“Like very little worms,” she said. “But short and fat and furry little worms.”
“Shigella sonnei. That’s their scientific name,” Lisette said in what Nick called her “lectury” voice.
Cristina sat down again.
“But you didn’t come here for a biology lesson. What seems to be the trouble?”
The girl threw a quick, shy glance at Anna, who was rearranging a supply cabinet.
“Anna, would you mind leaving us alone for a while?” Lisette said.
The nurse closed the cabinet and went out into the courtyard.
“I have been bleeding when I should not be,” said Cristina, after Anna had left the room.
“When?”
“In between, in the middle of my month. When it’s not supposed to.”
“Is the bleeding heavy?”
“No, not too much. It’s like small spots. But I’m worried it might get bad, like before.”
“Before? Before when?”
“In January. Things like little red peas came out.”
“Clots,” Lisette said, and frowned.
“They said it would stop, and it did.” Cristina gave a determined smile. “But now, more blood, and I am worried.”
Lisette returned the smile. “Who is ‘they’?”
The girl hunched her shoulders and cast a nervous glance at the ceiling. Lisette took a moment to give her time to answer, but none came.
“Cristina, I have to ask you this—did you have an abortion?”
With a rapid twitch of her head, she affirmed that she had. She was near the end of her first trimester when her boyfriend, Eduardo, brought her to the public health clinic in Hermosillo. It would not admit her because she lacked proof that she’d been raped. A nice lady at the clinic, however, referred her to a man who would do the procedure. A woman worked with him, maybe his wife, maybe not, and she was not so nice. It was done in a room in their apartment, which was dirty and in a rough neighborhood. Afterward, they gave her pills for pain and to prevent infection, and that was the end of it. Except now there was this bleeding.
“It’s not unusual to have spotting between your periods. You said you’re in the middle of your cycle?”
Cristina nodded.
“I think it’s nothing to worry about.”
The girl’s face brightened. “Honestly? I have been hiding the napkins in the rubbish, like I did after the, you know. I am worried my mother will find them and start to ask questions. I told her I had a miscarriage because she says that women who have abortions burn in hell when they die.”
Sounds like something my mother would say, Lisette thought. “I need you to take your clothes off so I can have a look and be sure,” she said.
“All of my clothes?” Cristina asked.
“No. From the waist down.”
She shyly reached under her dress, wiggled out of her underwear and, with the dress rolled up to her waist, lay on the examination table at the back of the room. Lisette moved a folding privacy screen between it and the door, and slipped on latex gloves.
No fever, no abdominal swelling, spotty blood with no clots and no bad odor, pulse and blood pressure normal, cervix closed … Cristina Herrera, so unfortunate in what had happened to her, was lucky in this instance. The exam over, Cristina dressed, and Lisette gave her pain medication and an antibiotic, assuring her that she would be fine.
“I am happy it is gone,” she whispered, returning to the chair beside Lisette’s desk. “It was the child of the devil, you know.”
“It was the child of a rapist, mi querida, not the devil,” Lisette responded gently.
“That is what Padre Tim tells me.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“I went to confession before I came here.”
“I can’t imagine that he said you will burn in hell.”
“No!” Her eyes widened, the brows lifting into arcs. “He told me about the sinful woman in the Bible who was going to be stoned. And the Lord says to the men with the stones to throw them if they have no sin. They go away, and then the Lord asks the woman, Where are the men who accused you? Haven’t they condemned you? And she says that no one is there to condemn her. Then He says—”
“‘Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more,’” Lisette cut in, somewhat startled that she remembered anything from her childhood Bible study.
“That is what he said, Padre Tim.”
“Sounds like him.”
Cristina looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “I cannot pay you, Doctor Lisette.”
“Can you make enchiladas?”
“No. But my mother does.” She smiled slowly. “It is said they are the best enchiladas in San Patricio.”
“Then ask her to bring me some when she has the time. Enough for two people. With green chili sauce.”
“I will, but I will not tell her the reason.”
“That goes without saying.”
After the girl left, Lisette massaged the back of her neck, musing on something she’d heard from a politician she knew in Álamos—“We have laws for everything in Mexico, but we don’t enforce them until we need to.” Evidently, there had been no need to enforce the law against Cristina’s rapist but great need to enforce the one requiring her to prove that she had been raped.
She went out to the courtyard, where Pamela was swiping a house-painter’s brush across her canvas; and she was swiping it like a house-painter, in long, careless strokes.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she muttered to herself.
Looking over her shoulder, Lisette saw that she was covering the work she’d done—in black.
“Does it ever stop?” Pamela said, swinging the brush back and forth. “It’s hard to concentrate with that racket.”
She meant the fiesta, whose sounds—drumbeats, flutes, guitars, and chants—drifted up, faintly, from the plaza.
Swat. Slap. Swat.
“Why are you covering the whole thing up?”
“Because it’s derivative. Bargain-basement, secondhand Georgia O’Keeffe. The Wexler people would see that in a heartbeat. The Wexler’s a big deal. I can’t turn in crap.”
“The other day you were on the launch pad, now you’re where?”
She was swabbing black over the black, the strokes vertical, horizontal, diagonal.
“Maybe you could use a drink,” Lisette said.
“Tequila on the rocks. How do you say it? En el rocas.”
“Las, honey. En las rocas.”
“That’s what I need.”
* * *
By Saturday morning, people had come out of the Sierra in the hundreds, some walking, some on horseback, some in pickup trucks with dust-curtained windshields. They pitched tents in the hills embracing San Patricio and in the afternoon streamed into the pueblo, the women wearing everything from shorts and halter tops to long Indian skirts, the men in jeans and straw cowboy hats, all surging toward the plaza to watch the final confrontation between the fariseos—the Pharisees—and the allies of Christ: the Matachines, the deer dancers, and the old men of the fiesta, the pascolas.
The noisy celebration made it impossible for Pamela to work. She and Lisette went out into the street. A human tide swept them down Calle Insurgentes, into the town center. Crowds five and six deep surrounded the plaza on three sides, kids riding their fathers’ shoulders so they could see. The fourth side, facing the church, was kept open as an arena for the climactic struggle. There, in the palm trees’ half-shade, musicians scraped battered fiddles, strummed guitars, and plucked homemade harps while the white-clad Matachines danced. They danced in lines and in circles, twirling and shaking gourd rattles. Some men came forward as others fell back, the choreography like a high school band’s at halftime: the same pattern over and over again, lines bending into circles, the circles breaking back into lines, advancing and retreating as the fiddles and guitars played a repetitious melody on a strange scale. This went on for nearly half an hour in the hot sun, the air dense with the
scrambled odors of mesquite fires, sizzling meat, bodies innocent of soap.
Now the pascolas and the deer dancers, wearing the antlered heads of real deer, joined the Matachines. Lisette climbed onto a bench to get a clearer view; even Pamela had to stand on tiptoe. Stripped to the waist, the deer dancers had the torsos of lightweight boxers; the pascolas wore masks dripping horsehair braids and carried banners emblazoned with red and green crosses. All of them shuffled toward the church and formed a human barrier at the bottom of its steps. At the top, Father Tim, Father Hugo, and the Old Priest stood in their brown habits, a choir behind them. Several women poured ashes from plastic pails onto the street facing the church to mark the boundary of holy ground.
The fariseos arrived, parading in two long columns up the Avenida Obregón, led by men who carried a straw effigy of Judas. The fariseos were also masked, their masks imitating witches and sorcerers and beasts. Some banged on handheld drums and beat wooden knives against wooden swords with a quick rhythm. The cocoon rattles wrapped around their legs hissed like rattlesnakes. They marched into the plaza, then turned to face the Matachines and pascolas, lined up at the foot of the church steps. The fariseos charged, but as they neared the boundary of ashes, Christ’s allies bombarded them with flowers—paper flowers and real flowers, gold, lavender, orange, and red. The fariseos fell back, re-formed their ranks, and charged again, urged on by frenzied drumbeats, only to be repulsed a second time under another barrage of flowers.
At last, after a third attempt, the fariseos retreated in confusion, tossing their swords and knives aside, tearing off their masks. The church bells rang out, and the choir began to sing the “Gloria” while the fariseos, admitting defeat, set fire to the straw Judas and threw their masks into the flames.
“This is supposed to be Catholic?” asked Pamela, looking up at Lisette, perched on the bench.
“Not quite.”
“It’s very exciting, but what’s it all about?”
“The Pharisees have been defeated by flowers. Christ’s blood was supposed to have turned into flowers. Flower power, you might say, has overcome the power of swords and knives. The triumph of good over evil.”
Her eyes watering from the smoke, Lisette looked over the flags, the blossoms scattered across the plaza, the mass of burnt-umber Indian faces, timeless faces that could have been lifted off a daguerreotype from a century and a half ago. A wave of love rolled over her. I belong to them, she thought. I belong here.
* * *
On Easter Sunday afternoon, Lisette was in the kitchen baking a ham while Pamela sliced potatoes for gratin dauphinois.
“What do I do now?” she asked when she’d finished.
“Put them in the baking dish, pour in the milk and cream,” Lisette said, reading from the recipe. “It says three cups, but it’s just the two of us, so make it a cup.”
Pamela brushed the slices off the cutting board, into the dish.
“Okay, now salt, pepper, a clove of garlic, nutmeg.”
“How much?”
“Teaspoon of salt, quarter teaspoon pepper, pinch of nutmeg.”
Her brows pursed with concentration, Pamela measured the seasonings precisely as directed, except for the nutmeg. What constituted a pinch? Cooking wasn’t her strong point.
“This isn’t a chemistry experiment,” Lisette said cheerfully. “Put a little between your fingers and sprinkle it over the potatoes.”
She did that, then placed the dish in the oven with the ham. Lisette set a timer for forty-five minutes and they went into the courtyard and sipped the margaritas she had made earlier. The mellow-yellow hour had arrived. The fountain bubbled, the stream from the griffin’s mouth flicking droplets into the oblique sunlight.
“I’m glad that fiesta’s done with,” said Pamela. “Peace and quiet—I can work.”
Lisette always had difficulty thinking of what her lover did as work. Cutting and baling Christmas trees, as she had in her girlhood, was work. A soft chiming came from the bedroom, and Pamela’s head turned quickly.
“My phone!”
She went into the room, practically at a run. Not half a minute later, Lisette heard her whoop, and she came twirling out, pumping her arms like a twenty-year-old cheerleader.
“Whoo-hoo! I got it!”
Lisette set her glass on the table. “Got what?”
Pamela spun toward her, waving her iPhone. “An e-mail! The job! Got the job! And we’ve got something to celebrate!”
She fell into a chair, slouching, her whole face alight, and wrapped her fingers around the margarita glass. Raising it, she said, “Let’s toast me! Whoo!”
They clinked glasses. “What job, sweetie?” Lisette asked. “You never said anything about a job.”
“That’s what I didn’t want to tell you in the car the other day. I was afraid of jinxing it.”
While she was in Philadelphia, the Wexler Gallery’s director mentioned that he’d had lunch with the dean of the Yale School of Art the previous month. The Department of Painting and Printmaking was losing two faculty members and looking to fill the vacancies. The gallery director said he would find out if the positions were still open and recommend her—if that was agreeable to her.
“Agreeable? Of course it was agreeable. Agreeable squared. I mean, Yale! I got the call the next day, the dean told me to shoot him a résumé and some photos of what I’d been doing, and I was on that so fast I should have gotten a speeding ticket. So the dean e-mails me back and says the résumé was being reviewed but if it was up to him all by himself, he’d be thrilled to have me on board. His word, Lissie. Thrilled.”
Lisette rose and, leaning over the table, kissed Pamela’s forehead. “And I’m thrilled for you. Congratulations.” Actually, “thrilled” might have been an overstatement, though it did please her to see Pamela happy, as opposed to being in a state of over-the-top excitement. “It’s great when all those connections pay off,” she said, realizing as she sat down again that the statement had come out wrong. A little resentment had sneaked into it, as if Pamela’s connections had come through an inheritance rather than her own merits.
But Pamela hadn’t noticed. “I start as a lecturer. In July. The summer term. But it’s a tenure track. I won’t have to worry about money again.”
Lisette squeezed lime into her drink.
“I didn’t think you’d ever in your life had to worry about money,” she said.
“Everybody worries about money. People with money worry about money. If they stopped worrying about it, they’d lose it.”
“That would be one way for their worries to be over.”
Pamela fixed her gaze on Lisette. “Something on your mind? You don’t sound as thrilled as you said you are.”
“Well, I am. It’s only that this news is unexpected, and I’m wondering where it leaves us.”
“You’re my rock, my anchor, Lisette. I think if I hadn’t had you in my life the last couple of months, I would have floated away, like one of those party balloons.”
“You will do just fine,” Lisette said, bothered by the description of herself as a rock and anchor. It seemed to confer a responsibility she might not be able to live up to, and didn’t want.
Right then the timer dinged, and they walked briskly into the kitchen, took out the ham and the potatoes, and carried them to the table. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes Lisette hardly uttered a word while Pamela went on about Yale and the exhibition, stopping only to take a bite of her food, which wasn’t often. She looked burnished, as lovely as Lisette had ever seen her. Yet she felt that peculiar loneliness again—of being in the company of someone who wasn’t present.
As if aware that she’d been yammering too much about herself, Pamela stood and wrapped her hands around Lisette’s neck.
“I was in a bad way after U. of A. let me go and you helped me through it.”
“Gratitude will get you everywhere.”
“Really? Where would that be?” Her voice was teasing.
&
nbsp; “You pick the destination.”
“Have you ever read Catullus?” she asked.
“I’m afraid I’ve never heard of him.”
“A Roman poet. ‘Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and let us judge all the rumors of the old men to be worth just one penny!’” She bent down and kissed Lisette on the mouth, tongued her ear, nipped her earlobe, and kissed her lips again. “‘Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred, then another thousand…’”
* * *
“Now, was that a great idea or what?” Pamela said afterward, a long leg thrown over Lisette’s waist.
Lisette agreed it was, though it seemed that in the act she had traded places with Pamela. It was she who had been present and not present at the same time, her heart somewhere other than her body; that is, while Pamela had made love, she had been fucking.
Pamela sat up, her back against the headboard, and pulled the bedsheet over her breasts in a sudden onset of modesty. Lying on her side, Lisette looked at Pamela’s shoulders, smooth as a girl’s, and was glad of the twilight; it concealed the wrinkles in her skin, dried out from too many years in arid climates.
“You said you wondered about where all this leaves us. I was wondering, too, on the flight back,” Pamela said. “I had a lot of time to think about what to do if Yale came through.”
Lisette, a bit drugged from the postprandial lovemaking, or fucking, whichever was appropriate, mumbled an “uh-huh.”
“Are you interested in what I was thinking?”
“Sure.”
“I’m going to have to start pretty soon, looking for an apartment in New Haven. I’d like to be looking for a place for us.”
Now Lisette sat up straight.
“I don’t want to be apart from you,” Pamela went on, fully in the persona of Pamela A. “You are my rock and my anchor, and you did say, twice, that you could practice medicine in the States. And it’s been legalized in Connecticut. Gay marriage.”
Oh, my God.
Pamela leaned over and cupped Lisette’s chin to gently turn her head so they faced each other. “I’m asking you to marry me.”
Lisette was silent.
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