by Carol Anshaw
On the drive back from the Loop, Maureen is perfect. Curious about Neale’s work, offering a self-deprecating anecdote about how terrible she was at yoga the one time she tried it. Falling smack onto her head in her first and last attempt at crow pose. She agrees to listen to a clip on Joe’s phone of his favorite noise musician, Merzbow, performing “Smelly Brain.” After maybe thirty seconds, Neale makes him shut it down, leaving Maureen with an appreciative smile hanging in the middle of nothing.
She tells them about her new assignment, a whole new area for her. She is designing uniforms for staff at an indoor theme park going up in a repurposed indoor mall in Gurnee, a featureless exurb near the Wisconsin border. The theme park will be intergalactic.
“I’m working with materials I’ve never touched before. Stuff that’s stretchy and shimmery. And military. I’m not sure why so many visions of the future are of a military state, but that’s what they want in Gurnee. Uniforms with severe hats. When you come to the park you are subject to rules of the planet’s government. You eat food that comes in cubes and squares. I think it’s, like, brownies. Potato nuggets, parallelogram hot dogs. I don’t know. You drink through a long thin tube leading to a softpack in a shoulder bag. There are space rides, but they’re just part of the total immersion thing. Who do you think will come to this place?”
“Me!” Joe says, then laughs at himself.
All around, it’s a really fun outing. But for all Maureen’s efforts, Neale dismisses her out of hand. What she says when Cate calls her the next day is, “Joe loves her. I think they’re getting married.”
“Tell me—”
“She’s fine.”
“What do you mean, fine?”
“I guess I mean fine for someone. But probably not for you. Down the line you’re going to want more from her but there’s only going to be what she’s already shown you. She’s sunny and buoyant—”
“Oh, please.”
“Lively, quite a bit of fun—”
“Stop.”
“Okay. Also totally apolitical. Knows almost nothing about the hideous world we’re living in. It’s something unpleasant. So let’s keep it at arm’s length. Am I right?”
“This is about her and her sister, isn’t it?”
“It’s way not about her and her sister.”
Sex doesn’t interest Irene. The sharp end of a needle, the cool glass tube of a pipe. That’s all she wants to take in.
She doesn’t want me to go without, though. She does what she can. She sets up dates. It’s hard for me to get anyone on my own. My hygiene is casual and I have very little money, and I’m a little on the heavy side. These are not pluses with a lot of women.
So Irene picks up this or that woman—on the street, or outside one of the shelters. One time at the library. She promises drugs and a little party, and brings my date to the hotel above the Indian buffet and I meet them there. We don’t bring a date home afterward. She shouldn’t really know where we live.
The dates are all kinds of women. Once in a while they are even young and sort of pretty or you can see they were once pretty, but mostly not. It doesn’t really matter. They all come with the same basic equipment and soon the three of us are high and in bed. Sometimes my date has even nodded off. Irene does this or that, she knows what it takes to make me hard and then she helps me in. This is not easy for me on my own. I am too big that way for most women, but Irene helps them manage it, and then I’m in for as long as it takes. If my date doesn’t like this or that, whatever, Irene slaps her around a little to shut her up. That’s as rough as it gets.
These outings are a nice part of our relationship. Something we can do together. It gets us out of the house.
puebla
Outside, the heat is brutal, doing a transparent shimmy above the highway asphalt. Inside the car, a new silver-blue Passat, Cate and her father are privileged in air that is dry and chilled, as though they are transporting something valuable and unstable. Infant lemurs. A replacement heart.
Alan, Cate’s father, plays a jazzy game with the stick shift; the car is always in the perfect gear. When she was twelve and he was teaching her to drive, he showed her how to shift without using the clutch, that if you really pay attention, like a safecracker, you can feel when one gear is perfectly aligned with the next and just slip from third to fourth, then back down to third.
“Want to give it a try?” he says, pulling off, onto the sandy shoulder.
They switch seats. The shift is satin smooth. At a certain point she doesn’t need the clutch, and rests her left foot on the rubber mat. She’s proud she can still do this. But she can only make it happen with a car like this one, on an open stretch of road like this one; in the city she can’t hear the engine over all the ambient roar, can’t find enough of a straightaway, plus she drives a small, utilitarian SUV.
Her father is an elegant man. He dresses like a golfer from the 1950s. Pants that sigh into light drapes on the tops of his feet. Shoes in pale leathers. His eyes, like Cate’s, have light blue irises. They share the same pale complexion, and sharp, narrow nose. His hair is also like Cate’s—black and dense. He used to comb it straight back off his face. Recently, though, there is more forehead, less hair, and he now sweeps what’s still there into a forelock. People would know at first glance that they are father and daughter. She likes this.
He came here to Puebla for the job of his dreams: he picks colors for cars, interiors and exteriors. When he and Ricky met at art school, he was a painting student. He is excruciatingly sensitive to color, also has an impressive memory in this realm. He can match perfectly something here and now to something far back, or to the underside of a leaf in a floral-patterned sofa pillow in a home he has visited only once. As they walked around Puebla’s zocalo yesterday, he showed off a little by pinning down the Pantone chip colors of the extremely vibrant churches. 17-1664. 14-0995. Like that.
Today they drove out of the city to the pre-Columbian pyramid at Cholula. He had to rest briefly as they climbed the million stone steps, the first time Cate has thought of him as old, as opposed to just older than she is.
Now they are heading out into the countryside, to a scruffy bar he likes.
She asks, as she always does, “How safe are we out here, alone on the road? I mean, I haven’t noticed many other cars.” Cate is thinking of photos she sees regularly in the news. Homemade Mad Max highway tanks with revolving turrets. Dead women hanging in a neat row on the side of a building, their legs still encased in skinny jeans, feet in bright sneakers.
“Well, Volkswagen has a presence in the area. Nobody wants the plant to leave. I like to think that working for the company, driving a VW, is a kind of carapace we’re traveling inside. And of course, it helps that neither you nor I are involved in the drug wars. Did you remember to move money out of your checking account like I told you? If you get express-kidnapped, they’ll only keep you until the ATM runs dry.” Statements like this are the closest her father gets to humor, if he’s being humorous.
“Seriously,” he says because he knows what she’s thinking.
Cate gropes around for a snappy answer, but she can’t find an offhand way to reveal (although she knows he probably suspects) that her checking account is her entire savings, an amount that would require only two or three modest ATM withdrawals to deplete entirely.
Cate sees her father at Christmastime and usually for a week in the summer. He and Ricky split up when Cate was a freshman in high school, a few years after the workshop accident. It could seem from the right distance as though her injury and his departure were unrelated. But the life of their small family thinned out after the mishap, the air in the house moved to a higher altitude, the noise of daily life became muted. This turned out to be the ghostly period during which her father was preparing for his absence.
The workshop project was just for fun—something she and her father would make together, a wooden silhouette of Cate to fasten to the kitchen doorframe. They decided to make i
t a foot taller than her current height. They made a best guess. The plan was to pencil-mark her height on the cutout as she grew. They were going to paint it with hair (black), face (pink), a blue-and-white striped shirt she especially liked, jeans, sneakers. They never got to the painting part. The jigsawed board was slippery with blood, then she never saw it again.
Because of the accident, because she had to live the last installment of her childhood without him, her father has become a somewhat distant relative—attentive in her presence, happy to see her, interested in catching up, but the connection has become faltering, sputtering, a call between two valleys on either side of a high mountain.
At the bar, which is mostly outside, tables on dusty ground, he orders beers for both of them, then heads for the john, which stands at not quite enough distance to keep the smell discreet, its door hanging open. The waiter brings two Tecates, the bottles feverishly sweating. Cate takes a long drink and, in tilting her head back slightly, sees the monkey. He is sitting on a branch midway up a dusty tree at a near edge of the patio. He is eating a piece of tortilla with a rapid burst of munching.
“Hey. What’s up?” she asks him. He cocks his head, which has a hat strapped to it, something like a fez. She checks out his situation. On the plus side, he probably has a steady supply of taco chips, and humans to amuse him. Still, there is the chain—one end wrapped around the tree trunk, the other clamped to one of his ankles, where it has rubbed away the fur around it. Mexico is, in general, a place with a lot of potential for an animal rights movement. She brings water to the thirsty, exhausted dogs that drag themselves around everywhere here. A metal bowl sits at the base of the tree, but it’s empty. She gets up to ask for a glass of water at the bar, but her father, on his way back to the table, says, “You can’t resolve this particular problem. I may have mentioned this before.” He pulls out the metal chair across the small table from her; the tips of its legs scrape through the gravel on the ground. “There isn’t enough water to satisfy the thirst of the dogs and cats, not to mention the monkeys in this patch of the world.” Her father, she has noticed, has a slight deficiency in empathy. When he tries, it comes off as an impersonation.
“I can do a little.” When she has gone up to the bar and come back with a glass of water, she pours it into the bowl beneath the tree.
Alan looks away. When he looks back, he asks her about the play.
“The playwright and director are kind of geniuses. The play is very good. If it takes off, a lot of people will see my work. Even better—they’ll see what I can do with more than a twenty-dollar budget.” She dips a taco chip into an earthenware bowl of salsa, bites into it, and her mouth explodes. After drinking the beer pretty much straight down, she’s able to speak again, and then only in a crackle. “I suppose this is probably my big break. Of course, I’m trying not to frame it that way. I can scare myself silly.”
“Has your mother dismissed it yet?”
“I haven’t told her. As a general practice I don’t ever tell her anything really good.”
“Ricky loved you, you know. I’m sure it’s hard to imagine now, but at the beginning she was enthralled by you. She used to sit you on her lap and inspect your ears, your toes. And she’d say to me, ‘She’s perfect.’ And then everything else happened. Not just the accident, not just that you’d become imperfect in her eyes. The bigger problem was that you started having ideas of your own. Ideas different from hers. She had to punish you for that. And it was, of course, a losing battle.”
Then why didn’t you help me? Why did you just walk out? She doesn’t ask these questions. What answer would be a good one? Instead, she sits trying, just for fun, to imagine Ricky enthralled by a baby.
* * *
Her father lives at the center of the old town. The apartment is vast, occupying the top floor of a four-story building with steps up to a roof garden. Cate hasn’t seen all of it, even after many visits. There are corridors off hallways; everything, even the still, cool air, is dark. Every time Cate visits, the passage from hot to cool makes her grateful for air-conditioning until she remembers there isn’t any, that the apartment’s sepulchral coolness is the product of heavy shutters, lazy ceiling fans, and walls that are two feet thick. The building’s stucco exterior is—her father tells her—painted the red of fresh rust (49-16-C) with dark green (638-7C) louvered shutters. She suspects he just makes up the color numbers, but she’s not certain. The apartment, the whole building actually, belongs to Seneca, her father’s companion. It has been in her family for generations. She is older than Alan, somewhere in her seventies. Physically, she is ample but with gravity rather than weight. She moves in a slow, smooth way, as though her tendons are silk cords. Her dark hair is shiny, almost reflective. She sits up straight and stands tall. Cate can see her as a girl, practicing with a book balanced on her head.
Cate thinks of her as Alan’s companion because she is unclear about the nature of their relationship. It doesn’t seem romantic exactly. They sleep in separate rooms. Cate sees their bond as adventurers in friendship. They shift deferentially around each other in these dark, cavernous rooms, then meet up at dinner, for which they dress. Whatever, it’s clear the congeniality makes her father happy. Before they met, he was solitary in a way that didn’t seem unhappy. But he is very different now. When Seneca comes into a room, he looks like he has spotted her across a vast train station, after too long apart. He has told Cate that he feels so lucky to have found her, to be with her.
Today, they find her in her office, across a small courtyard from the rest of the apartment. Walls lined with dark wood floor-to-ceiling bookcases, filled with books in dark—ruby, evergreen, navy—bindings. She is at her desk, a stack of folders to one side. Although the stack is at least a foot high, everything is tidy, squared at the corners.
“Catherine.” Seneca looks up, takes off her glasses. “How wonderful that we have you here. I woke up this morning feeling I had presents to open.”
Seneca is a lawyer. The common thread running through her clients is that they all suffer from injustice or injury.
“Whose plight are you taking up this time?” Cate says.
“Miners. Silver miners. Very little has changed for miners since Orwell’s Wigan Pier or even Zola’s Germinal. Only the horses have gotten a break.”
“What horses?” Cate sees her mistake even as these words are passing over her lips, requesting information she is not going to be happy to have.
“Beasts of burden. Pulling the carts. Their trip down was one-way. They worked down there until they died. Always dreaming of running across green pastures.”
Cate doesn’t say anything. She’s afraid there might be more to the horse story. Seneca doesn’t miss this.
“I am sorry I told you this. I forgot what a friend you are to animals. I am too distracted by the sorrows of humans. It’s good there are others to concern themselves with animals.” While this sounds sincere, Cate also catches on a small snag of trivialization. Seneca shifts her chair back to face the table she uses as a desk. Over her shoulder she says, “Maybe you are tired a little from your trip to the pyramid? Maybe you’d like to sleep awhile before dinner?”
Her father says, “Yes, take a nap. I have to go over to the plant. A short meeting.”
“Is the meeting about a color?” Cate says.
“Yes.”
“Is it about a blue?”
“No. It’s about a gray. There are way more meetings about grays than about blues, but they are shorter meetings.”
* * *
The nap is a fiction. In these suddenly busy days of her work life, Cate needs to steal every spare minute, even down here, to refine her sets.
Just a few years ago, if she were going to work away from her shop, she would have had to bring drafting tools and a tube of rolled drawings. Now she slips into her backpack a laptop thin as a magazine. Her ideas are now liquid, trickled into a design program, then shot into the cloud. She can work anywhere Wi-Fi hovers.
>
* * *
Seneca is late to dinner, then finally comes through the archway, placing a hand on the plaster in such a graceful way a stranger might not notice she is steadying herself. She has suffered from balance issues for years. At dinner she often wears a light caftan and heavy jewelry, a rolled scarf as a headband. She moves slowly. Her approach is like that of one or another of the three wise men.
As soon as she has made apologies and taken her seat, the door to the kitchen opens for the cook, who bears a salad of nopalitos. Juana is small and elderly in an extreme way. By now she has lost a hard-fought battle with the sun. Her face resembles that of a shrunken head. She seems to be done with speaking. Cate has only heard her do so a few times, and then only the fewest possible words. Initially, she interpreted this muttering as something ancient and important, a blessing on her maybe.
Juana greets Cate the way she always does, with a violent embrace, which is a little awkward because Cate is seated, so the gesture winds up being a hug of both Cate and the chair. Juana then takes Cate’s bad hand and kneads it then rubs the bumps, which are what remains of her lost fingers. All the while of this, she murmurs something that’s not Spanish but rather some indigenous language. The first time this happened, Cate thought she was being prayed for to some specialty saint. But when she asked about this, Seneca set her straight. “Oh no!” Then laughed in a spilling way. “It’s for good luck. To rub any deformity—a hump on the back, the stump of what was once a leg—is supposed to bring good fortune. You get a lottery ticket on a day this happens. I’m sorry to tell you this. How can it not be offensive? But she is from an older world than ours.”