Yo!

by Julia Alvarez

  I’m still mostly asleep so I don’t know what she’s talking about right away. “Time for what?”

  “You know,” she says. There’s just the slightest edge of blame in her voice. And I start to feel bad like maybe I pushed too hard for a breakthrough.

  “Well, it’s late,” I say in the soothing voice I use on my kids. “Things’ll look different in the morning.”

  Not a sound from her side of the bed. She’s lying on her back, looking up at the ceiling, an insomniac getting ready for the long night ahead. And though I try to sink back into the folds of the dream I was having, before I know it, I’m wide awake as well.

  “I’m sorry,” she says when I turn on the bedside light to check the time on the clock. Four-fifteen. Tomorrow—or really I should say, today—is going to be a wasted day all right. “I feel like the muse is gone again,” she says. She’s taking those short, panicky breaths I recall from when Pete used to scare me half to death. “Like I’ve let a man invade. You know?”

  I want to say, now come on, Yo, you’re scaring yourself. But maybe it’s the wine still in my head or the late night and us talking in whispers, but I know exactly what she means, how unknowingly we women give over our lives to the first needy thing: or men or children or the soufflé that won’t rise or the kitten that’s got a swollen paw. “I know,” I tell her, “but you’re not going to lose your voice. It’s in you, how can you lose it?”

  She seems comforted by my argument, but when I go to turn off the light, she says, “Tammy, let’s read each other some poems, okay?”

  “Yo, it’s four o’clock in the morning!” I argue, but I think what the hell, four-fifteen, five, what’s the difference. Besides, something in me always gives in to Yo’s schemes—a desire to make my life more troubled and interesting, I don’t know.

  She tiptoes out and comes back with her folder of poems, and grabs mine from my study on the way in. And there we are reading poems to each other while two men are snoring away in another part of the house.

  Or so we think. Yo’s in the middle of her second muse sonnet, when I look over her shoulder, and there’s Tom in the doorway, a towel like a little wrap-skirt wound around his waist. The neat hair is tussled, all right, and if earlier tonight he looked like he belonged in the nineteenth century, now he looks like he walked out of one of those plain-wrapper magazines you can’t even get in New Hampshire.

  “What’s going on?” he says, a kink in his eyebrows.

  We’re both in our nightgowns with manila folders on our laps. What does he think?

  “We’re having a poetry reading,” I say, like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

  But he’s not taking that for an answer. He looks straight at Yo, his eyes full of twentieth-century pissed-offness. “I wake up and you’re gone,” he says. I can hear the anger in his voice, and I feel my heart beating hard, recalling those horrid scenes with Pete. Meanwhile Yo’s gone absolutely silent on me.

  “She couldn’t sleep, and neither could I,” I defend us. “So we’re just reading to each other.”

  He thinks about that a moment, and when he lets out a sigh, I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I kid you not, but it’s some kind of revelation to me that a man can get angry and not hurt anyone with it. “I guess I can’t sleep myself. Can I join you?” he asks in a voice I would find hard to refuse.

  I’m about to nod when Yo finally finds her tongue. “No!” she says, so adamantly that both Tom and I are taken aback. “Tammy and I, we share our poems only with each other,” she adds in a kinder voice. Which is a lie, on my part. But of course, Yo has this thing about showing her poems to guys.

  This hurt look opens up his face, and just for a second, I catch a glimpse of the boy inside the stiff, shy man. And I can’t help but feel sorry for him. Yo feels bad, too, I can tell. Her eyes follow him as he shuffles down the dark hall, his hands behind his cute, terryclothed butt.

  And though she goes back to reading her sonnet out loud—her heart isn’t in it. Her voice trails away. “Your turn,” she says, but I’m not into reading my Sappho poems either. It’s like the muse has fled. “We should have let him stay,” I tell her, taking half the blame.

  She looks down at the poem on her lap as if it is going to tell her what to do. “I know,” she says at last.

  “And you know, honeybaby, until you share your work with a man, you ain’t gonna feel right with him in the sack.” Sappho with a Southern accent, sweet-talking some sense into Yo.

  Into myself for that matter.

  In a minute, she’s out of bed. “I’ll go get him,” she says. “But it’s going to change things,” she adds in a warning voice. Of course it is. The minute a man enters our lives, there’s bound to be trouble. But hey, like I told Yo, she’s got thunder and lightning to outdo any guy. And so do I for that matter.

  She comes back with Tom still in his terry kilt and an extra nightgown draped over her shoulder. “I told him he can join us,” she informs me, holding up the nightie. Tom looks at her, his eyebrows lifting, his curiosity piqued—as is mine, I admit.

  “Put up your arms,” Yo says and climbs on my bed and slips the nightgown over his head. “Tammy, get me one of your scarves.”

  At first, I think this straight-laced Tom is going to hightail it out of here. But he’s turning this way and that as Yo tugs the nightgown so it falls just so. All the while he’s grinning away like we’re playing out his fantasy. And I’m thinking, why this is a fantasy of mine as well. To find a male girlfriend with whom I can share my bed as well as the state of my soul.

  “One scarf, coming right up,” I say, grabbing my favorite, a purple silk from the basket on my bureau along with one of my lipsticks.

  “Hold still,” I say, outlining his lips in red. “What do you think?” I ask Yo. “A little eye makeup?”

  Yo nods, laughing, and now Tom is laughing, too, the loosest I’ve seen the man since he set foot in this house almost ten hours ago. And the thing I’m liking about him is that he’s not acting limp-wristed and silly the way men feel they have to when they’re imitating girls. When we’re done, Yo takes him by the hand and stands him in front of the mirror.

  “You make a damn good-lookin’ woman.” Her arm hangs over his shoulder, pals; her nose nuzzles his neck, lovers. She, too, has calmed down from the panic attack she was having only minutes ago. “And you’re not half bad as a man either.”

  When we have him all dolled up, we let him in bed with us, the poetry reading forgotten as we giggle and girl-talk about who has the best-looking legs. Soon we hear footsteps in the hall, moving in our direction, and there’s Jerry, still a little woozy, rubbing his eyes like maybe he’s seeing things. “What’s going on here?” he asks.

  Before he knows it, we’ve got him in one of my nightgowns, and he’s sitting at my end, the sheets pulled up to our laps, a soft dawn light coming up in the sky. Then Tom says, “Well, let’s hear some poems,” and I say to Yo, “You go first,” so she doesn’t chicken out. And sitting here with Jerry and Tom on either side of me, listening to Yo’s hesitant voice growing sure and steady as she reads along, I’m thinking, hot damn! I’ve found everything I was looking for in Brett Moore’s group, a muse, a man I can get to know, a best friend, Yo.

  The landlady

  confrontation

  She answers the ad, comes with a little notepad, wants to know everything about the place. “Is it quiet?” she asks. “I’m a writer, you know. I got to write a book to get my tenure.”

  I say, “I got two kids and those two kids got a TV and a dog. But I live here. I manage.” She doesn’t like that. She makes a little mark in her notebook, and I’m about to tell her the place is already rented because what business is it of hers if my two kids is hollering all time. Ever since Clair left last month, seems like everything around here is acting up. The oven door’s broke. The roof leaks—right into that two-bedroom, as a matter of fact. The front step rail needs fixing. Clair used to do all the small jobs, an
d it’s not that I’m cheap, but I got two kids and my own big self to think of, and I can’t go hiring some handyman for twelve-fifty an hour on account of he’s got a van with his name on the side written in script.

  But I need a tenant, and there aren’t many left as the college’s starting in a few weeks, and so most newcomers in this town are already settled in, so I say, “They’re nice kids. Dog’s never been a barker. Wanna go up and see it?”

  She looks at her watch first like she’s got an appointment with someone across town who’s going to rent her a much nicer two-bedroom for a lot less than the five-fifty I’m asking for. “Sure,” she says. We come out my front steps and down the yard to the entrance for the upstairs part of the house. “Sure is a neat old house,” she says.

  “Used to be my mother-in-law’s house. She was born in this house, so was my husband. This is the old part of town.”

  Now her eyes are shining with a greedy light I know well. Clair gets that look whenever some pretty thing comes in the auto parts store where he works. “I like old houses,” she says. “Those new condos make me feel like I could be living anywhere.”

  I’m liking her a lot more, so I leak out a little of the truth. “Wouldn’t live anywhere else myself. But a old house’s a old house, and you know, things break down from time to time.”

  “Yeah?” she says. “Like what?”

  I’m not going to get her all worried. Besides, it might not rain for a few months yet, and then it’ll be snow and the ice’ll plug any holes till the spring. By that time, who knows, we might be friends or something. “Nothing particular,” I say. “Just it takes a lot more work to live in a old house than those spanking new lookalike things.” Why is it that when I’m talking condos I always picture Clair’s little girlfriend with her shaggy haircut and spiky heels and halter top and shorts up to here.

  We go upstairs, and she’s telling me all about how she’s not originally from this country but came when she was a kid and now she has this job over at the college. All the time I’m wondering if she’s giving me some story because she’s talking English better than me. So I say, “You sure picked up English,” and she looks at me a moment and says, “Language is the only homeland. This poet once said that. When there’s no other ground under your feet, you learn quick, believe me.”

  “You bet,” I say.

  I show her the rooms, and she’s oohing and ahing, saying, wow, wow, all the time like some kid with a cowlick back in the fifties. “Light’s so good here,” she says in the room that’s got the leaks. “I think I’ll make my study here.” Then she looks over at me, her face full of color like she’s embarrassed that she let on that she wants this place. “That is, if I end up living here.”

  We go into the front room where the sun’s shining through the maple trees out front, real pretty. Makes me feel all sad remembering how it used to be with Clair. This was our bedroom when we first got married and his ma was still downstairs. Well, she likes this room too, and the little window seat, and the brick chimney that goes down into my fireplace. “There was a fireplace up here, too, but Clair—that’s my husband—blocked it up. Maybe I’ll open it up again.” I say this like it might happen tomorrow, though really, it’d cost a prettier penny than I got in my pocketbook to do that fixing.

  Finally she stops wandering around, opening closets, and comes back to me in the room she likes the most, the one she said she’d make into a study. She’s looking at me funny and I’m thinking she’s going to ask me can I come down from five-fifty which I’m prepared to do because I like her, number one, and number two, I figure her originally being a foreigner and all, maybe she needs a helping hand, too. But she says the most peculiar thing. “Has this been a happy place for you?”

  And you know, what I didn’t do when Clair moved in with that little girl-woman or when his ma, who was like a ma to me, too, died a couple of years ago of a cancer that was just like rabbits breeding inside her or when I looked in the mirror this morning and saw a fat woman dressed in a tent of fabric, I have to swallow hard to keep from crying. “It’s been a home,” I say, “good and bad, I can’t complain.”

  “So not really happy?” she says, all suspicious-like.

  And then I see what she’s getting at. She’s one of those people needs to hang a rabbit foot in the rearview of their Pinto, like that’s what’s going to make it run. So I say something that comes right off the needlepoint Clair’s ma made when she was a girl that’s still hanging in the kitchen. “This house is a home to all who come here. Honest,” I add, because she’s looking at me funny like I’m giving her a line. “And I’m prepared to come down to four-ninety on account of you’re by yourself and you won’t be using as much electric and water and sewage.”

  She’s thinking it over, goes through the rooms one more time, comes back and says, “I’ve got to go pick up my friend who’s coming up to help me move. Can I bring her over to see the place . . . and then give you my decision?”

  What a cockeyed way to do things, I’m thinking. Then I get suspicious. I seen those boat people bringing over whole villages to Miami. “I said four-ninety if you’re by yourself. Each extra person’s sixty more. And I need the security, too,” I add kind of stern.

  I can see my tone makes her jumpy—she’s a sensitive type. Like she’s going to decide on whether to live here depending on if I speak to her nice and the traffic light on the corner doesn’t change till she counts to five. “I just want my friend to give me her opinion,” she says in a little voice like my Dawn when she wants to spend the third night in a row over at Kathy’s—which she always does when her daddy’s in the house.

  I look at this skinny lady—she’s about my age, in her middle thirties, colored like those old-fashioned sepia photographs that make everyone look like they got some Indian in them, with a long dark braid down her back, big intense eyes like people in scary movies on TV have—and what I think surprises me. I could be this person, all alone in this strange world where I’m not sure how to do things because things haven’t turned out the way they were supposed to. So, I act the fool, which isn’t the first time. I say, “Sure. I’ll leave the door open. Just bring your friend on up and show her around. I’ll be downstairs. Let me know what you decide.”

  And suddenly, she’s giving me this hug like I’ve donated twenty bucks a month to a orphan in her country. “You’re so nice, thank you!” She climbs in her car, a Toyota, which doesn’t make me too happy her buying foreign, but then I remind myself she is foreign. Anyhow, she toots her horn and away she goes, and all up and down the street, neighbors I’ve known since I moved into this house sixteen years ago as Clair’s wife peek out their windows wondering what’s going to happen next in Marie Beaudry’s falling-apart life.

  She moves in with the help of this friend I don’t know what to make of. A tall, mouthy woman in shorts and a T-shirt with no bra and a funny color in her hair that don’t look right. This one don’t seem foreign, very white, with a name that sounds like she lives next door, Tammy Rosen, though she explains the name is really Tamar and the Rosen’s been shortened from Rosenberg when her family came over from Germany during the Holocaust.

  I just keep my mouth shut because I never was any good at history and I can’t ever keep straight who murdered who and why they did it. But anyhow, the news is good, this lady’s taking the apartment—she writes me the check right off for the rent and security deposit. Only when she signs the lease do I finally get what her name is, Yolanda García, but she says she likes to go by Yo. Tammy, Yo—that sure makes it easier. One thing I appreciate about these foreigners—and the two I’ve met in a day are two more than I’ve known all my life—is how willing they are to go along with the way we do things in this country. I mean they should, I know, but things aren’t always the way they should be. Look at Clair chasing after little girls and coming home drunk to beat up on his wife and kids. I keep telling myself this when I start regretting him being gone now for almost six weeks.


  What they’re up to upstairs—after a couple of days of moving in and setting up—I’d give my right arm to know about, throw in the eighty extra pounds I’m carting around. There’s a lot of murmuring and giggling, and then I smell it coming down through the vents, incense or something. Just as long as they’re not doing anything illegal, that’s fine with me. Emily and Dawn’s constantly upstairs and coming back down saying they been taught to say howdy-do and I-love-you in Spanish and German and to draw horses with horns that’s extinct but bring good luck. Couple of times they stop to talk to me on the porch: do I know about this Chinese class at the community center—it’s not really Chinese, just some exercise the Chinese do. There’s going to be a medieval fair on the green with booths and jugglers, do I wanna come and bring the kids along. Truth is, they’ve only been here two weeks and know things about this town I never knew. I always say no, cause I figure I’ll just feel fatter and more ignorant around all those college people. But just thinking I can do things besides hankering after Clair makes me feel the best I’ve felt in years.

  Only thing is, every once in a while I realize all over again how odd these gals are. Just this morning, I wake up early—can’t sleep as usual, grinding my teeth at Clair—and I see them wandering around in the backyard. I go out on my back steps. “You lost something, girls?” Funny how I call them girls even though they’re about my age. They look up guilty-like. The one called Yo is carrying a little Baggie.

  “Nothing, Marie,” she says. “We’re just protecting the space.”

  This is a first. But what am I going to do? Tell them they can’t sprinkle talcum powder on that sorry-looking lawn no one’s mown since Clair’s been gone. I just go along. “Throw around a little for me,” I tell them and I come back in the kitchen and look out at them through the window above the sink. They stand talking, heads together, glancing over their shoulders at my back door. Then they come right up to the house and circle it—I follow them window to window—until they end up right by my front steps shaking out the empty Baggie.