The Liars

by Jennifer Mathieu

  So we still go to Mass almost every Sunday, and when we were little Elena and I had to go to CCD classes before Mass in the classrooms at the Catholic school. We would sit with the other public-school kids and try to mess around with the stuff in the Catholic school-kids’ desks while volunteer mothers from the parish with eager smiles and rosy cheeks trained us in making our First Confessions and First Communions. I still remember the itchy, used, blue polyester suit I wore the first time I received the Eucharist and the way I kept rubbing my sweaty palms on my pants as I made my way up the aisle to receive the wafer or—as the priest and the overeager volunteer mothers would say—the body of Jesus Christ himself.

  “You look very handsome,” Mami had told me as she snapped my picture on the front porch that morning. Mami’s compliments are as rare as Texas snowstorms, so that one is stuck in my brain. I don’t know what happened to the card from the drugstore with the five dollars inside that she gave me after Mass was over and we went to El Mirador for a rare restaurant lunch. I don’t think I saved it.

  Maybe the morning I made my First Communion I was seated here, in this very pew, midway down the aisle from the altar. Elena would have been a kindergartner back then, and now she’s almost seventeen, sitting next to me, flipping through the hymnal as Father Harrison drones on through the homily. A serious look on her face, Elena tips the open, red leather-covered book toward me slyly and points to a page so I can catch the title—“How Great Thou Art.” Only some kid at some point in the past had penciled in an F before the Art. Elena and I make eye contact and I offer her a grin and a roll of the eyes, and Elena has to slip a hand over her mouth so she doesn’t let loose with a laugh.

  From next to Elena, Mami coughs pointedly, and Elena shuts the hymnal and sets it down. Father Harrison goes on about something, gesticulates with his old-man hands, pauses dramatically, and looks out at us with his rheumy eyes.

  I can’t believe that guy has never been and never will get laid. I mean, most likely. That’s been my number-one thought about priests since I was in junior high—that they’ll never have sex—and I feel kind of shitty that’s my first thought because some of them seem like nice enough guys, but it’s where my head always goes. I don’t even think they’re allowed to jerk off , which seems totally inhumane. My brain starts to wander to Amy Mitchell and her slow, ass-shifting walk, and I squeeze my eyes shut and give my head a little shake. I can’t think about jerking off in church, and I definitely can’t think about having sex with Amy Mitchell. Shit.

  I probably shouldn’t be cursing, either. Not even in my head.

  Finally, Father Harrison is finished with the homily, and we stand and we kneel and we sit and we sing and Elena shows me “How Great Thou Fart” one more time just before the final blessing to try to make me laugh, and finally we head outside, pausing to dip our fingertips in room-temperature holy water and cross ourselves. Then Mami digs into her purse and hands me the keys to the Honda.

  “You drive,” she says. She might be hungover. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to drive. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

  “Okay,” I answer.

  I’m not even out of the parking lot before she starts in. “Did you see what that woman in front of us was wearing?” Mami asks. “So tacky.” I try zoning out like I do with Father Harrison. You would think church would have some sort of positive impact on her. Then again, I’d be a hypocrite if I said it had any impact on me whatsoever.

  “What did she have on?” Elena answers, humoring her. Probably to keep me quiet. I decide not to fight it and I blank out as Mami prattles on about a woman’s short skirt not being appropriate for church. But just as I’m turning down Thirteenth Street, Mami says, “So, Joaquin, I hear you might be going to California?”

  I squeeze the steering wheel and try to stay calm. Don’t let her see you sweat. That’s rule number one—even though I always break it eventually.

  “What?” I ask, like I didn’t hear her. That always pisses her off, but it’s one of my signature moves—force her to repeat herself just to piss her off. I peer into the rearview mirror. Elena is staring out the back window, but her face is tight.

  “I said that I heard you’re going to California,” Mami repeats.

  I stop at a red light. The car next to me has the window rolled down and some shitty heavy metal is pouring out, so loud I can hear it inside the Honda. I don’t say anything. Maybe she’ll drop it.

  Who am I kidding? That’s Elena-level wishful thinking.

  “I just thought that you would tell your mother something like that,” she says. “Or were you just planning on leaving your sister and me like a thief in the night?” She’s calm. Collected. She has the upper hand and she knows it.

  She got it out of Elena. I know she did. Elena’s so good at lying about herself, you’d think she could lie well enough to protect me. But sometimes Mami knows just how to find the soft spot and go for the kill.

  “I’ve got no plans to go to California,” I say, stepping on the accelerator as the light turns green, grateful at least to have driving to focus on.

  Mami examines a fingernail and pauses, letting the tension build. “Well, that’s good. Because I think if you’re going to look for your father who abandoned you and your sister, that’s a really stupid idea. I mean, I know you weren’t an A student, but I didn’t think you were that dumb.”

  God damn it, Elena.

  I say nothing even though I want to yell everything. How Mami’s the one who’s kept information about our dad from us and how it pisses me off. How all we know is that he took off when we were tiny kids—I can barely remember anything about him, not his smell or his voice or anything—and she didn’t even try to track him down. How the few pictures of him are somewhere in her bedroom, guarded protectively. It’s been years since I’ve seen the fading square-shaped snapshots.

  “Well, wouldn’t you agree it’s a stupid idea?” she presses, her voice even. Calm. We’re almost home. I glance in the rearview mirror again. Elena’s face looks pained.

  “I’m not sure what I’m doing at the end of the summer,” I say. “It’s just the middle of July.”

  “You should do what I suggested and start classes at MICC,” she says. “They have a good program for radiology techs.”

  Mami wants me to be a radiology tech and she wants Elena to be a nurse. She’s obsessed with it. She thinks they’re reputable jobs, I guess, and they make good money. She’s been pushing them on us since forever. When I was in fifth grade and had to do a project for career day at school, I made a big, dumb poster about being a radiology tech because I wanted to make her happy. When I got to school everyone else had put down stuff like professional football player or archaeologist or zookeeper, and I had to stand up and talk like taking X-rays was my dream.

  We pull into our driveway, the tires crunching over the gravel. I can’t hold it in anymore. I turn to Mami. “What’s a stupid idea is thinking that I should already know what I want to do with my life. I’m eighteen. I don’t know what the hell I want to be.”

  Mami shrugs, still in control but close to erupting. “You should go find your father,” she says, picking the words that will hurt the most. “You’re a lot like him. A total disappointment.” She puts her hand out and I give her the keys, and she gets out of the Honda with a slam of the car door before walking inside.

  “Oh shit,” Elena mutters.

  “Oh shit is right!” I spit, turning around toward the back seat. I know I’m a dick for yelling at Elena—it’s not like I hold up under Mami interrogations any better—but Mami’s not here, and I have to yell at someone.

  “Why’d you tell her?” I shout. “Why’d you say anything about California?”

  Elena crosses her arms tight across her chest. “I don’t want to fight with you, Joaquin.”

  “You never want to fight,” I say. “You never want to acknowledge reality, either.”

  “That’s not fair,” she says. Little splotches of red are breaking
out on her face and her chest. “That’s not fucking fair.”

  I roll my eyes. “Oh, but telling Mami I want to leave for California at the end of the summer without telling me you’re going to is fair?”

  Elena snaps and jumps forward like an angry cat. “She heard us talking about it one night through her bedroom door. I just confirmed it.” Then she slumps back, and I can see her eyes are wet. She does hate fighting with me and Mami—she hates all conflict, really. In the end, her life is probably easier because of it. But something tells me she’s going to be living in our house with Mami when she’s twenty-five years old, Mami trying to control her every move, and this kills me so much I can’t let myself think about it.

  The Texas heat is already starting to turn the Honda into a sauna. I open the front door and Elena opens her back door. A mosquito ventures in, curious, and circles above me. I swat at it, annoyed.

  “She really overheard?” I ask, embarrassed for snapping.

  “Yes,” she insists, looking down at her lap. Her voice drops. “I did say that you maybe were going to look for our dad though. Don’t be mad, okay?”

  Her face reminds me of a little kid’s, with pudgy cheeks and anxious glances. She brings a finger up to the slim, rubbery scar on her chin and picks at it. It’s subconscious, I know, but my stomach knots up anyway.

  “I’m not sure I could find him, you know,” I tell her.

  Elena nods. It’s hot as Hades in here. I think of the AC pumping inside our house, but inside is where Mami is, either mixing a drink or sitting and stewing and preparing for the next round of our fight’s predictable course—lots of screaming and shouting and slammed doors by both me and her. It’s exhausting to think about it.

  “So do you actually think he’s in California?” I ask, trying to direct the conversation away from Mami, away from us. Elena shrugs.

  “Maybe,” she answers. “Not that it matters.”

  I draw a thumbnail to my mouth to chew on. I guess she’s right. It shouldn’t matter. So I don’t know why I wonder about him—this man who’s responsible for my physical existence. This man who dumped us before Elena could even walk or before I was speaking full sentences.

  “Listen, I haven’t made any decisions about leaving,” I say, and at this she looks up and makes eye contact. She nods, grateful.

  “I hope you stay,” she says. “Even if it is for Amy and not me.”

  I scowl, embarrassed. “If I stay, I stay on my own terms, okay?” I haul myself out of the Honda. I need to stretch my legs, get some air.

  “Fine,” Elena adds, joining me outside and slamming the back-passenger door. “I’m sorry I mentioned Dad to Mami.”

  The casual way she says it—Dad, like he’s somehow deserving of this title—makes me prickly. But I don’t push it.

  “I don’t want to go inside,” Elena says, peering toward our front screen door.

  “I could use a beer,” I answer.

  “Joaquin, it’s, like, lunchtime.”

  “Can’t I have a beer at lunch?” I ask, and Elena laughs a light, little girl laugh, and I think maybe it’s okay between us.

  “Walk with me to the Stop-N-Go?” I ask. “I could get a soda at least.”

  “Okay,” she says, glancing toward the clapboard house slumping there like it’s disappointed in itself. In us. Then we start the short walk toward the Stop-N-Go, wordless. Not even walking next to each other, really, but me slightly ahead of Elena, my arms swinging at my side, my feet automatically stepping over cracks in the sidewalk.

  Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

  “Will you buy me a Snickers?” Elena asks.

  “You don’t have any babysitting money?” I tease, not turning to look at her.

  “Come on, Joaquin,” she says, annoyed. But I feel a push on my shoulders, gentle enough to know she thinks my joke is funny.

  “I think I have enough to get you a candy bar, hermanita,” I say, using the nickname she hates.

  “Just one Snickers is all I ask,” she says, making a break for it, dodging me on the sidewalk until she is ahead of me, falling into a skip, a bounce. Her dark ponytail swings, her steps are light like nothing could bother her.

  Like nobody, not even once, has ever let her down.

  CARRIE

  Texas

  1967

  She said she would marry him only if he took her away from Healy. If he moved them somewhere where Carrie could smell the air coming off the ocean waters—even if it was the dingy, tired waters of the Gulf of Mexico, it would have to be better than staring at dumpy downtown Healy and the fields of nothingness that surrounded it. So the Christmas after Kennedy was killed and everything in her strange new homeland felt stranger and more off-kilter than ever, she was almost grateful when Frank dropped to one knee in the middle of Healy Park and dug clumsily into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a ring. It was the next wave that would push her forward, would give her life shape, but this time—by demanding the move, demanding Frank take her somewhere in exchange for her yes—Carrie felt she had some control over the wave.

  She had graduated from high school and was working as a teller at the bank downtown, still sleeping in her yellow bedroom off the kitchen and waiting for Frank to come home from the University of Houston on the weekends, where he was studying nothing that seemed of any use or interest to either one of them. The Finneys charged her rent now, which she paid begrudgingly even though she knew it wasn’t unfair to be asked. She was waiting for something to happen to her. And when Frank asked her to be his wife, finally, it did.

  “Let’s get married right away,” Frank had said. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” He was charmed by her, Carrie knew, to the point of idiocy. Charmed the way boys are by beautiful girls. So charmed he could not grasp the fact that Carrie still found him awkward and gawky, all skinny limbs and unkempt hair. His face was not so bad, though, she acknowledged, and over the years he had improved his kissing skills to the point that his kisses could sometimes even be enjoyable.

  “So when can we leave Healy?” Carrie had asked, keenly aware of the weight of the new ring on her finger. Of all it could gain for her. “I want to live by the ocean.”

  Frank had nodded, insistent he could make it happen. And, to his word, he did. But first, there had been the matter of the wedding. Frank’s parents had painted on tight smiles during the ceremony at St. Martin’s with only Father O’Dell and family present. They had long since become aware of the fact that their little Cuban refugee thought she was far too good for them or their family, and what a mistake it had been to take her in in the first place. And to make everything worse, here she was, taking their son away from them. Filling his head with ridiculous ideas like dropping out of college and leaving Healy and moving to Mariposa Island, where their lovestruck, stupid oldest child promptly filled his new apartment with fancy furniture he couldn’t afford.

  But Carrie didn’t care that Frank bought the furniture on credit or what the Finneys thought. She was happy. As happy as she could be and probably as happy as she had been since leaving Cuba. And Frank had made her so, taking her away from Healy and giving her a space she could call her own, at last. Everything felt new and possible. In the mornings Frank went to his job as a salesman at a mattress store and Carrie played house, scrubbing their little apartment until it gleamed, folding and refolding their laundry into perfect squares. Arranging cans and frozen dinners into sweet little rows. That she was no longer Caridad de la Guardia but Carrie Finney—that she’d had to trade in a name full of rococo flourishes for one that was all hard edges and sharp syllables—had seemed like a fair exchange at first, especially when she took a city bus to the beach and walked on the sand and dipped her feet in the ocean. In the beginning, it had been easier to ignore the obvious inferiority of the Mariposa Island beaches to the beaches of her homeland. Carrie even liked to imagine that the water she was touching was the exact same water she had once splashed in as a little girl in Mi
ramar, holding hands with her abuelita.

  For a brief time, all had been glorious.

  But there was the problem of boredom. Other young wives in their apartment complex would get together in the courtyard during the afternoons and smoke cigarettes and gossip while their husbands were at work. But Caridad found them unseemly, somehow, and ignored them. A few were newlyweds, but already they had allowed themselves to grow soft and blowsy. They gained weight in their middles and under their chins. They didn’t keep their hair or clothing fresh. Carrie avoided them because she didn’t want to turn into some trashy housewife, but that left long stretches of time to fill even after she had cleaned the apartment from top to bottom and prepared dinner for when Frank got home. And if she let her mind wander too much, it had a tendency to travel back to Cuba. To images—increasingly fuzzy—of her parents. Of Juanita. Of the night of her doomed quince. She didn’t like those images in her mind.

  The Finneys back in Healy had allowed her to drink a glass of wine with dinner on holidays, and Carrie had enjoyed the soft warmness it had always offered her, so soon she took to purchasing bottles of cheap Merlot at the grocery store and pouring out several swallows into a juice glass while she watched the black-and-white television set they still did not own outright. She liked the buzzy, swimmy feeling the wine gave her, the way it made the passing of time more interesting, or at least more bearable. When Frank came home from work and wanted to take her directly into the bedroom, a wolfish grin on his face, she found that if she’d had a glass or two of wine beforehand, she sometimes even enjoyed it.

  She didn’t get pregnant right away. She worried out loud to Frank that something was wrong, but secretly, Carrie wasn’t in a rush to be a mother. Not like Frank, who talked often about having a son and calling him Frank Jr.

  “Maybe once we have kids and they’re a little older, we can move back to Healy. Be close to my parents again, go to St. Martin’s with them on Sundays. Raise the kids near their cousins.” He’d said this in bed one evening after they’d slept together and he was full of possibility.