The Careful Undressing of Love

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “Good girl.”

  “Sometimes I want to leave.”

  Angelika nods, and I wonder whether she ever wants to leave. Whether she has dreams of a different life where she doesn’t have to be so diligent, where she doesn’t have to worry about love and teenagers and young men dying and how many lemon trees or rosemary sprigs are in the garden. Maybe there is a Future Angelika, too. Maybe she has a book club and three more dogs and a pasta-cooking second husband.

  “Leaving is easy.” Angelika takes her entire cup of tea in one long sip, like it’s medicine. “Sacrifice is hard.”

  “Haven’t we already sacrificed? Hasn’t Charlotte?” I watch Angelika’s face to see what happens at the sound of Charlotte’s name. Nothing changes, though. Angelika stays steady.

  I’ve always thought Charlotte and Cruz were one reason the Curse couldn’t be real. But Angelika has shrugged them off, year after year, insisting she’s never once caught love on Charlotte during the Shared Birthday.

  “Charlotte did sacrifice to protect Cruz. And it didn’t work, I see. Although you still have time. A tiny, tiny bit of time. You are on the cusp of love, not there yet.”

  “I think I’m in love.”

  “When you are in love, you know, you don’t think. Trust me. You have time.”

  “I don’t know if I can stop it.”

  Angelika twists her hair around itself until it’s a bun at the nape of her neck. She looks at the crayon drawing Cruz made of her. We both do.

  “Sacrifice.” She pulls the word out long and slow. “The Curse came because we weren’t grateful for all the love on the street. My parents weren’t grateful. They moved to Devonairre to meet someone to love and they did, and they shrugged like it was owed to them. We can’t shrug, Lorna. We took without thinking, and now we have to give.” I try to sip at the tea but it’s so sweet it makes my mouth fold into itself.

  “What are we supposed to give? You say it like it’s so easy, but obviously you haven’t figured it out, either. You didn’t sacrifice enough. You and Dolly and Betty and everyone else—you never figured out what it was you had to give up. And when you try to give up love—well. That doesn’t work.”

  Angelika looks at me so full-on I feel like her eyes are flashlights and she’s found me. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. You never tried to make that sacrifice. You all decided to love anyway.” She shrugs, but I’m pretty sure that what she feels is the exact opposite of a shrug.

  “Angelika—”

  “I’ll say it again if you weren’t listening.”

  “I’m listening! I’m here. I’m ready to listen. I’m scared, okay? I am finally scared out of my mind. I thought Charlotte and Cruz were the reason that—but they’re not. I see. I get it. But if love is a fever, how are we supposed to stop it? If love is a decision, why do you act like it’s an involuntary action? Is it something we can stop or something that happens to us? Is it falling or choosing to jump? I honestly don’t know anymore. I don’t think you know.”

  Maybe it’s the time—almost four in the morning—or the sweetness of the tea, or the smell of Aramis haunting the air, or the way Angelika covers her kitchen in thoughts of us, her Devonairre Street Kids, but I start to believe she might actually have the answers. I start to believe a lot of things I never thought I could.

  “Sacrifice,” Angelika says again, like it’s the only word she knows, like it’s the only word that matters, and maybe it is.

  We sit for hours and watch the sun come up, and when it’s up and the girls wake up and walk out of my building, looking for me, they find me on the stoop with Angelika, braiding bracelets and trying to think of how to stop the Curse.

  30.

  By nine we are all braiding and Cruz hasn’t been out of the house yet. He said he doesn’t believe so I wonder whether Mrs. Rodriguez is keeping him locked in there, or whether maybe he was lying and there’s a part of him that knows I’m dangerous.

  I have braided fifty bracelets. Angelika has added ten keys to my chain. I will my hair to grow faster and my heart to grow more slowly.

  Delilah is sitting so close to me she’s practically on my lap. “You needed to see,” she says. “You needed to understand. And now you see. Now you understand.”

  I am scared enough to braid until my fingers hurt. I am scared enough to leap off the stoop when I see Mom a few blocks away, coming home from Roger’s. Her hair is sticking this way and that and she doesn’t have on makeup or stockings. She’s in a blue button-down that must be Roger’s and she’s in a rush.

  I meet her a few buildings before ours and Angelika’s, in front of Bistro, which is opening up for the day, waiters tying their ties and reorganizing chairs and filling up saltshakers.

  “Charlotte doesn’t love Cruz,” I say, because that is the only place to start. Mom looks past me, to our building.

  “Honey, I don’t have time. I’m picking up some stuff and heading back to Roger’s. He’s really having a tough morning.”

  “Mom. Charlotte doesn’t love Cruz.” I want her to have the same moment I had last night—the zap and the panic and the need to be by Angelika’s side and the sureness that we Have to Do Something.

  The belief.

  Instead she pats my head, smoothing some of the flyaways.

  “I hate seeing you like this,” she whispers, like people are listening, which they probably are. Behind her there’s a group of outsiders, snapping pictures of buildings and wearing keys around their necks.

  More tragedy-tourists.

  “Charlotte’s in love with a girl named Nisha. And I’m falling in love with Cruz. And what’s wrong with Roger, Mom? He’s sick? How sick?” I feel a little like Delilah and I try to breathe deeply. I find a breath big enough to fill my throat and chest and I try again. “What if we’ve spent so much time not believing we’ve forgotten to look and see if there actually might be reason to believe?”

  Mom gets a look on her face that has never been directed toward me. Something hard and cold and indignant. She runs a hand through her messy short hair. Before she has a chance to speak, the group of tourists approaches us.

  “You’re Lorna!” one says. They have matching white T-shirts and matching wide eyes.

  “And you’re her mother, right?” another says. That one’s wearing sunglasses and I want to believe it’s because of the sun, not me, but it’s a gray day.

  Mom and I nod and try to look at each other instead of the group, but that doesn’t seem to stop them.

  “Can we have a picture?” the first girl asks.

  “Are you in love?” an older woman asks. There are two men and they look sleazy and sneering. I cover my chest and cross my ankles on instinct. I look over at Isla and want her to do the same, but she’s eyeing the group of strangers with interest, with intent.

  “No pictures,” Mom says. She puts a protective arm around me, but the group doesn’t shy away.

  “Where’s the old lady who runs everything?” one of them asks.

  “Where’s the Isla girl?” a man says. His friend snickers next to him, and I feel ill and overtired. Behind us, in Bistro, are more strangers who look at the menu like it’s an ancient artifact and stare out the window like they’re on the top of the Empire State Building.

  When we don’t answer, the group moves on, but not before snapping a few more photos of our dumbstruck faces and the way grief has imprinted itself along our jaws, in our pupils, inside our fisted hands.

  We watch them approach the girls on the stoop. Delilah gives them bracelets and Charlotte avoids eye contact. I wonder if she’s thinking of Nisha and a way to escape all this. Charlotte could get out. Charlotte could leave this all behind and live a normal life with love and happiness and no threat of misery around every corner.

  Her braids are frizzy and uneven, bumpy on top. Her nose is too serious and her bracelets are braided as
sloppily as her hair. She has to keep shoving her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose and she can’t carry a tune or run fast or be much fun at a party. There are so very many things that Charlotte Pravin isn’t. But she is a girl who can love without fear, and nothing else really matters.

  “I have to go, Lorna. I don’t want to leave Roger alone for long,” Mom says. She kisses my cheek. “Don’t get caught up with this. Go for a walk. Or a museum. Go with Cruz. Live your life, honey.”

  “This is our life.” I gesture at the street, but Mom is already rushing to the apartment to pick up who knows what for her boyfriend; and I don’t have time to ask her again what’s wrong with him, how sick he is, how much more worried I should be.

  Meanwhile Isla poses for the tourists. She stands on the stoop with one hip jutted all the way out and her arms up in the air, reaching toward nothing. They look disappointed. I think they want her to look sadder, more serious, more romantic. They turn toward Delilah and snap her picture, too, and seem more pleased with the effect.

  Isla sees the way they fall in love with Delilah’s serious face and busy hands, and she mirrors her. She sits next to Delilah and furrows her brow and separates her lips the tiniest bit and hunches her shoulders and braids.

  The visitors grin.

  “You’re exactly like we thought you’d be,” one of them says.

  “Isla Rodriguez,” one of the men says, and my heart worries for her, “can I get your autograph?”

  Isla beams.

  “Of course,” she says, and the man brings out a pen and a copy of our photograph on the bench, and Isla signs below her face before Angelika shoos them all away, telling them it’s not safe.

  For who? I wonder.

  • • •

  “They love me,” Isla says hours later in the garden. I am on high alert for Cruz, who still hasn’t left his house. Charlotte and Delilah are on the stoop, but Isla and I needed a walk and a moment away from red and white threads and huge thermoses of tea.

  “We love you,” I say, because I want her to know that’s the more important thing.

  Isla hums a non-response and stretches her legs.

  “They’ll love me, but I’ll never be allowed to love them,” she says.

  When Cruz comes to get her, the sun’s going down and I can’t believe we’ve spent the whole day being Angelika’s Devonairre Street Girls.

  “Mom’s looking for you,” he says.

  “I’m right here,” Isla says, and she looks so sad it vibrates off of her. “I’ll always be exactly right here.”

  “Head home. I’m going to talk to Lorna for a minute,” Cruz says, but Isla doesn’t move. She shakes her head the tiniest bit. She plants her feet. Cruz plants his feet. I look at the peonies because I’m scared that if I look at Cruz for even one minute more, the falling in love will be complete.

  Eventually he gives up and Isla leads him out of the garden, away from me, and I’m all alone with the peonies and the question what now?

  31.

  I stay in the garden long past the sun going down. There’s no one waiting for me at home and I can’t spend another second on the stoop and Bistro is, I’m sure, crowded with people who want to know my favorite color and whether I’ll ever get married and whether I blame my mother for my father’s death.

  I plant seeds all along the perimeter of the garden, not thinking about whether the soil is right for the particular plant, not worrying about how deep to put each one in, or whether they need to get watered often or who will trample them. I just plant until the garden gate opens and Angelika arrives.

  Betty and Dolly and Delilah aren’t far behind.

  Isla and Charlotte and their mothers are next.

  Maria. Mrs. Chen.

  I wonder about Saad and Hiba and what they think of all this. But their store has been closed for the last three days and I haven’t seen them walking down the sidewalk and turning the corner to go to the mosque a few streets away. They have vanished.

  “Of course you’re here,” Angelika says.

  “We’re making a sacrifice,” Delilah says. She has lit-up eyes, the way she used to look at Jack, and no matter how much I believe, I won’t ever believe like that. Her arms are loaded down with white tulle and silk. Widows are carrying wedding albums and veils and branches from the park.

  I laugh.

  I laugh so I can leave my body and see us from just above the garden. It is a ridiculous sight, long-haired ladies weighed down with the keys around their necks, preparing a bonfire sacrifice to fix a Curse that we all of a sudden believe.

  My father would have laughed, too, I think.

  “We’ll live in this wacky place,” he used to say, “but we all have to promise not to get wacky ourselves.”

  We are getting wacky.

  Soon there is a fire, and we are throwing wedding gowns and wedding albums and wedding rings that will melt into little pools of gold into the fire.

  “Sacrifice,” Angelika says.

  Delilah is holding an old flannel shirt of Jack’s and a dried-out corsage from the fall dance.

  “You’ll want those,” I say.

  “Exactly.” There’s a shiver in her voice that tells me she’s already cried about it, and she’s determined to do it anyway.

  “I thought we were supposed to remember them.” I try to piece together the growing list of rules. “I thought we were supposed to hang on to everything and not move on or whatever.” I am thinking of mother’s bedroom closet, of the framed portrait of my father behind shoes that don’t really fit and purses that are too worn-out to use but too expensive to throw away. Angelika gave us the portrait.

  I wouldn’t mind burning it. It’s not a memory of him, exactly, but a memory of how he’s not here anymore.

  Delilah pauses, and I think she’s considering the same contradictions.

  She drops the flannel into the fire and it flares a little. “We have to remember and sacrifice.” She scratches her arm like the inconsistency is irritating the skin there. “We’re trying to figure it out. This is different from moving on. This is sacrificing. For Cruz.” She lets the corsage go, and we watch the petals turn to smoke. My heart thumps with the knowledge of what these women are willing to do for the person I love.

  And like that I want to have something to give up, something to throw in the fire. In our apartment there is the drawer of my father’s things—shoelaces and old receipts with his handwriting on them and a birthday card he gave me the last year he was alive even though I wasn’t supposed to celebrate my individual birthday by then. In my mother’s closet there’s her wedding dress—a lacy, casual thing I loved to try on when I was little. And my father’s suit, the one he wore to every wedding, the one that we never dry-cleaned. The one we wrapped in plastic, hoping it would preserve the smell, “if we ever really need it,” Mom said, packing it up. There’s also a shoebox of love letters Mom has never let me read.

  I watch Mrs. Rodriguez hold her gown close to her chest before letting it fall into the flames. The rhinestones around the bodice glint and the lace smolders. It will take a long time for it to fully turn to ash. She catches my eye and she’s crying. We both know a little about the way things turn to ash.

  I run to the apartment.

  “Mom?” I call out, hoping she’s snuck in, that Roger’s back, too, that they’ve simply been too busy looking up California homes to find me. But the apartment is empty. I’m hoping, I guess, that she’ll stop me from what I’m going to do.

  I open the drawer and put my father’s things in my pockets, to see how it feels. It feels awful, like I’m robbing us. Sacrifice. I go to my mother’s closet. Roger’s clothes are hanging in one section, and it shocks me. They hang next to the few things we have left of my father’s—his suit, a Christmas sweater, his favorite pair of jeans.

  I take the suit and my mother’s we
dding gown. I lay them over my arms and imagine burning them. I think of my mother’s face and what it will do when she sees these things are missing. I can’t do it.

  My phone buzzes.

  It’s a text from Cruz.

  I think I love you and I think you love me and I think I’m finally scared.

  I can barely breathe. I find the shoebox of letters. I will burn them, too.

  I open the box—it’s green and worn and stuffed to the brim.

  I almost don’t read them. “People are allowed their secrets,” Dad said. But I am missing his words, his poems, his way of looking at the world like it is lighter and easier and better than it feels right now.

  I open one up. It’s a Hallmark Valentine’s Day card dated a year before Dad died. I’m surprised at the image on the front. A huge heart with a bow around its middle. It doesn’t remind me of my father, who liked to make his own cards with portraits of me and Mom sketched on the front. The words inside don’t sound like Dad’s, either. They are simpler, without poetry. I love you, the note reads. I will always love you. I’ll always be happy I met you. It will always be worth it.

  I try to imagine Dad sitting at our kitchen counter, penning a boring note to Mom in a store-bought card. I can’t see it.

  Happy Valentine’s Day. All my love, R.

  I start to shake.

  I sweat.

  I pick out another note. This one is on a folded sheet of hotel stationery.

  It’s a dirty one. About Mom’s legs and her breasts and the way she feels inside. My blood is cool and I’m dizzy.

  All my love, R.

  I take a breath and hold it until I almost pass out. I want to leave my body. I want to leave the moment and the street and my mother and my mind. I want to rewind and never have opened these letters. I want to have opened these letters years ago.

  I want to hate Roger and I want to hate my mother.

  I want to talk to my father. I want to talk to my father more than I have ever wanted anything. I close my eyes and try to summon him, but I don’t believe in ghosts or afterlives or his presence watching us from heaven. I have no room for that belief.