Of Women and Salt

by Gabriela Garcia

  Carmen wondered if Mario felt strange at the dinner table without Jeanette, whether he talked with other guests or felt like she would, counting the seconds until Jeanette returned. Carmen wondered if Mario would tell Jeanette about their encounter.

  “You still don’t even tell the truth about Dad,” Jeanette said. “Every therapist I’ve spoken with says that’s unhealthy.”

  Carmen’s hands shook as she rinsed each plate and placed it in its slot in the dishwasher. Of course it always came back to this, and each time it felt like an accusation, like Jeanette faulted her for what had happened even if she’d never say that. Carmen placed a rinsed spoon in its receptacle, and she felt the bile rise. To be around Jeanette was too painful. Was that the real reason she’d banned her? Had she just forgotten?

  Of course Carmen hadn’t known about the abuse. For God’s sake, she’d stayed with Julio because she’d thought he had a level of love and affection for Jeanette that would dissipate under the weight of separate homes. Because she, Carmen, knew better than anyone what it was to lose a father. She’d never understand why Jeanette had waited until Julio died to tell her. Why she had let Carmen mourn this man, live with him all those years, sleep in a bed beside him. This man who was now an infection eating through her. She would have killed him had she known. She would have called the police. Would that have saved Jeanette? Even she knew that was a lie.

  Jeanette had told her on the day of her husband’s funeral. She’d shown up slurring, moving from corner of the room to corner of the room like each one held an opposing magnetic force and she just could not find her place, falling asleep each time she sat down. Other mourners eyed her, cast sidelong glances at one another. And Carmen, furious, had thought, How could you do this? How could you do this to your father? She had kicked Jeanette out and continued to greet guests as if nothing had happened. She’d said Jeanette didn’t feel well.

  But Jeanette had returned. Carmen sat in an armchair, just outside the viewing room that contained Julio’s body. She’d tired of guests munching on crackers and standing around as if a dead body were nothing more than a prop, nothing more than a print on the wall or background music or a vase.

  “I’m not leaving,” Jeanette said.

  Carmen stood. She told Jeanette she’d disrespected her father’s memory.

  “My father’s memory?” Jeanette laughed harshly.

  “Do you know how lucky you are to even have had a father?”

  At that, Jeanette had grabbed Carmen’s arm and stared at her, wild eyed. “That father is the reason for All. Of. This.” Jeanette motioned at herself.

  “How dare you blame a man who—!”

  “A man who—” Her face changed, turned serious. “A man who molested me?”

  And Carmen felt the whole room shift, close in on them.

  Her words should have been How? or When? or I believe you. Or nothing. Just her body, holding Jeanette’s close. Jeanette began to sob.

  She remembered the feeling of hovering over the scene. Her daughter shuddering. The guests who walked past assuming Jeanette mourned her father. The flower vendors with the wreaths. That flower smell. Stale. The light bulb. The door. The heat, the heat, even in the overly air-conditioned room.

  Her words should have been—any other words. But the real Carmen floated somewhere in the distance. And the body said, “It can’t be. It can’t be. Are you sure you—?”

  But she absolutely knew it could be. How many nights had she woken to drunken Julio over her body? How many times had she fought him off and then given in, thinking, I’m married to him, isn’t this just duty? How the violation had strangled her, how she’d willed herself another life. She had thought herself a bad wife.

  Carmen collapsed in the stale-flower-scented bathroom of the Rodríguez Funeral Home. She’d contemplated crawling into a casket herself. When she left the bathroom, Jeanette was gone.

  * * *

  The dishwasher began its cycle with a lurch of swishing water, the stop-and-start of the jets. Carmen could hear the inappropriate child, Lila, loudly answering questions in the dining room as the adults laughed.

  “Maybe we should serve dessert,” she said.

  Ha ha ha went the whole dining room. Someone smacked the table.

  “Mom,” Jeanette said. “Asking me a few basic questions about what happened, one time, does not equal meaningful conversation. Do you know what it took for me to tell you?”

  Carmen could smell the funeral home again—ugh, the flowers, she hated the flowers. Why? Why dwell, why talk, what good would it do? She had mastered a life without unearthing her own horror stories. She wished Jeanette could do the same. Her daughter needed strength, she needed Carmen’s strength for the both of them, she needed to learn the past haunted only if you let it.

  “I have to go check on something,” she said, already walking out.

  She could feel Jeanette watch her, could imagine her exasperated face. Carmen walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway, walked past her guests with their faces turned to her, walked out the door. She could hear the conversation die down to a trickle and then silence as the latch of the front door clicked shut. She imagined Mercy turning to Pepe—Where did she go? She imagined Jeanette struggling to serve a flan, imagined her staring at her stacks of serving utensils in confusion.

  The pervert, the sick sick man, the poor excuse for a human being, he who should have met a fate worse than liver failure. Her heels clacked loud on the pavement. My beautiful daughter. My beautiful, beautiful, lost daughter. Her daughter needed her. No, she wouldn’t abandon her this time. She couldn’t. She would be a part of Jeanette’s life, sober or not, she would, she must.

  The other house. Again nobody answered at the other house. Carmen knocked and knocked. She walked across the driveway past the garage and turned. A fence separated the house from the next one, like her own. A small stone path cut to a low gate at the backyard. There was a trash bin and a recycling one. There was a small window perched inches over her head. Carmen stood on tiptoe and peered in. She could scarcely make out a bathroom curtain. She had never understood windows in bathrooms. Why not just a vent of some sort if humidity was the problem? Windows, so many windows. Florida was obsessed with windows.

  It was dark now. But the heat hadn’t let up. Carmen could feel the moisture bunching on her lower back, into the folds of her suit. She could imagine her carefully sculpted curls frizzing into clown hair. She felt like a clown, creeping around someone else’s house, pushing back the words that surfaced despite a refusal to accept them as her thoughts: It was minor abuse. He’d touched Jeanette twice only, over her clothes. Just her breasts, Jeanette had said. That minor and abuse could even fit in the same sentence seemed preposterous. There was no minor in abuse, there was no Thank God, it could have been worse. Sexual abuse was no car accident. Sexual abuse was no spectrum. Was it?

  The backyard gate wasn’t locked. Carmen left her kitten heels at the threshold and stepped onto the soft mowed lawn in her stockings. The backyard had a pool and a smaller Jacuzzi lit up from beneath like a deep candle in a tall glass. There was a ceilinged patio with a built-in bar and huge chrome barbecue. She tiptoed toward the sliding glass doors covered with thick vertical blinds. She put her face to the glass so a circle of her breath fogged and dissipated on the surface. She placed an ear to the cool surface. Again it was like placing a head over a chest and listening to the heartbeat: the hum of the air-conditioning, the barely perceptible groans of an empty house settling into itself. She could hear no cat or tiger or lion. Had she imagined it all? Was she so desperate to think every other home held violence lurking?

  A motion-detector light came on and illuminated everything in grotesque shadow. But no alarm had gone off, at least no alarm had gone off. Carmen imagined what she’d look like if the police showed up, barefoot in a sweaty suit pressed up against the glass. She wondered if this was what the Bottom felt like, that undefinable point of addiction when it could get no worse.
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  She’d read it somewhere once: about someone dying, alone, and the house cat eating pieces of her dead flesh bit by bit. It was supposed to be a cautionary tale, a sad, morbid truth to be faced: Cats aren’t your friend, you pathetic, lonely idiot. And yet she remembered not feeling that way. She remembered thinking it a practical afterlife, to become useful finally, food not dust.

  Carmen hadn’t expected the unlocked sliding glass door, really she hadn’t. Her hand traveled almost of its own accord and she was shocked to feel the levers give way, the door seamlessly slide to an opening of her size. She’d never done anything like this. The blinds rustled. A burst of cool air hit her face and before she knew it, she was parting the blinds, she was stepping into a stranger’s home.

  She closed the door behind her. The living room was dark, illuminated by only the fuzzy trickles of fluorescent light from the patio. She could make out marble statuettes, a wrought iron bird cage, multiple glass menageries full of crystal and ceramic figurines. The walls were almost completely covered by painting after painting, a collection grotesquely mismatched—stoic Renaissance portraits, abstract linear sketches, tacky pop art à la Romero Britto. The living room, what she could make of it in the dark, was like a museum basement of cast-offs.

  Carmen felt along the wall for a light switch and found one. The awful scene came alive before her in even harsher truth: brocade couch, oversized armchairs draped in velvet and silk tapestry, a swear-to-God actual bearskin rug with taxidermied head intact. Every square inch of the home was swathed in its own expensive and ugly décor. The panorama was so overwhelming that Carmen almost missed it: the huge metal cage nestled into a corner near the front door, reaching almost to the ceiling. Inside lay a curled, sleeping figure beside a water bowl and a slab of untouched still-bloody meat, beside a trail of blood drops leading to the front door.

  Carmen’s hand went to her mouth in almost choreographed, cinematic precision. She crept toward the metal enclosure, nerves rattled, her whole body trembling in excitement and terror.

  As if sensing her nearing presence, the creature stirred and sat up. Its lips curled and a long hiss escaped between needle-sharp incisors. A panther, a young one. She identified the panther almost immediately without knowing she held Florida panther in her mind’s encyclopedia of feline species. Carmen leaned closer, ignored the animal’s cautionary sounds. As if challenged, the panther’s hissing got louder. And then they just stared at each other.

  Carmen marveled at the similarities between the panther and her cat Linda: the ears, parallel and curved back, the tight wiring of the whiskers, the way the nose slightly quivered. But there were differences too: the sinewy muscles that rippled the panther’s sleek skin as if readying to pounce, the way its long teeth glistened like ivory knives. Some part of her, almost against her will but perhaps not really, wanted to reach over and open the cage, wanted to smear herself in blood and feel the body give way in sacrifice. To be an animal, to carry nothing of the past, nothing past the immediate need to satiate a hunger. She wouldn’t take it personally if the panther attacked. She would understand. She would forgive. She was so caught up in the moment she almost missed the headlights that moved a spotlight over the cage, almost didn’t hear the crunchy, gravelly sound of a car coming to a stop in front of the house.

  Carmen remembered herself. Remembered Jeanette, remembered her guests. She ran, the animal growling as she slammed shut the sliding glass door just as a key turned the lock of the front one, ran past the pool and around the corner, grabbing her shoes with one swift motion, crouching at the edge of the house, peering to her right, heart thumping thumping thumping, making sure the car’s inhabitants were inside, nobody there waiting to find her. She could not believe herself. Carmen as a cartoon, a Looney Tune, predator circling one side, she the outsmarting prey. Duck season, rabbit season. She nearly laughed. She nearly laughed as she ran in her stockings across the street. They would never know. They would never know.

  Of course, she’d gather herself before she walked back into her own home. Bending to see herself in the side mirror of her car, she’d smooth her hair as best she could. She’d take off the jacket with the sweat stains blooming and stay in her silk sleeveless blouse, even though she hated her flabby upper arms and thought it imprudent for a woman over fifty to bare legs past the knee or arms above the elbow. She’d consider calling the cops once again, she’d even quickly search Miami animal control and report exotic animals on her phone, before deciding to keep the secret. She’d keep the secret as she walked into her own home with an excuse about needing to move her car as Jeanette eyed her strangely. She’d keep the secret each time she waved to her frumpy neighbor from her own threshold. She’d keep the secret when she drove Jeanette to detox again, Mario sweaty and red beside her. She’d keep the secret even when, five years later, the panther would escape its cage and maul its owner, the woman who spoke too much, leading to five skin grafts and a face Carmen would never look at again and a newspaper article in which neighbors expressed shock—they’d had no idea!—and the woman would be quoted: “It could have been worse. I’m just grateful to be alive, my God, it could have been worse.”

  7

  PRIVILEGIO

  Ana, Irapuato, 2018

  Mexico morphed her language. A chele became a güero, a guineo transformed into a plátano. Her Spanish grew stronger than her English again but her accent began to change. Trying to Mexicanize a stubborn tongue to fit in. Hearing the derogatory comments. Gente de afuera taking over the city, bringing crime, taking jobs, pinches cerotes, call the Migra, send them home. Some Mexicans kind, welcoming. Not all. Easier to try to blend in, easier to try on a new camouflage (also painful). Also confusing. Her mother promised every year they’d go back, they just needed to save a little more money. A lot more money. Maybe they’d never go back?

  It’d been four years already. Ana and her mother were still in Mexico. She’d known almost as much life in Miami as in Irapuato.

  Here, she worked. For a US-born woman with flowing red hair. Doña Nancy. Well, technically she didn’t work for Nancy. Gloria, her mother, did. But Ana had always helped her mother, for years she had helped her mother, and Nancy finally offered Ana pay. The previous muchacha had started working in a kitchen when she was eight years old after her father died. As a girl she’d been able to buy shoes for all her sisters, and this had been a source of great pride. Ana heard her tell Gloria this story before the woman left her post to marry.

  “I want to work too,” Ana had said to Doña Nancy some years back. Nancy had said no but agreed to give Ana an allowance for helping her mother. Plus Ana wasn’t going to school; Gloria taught her with books Nancy brought home from the middle school where she taught English. So Ana was working, but she wasn’t. It was all very confusing. She spent all her time around adults.

  * * *

  Nancy liked everything really, really hot. She liked a quesadilla that could set off a smoke alarm when you unfolded the tortilla. She liked her soup still bubbling in the bowl. If you served Nancy food, and it wasn’t scorching hot, Nancy would frown and then she’d get up and microwave her plate. So Ana charred everything, skirted burning every meal. She often scorched her fingers taking plates to the dinner table.

  You learned these kinds of things about people, their habits, their eccentricities, when you worked for them. Ana knew Nancy better than Nancy’s own husband, who sometimes sought Ana’s advice over a birthday gift or anniversary plan, which her mother thought was an outrageous thing to ask a child. Sometimes he’d even ask Ana about Nancy’s schedule.

  For instance, Roberto probably didn’t notice that Nancy never wiped her feet on the bath mat when she got out of the shower, instead leaving a trail of watery footprints that required listening for the turn of the faucet, the opening of the bathroom door, so Ana could be ready with the mop.

  Roberto probably didn’t know that Nancy smoked cigarettes sometimes while he was at work and then hid the carton in the upper-righ
t drawer of their shared wardrobe between the neat rows of panties Ana folded each week.

  Or that Ana had caught Nancy kissing her Spanish teacher in her driveway one morning while Roberto was at work and that no one said anything and Nancy had given her mother a raise two days later.

  That Nancy liked to fidget by stretching a hair tie with her fingers, or picking at a piece of thread, or scratching off her nail polish.

  That Nancy had a hidden stack of cash beneath a floorboard.

  * * *

  Doña Nancy spoke terrible Spanish but she managed to survive in a city like Irapuato where few tourists had reason to visit and not many people spoke English. She’d arrived, after several years of floundering from job to job in the States, to teach English at one of the private middle schools. She’d met Roberto by chance, on a weekend visit to Guanajuato. Roberto was taking a New York client on a tour of the mummy museum and in between an exhibit of a mummified fetus and one that wore socks, Nancy struck a conversation, delighted to meet an English-speaking Mexican whom she could pepper with questions. They exchanged numbers and two years later had a house in one of the new luxury colonias popping up all over Irapuato and a dual citizenship that allowed her to live in Mexico indefinitely.

  Ana knew all this because Nancy loved to chat her up at the dining table as her mother swept and mopped circles around them. Ana liked that Nancy spoke to her as if she were any of the other adults in her life and not a twelve-year-old girl. Nancy said she had stood up for Ana and her mother, had vocally argued to keep them in the home even though Roberto had not wanted a Salvadoreña maid. It was typical, this attitude, Nancy said to Ana when telling her about how she’d fought for their hiring, as if Ana weren’t acutely aware of the bias she herself faced.