There was just one waitress working the breakfast shift at Max’s the next morning; Lucy waited on customers at her own tables and Teresa’s as well, and by noon she had called an old friend in Rio Nedro to offer her Teresa’s job. Early that same morning, Atlas had let himself out of the house through the back door, but the screen had slammed shut behind him and he hadn’t been able to get back inside. When Silver drove up, at a little after six, the dog was circling the yard; patches of the collie’s fur drifted over the lawn and took root like strange flowers. Silver went inside, then upstairs; the door to Dina’s room was ajar, and Silver opened it the rest of the way with his foot.
By nine that morning, Silver had packed up all of Teresa’s clothes. The skirts and dresses that wouldn’t fit into the suitcases were taken out to the car still on wire hangers. Silver let Teresa sleep all that day, and for a while he dozed on the living-room couch, but he woke with a start, certain he had heard the grinding sound of King Connors’s engine in the driveway. In the early evening, Silver walked down to the corner grocery and bought a six-pack. He was out on the front porch, finishing his fourth beer and throwing stones for the collie to chase, when Teresa finally woke up, got dressed, and came downstairs. He felt her before he heard her; it was as if pure electricity was circling closer and closer, his oldest memories fell about him like an avalanche, his sister sat beside him. She took one of the full cans of beer and held it to her forehead to cool her skin. In all the other houses on their street, dinner was already over, dishes were being washed, television sets turned on. In their kitchen, there was no one; only the remains of Gregory’s dinner from the night before—green tomatoes on a china plate, a spoon still in the sugar bowl, tap water that dripped in a slow steady rhythm.
“I’m not afraid of Gregory,” Silver told Teresa as they sat out on the porch, slapping away the mosquitoes that always appeared as soon as the sky was dark. “He’s all talk. But I don’t want him bothering you. I don’t even want him talking to you. Let’s face it,” Silver said quietly, “you can’t live here anymore.”
He left her out on the porch and went inside; he turned off all the lights, rinsed off the dishes in the sink, took the trash out through the back door, then came back around to the driveway. He opened the back door of his new Camaro and let Atlas climb into the back seat, then went around to the driver’s door and got in behind the wheel. In the yard the crickets’ call was slow; it was the end of their season. She had wanted him to come back, but not like this, not when their destination was an apartment in the Mission District where a wife and child waited. Not on an October night when she was wearing old blue jeans and it was too early for the stars to be out. If he hadn’t locked all the doors, Teresa would have run into the house, she would have hidden until the time was right, until she could see him from her open window on an evening when she was dressed in a long skirt made of linen or silk. But he was waiting for her, and the passenger door had been left open, and so she got up, and she walked to the car, and she didn’t look back at the house, not once. She kept her hands folded, but each time Silver shifted gears his hand was so close to hers she could feel its heat; she kept her distance, she wouldn’t talk to him, not when he suggested they stop for dinner or when he asked what radio station she wanted tuned in. In the back seat the collie nosed at the windows and shed all over the clean upholstery. And all the way to the city Teresa wished for one thing: that he had not come back for her at all or that he had waited until they could have driven to the very edge of the ocean, until there was just the two of them driving faster than any hawk could fly. She never told him how disappointed she was, but all the same Silver knew, he reached over and stroked her arm, and it was as if no time at all had passed since that day at the reservoir; she remembered it all. And when she turned to him it was just as it had always been: she saw nothing but him, just him, always him.
All that following winter there was a drought; city officials suggested that dishwater be used on gardens, and bathwater be recycled to clean the floors. The hills surrounding the city remained brown, and on rooftops all over the Mission District, pigeons fought each other for single drops of water. In Silver and Lee’s first-floor flat, there was always dust on the floors, no matter how often Lee swept the rooms; it seemed as if Teresa had brought the dust with her all the way from Santa Rosa. The two women tried to be friendly to each other: they sat in the kitchen each morning, drinking coffee, folding laundry, pretending there wasn’t a man still asleep in the front bedroom. But as soon as Silver woke up, his presence came between them; his every move, whether he reached for a cigarette or the telephone receiver, separated Lee and Teresa, made them eye each other with cool disdain.
At the beginning, Lee had hoped they would be a real family, she was alone so much of the time that she was grateful for Teresa’s company, even though her sister-in-law seemed standoffish, maybe just shy. And, more than anything, Lee had hoped that once Teresa was living with them, Silver wouldn’t seem so damned angry all the time; she imagined it was worrying about his sister living alone that set him off. But once Teresa had moved in, Silver got worse. He had trouble sleeping, often he didn’t manage to fall asleep until after the sun had come up, and then he had nightmares, he was being followed, his every move charted through telescopes. He was so irritable that asking him a question was hazardous, asking for a little affection, impossible. One night in November, Silver found a pack of Lee’s cigarettes hidden between two silk slips in the top dresser drawer. Teresa and Jackie were in the living room; KSAN was tuned in and Teresa held Jackie in her arms and danced with him. She was so concerned with trying to get her silent nephew to repeat some of the lyrics she sang along with that she didn’t hear Silver drag Lee into the bathroom. Silver locked the door and held a pack of Virginia Slims up to Lee’s face.
“I told you I didn’t want you smoking,” he said to his wife.
“You smoke all the time,” Lee countered. “You smoke more than a pack of Marlboros every day.”
Silver took out one of the cigarettes and held it so close to her that it grazed Lee’s lips. “We’ve got a kid, remember. Don’t think you’re going to give yourself cancer and leave him all to me.”
Silver emptied the pack of cigarettes into the toilet. He flushed them away, then slammed the toilet cover down.
“I want you to quit, understand?”
“I won’t,” Lee said.
Silver grabbed her; with his hands around her neck he studied her, as if he were considering murder. Then he turned away from her.
“You’re killing me,” he told Lee.
“You hate me,” Lee whispered. “I didn’t even do anything and you hate me.”
Silver sat down on the rim of the bathtub; he could hear the radio playing in the living room, the song was “Imagine,” and Silver suddenly felt tired.
“I don’t hate you,” he told his wife.
Lee sat down on the toilet seat and began to cry. “You do,” she said. “You hate me. It’s even worse since Teresa moved in.”
“Listen to me.” Silver reached and took Lee’s hand. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“I’ll do anything you want me to,” Lee said. “Just tell me what to do. I want you to be in love with me.”
Silver let go of her hand. “You’ve always got to push it. I’m here, aren’t I? I’m married to you. So leave it alone.”
“Just tell me,” Lee whispered. “I’ll do anything.”
Silver reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette of his own; he threw the match into the sink and inhaled. Lee sat with her hands folded in her lap; her shoulders were thin, her pale blue eyes were flecked with green, she looked younger now than she had on the nights when she first jumped out her bedroom window to run to Silver’s car. Even though Silver had known her for years, even though he now sat less than a foot away from her in their own bathroom, Lee could have been anyone: any stranger on the street, a young girl he had picked up for the night, an old sweetheart he’d
just as soon never see again.
“Listen to me, darling,” he said. His voice echoed off the tiles in the bathroom. “What’s the point in fighting?”
Lee reached over and took Silver’s hand, she raised it to her mouth, she kissed his palm and then his fingers, all the time wishing that the man who had married her would someday fall in love with her, or, at the very least, not look at her from such a great distance, as if he were more than a million miles away.
But nothing between them had changed and Lee had continued to smoke, secretly, a tiny act of rebellion, an invisible way to get back at him. One day in the middle of winter, when it still had not yet rained, Lee decided not to hide it from Teresa any more. She went over to the cabinet where the dishes were stored and, from behind the saucers and the cups, she pulled out a pack of Virginia Slims.
“Do me a favor,” she said to Teresa after she had struck a match and inhaled, “if he wakes up and comes in here, say this is yours. He wouldn’t dare yell at you.” Lee smiled. “Sometimes I think he’s afraid of you.”
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Teresa said.
“No one knows,” Lee said. She tapped her ashes into an empty coffee cup. She studied her sister-in-law. It was not just Silver’s concern for his sister that made Lee jealous, it was the way Teresa looked at him when she thought no one saw. “I don’t know if I should trust you. Maybe you’ll tell Silver, you two being so close and all.”
Teresa got up and poured herself a cup of coffee; she didn’t want Lee looking at her, she was afraid of what might be read in her face.
“Silver was talking in his sleep last night. He does that lately,” Lee informed Teresa. She went over to the sink, put her cigarette out under some running tap water, then carefully hid the butt in the trash. She was close to Teresa again; close enough to look right in her eyes. “Last night he was talking about you in his sleep.”
“He wasn’t talking about me,” Teresa said immediately.
“He sure was,” Lee said. “He said your name.”
Jackie was outside; Teresa went to the sliding glass doors and watched him. Dust had risen up and left bracelets of earth around his wrists; he had Lee’s blue eyes, her pale blond hair.
“People think I’m lucky,” Lee said. “I know other women wish they were in my shoes.” She lowered her voice. “I love him, you know.”
Teresa opened the glass door and went outside. A gardenia Lee had made certain to water with used dishwater was still green, but the birds of paradise had withered and no grass grew in the yard. Lee came out and stood behind Teresa, she wasn’t about to stop talking now; even out in the fresh air, she still smelled faintly of smoke.
“I’m not going to let him go,” Lee said. “Not to anyone. Not for any reason,”
Jackie was collecting stones; there were pieces of red glass among them, but they were dull, they had no edges, each one was thin as a dime.
“I’m not dumb,” Lee said, and she breathed heavily, as if it took all her strength just to go on talking. “I see the way you look at him. It’s the same way those women on the street look at him.”
“I don’t look at him,” Teresa insisted.
“A lot of women wanted to get Silver away from me,” Lee said. “But no one ever has. Maybe they had him for a night, but that’s all. And no one’s going to get him.” Lee held up her hand and studied her wedding ring. “We’re married,” she said. “We’re married for good.”
Teresa turned to her sister-in-law; in a sudden bolt of cold bravery, she smiled.
“You don’t have to remind me,” she said to Lee. “I was there, remember? I was right there in the same room.”
Silver wouldn’t allow Arnie Bergen into the apartment; he was convinced the old detective brought bad luck with him. But Teresa still telephoned Bergen, sometimes as often as once a week. Bergen preferred to live on Social Security and his pension rather than take the occasional divorce case that came his way. He was finished with that sort of business. Instead he spent his days sorting through his old files; he had filled up his bedroom with crates full of old cases when he closed down his office on Market Street. But the truth was he was low on cash, and in January he rented out the house on Divisadero Street; he left most of the furniture for the new tenants, and finally, for the first time in months, he was able to pay the real-estate taxes.
“Sell it,” Teresa continued to advise Bergen, but when he refused she was relieved; she couldn’t imagine another family owning that house, or a time when she couldn’t arrive back in Santa Rosa and feel that she was home. The apartment where she now lived certainly was not home, certainly not now that Lee had turned against her. In the same month that Bergen rented out the house in Santa Rosa, Teresa got a job at the Crescent Incense Factory, near Union Street. At last she was able to leave the apartment: she went out at eight in the morning and didn’t return until after four. Finally, she could escape Lee’s distrustful eyes. She was able to avoid Silver, and the longing she felt each time she passed him in the hallway, every time she sat across from him at the kitchen table. But it didn’t take long for Teresa to discover that she hated her job. She packed sticks of incense for so many hours that her hands felt permanently cramped, a dusty vanilla coated her skin, the scent of cedar and sandalwood filtered into the fiber of all her clothes.
If the owner of the factory, Carlos, hadn’t bought his marijuana from Silver for years, he would have fired Teresa after her first week. He tried to ignore the fact that she fell asleep at the wooden packing table, her long hair coiled over the natural soaps and circular tubes of incense. Teresa could barely keep her eyes open, her sleeping sickness had descended with its full force; she packed patchouli in with the vanilla, she confused boxes of cinnamon-scented blocks with blocks of lavender. And, in spite of her desire to stay out of the apartment, Teresa began to miss work. She slept for long hours at a time, and her spells frightened Lee; Lee no longer let Teresa babysit for Jackie, and if Teresa cooked dinner, Lee was right there watching her, making certain one of Teresa’s spells wouldn’t strike after she had turned on the gas. Teresa began to fall asleep in buses; she tumbled to the floor in a Bell Market, knocking over a display of herbal tea; finally, she was fired from the Crescent Incense Factory in February.
“It’s not that I don’t like you,” Carlos told her. “I like you fine. But it’s dangerous for you to work here, you could hurt yourself. It’s no disgrace to be fired from this job. Any idiot could work here; I could have monkeys filling up these boxes. Listen to me, Teresa, this isn’t a skill you can acquire. It’s boring, so you fall asleep—I can understand that, but I also have to fire you.”
After she was fired, Teresa continued to leave the house at her usual time each morning; she bought a bottle of perfume that smelled like vanilla and doused herself with it before she came home. She didn’t want to spend her afternoons with Lee and so she looked for another job, but after a while she gave up. Even if she was hired at one of the restaurants or offices she had applied to, she was sure she wouldn’t last long—she’d have too many absences, she’d fall asleep on the very first day.
Late in February, when Teresa had tired of the aimless bus rides she took around the city, when she was sick of filling out job applications in shops she knew she’d never return to, she went to Bergen’s apartment. She hadn’t planned it; one morning she was suddenly on Dolores Street, a block away from the second-floor flat where the detective lived. She had never been to his flat before and Bergen hadn’t expected company; his apartment was messy, he hadn’t swept for weeks. There were no curtains in the windows, but there was southern light and he had hung a cage which held a yellow canary in the brightest window. Because the bedroom was filled with crates from his office, and with Dina’s personal belongings, picked up the weekend before the new tenants had moved into the house on Divisadero Street, Bergen had taken to sleeping on the Castro Convertible in the living room. Occasionally he had visitors: an insurance investigator named Molloy, whom Ber
gen had known for years, came over on Thursday nights to play cards; a widow who lived on the third floor brought him a shoebox full of coffee cake once in a while. Fact was, his loneliness didn’t hit him at bedtime or in the middle of the night, as it did some men, but in the mornings, when the whole day stretched out before him—his whole life seemed to stretch out, too, all of it without Dina.
When he opened the door that morning to find Teresa, Bergen was delighted. He had been worried about her, had even looked up Silver’s address in the telephone book and driven by the apartment a few times.
“What do you know!” Bergen said when he opened the door. “Lucky for you I went shopping yesterday and just happen to have a chocolate cake.”
Bergen went into the kitchen to boil some water for tea, and Teresa looked around his apartment. She peered into the canary’s cage. “How long have you had him?” she asked when Bergen returned with two cups of tea and a package of Sara Lee brownies.
“Too long,” Bergen said. He cut two brownies and set them out on paper napkins. “I bought him for company, but he’s driving me crazy.”
Teresa sat down and kicked off her shoes; she apologized for not having invited the detective over to Silver and Lee’s for dinner.
“Don’t put me and Silver in the same room if you want to have peace,” Bergen said.
“I can’t live with them any longer,” Teresa said, suddenly realizing it was true. Living with Silver and Lee forced Teresa to be an acrobat balanced between waking and sleep, between desire and lies. The walls that separated her from Silver were growing thinner every day, turning from plaster into thin bamboo.
“Maybe when the new tenants move out, I can go back to Santa Rosa,” Teresa said.
White Horses Page 18