“No,” he said.
Carmen stopped looking at her hands and reached one down to the grass and picked up her wine cooler and sipped it and put it back down in the grass.
“That’s cool,” said Cindy. “I guess you got to keep your mind on what you’re doing.”
But that wasn’t it, really. He could not say why. The next day at work Cindy’s question kept needling him. He even heard it. To hear anything in the plant was not possible over all the machines. The shift supervisor, when he wanted you to do something, came close in to your face and yelled in your ear. At home his ears rang for hours. Carmen loved to go see shows at the Checker Dome and he never did have the heart to tell her that was the last thing he wanted to do, go hear every band that came through town when his ears were already ringing. That day Cindy’s question kept rising from the noise. It reached him as he worked on a light blue Electra. They’d been running Electras all week. He didn’t want to think about her question because if he thought about it for this blue Electra he would have to think about every car on the line, and Brantley remembered this one time when high Cindy, all of a sudden not-so-dumb Cindy, said when they were watching something on TV, “Hey, do you guys think it’s possible to, like, not think? Because I was just thinking that if you knew you wanted to clean your head empty, then that wouldn’t really be like not thinking because you’d have to think, I’m not thinking, which isn’t that like a thought?” Then she said “I’m not thinking” again and then again louder until she was sitting on the couch during a commercial for nasal spray screaming, “I’m not thinking, I’m not thinking,” and Carmen was laughing so hard that later she claimed she wet her pants a little and then when they were in the bedroom with the door closed Carmen said, “I wanted to say to her, Yeah, girl, I think it is possible for you not to think.”
Brantley remembered Cindy’s question as the Electra, at his signal, directing Arthur from above—I now pronounce you chassis and body—became a car. Or the shell of one. Down the line it would become more of a car until finally it was a car, washed and detailed and gleaming among hundreds of others of various colors on the lot, where it would sit until a carrier came and loaded it up and took it to a dealer and someone would buy it. He did not want to know who. But who? Who would buy it? Who would drive it? Every time he thought about it he would say quickly, “I hate rubbers, too”; he would say it louder and louder to stop himself from thinking about where this car would end up, and then he saw it merging onto an interstate and at first he was above it like in one of those choppers that worked for the news and reported on the traffic and then he was inside the Electra, on the interstate, and Carmen was with him and then there was a UPS truck ahead of them and the truck swerved to miss someone stopped half in the lane to change a tire and then Brantley was standing by Carmen’s grave and people were coming up to him and hugging him and saying the same things to him, and Cindy, who Carmen had made such fun of, was bawling under a canopy and it was raining. Brantley put his left hand up and signaled to Arthur a little to the right. What kind of sick shit was that, thinking his girlfriend was dead and everybody was, like, all thoughtful and sad for him and he was standing in the rain and it felt, I don’t know, like, glorious somehow and then he felt so selfish and awful for allowing that thought into his head, a fantasy about his girlfriend’s death by vehicle while he emerged without a scratch, and how people would come up to him and say stuff about doing things for him and he would nod and his tears would mix with rain. “You are at work, asshole,” he said, “you’re going to be here for another six hours and this car is just another car and I AM NOT THINKING I AM NOT THINKING I AM NOT!”
El Paso, Texas, 2004
Maria’s mother was waiting in Baggage Claim.
“It’s only this one,” said Maria, holding up her carry-on. They embraced and Maria noted the stiffness in her mother’s thin and sun-ravaged body, and the tightness of her lips, which she had almost forgotten. She watched her mother stare at the bag as if she were trying to decide whether to acknowledge what it represented.
“Well then, we better get on to the car,” her mother said finally. “They charge you an arm to park and it’s not even got a roof over it to shade.”
Maria had not seen her mother, nor set foot in the state of Texas, for ten years. For five of those years she had had no contact with her family. One day she was peeling chilies in the restaurant where she worked and she thought of her father, who used to stuff chilies with string cheese and wrap them with bacon and grill them under the carport. All afternoon came pangs she had long accustomed herself to, but at some point she realized these were not the usual feelings of guilt she felt at the thought of Randy behind the Airstream. That night she sat down and wrote her parents a letter. It was short and perhaps curt; it said where she was and what she was doing and it said that she was fine and it was signed “With love.” Daily she held her breath when she slid her key into the post office box, but there was nothing but flyers and bills and postcards from traveling friends.
Later when she got a computer and an e-mail account, she found a website for the Mountain View Motor Lodge, where her mother had worked for thirty years, and sent a message to the address listed under Contact Us. When she did not hear back, it was not hard to convince herself that her mother had no use for computers, that she still kept her books using a ten-key adding machine. Then one day there was a card. A photograph of a horse, backlit, nestling a colt. Inside, her mother had written the following lines in a hand so precise it bore the stamp of some strict small-town teacher who saw as her calling the teaching of proper letter form as well as expert penmanship to West Texas girls bound to marry ranch hands and promptly forget, by the time they returned from their honeymoon, the meaning of the word salutation.
Dear Maria Grace,
[For Grace was Maria’s middle name and never had she heard her mother say or write her middle name and already she was choking with sobs at the sight of her mother’s careful capitalization of the letter G, especially the slightly curled stem she added to give it a flourish.]
I hope this address is still good. Your dad and I are doing good. Manuel and his wife Alicia got a divorce. He has moved to New Braunfels and is driving a truck for H-E-B. They have two children, Inez (7) and Iris (4). I don’t know that he’s seeing someone else new, we never talk about all that on the phone. I am still at the motel. We do pretty good except you know how it slows down when the park gets too hot for the tourists. But I keep busy over there. Your grandmother Gloria died. They buried her up in Odessa with her husband’s people. Your daddy did not like that but they claimed it was what she wanted. I wonder how you are doing. Well I must go it’s nine at night here and I’ve got some accounts to go over, you be well now.
“With love,”
Your mother
The quotation marks did not annoy Maria as they might have had she seen them misplaced on a billboard, for although they might literally have called her mother’s love into question, she knew her mother thought they added emphasis. And this is what turned, after so long, her blinking and swallowing into steady streaming tears.
Maria spent a week writing and rewriting her reply. In grave question was the tone. There was nothing forced or unnatural about her mother’s tone, for what she wrote was exactly the sort of letter she’d have written had Maria not run away at seventeen and stayed gone for so many years. But Maria could tell her mother craved more information, and she knew, as well, that she owed her more than, Here I am, I have a steady job, doing fine, with love. In her letter she described her job and the ocean. (By that point she had settled in Newport, Oregon.) She said she was busy at the restaurant. She nearly had a breakdown trying to fashion a letter of facts—the sort of facts her mother would understand and appreciate. Only later, after she had been home for a while, did she begin to understand the arid, brittle way her mother expressed love, and only then did she realize that her mother desired everything she left out. Friends, boyfriends, and above a
ll, Maria, honey, are you happy? And have you learned, my sweet girl, to forgive yourself for what happened? Have you moved on or is all this moving about some substitute? Some attempt to stop the revving inside you, some way to try and quiet it? Oh, how I wish there was something I could do or say to ease your suffering. If it could be me, if I might carry that burden for you, if I could take your place that night we pulled up in the drive to see that yellow tape strung along from the carport back to the juniper tree where your daddy hung a tire for you and Manny to swing on, your father talking to the sheriff and both of them not looking at the car pulling up into the drive carrying a girl who’d just had her life pulled right out from under her . . .
She did not hear from her father ever, for in the absence of Manny, her older brother, who had settled in San Antonio after a stint in the Coast Guard and never came home, her father had really taken to Randy. When her mother wrote to tell her that her father was in the hospital up in Midland, that the doctor had given him less than a week, Maria knew her father blamed her still for Randy’s death. Her mother never responded to the card Maria sent telling her that she did not think she could make it home for the funeral.
Five years after her father died, her mother wrote with news of another death: the owner of the Mountain View. He had left her mother the motel. “I was there about as long as he was,” her mother wrote. “I’m just way too tired to run it on my own. Come on back home, we’ll make a little money, I’ll not get in your way.” The way her mother promised to keep her distance made Maria realize how deeply her mother must have assumed, for years, the worst about her life. Lap dancing, trick turning. GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! blinked the neon in her mother’s nightmares.
The plane she flew home on had circled the busy airport as if it was a car seeking prime parking at a shopping mall. Yet it was filled with people’s lives and as it wasted time and fuel it flew right through clouds. Had the world changed? Was there suddenly time to kill hanging about in the heavens? Below, Maria studied the sprawl of El Paso and, across the river, smoggy Juárez. Technically they were the same town, but far more than water divided them. As they circled the city she thought of how she had never let herself separate the events of that September afternoon ten years earlier. The weight of both lives were her burden, but as long as she did not divide them into two distinct if obviously related incidents, she did not have to admit that had it just been the one—had Randy accepted her decision and held out a little longer to get past the crust of his hurt, had he found someone more suited to the life he desired—she might have known that airplanes sometimes orbited their destinations, which were not quite ready for their arrival.
In the car they talked of people she had forgotten.
“You know your first cousin Jan married a guy named Tony. He’s—what do they call them—a bodybuilder?”
“I think that is what they call them,” said Maria, as if playing dumb was the polite thing to do.
“Well, he spends a lot of time on his muscles,” her mother said. “At a gymnasium somebody built behind the fairgrounds.”
“You mean a gym?”
“Isn’t it short for gymnasium?” her mother said. “It’s got to be short for something.”
Ten years away and here she was, talking to her mother about abbreviations.
“I’ve never thought about it,” said Maria, which was certainly the truth, “but I guess you’re right.”
“Well, whatever you call it, he’s up there more than he’s home with Jan and those kids. If I were her I would tell him he had to choose between a gymnasium and her.”
“Maybe she likes them muscle-bound,” said Maria.
“Likes what like that?”
“Her men.”
“Well, she’s not got but the one,” said her mother. A half mile of dark desert passed. Maria stared out the window toward the darker shadow of the Davis Mountains. “Least that I know about.”
“What about Marcie? Isn’t that her sister’s name?”
“Marcie lives down near Sanderson somewhere,” said her mother, and then she was off for a good half hour, ticking off cousins and classmates, their whereabouts and accomplishments and failures. Lives were narrated by her mother without inflection, as if having your child die in Iraq or getting filthy rich off mining rights and oil leases and building an four-thousand-square-foot mansion high up at the Fort Davis Resort was simply what lay ahead in this life. And yet perhaps her mother chronicled the things that happen to people so flatly to let her errant daughter know that all was forgiven. No surprise and no judgment. You are born and then this happens and then something else. Just like you, child.
“Just a visit,” Maria had said on the phone. “I can’t take too much time off work.” She did not outright decline to run the motel, which she remembered as a string of brick sunbaked rooms with a humming ice machine in a dank closet and a pale blue pool with cracks in its concrete, but she certainly made clear her round-trip ticket.
Since Maria could remember, her mother, the daughter of a ranch hand from Valentine, had worked the front desk at the Mountain View Motor Lodge. Until Maria was in junior high, her mother worked only during daylight, but at some point she seemed to always be working the third shift, so that Maria saw her mother only on weekends, which her mother spent cooking, cleaning, and working in the garden.
Ahead on the highway the high beams caught the rippling away of a snake come to warm up on the blacktop. Maria rolled down her window and wished for more moon. Dear God, the smell of creosote and the brilliant starry sky between Van Horn and Valentine. Living for so long in cities forever cloudy or contaminated by streetlights had turned her from looking skyward. She had forsaken stars. Now one seemed to break loose from whatever held it and streak wildly away. She followed its progress even through the bug-crusted windshield of her mother’s Jeep Cherokee. Wind from the open window thickened her hair and she opened her mouth wide enough to drown on the thin air of home.
“How’s Manny?” Maria asked. Since Manny was six years older and had joined the Coast Guard right out of high school, she’d not seen much of him even before she left home. She’d worshipped him once, even after he was old enough to shun her. When she was six and he was twelve, he used to let her come along with him through the fields behind the house to shoot birds with his air rifle, but as soon as his friends showed up, she was shooed away, often just this side of cruel, to impress his pals.
Manny had been stationed somewhere on the East Coast when Randy died. Maria had no idea how much he knew, how much her parents had told him. Oddly, it was Manny she grew to miss the most during her years away, though he was mostly ghost, the scent of sneaked cigarettes at the dinner table when she was young enough to equate smoking with sniffing glue or shooting heroin. She had trouble even remembering what he looked like, though she knew he favored her father, but only physically. In memory he’d inherited her mother’s taciturn way, though she couldn’t say whether this was true or she’d just made him this way, whether his terseness made her all the more eager to talk to him. Because she never had talked to him, not as an adult, and with her reserved, long-gone brother she could start over, clean slate. He would not judge her because he had not been there to witness the way her father shunned her after Randy died, the way her mother refused to talk about it. Plus the Manny she concocted had so few words to spare, and the ones he would choose when they at last talked would be soothing.
But she had no idea where he was. The Coast Guard never kept him long in one place. She couldn’t call home and ask for his address, and so she spent years imagining their reunion, which always took place at the depot, her train pulling slowly into the station during the last dusty light of day, a time of incomprehensible beauty back home, pink-and-blue clouds hugging the mountains, and Manny leaning on the hood of his truck, his skin tinted by the last slat of sun.
“Manny’s getting along all right,” said her mother.
“How about his children?”
“Cute
as can be.”
Maria waited for more but her mother had nothing else to report, perhaps because they were almost home, and taking her daughter home after all these years made her mother nervous. When they pulled into the driveway, the headlights streaked across the Airstream, a silver flash like the backsides of cottonwood leaves ruffled by a breeze. That she thought of trees instead of what had happened behind the camper comforted her, for wasn’t the reaction she’d feared at the sight of it what had kept her in foggy foothill towns for so many years?
Her mother followed Maria’s eyes to the camper and killed the headlights before she even reached the carport. The carport had been her father’s domain. His name was Luis, and she associated him with the oil-stained concrete and also with the edge of the yard, where he liked to burn trash at dusk. Most of her early memories of him were in silhouette, aglow against the endless flatness, the huge sky blue-black and primed to soon explode with planet and star. Somehow he managed to be sweet and distant at once. He could be kind to her, even doting, when he saw that she was pained about, say, the boring tribulations of high school, but all too often her real pain, the kind that had nothing to do with bitchy girls or getting the right part in Grease, the kind that was vague but persistent, could not penetrate his aloofness. He liked things she did not know how to talk about: rockabilly, cars, hunting, football. Like the rest of the men in their town, he was up and out of the house before the sun rose. Lying in bed, she would hear his boots on the kitchen floor, the screen door slam, the throaty stutter of his pickup before it finally turned over.
She remembered her father taking her along on his errands, the way he always cut off his truck and coasted into the mostly dirt parking lots of the local stores, tapping the brake with the toe of his boot, yanking the keys from the ignition, swinging open the door and hopping out of the cab in what seemed to her a single motion. It pleased her, this memory, for once she was inside, the house bore no trace of her father, not that it had when he was alive. As in all the houses of her childhood, any trace of masculinity was banished to garage or outbuilding. Men were not supposed to notice decor, but she could not imagine her father feeling at home in her parents’ bedroom, with its fleur-de-lis wallpaper, ruffled curtains pulled tight against the intense summer sun, and cherry-red comforter and matching pillows plumped atop the white-framed queen-size bed. A lace doily covered the top of the dresser on which lay the tortoiseshell comb-and-mirror set handed down to her mother by her great-grandmother, a teacher from Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, from whom her mother had gained the name Harriet, which she hated.
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