by Carol Anshaw
* * *
What Juana serves tonight is chiles rellenos and bread in the form of soft, slightly sweet pads and a butter mixed with honey—all delicious.
Of course Seneca wants to talk about the political upheaval in the U.S. And of course Cate dreads this. It’s one thing to go over (endlessly) with other Americans the huge wrong thing that has happened, but totally embarrassing to discuss with anyone in another country, particularly a country the new president wants to wall off to keep out mythical, rampaging rapists.
Cate gathers up all her resources.
“Apparently there was mischief from Russia. They picked the candidate they knew would be a useful fool. So he was their guy and they went to work for him with their massive hacking savvy. Lies and propaganda messages whirled out by the zillions by—”
“Bots,” Seneca says. Cate didn’t expect her to be so well-informed on this, but of course she is. And clearly seeing how uncomfortable all of this is for Cate, she pulls the rug out from under the subject and asks about the new play. But this is almost as difficult a subject. Cate doesn’t feel up to explaining Vita and her crazy life. If Vita were a little more famous than a Bloomsbury footnote (by way of being Woolf’s lover), Cate wouldn’t have to keep relating her story to anyone who asks about the play. But that doesn’t happen now. Seneca has, of course, done her homework.
“I have been reading up on your Sackville-West. A very good biography. Also a diary of a time early in her marriage. Dramas in hotels and Parisian dance halls for her, but her husband minded and the children barely knew her.”
“Wow. I’m so impressed you did all this research.”
“It wasn’t a hardship. It’s always amusing to read about the terrible things people did when they were young and run by their passions.”
Cate says, “But the thing is, with Vita, age didn’t completely subdue her. She didn’t fly off to Paris anymore to ravish her girlfriend in small hotels and then go out on the town dressed as a wounded soldier. That stuff was over. Her affairs became more discreet. She stayed closer to home. And then eventually she got old and retreated to her castle. But even then she could spin a web for women who came around. One victim was a tourist she lured off the garden tour. The bus went back to London without that lady.”
Her father laughs. He hasn’t read up. All the Vita stories are new to him.
Seneca says, “All those passionate letters, all those walks in the garden in the moonlight. Then discarding one poor lover to take up with the next, then writing another mailbag full of love letters—does seem comic. Is the play a comedy?” Seneca always treats Cate cordially, politely, but it’s clear she thinks Cate is postponing adulthood.
“I think it’s more a minor tragedy,” Cate says. “Sorrow in the key of human frailty. Virginia Woolf’s broken heart in particular, which she couldn’t really afford on top of her mental illness. Those birds were speaking to her in Greek in one ear while Vita was whispering in the other. She shouldn’t have started anything frivolous with Virginia. Virginia should have been off-limits.”
Seneca nods. “The play I would like to see is the one where Vita gets sent to the coal mines. Ah. Sorry. Perhaps miners are too much on my mind these days.” But this is not an apology. It’s tiny clipping—the sound of a single hair being cut. Cate doesn’t take it personally. Seneca would like everyone to shape up, be more serious. She wishes Alan did something more important than picking colors. It’s difficult to take offense at Seneca’s delicate prodding. She wears her erudition lightly, wages her battles against tyranny without fanfare. You can’t dislike her; Cate has tried, but it’s just not possible.
The scariest thing about Seneca is how she x-rays the vague, general version of Cate’s life that she presents for inspection. She sees that much of Cate’s movement through life has been thinly disguised stasis. If Cate, conversationally, positions herself at a crossroads, Seneca sees these would only be crossroads if there were actual roads crisscrossing the place where Cate stands. She comprehends, without really knowing, the slightly sad particulars of Cate’s life. She can see the small pile of accomplishments, the reduced circumstances.
* * *
Cate’s father has to work the next day, so Seneca offers to take Cate on a small outing.
“Something new since you were last here. A dream pool for you.” This is typical of Seneca, this attention to the details that make up Cate. She is probably this way with everyone, which doesn’t at all devalue it.
The pool is on the roof of a hotel occupying what used to be a water purification plant when this city was still a town. The redesign is all about architects at play without enough supervision. Everyone walks mincingly up and down staircases made of clear glass. The slate tiles in the lobby are set ajar, at slight angles to each other.
“I am an abogado,” Seneca says. “These designers saw fun; I see lawsuits from all the late-night falls. Slightly drunken girls in high heels.”
The pool is a more interesting bit of whimsy. It runs the entire length of the building, is a single lane, and has one side made of thick, translucent glass.
“Oh my,” Cate says when they spot it as they come off the elevator. She goes into the ladies’ room to change. She’s childishly excited to get into this human fishbowl. When she comes out of the bathroom, Seneca has ordered them glasses of a popular red wine from Guadalajara. Incognito. They had it the night before, and Cate told her how much she liked it. Seneca doesn’t miss many beats.
“Go on, now,” Seneca flutters a hand urging Cate toward the pool.
“You won’t come in?”
“Alas, I do not swim. I will do a little work here.”
While Cate does laps so long she sometimes has to stop three-quarters of the way in disbelief that there can possibly be more water ahead, Seneca sits at a high table making phone calls. Her forehead rests in the palm of her hand as she talks, as though the conversations are burdens she bears. When Cate gets out of the water and is toweling off, Seneca puts her phone facedown on the table and smoothly redirects her attention.
“How do you know about this place?” Cate says. “If you’re not a swimmer.”
“I know some of the masons who worked on the crazy renovation. They are plain men and found the architects’ mischief hilarious. All the glass floors, the crazy tiles in the lobby, as though an earthquake has passed through. When in fact earthquakes do pass through here on their own, shuffling tectonic plates without any artistic intentions.” Then, upshifting her tone, “You had a very nice swim?”
In this single moment, Cate sees the position she occupies in Seneca’s maternal life. Her own children, a doctor and a lawyer, are deeply serious adults treating burn victims, representing indigent clients. The daughter has an autistic child. They have chests filled with the medals of responsibilities firmly met. Seneca doesn’t dismiss Cate as Cate has assumed until now. She sees her as a child who is still playing out her childhood, someone she can still spoil.
* * *
At the airport, Cate changes for dollars the pesos her father stuffed into her backpack when she wasn’t looking. She minds this less than the money her mother gives her. She thinks of her father’s donations as minor installments of penance, for his carelessness at the tool bench.
Waiting at the gate, she watches elephant videos on her cell. She has to be careful. Eventually the uplifting stories, like that of the friendship between Tara the elephant and her best friend, Bella, the small white dog, lead to those which involve happy reunions like Shirley and Jenny, but with backstories of why they needed to be reunited, some tragic twenty-year separation as they were shuffled from circus to zoo and back again. Or Raju, the elephant who is so amazingly happy he’s weeping because he has finally been released from fifty years of misery and beatings in a cage. How will anyone be able to make that up to him?
visitors
Cate has finished her articulated drawings and sent off the files to Lauren and Molly. Now she waits. After a crush of too much
to do, she suddenly has nothing pressing. She calls Neale and asks if she can tag along to yoga.
“I can even pick you up. I travel with four-wheel drive.”
“Oh, that’s great. I don’t and I was fishtailing all the way to the Jewel and back. I thought about canceling on account of the snow, but I got calls from people in the hood, women with cabin fever. So I’m going to run a limited schedule. Come soon. I just have to put away my groceries. You can get me there for Level One.”
* * *
Now, after her big offer, Cate is running late, which is bad, but when she pulls up in front of Neale’s house, Neale is not waiting outside. Cate calls her cell, but gets sent straight to voice mail. The front door has been unopenable for the past couple of weeks since Joe played a trick on Neale with crazy glue. He was thinking about the crazy part, not enough about the glue part. Although at twelve he usually seems twenty-five years old, every once in a while he seems eight.
She drives around into the alley and puts on her flashers. As she gets out of the car, the DJ is saying, “New song by Neko Case, right after the weather—” Turning off the ignition annihilates the rest of the sentence. Cate loves Neko Case, and if she’s quick, she thinks—in a very small thought—she can get back in time to hear the song.
She heads in through the back gate, along the gangway by the garage, then the small patch of snowed-over vegetable garden. The back door is ajar, Neale’s key ring like a crappy charm bracelet with swipe tags dangling from the lock. Tapping into some vein of instinct, Cate moves quietly into the mudroom. From there she can hear someone talking, loud without quite shouting. A woman’s voice, abraded, punctuated by a stuttery cough. Cate thinks, well, maybe a neighbor.
“She’s just your type,” says the voice. “And look. She’s not fighting all that hard, she’s just teasing you.”
Not a neighbor.
“Hey mama.” A higher voice, but definitely a man. “I can’t get in.”
* * *
Cate understands that what she is walking into will be horrible. She presses her back against the cold masonry wall and moves slowly up the short flight of stone steps. Halfway, when her head is level with the kitchen floor, she sees Neale pinned to it by a large man, too large, his back to Cate. He’s wearing a hoodie, bright blue with a low tide of grime around the bottom. He has Daffy Duck tattooed on the side of his neck; he’s the guy she noticed in the library. Neale is squirming under him. He is trying to get her cooperation by slapping her head one way, then the other.
“You don’t simmer down, we might need to do a little dentistry.” He pulls a pair of pliers from a pocket of his hoodie. Warm saliva slides up the sides of Cate’s throat. She swallows hard. This is it. The moment underprepared for.
Scattered around on the linoleum are a bag of chips, some peaches, a block of tofu, a box of spaghetti, a box of doughnuts, a plastic bottle of V8. Neale’s purse with glasses and wallet and a small pack of Kleenex spilling out. A roll of mints. All of this detail Cate registers pointlessly, as though she’s been asked to play an old-fashioned party memory game.
Then she sees the woman, pacing, skinny in jeans with jeweled back pockets, cowboy boots with pointed toes. She is fiercely agitated. She comes over to help subdue Neale, who is twisting harder now. To remedy this, the woman kicks her casually in the side of her head—casually but hard.
“Simmer down, cunt.”
yule log
Cate and the detective are the only people in a large room crammed with rolling chairs and beat-up desks, one of which is buried beneath the ruins of an office Christmas party—a desiccated Yule log cake; a crumbling tower of unspooling lunch-meat wraps; a large, clear plastic bowl nearly drained of punch. This room is an opposite of the office in CSI: Miami; the only colors are bad ones—tan and wheat and beige and off-white and gray, and a dirty pale yellow. An atmosphere of failure in keeping up with the bad behavior of humans. The detective sees her looking at the cake.
“Yeah, happy holidays, right? The truth is there’s always a surge in bag-snatching, small-time burglaries, muggings just before Christmas. People want to get presents even though they can’t afford them. I think they also resent the gap between themselves and people who can afford gifts and turkeys and trees to decorate. They start thinking about evening up that score.” He shifts around in the chair and groans a little through clamped jaws. “Crappy back,” he says. Three red-light buttons on his desk phone are blinking; every once in a while, he looks at these, but doesn’t press anything, or pick up the receiver. It occurs to Cate that landlines are no longer conveyances of important information.
“I’m not sure I can be of much help. A lot of what happened is kind of static in my head.”
“So when you go through something like this, your mind can wall off the mess for a while. I mean, you did a lot of damage in that kitchen, considering that the fire extinguisher was your only weapon. You hit them hard and fast. Were you in the military at some point?” He nods toward her partial hand. Cate sees that the cop is imagining her to be a very different person. The kind of person for whom danger and violence are routine.
“No. Childhood accident.” She rubs the two knobs of bone where fingers used to be. Even her memory of them as full fingers is lost by now. “Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever been in any sort of violent situation before, unless you count a table saw.
“Is he dead?” she asks. The last she saw of him, he was being wheeled out of Neale’s kitchen on a gurney, little oxygen pods stuck up his nostrils. “Did I kill him?”
“The gentleman is down for the count. They’ve got him on a ventilator, but when they pull the plug, they don’t expect him to go far on his own steam. We’re still trying to figure out who he is. Guy carried zero ID. Maybe living off the grid. We’ll find him, though. He probably lives near your friend. With break-ins, the perps often live nearby. It’s just a casual, walk-by bit of business. They saw the door ajar as a pleasant opportunity. They surprised her. They went in to take some stuff and then decided to mess with her.”
“When he dies, will I be charged with murder?” As though they’re talking about an episode of a crime show.
“Oh no, lady. You’re the hero in this, not the bad guy.” He shifts in his chair again. He could really benefit from a little yoga. Then she tries to picture him in yoga class.
He pulls her out of her mental drift. “You sprayed the woman with the fire extinguisher. Can you see that? Maybe you’re starting to remember, even a little would be a big help. Could you help me build a rough picture of her?”
Cate shakes her head. “I’m not sure I even registered what she looked like. It all happened so fast.” She is so tired. She doesn’t want to select noses and lips to make a composite. She wants to disconnect from both of them, the huge guy and the crazy lady. The detective isn’t interested in Cate’s reluctance; he turns his monitor to the side so they can both look at the same time, and clicks the mouse to call up a selection of face shapes. Cate watches as the photos flip onto, then off the screen.
“No.”
“No.”
Shakes her head to indicate no.
“No.”
Then, “Do you have a category for really crazy-looking? That was her look, like someone escaping from the asylum.”
“See. Even that’s helpful.” And then he switches back to eyes. “Any of these look familiar?”
“Maybe smaller.”
“Was she white or black or Hispanic?”
“White. But dark.”
“What color was her hair?”
“I’m not sure. Brown? Maybe black. Dirty. Everything about her was dirty. Kind of caked in.”
“Short or long hair?”
Cate shakes her head. “She had a hat or a cap on.”
After reshuffling the component images a few times, what they wind up with prompts the detective to ask, “Was she Hawaiian?”
“I think maybe we’ve reached the limits of this technology.”
machine burgers
Joe looks so small in the chair by the hospital bed. The chair has a back that’s high and straight, upholstered in teal vinyl. Framed by it, he looks like the boy king of a bleak country. His eyes are closed and he’s wearing earbuds, putting himself inside his noise music. It’s cool in the room but he looks sweaty, even in just a T-shirt and jeans. She puts a hand on his shoulder and he jumps a little.
In the bed, his mother looks startlingly bad, worse even than she did when Cate got separated from her by triage in the ER. Her affect, though, is peaceful in a doped-up way. The two sides of her face don’t match. The right side is Neale, but the left is several colors and misshapen with swelling. An ice pack is strapped against the left cheek, connected to a whirring machine on the floor next to the bed. One small stitch has escaped from under the pack, which hints at more. They’ve put her into a nightgown patterned with tiny evergreens. Cate watches the tree line along Neale’s chest go up slightly, then down. Her right wrist is held by a splint. And then Cate can’t look anymore. She loves Neale so much.
Beauty is so fragile. Neale’s isn’t just about her face, it’s part of the whole easy, open way she is in the world. Maybe everything will come back together in time, but Cate imagines from here on, fear will be part of who she is. Boldness will have to be summoned from a past, remembered place.
* * *
Joe pulls out one of his earbuds, leaving it to dangle, touching his chest, leaking steel-mill noise into the quiet room.
“I’m so sorry about this, honey.” She doesn’t know what to tell him. She can’t even think where to begin. Where to stop. The best she can come up with is, “Are you hungry? Is there any food around here for you?”
“The cafeteria part is closed. There’s a machine in the basement. It has a dead apple, a flat cheeseburger. Weird candy bars. Lucky Lady. I think they might be from another country. I didn’t have money anyway.”