by Lucia Berlin
It was horrible. The minute I lay down, Jesus woke up. He wouldn’t stop crying. I made sort of a tent to keep the sound in, but some of the women were cussing and saying, “Shaddup shaddup.” They were mostly old white wino women but some young black ones who were shoving me and pushing me. One little one was slapping me with tiny hands like quick hornets.
“Stopit!” I screamed. “Stopit! Stopit!”
The man came out with the flashlight and led me through the room into a kitchen and a new corner. “Mis bolsas!” I said. He understood and went back in and brought my bags. “I’m sorry,” I said in English. Jesus nursed and fell asleep, but I leaned against the wall and waited for morning. I am learning English, I thought. I went over all the English I knew. Court, Kentucky Fry, hamburger, goodbye, greaser, nigger, asshole, ho, Pampers, How much? Fuck a duck, children, hospital, stopit, shaddup, hello, I’m sorry, General Hospital, All My Children, inguinal hernia, pre-op, post-op, Geraldo, food stamps, money, car, crack, pólis, Miami Vice, José Canseco, homeless, real pretty, no way, José, Excuse me, I’m sorry, please, please, stopit, shaddup, shaddup, I’m sorry. Holy Mary mother of God pray for us.
Just before light the man and an old woman came in and started to boil water for oatmeal. She let me help her, pointed to sugar and napkins to put in the middle of the lined-up tables.
We all had oatmeal and milk for breakfast. The women looked really bad off, crazy or drunk some of them. Homeless and dirty. We all waited in line to take a shower, by the time it was Jesus and me the water was cold and just one little towel. Then me and Jesus were homeless too. During the day the space was a nursery for children. We could come back at night for soup and a bed. The man was nice. He let me leave my bolsa there so I just took some diapers. I spent the day walking around Eastmont Mall. I went to a park but then I was scared because men came up to me. I walked and walked and the baby was heavy. The second day the little one who had been slapping me showed me or somehow I understood her that you can ride all day on the buses, getting transfers. So I did that because he was too heavy and this way I could sit down and look around or sleep when Jesus did because at night I didn’t sleep. One day I saw where La Clinica was. I decided the next day I’d go there and find somebody there to help me. So I felt better.
The next day though, Jesus started to cry in a different way, like barking. I looked at his hernia and it was pooched way out and hard. I got on the bus right away but still it was long, the bus then BART then another bus. I thought the doctor’s was closed but the nurse was there, she took us to the hospital. We waited a long time but they finally took him to surgery. They said they’d keep him for the night, put me on a cot next to a little box for him. They gave me a ticket to go and eat in the cafeteria. I got a sandwich and a Coke and ice cream, some cookies and fruit for later but I fell asleep it was so good not to be on the floor. When I woke the nurse was there. Jesus was all clean and wrapped in a blue blanket.
“He’s hungry!” she smiled. “We didn’t wake you when he got out of surgery. Everything went fine.”
“Thank you.” Oh, thank God! He was fine! While I fed him I cried and prayed.
“No reason to cry now,” she said. She had brought me a tray with coffee and juice and cereal.
Dr. Fritz came in, not the doctor that did the surgery, the first doctor. He looked at Jesus and nodded, smiled at me, looked over his chart. He lifted the baby’s shirt. There was still a scrape and a bruise on his shoulder. The nurse asked me about it. I told her it had been the kids were I was staying, that I didn’t live there no more.
“He wants you to know that if he sees any more bruises he is going to call CPS. Those are people who might take your baby, or maybe they will just want you to talk to somebody.
I nodded. I wanted to tell her that I needed to talk to somebody.
We have had some busy days. Both Dr. Adeiko and Dr. McGee were on vacation so the other doctors were really busy. Several gypsy patients which always means the whole family, cousins, uncles, everybody comes. It always makes me laugh (not really laugh since he doesn’t like any joking or unprofessional behavior), because one thing Dr. Fritz always does when he comes into the room is politely greet the parent, “Good morning.” Or if it’s both, he’ll nod at each and say, “Good morning. Good morning.” And with gypsy families I suffer not laughing when he squeezes into the room and says, “Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning,” etc. He and Dr. Wilson seem to get a lot of hypospadius babies which is when male babies have holes on the side of their penises, sometimes several so that when they pee it’s like a sprinkler. Anyway, one gypsy baby called Rocky Stereo had it but Dr. Fritz fixed it. The whole family, about a dozen adults and some children, had come for the post-op and were all shaking his hand. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” Worse than his good mornings! It was sweet and funny and I started to say something later, but he glared. He never discusses patients. None of them do, actually. Except Dr. Rook, but only rarely.
I don’t even know the original diagnosis for Reina. She is fourteen now. She comes in with her mother, two sisters and a brother. They push her in a huge stroller-wheel-chair her father made. The sisters are twelve and fifteen, the boy is eight, all beautiful children, lively and funny. When I get in the room they have her propped on the exam table. She is naked. Except for the feeding button her body is flawless, satin smooth. Her breasts have grown. You can’t see the hoof-like growth she has instead of teeth, her exquisite lips are parted and bright red. Emerald green eyes with long black lashes. Her sisters have given her a shaggy punk cut, a ruby stud in her nose, painted a butterfly tattoo on her thigh. Elena is polishing her toenails while Tony arranges her arms behind her head. He is the strongest, the one who helps me hold her upper torso while her sisters hold her legs. But right now she lies there like Manet’s Olympia, breathtakingly pure and lovely. Dr. Rook stops short like I did, just to look at her. “God, she is beautiful,” she says.
“When did she start to menstruate?” she asks.
I hadn’t noticed the tampax string among the jet black silken hairs. The mother says it is her first time. Without irony she says,
“She is a woman now.”
She is in danger now, I think.
“OK, hold her down,” Dr. Rook says. The mother grabs her waist, the girls her legs, Tony and I hold her arms. She fights violently against us but Dr. Rook at last gets the old button out and puts in a new one.
She was the last patient of the day. I’m cleaning the room, putting fresh paper on the table when Dr. Rook comes back in. She says, “I’m so grateful for my Nicholas.”
I smile and say, “And I for my Nicholas.” She’s talking about her six-month-old baby, I’m talking about my six-year-old grandson.
“Goodnight,” we say and then she goes over to the hospital.
I go home and make a sandwich, turn on an A’s game. Dave Stewart pitching against Nolan Ryan. It has gone into ten innings when the phone rings. Dr. Fritz. He’s at the ER, wants me to come. “What is it?”
“Amelia, remember her? There are people who can speak Spanish, but I want you to talk to her.”
Amelia was in the doctor’s room at the ER. She had been sedated, stared even more blankly than usual. And the baby? He leads me to a bed behind a curtain.
Jesus is dead. His neck was broken. There are bruises on his arms. The police are on the way, but Dr. Fritz wants me to talk to her calmly first, see if I can find out what happened.
“Amelia? Remember me?”
“Sí. Cómo no? How are you? Can I see him, mijito Jesus?”
“In a minute. First I need for you to tell me what happened.”
It took a while to figure out that she had been riding around on buses in the daytime, spending the nights in a homeless shelter. When she got there tonight two of the younger women took all her money from where she had it pinned inside her clothes. They hit her and kicked her, then left. The man who runs the place didn’t understand
Spanish and didn’t know what she was saying. He kept telling her to be quiet, put his fingers up to his mouth to tell her to be quiet, to keep the baby quiet. Then later the women came back. They were drunk and it was dark and other people were trying to sleep, but Jesus kept crying. Amelia had no money at all now and didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t think. The two women came. One slapped her and the other one took Jesus, but Amelia grabbed him back. The man came and the women went to lie down. Jesus kept crying.
“I couldn’t think about what to do. I shook him to make him be quiet so I could think about what to do.”
I held her tiny hands in mine. “Was he crying when you shook him?”
“Yes.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then he stopped crying.”
“Amelia. Do you know that Jesus is dead?”
“Yes, I know. Lo sé.” And then in English she said, “Fuck a duck. I’m sorry.”
Del Gozo Al Pozo
Every morning Seferino drove Claudia to the post office, to the kiosk on Insugentes for the Jornada and to Sanborn’s for the Herald-Tribune. Amalia, the cook, went to the Super every day but Seferino took Doña Claudia three or four times a week to the market in Coyoacán. When the vendors saw them coming they would smile. The old flower lady and squash lady even laughed out loud. The gringa, Doña Claudia, was very tall, big. She would stride through the market with her bags of vegetables and fruit, with little fat Seferino puffing after her, a gloomy Sancho Panza. He stayed four paces behind, carrying even more bags of oranges, peppers, jicama. On Fridays she always bought flowers. Seferino marched along like a thick-trunked flowering tree, peering through spears of red gladioli, tuberoses, canna lilies.
Seferino interfered with her purchases only when she was coming out badly in the bargain. Usually Claudia did well, even though she refused to haggle. She watched for a while and figured out what the shrewdest shoppers paid for epazote, then she would offer the same. If the price were raised she’d say no. After a few weeks the vendors saw this as a variation on the ritual of bargaining and accepted it, and her, even if they laughed at the sight of her and Seferino.
Seferino unloaded the purchases into the van. The seat behind the driver had been removed so Claudia had to shout to Seferino above the traffic noises from her seat in the far back. After the market Seferino drove her to the Jarocho café. He always said no to her offer of a coffee. He waited, double parked, while she sat on a bench in the sun, drinking a double cappuccino made with coffee from Veracruz, dunking a pan dulce. She watched the people walking by, listening to the banter of the regulars in the coffee line.
Workmen sing as they toss wooden crates of empty Coca-Cola bottles down from the balcony. The dozen litre glass bottles rise two or three inches into the air, drop back down into the crate just before the man on the ground catches them. Across the street a young man dances as he paints on a scaffold three stories high, cars run the lights, bicycles miss hitting old women. Everywhere risk and defiance weave through the most mundane daily affairs.
When she got back to the van he always said, “Panza llena, corazón contenta.” Then she’d say, “Home, James,” and he would smile. He spoke no English but knew it was a joke that meant home to Amores Street, to her sister Sally’s apartment.
In the beginning, when Sally wasn’t so sick, she would have visitors in the mornings. Claudia would go to museums or to the Zona Rosa or the Benjamin Franklin Library. This library has only American writers which makes you feel very patriotic and proud but the stacks appear to be eerily askew, the A’s without Austen, the T’s without Trollope.
If Claudia went somewhere, Seferino would take the groceries home and appear for her at a designated time. The car and driver were from Sally’s ex-husband, a high-ranking PRI politician, so Seferino could park or doublepark anywhere.
Seferino greeted her each morning with a dicho. Today is Monday, even hens don’t lay. Today is Tuesday, don’t get married or go to sea, etc. Whatever Claudia called out to Seferino he shouted back an answer in aphorism. When he picked her up at the hairdresser, after she dyed her hair, he said, “With your permission, Doña Claudia: hair can lie, teeth can cheat, only wrinkles tell the truth.” After a few hours at the Anthropology museum, she remarked, “Que gozo! What a delight!” He shrugged and called out, “Si, Doña Claudia. Pero, del gozo al pozo!”
He said this any time things were going well. From pleasure you go to the pits, or, from delight to the cess pool. Maybe this is an old Mayan saying. The sacrificial victims were made deliriously happy with mushrooms and liquor before they got tossed into the well.
Many of his adages proved to be opposite of ones in English. We think the way to hell is paved with good intentions, but in Spanish the intent is all that counts. For us beauty is only skin deep, but in Spanish any beauty is a blessing.
When things were grim, with Sally’s cancer or with the PRI’s situation or with the children, Seferino always said, “Pues, Doña Claudia, como yo digo: paciencia y barajar.” Patience, and shuffle the cards.
It reminded her of one of her mother’s jokes. The little kid says, “Daddy, now can I go out to play?” and the father says, “Shut up and deal.” She hollered this to Seferino. It didn’t translate well, but he laughed.
Before Sally had her chemo treatments at home, Claudia and Seferino would help her down the four flights of stairs and into the van. “Mira, Señora!” he kept calling to Sally on the drive to the clinic, to show her trees in bloom or little girls dressed for first communion.
At first, before treatments or X-rays, Seferino and Claudia would take her to a café for a real breakfast and to read all the papers. Sally went along with it for a while. She got mad at the papers and gossiped about the other patrons, teased Seferino about his mistresses. Then she admitted that she was only going to please them. She no longer had any interest in cafés. Sally, who used to spend entire days at the La Vega café arguing politics, lecturing her children, gossiping with the changing cast of characters, listening to Julián the waiter’s problems. In the mirror Claudia saw tears in Seferino’s eyes.
So then they would just take her to chemo and X-ray, help her back up the stairs, until finally she never went out at all.
Claudia would assist the doctor in Sally’s room, laying out the various chemo drugs, starting the IVs, calming Sally. Each time he said this would be the last chemo. Sally would be very sick for weeks and then feel a little better. Then the doctor would call and say he had a new chemo drug that might keep back the tumor in her lungs, stem the cancer in her liver and pancreas. He could keep her alive longer. So months and months passed and she stayed alive and got sicker and sicker, her hope reviving each time he offered another chemo.
Sally was depressed and angry; she hollered at her children and at Claudia. In the evenings she would weep, inconsolably, for hours and hours at a time, stopping only to gag and vomit and rage at Claudia and her daughter Mercedes, for not crying with her, for not sharing her pain.
Her younger children stayed away. When they came home she would accuse them of killing her with their indifference. They began to act out badly, getting really wild, which made Sally even more frantic. Seferino chauffeured young Sergio around at night but more and more often was having to bribe officials to drop charges on him for disturbing the peace, drugs, vandalism. Then he’d have to go off to another police station to pay off Alicia’s speeding ticket or an indecent behavior charge.
“Promise me you’ll take care of them,” Sally would say to Claudia, and Claudia promised she would. Sally believed that Claudia would be there for them. Claudia’s conviction that they would indeed be fine reassured her sister. Claudia knew that they too were suffering from their mother’s dying, from her pain, from fear, anger, guilt. This long illness had pre-empted five years of their youth.
Claudia had many talks with them, especially Sergio, who was sixteen, and lived at home. His room reeked of rum, glue, paint thinner, marijuana. His father had rema
rried, was so busy in the PRI he rarely saw the children. The few times Claudia had tried to talk to him about Sergio’s heavy drinking and drug use the father had responded that boys will be boys.
Seferino drove Sergio to and from school and out everywhere at night. He thought of himself as a surrogate father to Sergio. He was scandalized by Alicia, her miniskirts and mohawk, rings in her nose and tattoos. He worried because the press loved Alicia, her scandalous avant-garde dance group, what she wore or didn’t. At a state dinner when President Salinas stopped at their table, Alicia had waved a chicken leg at him and said, “Que pasó?”
It was bad publicity for the PRI, Seferino said. “The PRI? Get real,” said Claudia, in English. In Spanish she sighed, “Ni modo. What can one do?”
“One cannot interfere with God’s will,” Seferino said, “especially when it’s raining.”
More and more often Claudia and Seferino would have long discussions about the children. They stood in the sun on the sidewalk, before she got into the car. Serious problem. What to do? The talks always ended with Seferino sighing and saying, “No hay remedio,” as he opened the door for her.
Claudia was a nurse, had come from California to care for Sally, but mostly just to be with her, talking, talking, laughing. Claudia read to her for hours every day, books in English. They watched Te Conté, a Chilean soap opera, completely involved with the melodrama, but also watching for familiar scenes from their childhood, the racetrack, Calle Ahumada, Santa Lucía hill, a view of the Andes.
Sally had wanted Claudia to come get her house in order, to get windows and doorknobs fixed, organize closets and papers, teach the cook how to make new dishes. Claudia cooked on weekends so that the children would come home, so Sally could see them. But mostly for them to get closer to one another, for after Sally was gone.
With Claudia running things, Sally’s servants worked much harder than before. They grew fond of Claudia, but she was always Doña Claudia, not dear like Señora Sally.