by Lisa Gornick
Afterward, maneuvering their cart through the sawdust-covered aisles, they bumped into Hildie scooping brown rice into a paper bag. With everyone else in Birkenstocks and Indian shirts and Army Surplus pants, Hildie in her navy suit and black pumps with her thunderous calves and bright red lips looked like she was in drag. She kissed Sam on the cheek, held out a hand to Marnie—“Another Klein”—and then, hardly missing a beat, launched an account of the conference she’d attended that day at San Francisco State on third world women and feminism, how much more advanced the students there were than at Berkeley, how she was off the next day to give a paper at the University of Michigan but would Sam come by on Monday, she needed Sam to do some research for the talk she was giving next month at the International Women’s Conference on Western responses to clitoridectomies—cultural centrism or anti-violence advocacy?
“You should see their house,” Sam whispered once Hildie headed to the checkout line. “It’s in the hills overlooking the bay, handmade out of redwood, with a Spanish-tiled lap pool at the end of which there’s a humongous Jacuzzi.”
“On a professor’s salary?”
“About ten years ago, her husband, George, lost a finger in a chain saw accident. Her son told me they got a three-million-dollar settlement from the chain saw manufacturer and bought the house with cash.”
According to Andrew, since the accident, George has never left the Berkeley municipality; approaching the Oakland city line, he’ll break into a sweat and scamper back to Telegraph Avenue. George’s panic attacks, Andrew claims, are necessary for the survival of his parents’ marriage, allowing them time apart while Hildie rides out the crest of her now nearly twenty-year academic stardom, the more elaborate trips to China and India subsidized by George’s lost finger. When, in January, Marnie and Andrew had decided to get married, they’d let George save face by saying that it was silly for Hildie and him to fly so far for what would be, after all, a small wedding, when Andrew and Marnie were planning in any case to visit them in September.
Now Marnie feels nervous about meeting George, afraid of what his hand will look like. Or is it Hildie she’s nervous about seeing, Hildie with her volumes to say about everything and enough personality, it seems from Andrew’s accounts, for all of them? From what Marnie can piece together, as a child Andrew had thought of himself as a member of Hildie’s audience. Unable to compete for the stage or even, at times, to make it backstage, he’d opted by fifteen for escape—a job as a bicycle messenger in the San Francisco financial district, where he’d earned enough money to launch his own life: girlfriends, marijuana bought in the Haight; by sixteen, a very used Peugeot and a beginning cache of his own stories. At times, listening to Andrew’s adventures—the months in Guatemala, trekking in South America, a boat trip through Indonesia—she sees Hildie reincarnate in her son, Marnie cast now as the awestruck child.
Marnie places her hand over her belly and presses her nose to the window. Outside, it’s pale and murky, like the fluid she imagines inside where her baby lies curled. For the past six weeks, since she told Andrew about the baby, they’ve slept without touching. Were she to ask him about it, he would, she feels certain, say that he hadn’t noticed.
*
Andrew wakes when the pilot announces that they are beginning their descent into Dallas, where the temperature is ninety-three degrees. It’s an hour-and-fifty-minute layover, Marnie’s first time in Texas. Walking from the arrivals gate, they pass through the usual airport shopping mall augmented by Texas-themed goods intended to evoke the fantasy Texas: cowboy hats, string neckties, coffee mugs painted with cows—the Texas Marnie can see out the window looking indistinguishable from the runway at Kennedy where they’d taken off three hours ago.
Passing a raw bar with oysters and clams laid out on ice, Andrew suggests a drink. Marnie looks at her watch. It’s noon, one o’clock New York time. Before they were married, she’d never thought about Andrew’s drinking. Since she’s been pregnant, though, she has been preoccupied with the subject—not worry that Andrew is an alcoholic but rather a nagging awareness that drinking is important to him in the same way it had been important to her father during the long evenings after Alan’s suicide when Marnie would sit with him while he read his newspapers and work reports and refilled his gin and tonic three, maybe more, times in a night.
Andrew heads for a table to the right of the bar. For the most part, she’s left morning sickness behind; now, though, the processed air and the perfumed candles bring on a wave of queasiness. She pulls out a small plastic bag of saltines from her purse and begins to nibble, dusting off the crumbs from her sweater.
A waitress with sea-green eyelids approaches, a pad of checks perched on her ample hips. Andrew orders a screwdriver and a plate of oysters. Marnie asks for an apple juice on ice.
The waitress squints at Marnie. “Expecting?”
Marnie is startled. She’s abandoned clothing with waistbands, but has not thought she was showing yet.
“The saltines. With my first, I lived on crackers. Couldn’t keep a darn thing else down. With my others, I ate like a horse starting day one.”
When the drinks come, Andrew downs half of his in one go.
“Are you nervous about introducing me to your parents?”
“No.”
“It’s not like you to drink so early in the day.”
Andrew stiffens. “It’s vacation. I’m unwinding.” Except for a long weekend in Miami, this is, in fact, their first vacation since they’ve been married. After Marnie learned she was pregnant, they’d canceled their delayed honeymoon, a safari in the Masai Mara—a disappointment for Andrew, Marnie knows (though he’d been careful not to grumble), the travel adventures his attempt to compensate for the sliver of the financial world to which he fixes his attention the other forty-eight weeks.
Marnie grasps for a way to redirect the conversation. “Have you been in Texas before?”
“Once, on my way to Guatemala. We crossed into Mexico at Nuevo Laredo.” Andrew angles his chair so he can stretch out his legs. He pauses, debating, Marnie imagines, whether to oblige her by letting go of her jab about his drinking, and then, as Marnie had gambled he would, continues. “The border station made Tijuana seem tame—a lot of guys with silver belt buckles and scars on their faces. It was the middle of the night when we got there and they were officially closed, but a truck driver told us you could get through if you greased enough palms.”
Marnie folds her hands over her belly, and leans back so her shoulder blades rest on the padded leather of the chair. It’s too early to feel the baby moving, but it pleases her to have her hands only an inch away from her growing child. “Sounds dangerous,” she says.
“Not compared to what we encountered later. We used to joke that Laredo was the GO square you had to pass through to get to the real tamale.”
Andrew is vague about who the we is. Shortly after they met, he’d shown her a shoe box filled with packets of photos from the time he’d spent in Guatemala. Sorting through the pictures, he passed quickly over several of them. In a voice that sounded brittle even to her own ears and that reminded her that she had not yet asked if he and Sam had been lovers, she’d said, “You don’t have to hide that you had a girlfriend there.” Reluctantly, Andrew stopped censoring the pictures. Many were of a girl with a thick blond braid and leather sandals, someone, he told Marnie, he’d met in Panajachel who’d then traveled with him for a while. In one picture, she was lying without a shirt on a rock overlooking Lake Atitlán, her large breasts lazy and pink, the lake an unreal blue like a photographer’s backdrop.
Since then, Marnie has heard many of Andrew’s Guatemala stories: how the villages had been like tiny nation-states; how for years the government had tried to break their tribal order but were, as Andrew put it, so goddamned brutal about it, they’d only succeeded in alienating the Indians further; how, looking back, he’d been in the eye of a storm in those highlands without realizing how soon the hurricane would hit.
At times, Marnie has wanted to say, Enough, you’ve told me enough, but now, feeling remorseful about the drinking bait, she raises an eyebrow to encourage him to go on.
“A week before I got to Totonicapán, a Peace Corps worker was killed. That felt dangerous. Rumors were that an army officer had offed the guy, a hippie American kid. The police claimed he’d been shot by a student activist from Guatemala City, but the weavers told me no one believed it—that the charges had been trumped up to turn American politicians against the leftists.”
Andrew makes a little snort. “As though that were necessary. We were already training the Guatemalan military.”
At these times, Marnie wishes she had known Andrew when he had hair to his shoulders and hippie paraphernalia. Had the cynicism been there even then? Once, she’d asked Sam, who said that Andrew had always maintained a hairsbreadth of ironic distance from whatever he did. “His jeans were faded but never frayed. His backpack was made of leather.”
“Did you know that then? That the CIA was there?”
“There was talk—particularly around Todos Santos.”
The waitress arrives with a plate of oysters. Looking at the gelatinous bodies, Marnie feels a new wave of nausea. She raises her hand to cover her nose. The waitress catches her eye, and places the plate as far as possible from Marnie, with a basket of bread in front. “Thought you might like something bland,” she says to Marnie. “Anything else?”
Marnie shakes her head no. She wants to say thank you but fears that if she doesn’t stay perfectly still she’ll be sick. “I’ll have another,” Andrew says, pointing to his drink.
Marnie closes her eyes and inhales cautiously. In the past, when Andrew has talked about Todos Santos, it’s been about a mountain village reached by roads too rutted and steep for his van to navigate. To get there, they’d had to take the bus—unheated with baskets on the roof and animals everywhere. There’d been only two buses out each week, leaving at some ungodly hour like three in the morning so the Indians could get to the market in time to set up their goods. Now, “doing a Todos” has become a joke between them: the way that Marnie occasionally cajoles Andrew, whose hand will shoot over his head to hail a cab before he’s two steps outside, to rough it by taking the subway or bus.
The queasiness about the oysters lifts and Marnie opens her eyes. Andrew has a shell at his lips. He sucks the salt water and blue-gray body into his mouth, swallows, and then washes it down with his drink. With the vodka in his bloodstream, the corrugated lines in his brow have begun a pale pink dissolve.
“Todos was the Guatemalan version of the Wild Wild West. The men drank like fish. They were small even for the highland Indians: short legs, hunched shoulders, nasty tempers. On festival days, they’d hang live chickens from ropes at each end of the village and race back and forth bareback on their horses through the streets and alleyways, betting on who could pull off the most heads without falling from his horse.”
She spreads her hands wide and flat over her stomach. If her baby can hear already, she does not want him or her hearing this story.
“I saw it once. It was gruesome: drunken men howling and blood pouring onto the dirt from the necks of these decapitated chickens.”
In Andrew’s photos of Todos, the men had feet callused as mule hooves and cropped pants like the pedal pushers American women wore in the fifties. There was only one picture of a woman—a tiny figure with long braids, a stiff embroidered blouse, and a face that looked sixty but, Andrew said, had probably been barely thirty. Widowed, with children to feed, she rented cots to travelers, a dollar per night with a quarter extra for each blanket. Everyone, the travelers, the woman, her six or seven children (one died that year), slept in the same one-room thatched-roof hut.
The waitress arrives with Andrew’s second screwdriver. Andrew reaches immediately for the glass, and then, as if sensing Marnie’s scrutiny, waits a moment before taking two long sips.
The biggest problem, Andrew had told her, was food. Because of the altitude, they could only grow corn. For months on end, the only food in the village would be eggs and beans and tortillas and cans of juice so supersaturated with sugar it left grit on your teeth. When there were travelers in the village, the widow’s sister would set up a table outside her stall in the marketplace and cook whatever she had. At night, the men who lived nearby would gather there to drink.
“Would you drink with them?” Marnie asks.
“Not during the festival. But sometimes at night, sitting with them in the market, I’d have a shot of quetzalteca.” Andrew sucks on an ice cube. His eyes, usually darting from place to place, are now still, almost glassy. “Most of the men spoke only K’iche’, but there’d usually be someone who could translate into Spanish for me. After a while, after I’d bought a lot of the woven bags from them at a price higher than they could sell them at the Huehuetenango market and then started to talk with them about how to form a cooperativa, they began to almost trust me.”
Andrew pats his shirt pocket as if searching for a cigarette. Marnie watches him and wonders if he has forgotten that he stopped smoking before their wedding or if he has continued smoking in secret. It occurs to Marnie now that Sam and Andrew had probably smoked together.
“There was a weaver who lived outside of Todos, a man named Teofilo who spoke pretty good Spanish and interpreted for the others when I bought their goods. He’d told me that the year before, one of his cousins who’d sold some corn to a guerrilla band had been found with his throat slashed. Someone had painted the letters for the revolutionary party on his jacket with blood.”
Marnie wishes her mother could have met Andrew. With her admiration of the people-first politics of Rivera and her idol, Kahlo, she would have enjoyed Andrew’s stories.
Andrew plays with his now empty glass. His eyes drift to the bar and then back to Marnie. “One night, maybe the fourth or fifth time I came to Todos, I was sitting outside the market stall with Teofilo and about a half dozen other men. It was a few days before festival week, and they were drinking this liquor they made each year for the festival from corn—beginning the bacchanal early. Some of them had skipped going to the Wednesday market in Huehuetenango so they could drag the vats of this stuff up from the storage cellar, which was—they saw no contradiction in this—under the church.”
Andrew takes another oyster, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he swallows. “It was about ten o’clock, and a boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen, came running into the market. He was the son of one of the men and he began talking, more yelling than talking, in K’iche’. When I asked Teofilo what was going on, he told me the boy had spotted the villager they thought had ratted on Teofilo’s cousin. The morning before Teofilo’s cousin was found murdered, this man had left with the others for Huehuetenango and had then never come back. Now the boy had seen him get off the bus and head across the square to the path leading to his mother’s hut.”
Marnie looks at the clock on the wall—an hour still until the plane to Oakland. “What happened?”
“They all got up, with the boy following behind. Two of the men unhooked the machetes that always hung from their belts. Another took a tarnished pistol from under his jacket. I was surprised since I’d never seen any of the Indians with a gun. I’ll never forget the way he blew on the barrel and then spit into his palms.”
Marnie feels her brows squeeze together. “What happened?” she repeats.
Andrew laughs. “What do you think? They killed the guy.”
“You saw them?”
“I heard screams, probably while they were hacking at him with the machetes, and then, after a while, two shots.”
Her hand moves from her belly to her chest, where her heart pounds wildly. “You didn’t try to stop them?”
Andrew looks at her coolly. A bead of salt water lingers on his lower lip. “The man was a gusano, a worm—he’d ratted on one of his compadres.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know that for sure.” Her voice i
s thin, almost shrill. On Andrew’s face—disdain, as though she’s beneath being called an idiot.
“I should have chased after half a dozen Indian men, all of them with machetes, at least one with a gun, only one of them able to understand a word I spoke, and tried to convince them not to kill a man they thought was responsible for the death of their friend?”
Marnie feels like a car whose idle has suddenly shot too high. Her ears are ringing and she is afraid that she is going to do something out of control: scream or slap Andrew. Only once, the night they learned about Alan’s suicide, has she ever done anything like that. Her parents had called Sam and her into the living room. Her father was unable to speak. When her mother told them, Marnie lunged at her, batting her fists at her mother’s chest. Liar, liar, liar.
Yes, she wants to yell. Yes, you should have. But her stomach saves her. Her gurgling stomach rising into her esophagus, her stomach that remembers the four oysters Andrew slurped whole and the two that still float in a cloudy fluid behind the bread basket. She stands, pressing on her breastbone, willing the contents of her stomach to stay below her palm until she makes it to a bathroom.
*
While the others had rolled like billiard balls from their senior years of high school into their excellent colleges, Marnie, in her first act of defiance (of all of them, she had been the most compliant, trailing behind Sam, bringing home report cards with only As, rarely ever even getting sick), had the June before she was scheduled to start Barnard refused to go. She’d told her father first, one night after dinner when the two of them sat together with Thomas’s gin and tonic between them. Her father had reacted in the only way he knew: to insist on a kind of corporate obedience, to remind Marnie that the deposit securing her position in that September’s class had already been sent.