by Mary Morris
Lucinda comes to the doorway, looking for Santiago. “He went outside for air,” Antonio says. Lucinda nods and puts her hands on my shoulders. In Quechua, I ask her what they are discussing and what is going to happen, and she puts her fingers to her lips to shush me. I ask her why I have to be so quiet, why everyone talks in whispers tonight, and she shushes me again. Margarita leans against the doorway, waiting for Miguel to give her his decision. In the drawing room, Nona sits. Her lips move back and forth, as if she were reciting her rosary. She mutters to herself and the words are nonsense, like the code the men receive. Sometimes, though, I hear her say Jorge, and I know she is seeing him as he rode through town on that white horse, celebrating a premature victory.
Santiago returns and Lucinda stops him in the doorway. Two months ago he found his dog and his son with their heads severed by a machete. They had been trespassing on the land of the banana growers. Since then, he has hated them as much as Miguel. Tarantulas, he calls them. Manylegged creatures filled with poison. Lucinda stands between Santiago and the kitchen. He is her only living relative, her grandson. “Will you go if they go?” Santiago shrugs his shoulders. Lucinda asks again and he nods. Lucinda steps back and Santiago returns to the kitchen.
I have never seen the banana growers because I am not allowed to go into that part of the jungle. I just know that they are out there, the way I know snakes and wildcats are out there. Margarita taps me on the shoulder and points upstairs. The men sit, bullets strapped around their chests, listening to the beeps. The room is dark and hazy with their smoke. I kiss Nona and slowly climb the stairs.
I pull back the mosquito netting over my bed, and the netting is moist with humidity. The moonlight shines on the wooden floor and the netting appears luminous. The air smells heavy but fresh with nectar, because now is the time when the flowers are in bloom. I have to fight to keep the bougainvillea from coming into my room. Downstairs Nona sits and I know she will outlive us all. As I drift to sleep, I hear voices and my dreams seem to be messages sent over the miles, messages in a code that I cannot decipher, as if someone wanted to tell me something very important but could not make me understand. Later I wake. It is still dark and from somewhere in the house I hear the sound of crying.
In the morning Margarita is gone. To the city, Miguel tells me, where it is safer. For some reason I believe that he is lying. I go into her room but it is empty. On the dresser is her veil. The room seems sadly expectant, the way Margarita always seemed to me. Nona is already down on the porch, where Lucinda has carried her. She is tiny now; she cannot weigh more than a hundred pounds. I never see her eat. Only drink the thick liquids Lucinda prepares. Miguel paces the house all day. He walks from room to room. He paces and then he sits and then he rises and begins pacing again. He watches. Miguel was always a watcher. He watches the jungle for some sign. He watches me as I move through the kitchen while he eats alone.
“I heard crying,” I say as he eats.
“She did not want to leave,” he says, “but it will be better. Her people are there. Here she will rot.”
I go to Nona on the porch and ask her why Margarita went away. Nona stares at me and her eyes widen as I mention Margarita’s name. “An unpredictable girl,” Lucinda says. “You never knew when she’d flare up.” All day long I sit and watch the jungle. The air is heavy and smells like rotting wood and stagnating water. Miguel sits in the kitchen as it grows darker, jotting down notes and listening to the short-wave. He shakes his head back and forth as the messages come through.
That night after dinner I go to bed early. I sit up reading by a small lantern. Miguel comes into my room. “Little cousin,” he says. He lifts the mosquito netting and takes the book from my hand. He touches my cheek and turns down the light of the lantern. He removes the charm from around his neck. “If you are ever in danger, send this with a messenger you trust. All he has to do is show it to the people he encounters along the way, and they will lead him to me. When I see this, I will come. No matter where I am.” He places the charm around my neck. “It is your safety.” Then he pulls back the covers and looks at me for a long time with his steady green eyes. He runs his fingers through my hair. Then he lies down beside me and moves his hand on my belly.
The news over the radio is not good. Lucinda and Nona and I sit by the radio and listen and it is not good. In the distance we still hear the sound of chopping, the sound of the banana workers at work. We listen, and Nona rocks back and forth. I put my hand on my belly, on the spot where Miguel placed his the night before. I can still feel the pressure of his hand there. With my other hand, I absently hold on to the charm.
“Where did you get that?” Lucinda asks, trying to tug it from around my neck. I pull away. “Did he put that on you?” She orders me to take it off, but I refuse. “Poor child,” she says in Quechua. “You are marked as if you had been branded. They should have taken you from this place years ago.”
I go with Chalo, the dog, for a walk around the perimeter of the town. He leaps into the air and darts ahead of me, barking. He is nervous about something. No one is outside. The streets are white in the rays of the sun and the town is dusty. It is quiet, it is suddenly so quiet. I wonder if this was the way it was quiet before the machines came, the way Lucinda said. But it is too quiet. Even the monkeys and parrots are still. Then I hear a noise, a very loud noise, and I think of Nona. This time it seems that she really is dying. I run back to the house, with Chalo rushing at my side, barking all the way, and on the porch I see Nona alone. Her eyes are wider than ever before, wide as if she had just been stabbed somewhere. And her lips are moving swiftly and she mutters the same sound over and over again. I lean forward and press my ear to her lips. Her lips are moist and the air she breathes into my ear is very hot. “Bees,” she says. “Bees.” I look out toward the jungle. The air seems heavy with sweetness; the town is hot. It emits a yellow glow, a sickly pale yellow glow. Again there comes the strong scent of bananas, but it is not siesta time and there is no sound of chopping. I look out to the hills and I see the swarm where Nona is pointing. She continues pointing and stammering the first word she has uttered that I have understood in a long time, but she is mistaken. They are small, so I can see how she made her error; tiny like insects. “No, Nona,” I say, trying to restrain her. “No,” I repeat, helping her sit back down, “it’s only men.”
Death Apples
FOR REASONS that would never be clear to her, Rita Hoffman invited her mother to a Caribbean island to recover. Mrs. Hoffman had a lot to recover from. The divorce from her second husband being one. The death of her first husband being another. The death of her parents, of her firstborn in a car crash. In sum, Rita invited her mother to recover from her life.
Rita thought the island would be a perfect place. But there was nothing to do that Mrs. Hoffman liked to do. There was no shopping, no good restaurants, and not many white people. There were things about the island that Rita liked, though. She liked the lizards who blew up their red porous pouches and humped up and down when they seemed to be listening. She liked the little furry mongooses that slunk across the roads, bellies to the ground, and she liked to look at the bodies of the West Indian men. She liked swimming among the barracuda of Ginger Bay. And she liked the warning signs painted on the manchineel trees. Killer trees. Trees that if you touched them would take your life away. Rita liked all the things she discovered during their first three days while her mother slept.
Shortly after they arrived at the tiny island a few hundred miles east of Puerto Rico, Mrs. Hoffman said, “Honey, your mother needs her beauty rest,” and she went to bed. Rita didn’t know what to make of it. Her mother got up at noon, walked out to the patio, went back to bed, and slept until cocktails. Then she made it through dinner and went to bed again. Rita figured her mother was just tired, but by the third day this period of rest seemed to be getting a little long. It occurred to Rita that perhaps her mother had come here to die.
So the next day Rita rented a mop
ed for her mother. “Mom,” she said, waking her with a tray of coffee and rolls and fresh-squeezed orange juice, “it’s time you tested your wings.”
“My wings seem a bit weary,” her mother replied. But then she said, “You’re right. I suppose I should venture forth.” Mrs. Hoffman got out of bed. She opened her striped cotton hospital robe, the only thing she’d kept—except for his name—that had belonged to Rita’s father, whom she had nursed for the last six months of his life. At night, while her father lay upstairs, dying, Rita would go downstairs and in the darkened living room see just one red light, from a cigarette, glowing in the dark. Her mother would say, “Honey, is that you?” and Rita would sneak back up the stairs.
Mrs. Hoffman let the robe slip off her shoulders and onto the ground. Rita saw her mother, standing there, naked. Her thighs and hips were turning to flab; her breasts sagged. In her legs, thick blue veins like rivers twisted and ran. She had borne three children, and the oldest, James, had died in a car crash, speeding on an L.A. freeway, though the police said he wouldn’t have had a scratch on him if he’d been wearing his seat belt. James had always been reckless, like their mother. Rita had her mother’s body, she knew that, and now she could see what she’d look like in twenty-five years. Everything in Rita’s life had thus far been directed toward one simple goal, the only real goal in Rita’s life. She was determined not to grow up to be like her mother.
Mrs. Hoffman had never been on a moped before, but she was willing to try anything once. On their way to the moped place, Mrs. Hoffman glanced into all the windows of shops. She looked at the rose-colored shells and the T-shirts that read I’VE DONE IT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA. She wore dark glasses with pale blue rims that winged up at the sides, and she lifted them from time to time, staring at her own reflection in the glass. “I don’t look so bad, do I? For an old dame?”
Rita looked at her mother in the Bermuda shorts that didn’t quite fit, the polo shirt that clung too tightly to her breasts. “You look terrific, Mom.”
Mrs. Hoffman tucked her arm through her daughter’s. “I needed to get away.” As they walked, her mother looked at her reflection again. A group of Caribbean men on their way to the sugar cane fields watched them as they walked past. The men had dark skin and arms with thick working muscles. Their bellies were taut. They were accustomed to the white women who came down from the north. Sometimes they made love to them. Sometimes they married them. Rita looked at the men as they passed, and Rita supposed that the men had no right to look at her in that way. Rita supposed incorrectly. The men were not looking at her in that way. They were looking mostly at Rita’s mother.
Just before they reached the moped place, her mother paused. “How could it have slipped my mind? I forgot to tell you. Did you hear about Russ Stapleton?” Rita couldn’t help being stunned. Her mother hadn’t mentioned Russ to her in ten years, perhaps more. Not since her father died. But Rita was certain, if she thought about it, that she hadn’t spent a single day without thinking about him. And if Rita thought about it further, she knew there was no reason that her mother should even mention Russ Stapleton to her, yet her mother had said it in such a way that Rita had to assume her mother knew something about Rita that Rita didn’t know her mother knew.
“He’s getting divorced.”
“Oh,” Rita said. They had reached the moped place. Charlie, the huge fair-skinned man with fifteen tattoos—Rita had counted fifteen, up and down his arms—greeted them. He pointed to the moped Rita’s mother was supposed to ride. Rita turned to her mother. “Is he really getting divorced? That’s incredible.”
“Oh.” Her mother nodded. “That doesn’t surprise me so much. I was more surprised when he didn’t marry you.”
Mrs. Hoffman took to the moped right away, after a brief lesson from Charlie. He sent them off on the ocean road, heading toward the ruins of Gustavberg, the old sugar cane plantation at the tip of the island. Rita checked to make sure her mother could drive the thing up the hill and use her brakes and not sail over the handlebars. And when Rita was sure of that, she took off.
Rita liked to fly. She liked to ride horses and bikes and motorcycles. She liked fast-moving trains and low-flying planes. When she’d been younger, she’d been reckless, like James. She’d liked riding on Russ Stapleton’s Harley when he used to pick her up at night in the cartyon and take her down to the sea.
It wasn’t Russ who gave Rita her first kiss. It was some other boy, now faded into the memory of so many other nondescript boys who’d kissed her during spin the bottle or after movie dates. But it didn’t matter who the others were or how old or when it happened, because for Rita there was only one night that mattered.
It was the night when Russ came over and said he wanted to talk, so they’d gone down to the ocean. But when they got there, he didn’t seem to have anything to say. They’d been friends since they were children, and Leslie, Russ’s girlfriend, was a good friend of Rita’s. Rita asked him if anything was wrong with Leslie, and Russ had shaken his head. He’d taken her by the hand and walked in silence, the Pacific roaring at their feet. Then, suddenly, without a word, there on the beach with the warm breeze blowing off the ocean, he’d kissed her. She felt as if there were no world beyond the world of his lips on her lips. Nothing had prepared her for this. Nothing would ever be like it again. That kiss had wakened Rita as if she’d been sleeping her entire life.
She shuddered as the moped zipped along the ocean road. Rita had spent most of her life falling in or out of love with the wrong men. And not a single one of them had ever done for her what Russ did when he kissed her that night on the beach. And not a single one had ever done to her what Russ did when he married Leslie.
Black men grinned at Rita and her mother as they took the curves on their mopeds. Mrs. Hoffman waved and laughed. Defiantly she passed Rita. Most of the black people of the island were descendants of the slaves who had worked that plantation, and the sugar cane industry had declined since the slaves were freed. Mrs. Hoffman and Rita zipped along, waving at descendants of slaves, until they came near the ruins of the sugar cane plantation.
At the plantation they parked their mopeds and walked. They walked past beautiful trees named flamboyant, the frangipani, the genip, the sugar pear. And the manchineel. When they got to the manchineel, Mrs. Hoffman stopped. She stopped at the big red spot on the trees and the sign beneath them, the warning. These trees are fatal, the sign said. You cannot eat their fruit. On the trees Mrs. Hoffman and Rita saw little reddish-yellow apples, like crab-apples, and another sign told them that these were called death apples. That Columbus, the great discoverer of America, had named them death apples because his men, thinking they were in paradise, had eaten of them and died.
That evening for dinner they went to a beach bar and ordered piña coladas and sea turtle steaks. Mrs. Hoffman talked about the breakup of her second marriage. She told Rita how she almost died of boredom with Ben. “Golf and gin rummy; that’s all he ever talked about. In all of L.A., he’d only eat in three restaurants, and two of them were his private clubs.” Rita laughed and her mother ordered another piña colada and a bottle of white wine. “But, you know, even when you want out,” Mrs. Hoffman said, “it’s always difficult to break up with somebody. Ben used to fix all the appliances in the house. He’d fix the dishwasher, the dryer, whatever. Do you know what I did when he left me? I showed up one day at his office with the toaster.”
As Mrs. Hoffman poured Rita a glass of wine, they both laughed at the thought of Mrs. Hoffman arriving at Ben’s office with a broken toaster. Mrs. Hoffman patted her daughter’s hand. “I want you to marry a good man. Are you seeing anybody now?”
Rita had been seeing somebody for the past three years, but she didn’t want to tell her mother about him. He was the lawyer she worked for as a paralegal. After hours, they made love on the red vinyl sofa in his office. He was supposed to leave his wife, and sometimes he got closer to it than other times. “What about Russ?” Mrs. Hoffman asked. “M
aybe you should call him. After a while, of course.”
Rita turned her wine glass in her hands. “Mom, I didn’t know you knew anything about it.”
“You’d be surprised what I know,” Mrs. Hoffman said. Then she added softly, “I’m your mother.”
“Anyway, it was over ten years ago.”
“Go for it,” Mrs. Hoffman said, “while you still can.”
Just then a group of boys, young men really, came into the beach bar. They wore Bermuda shorts and T-shirts and were drinking beer out of bottles. Rita counted thirteen of them. They formed a line and said they were called the Baker’s Dozen from Yale University and they were going to sing. First they sang, “There ain’t nobody here but us chickens.” They tucked their thumbs into their armpits and clucked like chickens. And then they sang “Mammy” in a good Al Jolson rendition.
Rita and her mother were laughing and enjoying themselves. Then, for the next number, a young man with a head of auburn curls and blue eyes stepped forward. The beach bar was filling up, with tourists milling around. The young man glanced around.
Rita noticed her mother looking intensely at the young man, and the young man suddenly fixed his eyes on Rita’s mother. He stared at her with a deep look of longing as he began to sing, in a beautiful tenor voice, “Oh, ye take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.” Rita put down her fork and her glass of wine. Her mother stared deep into the eyes of the young man, and the young man stared at her. “But me and my true love will never meet again, on the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.”