by Tatjana Soli
* * *
There had come a time, after the trip to Mexico with the girls, when Claire could no longer stand miming her way through the empty days. After Forster left, she sat in her bedroom, still in her nightgown at five in the afternoon, hair unbrushed, when Lucy, home from school, came into her room, sat on the bed, and held her hand.
“Mom,” she said, “would it be okay if we just pretended we were happy?”
The shock of what she was doing to her girls called her to action. And that’s what she did all those years—conformed to the world’s expectations. Cleaned the house, ran the farm, took care of the girls, and smiled and pretended, pretended and smiled. Finally, pretenses were falling away.
Before she left, Gwen had stocked the freezer with meals she’d cooked, but over the next weeks, these ran out. For a while, Minna got motivated and cooked her own dishes: chicken and rice, plantains and beans. But these inspirations were erratic. Some days she would simply pick vegetables and fruit from the garden, and that would be what they ate. A few days they simply scooped avocado directly out of the shell, or smashed it on toast, drizzling it with lemon and salt. Ate oranges off the trees.
Minna no longer shut the windows or the doors, so it was as if they had no indoors, or rather that the rooms had become derelict and abandoned. A great interpenetration of the in with the out. Breezes fluttered papers on the couch, ruffled pages of an open book, ballooned the curtains. Sparrows tumbled through the windows and perched on the rafters, flying into furniture and walls until they found their escape. Feathers drifted onto the floor. Lizards sunned on the doorstop. It felt like living inside a ruin.
Yes, dirt collected on the tables, cobwebs in the doorways. A baby garden snake was found coiled in the bathroom. The floor was gritty, and the soles of Claire’s feet turned brown after walking barefoot across the room, but she was happy as she had never been happy in her spotless house. Dishes crowded the sink and counter, mold bloomed in the shower, but a great peacefulness was in the hours. It was as if from sheer will they had somehow stopped the track of time. Literally, Minna had disengaged the grandfather clock, saying the counting of the hours depressed her.
* * *
One afternoon as they watched the news, street riots were shown in some small island country Claire didn’t catch the name of. Minna watched, eyes widening till the whites showed, like the rolling eyes of a frightened horse. She got up unsteadily and turned the TV off. After that, they never watched television again, never listened to the radio. Claire got used to silence and for the first time in her life realized her own thoughts required a stillness she had never allowed.
Sometimes when they sat outside, they heard the workers’ voices far away, but the noise was indistinct and melodious and of no consequence, like birdsong or the buzzing of bees at work. Only for a special treat would Minna put on a CD, and then listening to Mozart or to jazz or reggae took on a richness unimaginable. Was that what heaven would feel like if one believed in it?
* * *
As summer drew on, the house grew hot in the daytime, and they slept in later and later. Claire woke to the smell of earth from the fields, citrus baking in the scorching sun. When it was unbearable inside, Minna swam naked in the pool while Claire dangled her legs in the deep end.
One morning by the pool, she noticed that Minna was putting on weight when a noise startled her. The pool man stood there, unexpected, holding his net and scrubber, lewdly grinning. For a moment, Claire felt panicked, the shadow of a memory of male intrusion. She was unused to the eyes of strangers. The women both wrapped themselves in towels and hurried inside. Claire was surprised that Minna, despite her brazenness, hid in her room. After he left, Minna insisted on firing him.
“Who will clean it?” Claire asked, knowing already the deed was done.
“I will.”
“But…”
“But what?”
And so with time, the pool, too, returned to its primordial nature, turned from blue to green. Leaves floated on its surface, and dirt collected on the bottom till it resembled a pond.
Claire added the pool man’s wages onto Paz’s wages onto her assistant’s salary, with no protestations from Minna. None of this bothered her for the simple fact of Minna’s increasing goodwill. She was simply buoyant, and her happiness transferred itself to Claire. They were like children going to camp during the summer, the ordinary, workaday world temporarily suspended except for the injections each morning that reminded Claire of her illness.
The heat grew so intense, they moved entirely outdoors, using the inside of the house only for storage. When the temperature passed one hundred, they lived on lawn chairs under the deep canopy of a large avocado tree next to the pool, mirroring Octavio’s makeshift headquarters out in the orchard.
Minna went barefoot, wore cotton overalls cut off short on the thigh. Thin, white strips of cloth were threaded through her braided hair. Bare of makeup, shiny with sweat, she looked like a wholesome teenager. Despite the heat, Claire tried to keep covered. Minna looked at her perspiring face, then reached over and yanked off her baseball cap.
“Don’t,” Claire said.
“Enjoy the air.”
After a minute, Claire had to admit it felt better, the air dry against her scalp. She tried to forget what she must look like. “I’m tired of being ugly and old.”
“It feels the same when people stare at you because you’re beautiful. Or because you’re black. Staring is staring.”
The next time Minna caught Claire despondent over her appearance in a mirror, she took all the mirrors down in the house and put posters in their place: the living room became Greece, and the den turned into Italy, and the dining room, which they never went into, languished as Finland. In the bathroom, Minna painted over the seventies-style mirrored walls with great swathes of blue-gray color so that one could only see one’s ghostly shape moving as if through fog.
As the house fell into a swoon of neglect, Claire tried to take an interest in the farm, but it was no use. For years she had overseen and shared the decisions on the daily work with Octavio, but over the last months, as she spent less and less time out in the fields, everything ran just as smoothly as it had before. Trees were sprayed and pruned, the irrigation ran, the pickers came and went, all without her lifting a finger. Now when Claire forced herself, the long walks out in the field were difficult, and she arrived exhausted, unsteady, more nuisance than help.
She suspected that her previous efforts had been in vain, that Octavio had never needed her input, had consulted her as a courtesy. With Octavio’s new coolness, Claire had to admit what she had never before considered. How could he not feel that three Mejia generations had worked their lives away on the ranch for nothing more than a decent living? Of course he wanted better for Paz. Forster’s family had bought when buying was cheap, and that piece of paper allowed them the lion’s share of the money, allowed them a home and belonging that was denied Octavio’s family. In her new state, human arrangement and history seemed a strange and arbitrary thing. When did a person really own something?
* * *
One afternoon Minna and Claire were napping under the tree, lethargic from the heat. Claire dreamed of troubling things and woke to see Minna staring at the railing, specifically at two large fruit rats as large as house cats staring back. On the railing between them lay a half-eaten avocado. Both sides were quiet for so long that Claire began to think she was still dreaming, but when she moved her arm, the rats scurried away, the avocado falling onto the deck. Minna and she blinked at each other as if they had just woken from the same dream.
“Why are you so at ease with me? More than your daughters?”
“I can’t tell them things, do you understand?”
“I do, che. You and I, we know pain.”
“I want to protect them.” Ever since the girls had left, Claire had been bursting with the desire to talk to Minna about her visitation. “I need to tell you something.”
�
��Yes?” Her eyes were closed.
Claire pressed her hands together, plunged on. “While you were gone … the Fourth of July … one day in the kitchen … there was a flame.”
“A flame?” Still Minna did not open her eyes, and her seeming disinterest egged Claire on.
“I saw him. My boy.”
Now Minna opened her eyes, sat up with a big smile. “Good! Why didn’t you tell me earlier? It’s starting to work.”
“What is?” Claire asked, confused by Minna’s lack of surprise.
“Come.”
She took Claire by the arm and led her through the broiling house, up the tinder-dry stairs, and into her bedroom. Each time she opened the door, Claire was again surprised by the changes. Now the figures on the wall had multiplied again until they squeezed against each other, became as dense as a forest, so thick she could hardly tell the color of the wall for the profligacy of the creatures crowding it. The paint was so thick in places that the figures were beginning a life of three-dimensionality, beginning to lift themselves off the wall, like Michelangelo’s prisoners freeing themselves out of stone. Minna directed Claire’s attention to the middle of the room, to a large link chain, coated with a thick, gluey bright green paint, hanging from the ceiling and ending in a fabric-filled pail on the floor.
“This is the poto mitan. It attracts the iwa, the spirits, to come.”
“You don’t believe in this?”
Minna grinned. “Why not? No harm done, right?”
Claire turned and studied the figures on the wall. The silence stretched between them.
“Just fun and games, right?” Minna said. “Like a psychology course taught in pictures. No black magic or zombies.”
They both laughed, thin, shallow, insincere sounds that bounced off the hot, dusty glass of the windows.
“You’ve never seen him before, your son, have you?”
“No. Never.”
“It’s not a bad thing. It’s like a dream you make for something not finished in your real life. You finish it inside, in your heart.”
Chapter 13
The intense heat continued, and that, coupled with the isolation of illness, made time become elastic. With it insufferable to be in the kitchen, much less cook over a hot stove, Minna and Claire ate bowls of cold cereal with milk, adding nuts and bananas and berries. When the milk ran out, they poured fresh orange juice over the cereal and finally succumbed to eating it dry right out of the box. When the cereal was gone, they finished the almonds, walnuts, and pecans out of the pantry by the handful, picked strawberries and blackberries from the garden, ate oranges, tomatoes, and avocados. Hungry, sometimes Claire ate fruit straight off the tree, not quite ripe, and suffered stomachaches. She pulled carrots out of the earth, held them under the hose, then ate them, warm and sweet. The absence of the debilitating effects of chemo resembled a return to health; hunger was a return of vitality. It allowed her to entertain the ironic hope that she would soon be strong enough to endure the poisoning again.
The girls called on schedule again. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. How’re you? Fine. How’re you? Great. Couldn’t be better.
Octavio was a shadowy presence, only intruding on them once a week when he would stop at the house, stand below the porch, and fill Claire in on the details of work. It was as if he wanted to emphasize that he understood that he, too, was only an employee, subject to termination at any time like his daughter. An aloofness had entered their relationship since Paz had left, but Claire planned to repair the damage later, as soon as she had energy enough.
When the time came to have her checkup with the doctor, Minna and she spent the morning showering and dressing in a combination of dread and excitement at returning to the world. Claire searched for her wig, but could not find it and had to resort to a scarf. Her hands shook with nerves, both from the upcoming verdict and at the jolt of unaccustomed activity.
“What’s wrong here is that we need to get in the car to do anything. It would be better if we could walk to the grocery, to the laundry, the doctor,” Minna said.
Claire shook her head. “No one walks in California.”
“Well, they should.” They giggled as if drunk.
“It makes people nervous to see pedestrians. It seems unreliable. They wonder what you’ve done wrong to not have a car.”
* * *
They stopped at the IHOP and ordered two breakfasts each: one of eggs and bacon, the other of pancakes. Waiting for her food, Claire felt overwhelmed by the number of people around them, the noise. When someone sneezed a few tables down, she jumped. Had she become such a recluse? After their food deprivation, they now gorged until they could hardly move. But Claire only managed to eat half her portion before she was full to bursting. They sat back in their booth, giddy. Minna clowned, putting a smudge of whipped cream from a pancake on the end of her nose, while Claire laughed, holding her stomach in pain.
People in the surrounding booths turned and stared, but that only increased their hilarity, until Claire feared she would be sick from laughing so hard and long. Had she forgotten how to act in public? So-called polite society?
The waitress, a big, tired-looking Swede with graying blond hair, eyed Minna with distrust. Although Minna ordered for both of them, it was as if she were invisible. The waitress talked only to Claire, handed her the bill, returned the change to her, which she pointedly handed over to Minna. Unimpressed at the correction, the waitress turned her back on them. They revenged themselves with a nickel tip.
* * *
At the hospital, the doctor came in and sat studying Claire’s charts, still holding a grudge over Mexico, refusing her any small talk since that disobedience. He stroked a thin goatee he was growing, reluctantly satisfied with Claire’s white blood cell count but unhappy with the weight loss.
“Are you eating? Too nauseous?”
“Trying…” Claire said. Forgetting was more like it, she thought.
“After this much of a break, I don’t see the efficacy in starting the chemo again. If you agree, we’ll move straight to radiation. Provided you put on weight.”
He could not see Claire was blooming from the inside, blooming and blooming, alive in a way she hadn’t been in a long while. He could not see that she would no longer be defeated by anything as prosaic as cancer.
* * *
Bringing in the bags of groceries from the packed trunk of the car was like Christmas morning. Claire ate a few spoonfuls from the tubs of ice cream, a single butter cookie from each of the tins. Minna boiled a huge pot of spaghetti and meatballs; after three meals, the amount still in the pot was hardly dented. They did this with the knowledge that these were treasured feast days, following doctor’s orders. Claire’s appetite would wane as surely as the moon, a self-induced famine would inevitably follow because Minna would lose her will, forget, and let food run out again.
On a Wednesday, Claire picked up the phone to Gwen’s call. When Claire told her that the chemotherapy was over, that now it was six weeks of radiation, Gwen started to cry.
“What’s wrong?”
“Does this mean you’re okay?”
“The worst is over.” After Claire hung up, she stared at the phone. Minna walked by and asked what was wrong.
“I think Gwen loves me.”
“What kind of daughter doesn’t love her mother?”
* * *
In celebration of the end of chemo, Minna turned on the pool lights, which lit the now murky green into a romantic grotto. By candlelight, she brought out a tarnished silver ice bucket from the dining room—polishing silver another thing that had gone by the wayside. They popped open a bottle of French champagne Don had given Minna. Claire sipped one glass while Minna finished off the rest of the bottle. When the ice had melted, skeletons of insects floated to the top from the dusty bottom of the bucket.
“To Claire. The survivor.”
“I feel more like the kid passed on to the next grade who didn’t quite complete the wo
rk. But the chemo is over. Unless there is a recurrence.”
“Don’t say that word,” Minna whispered. “Words have power.”
“You’re right. Survivor.”
“A survivor is the most important thing to be. Nothing else matters.”
Claire sipped her drink.
“The spirits are aligning.”
They sat, the sky softening to a velvety blue. Clouds were coming in, the unheard-of promise of a summer shower. Birds roosted in the trees, feeling the change in the air in their bones, the promise of real moisture, unlike the irrigation. The pool was a mottled, embryonic soup, like the stirrings of a universe. Like housekeeping, cleaning the pool another useless worry to be let go. Claire decided she liked this more natural pond incarnation. Was that part of surviving, too, allowing things to morph into new uses?
“I think it needs fish,” Minna said.
Claire shook her head. “They’d die in the chemicals.”
“The chemicals are gone. Fish will eat the algae. Carp. Maybe koi. And goldfish. Except they get eaten by the bigger ones. A hard fish world.”
“I want to give you something.”
Minna grinned. “Aren’t you the suitor.”
Claire went into the house, which ticked in the cooling air like a car engine. When she turned on the light, a small lizard on the wall blinked. She dug in her closet and brought out a necklace Forster had given her years ago, a heavy gold filigree from Turkey, a place they had dreamed of going to but never did. The necklace consisted of semiprecious stones embedded in elaborate goldwork. It had always been too extravagant for her, and she thought Forster gave it to her in consolation.
“I can’t take it,” Minna said as Claire draped it over her collarbones, reaching behind her neck to fasten the clasp.
It glowed against Minna’s skin as Claire imagined it would. Without thinking she pulled down the sides of Minna’s T-shirt so that her shoulders were bared.
“You should never take that off. It was made for you.”
“Wear only your necklace?” Minna laughed and pulled off her T-shirt. Underneath she wore her two-piece bathing suit. Only the necklace and covered breasts and the bulge of belly. She rose and unzipped her shorts. Although it was clear even in clothes how narrow-hipped Minna was, in her seminakedness she was surprisingly boyish, unsuited for maternity—straight torso, muscular thighs and buttocks, no rounded softness except for the stomach.