sat dangerously still on the couch in her Talbots dress and her high-heeled shoes and didn’t answer me.
“I thought Dad was going to be here,” I said.
No movement from the couch.
“Was there a plane wreck?”
She shook her head.
“Are you sitting like that because Dad was killed?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than that.
She shook her head.
“Is someone else dead or hurt?”
More head shaking.
There’s this finger game my mom made up when I was little, a variation on “Here is the church, here is the steeple” or “Where is Thumbkin?” My mom figured out that when I wouldn’t talk to her, I would talk to “Mrs. Nelson,” which was just her thumb popped up between her curved fingers. Mrs. Nelson the Living Thumb sat there like a grandma tucked into her covers and talked me through things like the extraction of a rod from my wrist and third-grade recorder concerts and throwing up on the bus during a field trip to Birch Aquarium.
Feeling pretty stupid, but also certain that something had set the world on a diagonal so steep everything in it was about to go sliding and crashing to pieces, I let my thumbnail poke up through my fist and I set the fist on her knee.
I wiggled my thumbnail like it was a friendly earthworm.
My mother looked at the thumb and said, in a very slow and controlled voice, as if she were issuing instructions for bomb-defusing, “Your dad was here. He said he doesn’t love me anymore. He hasn’t loved me for ten years. He’s going to live in Phoenix now.”
I pulled my thumb back out because I was so shocked, and Mrs. Nelson disappeared for good. I think I couldn’t stand for Mrs. Nelson to know what had happened to us.
For reasons I can’t explain to you because at the time it just seemed like our fate, my father didn’t have to keep paying the mortgage on our four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath Spanish ranch. We were what my mother called “upside down” on the house, which means you owe the bank more than it’s worth. That was because my father had refinanced the house to get the money for the project in Phoenix that was now, somehow, only in his name. So we sold things. We sold the $2,500 living room set my dad had picked out a few years earlier. We sold the extra freezer, the sofa bed, and the extra television. In each case, we were upside down. Little by little we gave away or sold or threw out everything, and I imagined it all falling through the air as our house turned upside down. In time all we had were old quilts, my grandmother’s Singer sewing machine, one-tenth of my mom’s and my books (because there were way too many of them to keep in Lavar’s house), and four boxes of Christmas ornaments. One night when I went to the movies with Robby (I remember what we saw—the Clause movie where Santa has to find a wife), my mother got drunk, which she never, never did normally, and smashed all the smashable Christmas ornaments with a croquet mallet. Then she burned her wedding pictures in the Weber grill.
A realtor who used to work with my dad sold the house, which I liked to picture with the pointed part of the roof as a balancing point and the door up high, so that nobody could get in. We didn’t get any money afterward.
Seven
Which is why Robby and I were sitting in Lavar’s decrepit cottage on Amiel’s first day of work. I put some tuna on the counter, opened it, and stared out the window. I carried around for the first time that day the sensation of Amiel being nearby, like he had one of those laser pointers aimed at me and the red dot of light moved wherever I moved. All I could see through the window, though, were avocado trunks and a couple of crows.
“Want some le crackers?” I asked.
Robby was sniffing the tuna like it had gone bad. He doesn’t look like my blood relative at all, which I guess is normal for cousins. He has his mother’s coloring, which is whitish, and black hair and gray eyes. His lips are just ridiculously pretty—kind of salmon and curvy the way a woman’s might be, but he’s got a square jaw, blocky hands, and buff shoulders, so he doesn’t look like a wuss who collects Tintin figures.
“I just made it le yesterday,” I said. It was a thing we started doing back when our mothers got this idea that Robby and I should speak to each other exclusively in French, rendering me totally fluent and chic by, like, second grade and keeping Robby from the dreadful fate of growing up American. Robby was much better at Franglish than I was and could generally do more than “le” the heck out of things, but he wasn’t in the mood.
“What’s that terrible smell?” Robby said. He was looking through his glasses in a moderately disgusted way at my mother’s silkworms. My mom’s best friend, Louise Bart, gave my mom the worms because she noticed, while visiting us in our new old cottage, that my uncle had a pair of mulberry trees. A normal friend might have found this a great opportunity to make mulberry cobbler (which tastes like blackberry cobbler), but this friend, like my mother, is fatally interesting, so she said, “You could raise silkworms here!”
“We could?” I asked. “Why?”
“Because you have a constant source of food for them,” she said. “Full-grown mulberry trees.”
I meant “why would we want to,” but my mother didn’t need to ask. She’d gone with Louise to workshops on raising your own cotton, she’d learned to use a spindle one year, and she saw herself, I think, raising silkworms, processing the silk, and weaving it into priceless cloth that she could sell when the wolf came to the door.
Robby looked dubiously at the smooth white caterpillars crawling on the mattress of mulberry leaves my mother and I fetched for them three times a day. They munched big lacy holes until their pulsing bodies were strewn with green crumbs, then waited to be covered again, like children who have kicked off their blankets.
“Aren’t you worried they’ll crawl into your Caesar salad?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “they’ve been bred not to wander,” which is what my mother told me.
“You’d think they mi
ght try that with people,” he said more bitterly than I would have thought normal. He stared at them a little longer. “They smell kind of funky.”
“Don’t we all,” I said. I was pretty sure the house smelled funky all by itself, before we even moved in. “But they’re interesting, don’t you think?” I asked. Now that the caterpillars had molted into newer, larger skins five times, they were as big as my index finger and snowy white. A black line that looked like an artery pulsed just below the skin along their backs like the soft spot of a newborn baby’s head. “Do you hear that?” I asked.
Robby slumped without interest on the sofa back. “What?”
“Can’t you hear it?” It was a crackly-tap-tappy sound. I’d once thought it was the sound of twenty-five mouths chomping mulberry leaves, but it turned out to be all their little caterpillar feet grasping and ungrasping the leaves as they moved.
“Snap, crackledy, pop,” Robby said finally. “That is kind of creepily interesting. I recommend checking your cereal bowl before you eat in the morning.”
I was disappointed that he didn’t appreciate the caterpillars, but I couldn’t really blame him. Not everyone likes a tray of devouring insects in the living room.
“I think I’ll go eat something at home,” Robby said.
“Well, why don’t you,” I said. “You big snob.”
“Stop calling me that.” But he didn’t leave. He just stretched full length on the sofa, which wasn’t easy because of the various pillows and magazines and remote controls that had been strewn all over it, and he put his arm across his forehead in this way that at first looked stupidly theatrical. But then he said in this seriously miserable voice, “Cherchez la femme.”
“Cherchez la what?”
“It’s just this French saying. If a guy’s behaving weirdly, look for the woman.” His face was whiter than usual, and sadder.
“Are you hiding a le woman somewhere?”
“No,” he said. “It’s my le dad. He has a le femme.”